Contest 2: Cavalry Mech, Phase 1
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Waking up from the previous night with a hellacious hangover, you find your head buried deep in the sands of paper, as well as forty small children's tops all left half-disassembled as you sketched out the remains of their operation. A mess of springs and tiny threaded rods inside the toy controlled weights, which then moved relative to the rest of the standing mass to change the distribution of weight. It was quite clever- and more importantly, meant something you could borrow from. One major issue of gyroscopes was getting them up to tempo, and with this system you were envisioning you could get the system up to speed with the weights in, and then adjust speed via adjusting position of those weights instead of running a brake on the shaft.
Collecting your sketches, you got everything bundled up, and dutifully headed off to work. Once there, the gyroscope team dutifully went over your designs, and prototypes were discussed, before being put to the think team. Working off the older Foucalult 2,000rpm unit, there would have to be a lot of adjustments, but if the tunings held correctly the gyroscope team leader thought he could get the same rotational momentum out of a 1,500rpm unit with the new system. Unfortunately, the control rod system would cap net rotations unless someone else came up with something clever, but that wasn't your department.
Sitting down in the work room, you got together with your team of experts and got to work. Hotchkiss wasn't kneecapping you on this project, thankfully, but there was a request to keep transmissions systems simple. More importantly, however, was the request to try and work with Workshop 1 on a common weapons arrangement so that Hotchkiss Arms could start tooling up a dedicated shop for the mechworks. In addition, you were getting a new team lead: Robert Niels, head of the armorers team. While he only had five machinists and ten laborers, the fact he had the licensing and ability to get his hands on whatever weapons you wanted was going to be critical.
Sitting down to talk design, things got started quickly. Gregory du Sale flat out said he wanted to push for a forty-ton design, which opened the discussion with flying coffee cups. Compagnie du Siens only offered up to twenty ton feet, and this design had to be a biped: going for multiple feet was out of the question! With that matter settled- and the broken porcelain swept up- he compromised down to a full-bodied twenty tonner, with the additional caveat that a long-body design would get him better structural articulation to mount armor to.
Matthew Javiers, meanwhile, was much more conservative in his wants. Pushing weight limits was for fools, and more importantly engines were going to be a very hot topic for this design. The Army was pushing for the Hispano-Suiza 12N engine to get used; a newer design, it would be slightly larger and far more powerful than the previous 12X and its major horsepower losses. In contrast, Matthew was looking for the Lycoming R-680 engine: an American radial design. This started another argument, since conventional logic dictated engine dimensions ruled chassis dimensions: a wide, flat dinner plate of an engine would dictate a wide, flat dinner plate of a torso: perfect to shoot and impossible to armor.
Conrad Moreau, the insatiable rascal, had meanwhile decided that it was not enough to watch Gregory and Matthew brawling on the floor, but had to add fuel to the fire publicly. He advocated for a designed two-man system from the start, with a pilot, and a gunner-commander to dictate the operation of the weapons system: since the Army obviously wanted a sophisticated weapons load, it needed its own manager. Since therefore size calculations would need adjustment again, the brawl turned three-way, before you laid into the lot with a fire control hose to restore order.
Yves Pitiet, in a fit of sanity, had no comments on this phase of design.
Of course, Robert Niels couldn't let sleeping dogs lie, since he had solutions for the problem no matter how you designed things. While a light eighty-one millimeter mortar could handle the explosive load task, Robert considered the Army's current doctrine to be one that was… uninspired. Low velocity explosive chuckers were inaccurate and difficult to use; with his suggestion being a primary armament of the new 13.2mm version of the verniberale mle.1914 machine gun. Two of those in free-targeting arms would handle almost any light vehicle, while a small mortar or series of rocket tubes could engage anything else. Once everyone else finished having him turn out his pockets for mind-altering substances, he also begrudgingly admitted that if such a design wasn't plausible, then there might be suitable experimental developments to reduce recoil to such a point where a full-caliber cannon could be used.
Putting all this information together, you sat on it for the rest of the day while the shop prepared itself. Fundamentally, the design issues boiled down to if you wanted to push a one man or a two man crew. A one man crew would be preferable to the French Army for purposes of training, but would massively increase pilot workload and the amount of cockpit complexity. Figuring out a way to aim non-fixed weapons alone would be devastatingly difficult. Adding a second crewman though as a general gunner and loader would fix that problem in the bud- except it would also negatively affect weight, since it meant a larger crew compartment, and therefore more area under armor.
Of course, this discussion then looped back into weapons. If you wanted a decently sophisticated way to throw explosives, you needed a loader. If you were willing to go simple, though- say, with a pre-loaded set of mortar tubes, or rockets, or what-have-you, then you could delete the loader and go about your merry way. Machine gun aiming was going to be an issue anyway with or without him, since the pilot needed a more sophisticated option than a fixed gun (one of the few major issues with the old Araignée) and while the loader could be trusted to man a machine gun, that also meant providing him one and related costs and weights.
This was going to be a messy decision, wasn't it?
VOTES
Engine
[] Hispano-Suiza 12N
(pros: domestic production, in-line engine, easily modified. cons: Hispano-Suiza, water-cooled.)
[] Lycoming R-660
(pros: air cooled, radial engine, will run after traumatic damage. cons: imported, radial engine)
Chassis
[] Single Operator Design
(Pros: Smaller crew area, less armored area. Cons: Simpler weapons, worse endurance)
[] Pilot/Loader Design
(Pros: Better weapons, better endurance. Cons: Much larger area under armor, still have to design machine gun handling system anyway)
Collecting your sketches, you got everything bundled up, and dutifully headed off to work. Once there, the gyroscope team dutifully went over your designs, and prototypes were discussed, before being put to the think team. Working off the older Foucalult 2,000rpm unit, there would have to be a lot of adjustments, but if the tunings held correctly the gyroscope team leader thought he could get the same rotational momentum out of a 1,500rpm unit with the new system. Unfortunately, the control rod system would cap net rotations unless someone else came up with something clever, but that wasn't your department.
Sitting down in the work room, you got together with your team of experts and got to work. Hotchkiss wasn't kneecapping you on this project, thankfully, but there was a request to keep transmissions systems simple. More importantly, however, was the request to try and work with Workshop 1 on a common weapons arrangement so that Hotchkiss Arms could start tooling up a dedicated shop for the mechworks. In addition, you were getting a new team lead: Robert Niels, head of the armorers team. While he only had five machinists and ten laborers, the fact he had the licensing and ability to get his hands on whatever weapons you wanted was going to be critical.
Sitting down to talk design, things got started quickly. Gregory du Sale flat out said he wanted to push for a forty-ton design, which opened the discussion with flying coffee cups. Compagnie du Siens only offered up to twenty ton feet, and this design had to be a biped: going for multiple feet was out of the question! With that matter settled- and the broken porcelain swept up- he compromised down to a full-bodied twenty tonner, with the additional caveat that a long-body design would get him better structural articulation to mount armor to.
Matthew Javiers, meanwhile, was much more conservative in his wants. Pushing weight limits was for fools, and more importantly engines were going to be a very hot topic for this design. The Army was pushing for the Hispano-Suiza 12N engine to get used; a newer design, it would be slightly larger and far more powerful than the previous 12X and its major horsepower losses. In contrast, Matthew was looking for the Lycoming R-680 engine: an American radial design. This started another argument, since conventional logic dictated engine dimensions ruled chassis dimensions: a wide, flat dinner plate of an engine would dictate a wide, flat dinner plate of a torso: perfect to shoot and impossible to armor.
Conrad Moreau, the insatiable rascal, had meanwhile decided that it was not enough to watch Gregory and Matthew brawling on the floor, but had to add fuel to the fire publicly. He advocated for a designed two-man system from the start, with a pilot, and a gunner-commander to dictate the operation of the weapons system: since the Army obviously wanted a sophisticated weapons load, it needed its own manager. Since therefore size calculations would need adjustment again, the brawl turned three-way, before you laid into the lot with a fire control hose to restore order.
Yves Pitiet, in a fit of sanity, had no comments on this phase of design.
Of course, Robert Niels couldn't let sleeping dogs lie, since he had solutions for the problem no matter how you designed things. While a light eighty-one millimeter mortar could handle the explosive load task, Robert considered the Army's current doctrine to be one that was… uninspired. Low velocity explosive chuckers were inaccurate and difficult to use; with his suggestion being a primary armament of the new 13.2mm version of the verniberale mle.1914 machine gun. Two of those in free-targeting arms would handle almost any light vehicle, while a small mortar or series of rocket tubes could engage anything else. Once everyone else finished having him turn out his pockets for mind-altering substances, he also begrudgingly admitted that if such a design wasn't plausible, then there might be suitable experimental developments to reduce recoil to such a point where a full-caliber cannon could be used.
Putting all this information together, you sat on it for the rest of the day while the shop prepared itself. Fundamentally, the design issues boiled down to if you wanted to push a one man or a two man crew. A one man crew would be preferable to the French Army for purposes of training, but would massively increase pilot workload and the amount of cockpit complexity. Figuring out a way to aim non-fixed weapons alone would be devastatingly difficult. Adding a second crewman though as a general gunner and loader would fix that problem in the bud- except it would also negatively affect weight, since it meant a larger crew compartment, and therefore more area under armor.
Of course, this discussion then looped back into weapons. If you wanted a decently sophisticated way to throw explosives, you needed a loader. If you were willing to go simple, though- say, with a pre-loaded set of mortar tubes, or rockets, or what-have-you, then you could delete the loader and go about your merry way. Machine gun aiming was going to be an issue anyway with or without him, since the pilot needed a more sophisticated option than a fixed gun (one of the few major issues with the old Araignée) and while the loader could be trusted to man a machine gun, that also meant providing him one and related costs and weights.
This was going to be a messy decision, wasn't it?
VOTES
Engine
[] Hispano-Suiza 12N
(pros: domestic production, in-line engine, easily modified. cons: Hispano-Suiza, water-cooled.)
[] Lycoming R-660
(pros: air cooled, radial engine, will run after traumatic damage. cons: imported, radial engine)
Chassis
[] Single Operator Design
(Pros: Smaller crew area, less armored area. Cons: Simpler weapons, worse endurance)
[] Pilot/Loader Design
(Pros: Better weapons, better endurance. Cons: Much larger area under armor, still have to design machine gun handling system anyway)
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