Mecha Design Quest
- Thread starter 7734
- Start date
Well, time to go make some sacrifices to the dice gods to keep our too-hot-to-handle mech from murdering a nurse. Y'all owe me some baby kaiju for this.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
This quest doesn't really use dice. Instead, you are expected to have the ability to muddle through things all on your own, with the knowledge I enable bad decisions. A far more terrifying prospect to some.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
@7734 Something I was kind of wondering was how electronics heavy these mechs are in 1927 and how those electronics might compare in complexity to some other electrical devices of the era. There's mention of them being used in the Fourmi when it was being finalized for production which caught my interest.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Electronics are a very 'aaaaaaaaaaaa' item of discussion. A lot of old-school designers don't like them, but they're definitely coming into their own now. Compared to the Fourmi- a design that IIRC rolled off the line in '24-25 ish (yes up to this point it's taken two-ish years in quest from Contest 1 to Contest 2) there's a lot of definitive advances being made. The issue is how to translate that into useable mecha characteristics. For example, if you were doing an ultralight mecha around four tons, that would be low enough that I could theoretically introduce electrostatic transmissions or pneumatic/hydraulic systems.
The issue is, right now the big push in electronics development isn't in raw power of systems, it's in sophistication of systems. A lot of things are still in the stages where the full ramifications of alternating current haven't really been explored yet, much less these items just passively getting better as more time is put into them and more experts start fucking around in sheds. A big example is the radio set: the Fourmi has a nearly seventy kilo high-power transmission system and boosted receiver, which has full broadcast and reception abilities over ludicrious parts of the spectrum. In contrast, the current Contest 2 design has a twenty kilo radio set that has very limited broadcasting capability, in a limited HF band, but can dial to a station much faster and has three 'channel locks' so a mecha pilot can snap from platoon net, to platoon backup net, and then to company net (or for officers, a battalion net) with very little attention on the actual radio, as well as an A/B set system for their headsets so they can talk to the loader/engineer.
Part of the problem here, however, is France is kind of a technical backwater. Most of the really groundbreaking stuff on the Continent right now is in Budapest, and since you don't have a lot of Great Men around to have Great Projects (Werndel you know what you did) there's some understandable jank as people have to copy the inventions to learn the principles to develop out of them.
Just one more invisible cost of the Great War.
KhazintheDark
May or may not be insane...
- Location
- Not where you are. Probably.
Given the various expys, what are the other great powers like?
Especially the British since IRL they were one of the few nations to field a fully mechanised army by some point in the late 20s, that is to say, no horses.
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BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
*nod* So its mostly in the fiddly small bits, and less interest at the moment in figuring out how to make them have more ompf?
I can see the logic there if that is the case. I mean, using electronics for the fiddly bits is frankly a good use for them, case in point the 'channel locked' radio our Contest 2 is going to have. That's nifty!
I do like the idea of a vacuum system for the instrument gimbals/gyros on the Cavalry Mech, its a fun little detail that seems pretty straightforward. Gaskets must be a bit of a bitch though I can imagine.
- Location
- California
Who? Is this someone in irl France or in Budapest, Hungary?
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
I'm just gonna ping in the erstwhile @CthuluWasRight so he can explain what this absolute madman got up to.
As a rule, most of the powers are fairly close to OTL in terms of their achievements and relative strengths, even if they're not looking at things through a mirror. One good example of this would be Germany not building their pocket battleships in this timeline, instead preferring, quote, "long range independent cruisers". Why? Because people had different ideas.
There is no timeline where gaskets aren't a bitch.
Sounds like story time.
THatWhichWillBe
The Squiddly One
- Location
- In The Darkened Deep
I do wonder if we'll be able to make sales to the Republicans for the Spanish Civil War, if it happens in this timeline.
...What are the odds WW2 will be DOA?
I mean, the Nazi army was practically a paper army at the start whom only managed to not get crushed for their aggression because their shock and awe was enough to keep people noticing just how little there actually was available to them...
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
No, because frankly speaking the Nazi army wasn't a paper tiger at the start of the war. Horribly optimized, designed around things that couldn't actually happen in a sane world, and stupidly risk-orientated? Yes. If they were a paper tiger, though, then the Saar Offensive would have been a meaningful operation that actually forced the Germans to respond in any capacity, aside from a derogatory shrug.
It would also require the French military to have a drastically greater reaction speed and overall less dubious strategic planning, which, uh. . . .
*crosses fingers*
*crosses fingers*
Very powerful, but not exactly equipped with the numbers they needed for a full war. Looking at the wiki page, the Saar Offensive was likely not decisively reacted to due to the army and air force being busy with Poland, and Hitler's past experiences with France and England...
Very capable, but few in number, hence the policy of Blitzkrieg, shatter them before it turns into a war of attrition, which worked wonderfully for them IRL.
Edit: Though of course, very likely most if not all of the reasons WW2 went the way it did IRL would be also around here.
Edit 2:....For some reason, I think this might have been treading old ground
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CthuluWasRight
Fresh Meat for the SV Grinder
- Location
- Canada
Okay, so Joseph Werndl has inherited a manufacturing company in Steyr, Austria which makes... Well, everything, but mostly guns. He has a dream of building a shiny new military rifle with interchangeable parts and all that cool stuff. So he takes Karl Hollub, his best gun designer, and goes to the US to check out the American civil war and see how those yankees build their guns.
He buys some tooling, but the really important bit is when he goes to church, sees a neat little revolving tabernacle, and thinks "I could make a gun out of that." Hollub agrees, so Werndl goes home and promptly plows a ton of money into setting up a factory for a gun which is not even fully designed yet. Eventually it gets made, and he shows it to Austria Hungary, which is still using Lorentz muzzle-loaders. They immediately tell him to fuck off. Then Prussia kicks their ass and they tell him and all the other gun manufacturers wait, no, come back. Clearly Austria Hungary needs a new military rifle which can compete with the Dreyse: a design which can restore their national pride and will ideally be cheap, rugged and easy to use. That's why they make the obvious choice:
They pick the Remington rolling block.
Werndl fucking hates this and continues pushing the new rifle, in large part because his creditors are hunting him and his company has expanded into an ungainly colossus full of a bunch of ancillary companies doing all kinds of whacky shit. If it doesn't keep staggering onward it will collapse, and crush Werndl with it. So he wheedles an archduke into taking it to Vienna for trials since Remington are dicking around with the contract, and the gun passes with flying colors as being easy for a peasant to operate and nearly indestructible. Werndl duly scoops up an order for 100,000 guns, waives his advanced fee to just pump the money back into Steyr, and settles in to manufacture these weapons on a very tight schedule.
Vienna wants to cover its bases, so it contracts another 50,000 guns to an unrelated firm so that Werndl will not be the sole manufacturer of the rifle. Werndl immediately goes out and buys them up. In fact, he vores every single other manufacturer of the Werndl that emerges, scooping up more and more orders until he has pledged 250,000 guns at a knock-down price on a very aggressive schedule, followed by another 70,000 to the Hungarian Honvedseg, plus dozens of foreign orders for clients all over Europe. At this moment his creditors begin to catch up with him and he actually briefly goes bankrupt before he takes the company public, turning into OEG, the largest arms manufacturer in Europe. This hideous titan born of Werndl's insatiable lust for contract guns will eventually become Steyr Arms.
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The guy was a freaking spark or something for the sheer Madlad vibes.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
No, that was the Austrian telephone company that had dial-a-show, and would put on four operas a day. That's right, folks, four complete and separate operas in a day. Because you need it.
CthuluWasRight
Fresh Meat for the SV Grinder
- Location
- Canada
Ah, Telefon Hirmondo. Still not as bad as Vienna of the time though. Your choices for an evening out were exclusively featherweight comedic opera followed by cafe, featherweight comedic opera followed by wine bar, or melodramatic morality tale tragedy opera followed by one of the above two options. Simply ghastly.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
There is a very good reason this quest has exactly nothing to do with anything that isn't building mecha, or else I'd have to do so much bitching about the fact absinthe is currently technically illegal and the atrocious state of the film industry.
Contest 2: Cavalry Mech, Phase 6
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Looking at the test track with baited breath, you watched Prototype 0-2 making the rounds. After 0-1's fatal failure and structural loss, you were making absolutely sure this mecha was being documented in every way possible. In addition, the cockpit radio was running hot, with the new test pilot running things. Vans wasn't a particularly inspired test pilot, to be sure, but he was very respectful of the gauges and was more than willing to talk. His running commentary was getting transcribed for future reference, as well as to help brief the second new test pilot: Chompevsky.
Once low-speed trials were finished, high speed came up quite naturally. At thirty kilometers per hour, the nose wobble was completely gone. It stayed gone, too, until the mech's gait picked up to fifty-five kilometers per hour and the roll cycle started intensifying. According to cockpit instrumentation, it was holding steady at about four degrees off centerline in the roll, and nose yaw wasn't above ten degrees.
You still capped the speed there: some other morons could do testing beyond that. Cornering tests, meanwhile, showed that at everything slower than forty-five kilometers per hour, the mecha was very stable. At forty-five, though, the turning radius had to be either incredibly shallow, or the mecha would start to have some very dangerous-looking yaw characteristics that tried to push into a roll, forcing the test pilots to max-rev the gyro and pull out of the turn. While nobody got hurt, per say, Vans did put Unit 0-3 through the barriers and instituted a pretty bad fall into the berm around the facility. While the mecha's undercarriage was hideously banged up and the chin machine guns were once again utterly wrecked, the rest of the mecha was fine and Vans only had to retire the day with a mild concussion.
Once walking tests and other ground testing was done, you put together your current progress report to Hotchkiss, and got the rest of the initial five-mecha prototype batch up to current standards. About two-thirds the way through, word came in: you were to take all current mecha to Brest for weapons integration testing. Apparently, someone had only just now told Corporate that Renault was finally sticking their neck in the military mecha show, with a bipedal, hunchback design mounting some lunatic new weapon: an 80mm gun-mortar with a revolving autoloader, as well as a pair of Riebel machine guns.
Brest was… it was Brest. Damp, windy, and full of Navy pukes staring at you for the temerity to bring a mecha into their gunnery training ranges. That didn't really matter, though, as you had rented out sufficient offroad cargo-hauler mecha to get your prototypes in, and an off-base mecha shop. Getting everyone to work was much easier this time, thanks to the fact you'd all done this before, as well as the fact there wasn't a competition this time.
It took about three days to get all the non-weapons testing done- off road, endurance, field repair, basic training- and then came weapons testing.
For this, the plan was simple. You weren't trying to figure out if the weapons were accurate or how easy they were to use: right now, you were figuring out 'would the weapons damage themselves in the course of normal operation'.
To that end, you started with the machine guns. Since they only had 90-round magazines, you weren't worried about the problem where they'd rattle themselves to bits. Instead, you were worried about access and reloading, and as it turns out, you were right.
While initial testing had no problems emptying the drum mags, the problem was exchanging them for filled ones. Eventually, the compromise technique was developed of 'kneeling' the mecha, for the reloader to pop out using the underside escape hatch, unlatch the rear panel, and then disengage both drum magazines, and retrieve fresh ones. The loaders- conscripts recruited from the Army garrison- bitched mightily about this arrangement, and were deeply unhappy with the concept of potentially dismounting under fire.
Continued testing, however, revealed that the chin turret had one significant and unforeseen flaw: specifically, piper drift. The reflective synthetic gunsight was a useful tool, but it wasn't slaved to the mounting. Instead, it operated off a parallel interpretation of input commands. What this meant was that as the turret continually lost zero due to recoil, mecha vibration, and God's hatred of machines, the piper became continually more and more unreliable. A field-expedient repair was cooked up by re-zeroing the piper to the turret, but once again the loaders bitched about this as they had to tie a pole to the gun barrels so the driver could see where the guns were pointed.
Then came the Soixante-quinze's testing, and oh, how you were biting your nails for this. Unlike with the machine gun testing, the flaws you found were many, and all of them were not kind ones.
First and foremost, your team had badly bungled the redesigned recoil system. The problem was, the gun normally had a 90cm recoil path. This wasn't really acceptable, so when it was rebuilt for your mecha, Niels and the armaments team had built a new hydraulics arrangement that, on the trial stand, had cut the recoil path down to about 45cm: just enough room for the old shell to stay on the recoil trail for the loader to kick out of the mecha via a special slat in the belly armor. In testing, however, the recoil absorption was incredibly subpar, to the point that the pilots were reporting significant nose-up at the instant the system ran out its recoil stops.
Second, the feed system and loader's compartment was totally unacceptable. Every step in the loading cycle was fraught with issues. Inserting a shell required a straight kick, followed by a careful maneuver to close the breech: loaders had great issue making sure the shell was fully inserted and the breech totally sealed. On firing, the mecha bucked wildly, resulting in loaders grabbing on to many things they shouldn't, causing nearly a dozen conscripts being injured in the process, with resulting issues ranging in severity from bruised fingers to an amputated foot (as said foot had been resting in the recoil path of the gun on firing) causing much tirade from the base's commander. On shell ejection, the shell rarely completed ejection fully, frequently striking the backrest of the system, and becoming stuck in the breech as they bounced forward back towards the gun.
Finally, and most critically, the gun was severely limited in firing ranges due to limitations of the mecha. This required a little explaining.
Due to weight issues, you and Gregorie had designed the mecha to have a permanent five degree pitch up at the nose in resting configuration, which would steadily 'droop' as the fuel tanks and ammunition racks in the rear of the vehicle were depleted. Therefore, in standard operation, the main spinal spar was at five degrees up pitch. Niels, then, to maximize recoil travel length and structural integrity, then mounted the Soixante-quinze at a negative five degrees relative to the main spinal spar: in short, in normal operation, the gun would be level to the ground.
Now, you had foreseen this might be a problem, and wanted to mirror the standard trailer's twenty degree elevation, which in turn meant elevating the main spar to twenty-five degrees on account of the cannon's inclination.
What happened when you tried using the gun at this position, well, was not pretty. On firing, the shell launched, the gun recoiled, and then math failed you as the legs on your mecha folded up with a scream as actuators gave out and it fell to the ground, ass-first.
Preliminary investigation revealed that the system had flat-out failed after the pilot had felt the mecha rock over the redline for pitch and therefore thrown the gyro and hips into a full downward press. Your preliminary estimate was that this couldn't compensate for the inertia of the armored nose, which had less downward weight due to the high angle, and as such couldn't handle the recoil of the main battery.
Testing revealed that +20 degrees on the mecha did not suffer the same failure, although relative 'bucking' of upward pitch did increase with higher angle fires, so the theory that the nose wasn't able to help control recoil was going to likely be part of whatever solution you came up with.
With weapons integration coming up mostly green- and yes, you checked, according to your liaison from the Army, this was a pretty good showing, you were sent back to the factory with an official notice: trials were going to be in six months, to allow for the adoption to come in with the 1928 fiscal year, first quarter.
According to your napkin math on the train ride back, that was exactly enough time to fix one problem with the mecha. Maybe two, if they were small ones.
-/-/-/-/
Votes
[] Fix the actuator arrangement so you don't have more catastrophic blowouts, and while you're at it see if you can perk up the gyro to improve handling. The automatic system works, but you know it can be better.
[] The gun. That damn gun. Recant against your personification of hubris, and find something smaller to fit in there.
[] The loader's compartment. Obviously, there were issues with how things went, and frankly speaking you knew, at least a little, that this would probably need some touching up.
[] The chin turret. Between the piper drift, the short magazines, and the reloading issues, you need to get that whipped. That might mean replacing one of the heavy machine guns, might mean finding out if you can get custom belt adaptors, you don't know. What you do know is this needs work.
[] General fine-tuning. Everything works fairly well according to the Army rep, and he's the sort you can trust not to talk out his ass. If you spruce the main items up and trust that you can submit revisions later, then anything that bites you in the ass should be rectifiable in the long run.
Once low-speed trials were finished, high speed came up quite naturally. At thirty kilometers per hour, the nose wobble was completely gone. It stayed gone, too, until the mech's gait picked up to fifty-five kilometers per hour and the roll cycle started intensifying. According to cockpit instrumentation, it was holding steady at about four degrees off centerline in the roll, and nose yaw wasn't above ten degrees.
You still capped the speed there: some other morons could do testing beyond that. Cornering tests, meanwhile, showed that at everything slower than forty-five kilometers per hour, the mecha was very stable. At forty-five, though, the turning radius had to be either incredibly shallow, or the mecha would start to have some very dangerous-looking yaw characteristics that tried to push into a roll, forcing the test pilots to max-rev the gyro and pull out of the turn. While nobody got hurt, per say, Vans did put Unit 0-3 through the barriers and instituted a pretty bad fall into the berm around the facility. While the mecha's undercarriage was hideously banged up and the chin machine guns were once again utterly wrecked, the rest of the mecha was fine and Vans only had to retire the day with a mild concussion.
Once walking tests and other ground testing was done, you put together your current progress report to Hotchkiss, and got the rest of the initial five-mecha prototype batch up to current standards. About two-thirds the way through, word came in: you were to take all current mecha to Brest for weapons integration testing. Apparently, someone had only just now told Corporate that Renault was finally sticking their neck in the military mecha show, with a bipedal, hunchback design mounting some lunatic new weapon: an 80mm gun-mortar with a revolving autoloader, as well as a pair of Riebel machine guns.
Brest was… it was Brest. Damp, windy, and full of Navy pukes staring at you for the temerity to bring a mecha into their gunnery training ranges. That didn't really matter, though, as you had rented out sufficient offroad cargo-hauler mecha to get your prototypes in, and an off-base mecha shop. Getting everyone to work was much easier this time, thanks to the fact you'd all done this before, as well as the fact there wasn't a competition this time.
It took about three days to get all the non-weapons testing done- off road, endurance, field repair, basic training- and then came weapons testing.
For this, the plan was simple. You weren't trying to figure out if the weapons were accurate or how easy they were to use: right now, you were figuring out 'would the weapons damage themselves in the course of normal operation'.
To that end, you started with the machine guns. Since they only had 90-round magazines, you weren't worried about the problem where they'd rattle themselves to bits. Instead, you were worried about access and reloading, and as it turns out, you were right.
While initial testing had no problems emptying the drum mags, the problem was exchanging them for filled ones. Eventually, the compromise technique was developed of 'kneeling' the mecha, for the reloader to pop out using the underside escape hatch, unlatch the rear panel, and then disengage both drum magazines, and retrieve fresh ones. The loaders- conscripts recruited from the Army garrison- bitched mightily about this arrangement, and were deeply unhappy with the concept of potentially dismounting under fire.
Continued testing, however, revealed that the chin turret had one significant and unforeseen flaw: specifically, piper drift. The reflective synthetic gunsight was a useful tool, but it wasn't slaved to the mounting. Instead, it operated off a parallel interpretation of input commands. What this meant was that as the turret continually lost zero due to recoil, mecha vibration, and God's hatred of machines, the piper became continually more and more unreliable. A field-expedient repair was cooked up by re-zeroing the piper to the turret, but once again the loaders bitched about this as they had to tie a pole to the gun barrels so the driver could see where the guns were pointed.
Then came the Soixante-quinze's testing, and oh, how you were biting your nails for this. Unlike with the machine gun testing, the flaws you found were many, and all of them were not kind ones.
First and foremost, your team had badly bungled the redesigned recoil system. The problem was, the gun normally had a 90cm recoil path. This wasn't really acceptable, so when it was rebuilt for your mecha, Niels and the armaments team had built a new hydraulics arrangement that, on the trial stand, had cut the recoil path down to about 45cm: just enough room for the old shell to stay on the recoil trail for the loader to kick out of the mecha via a special slat in the belly armor. In testing, however, the recoil absorption was incredibly subpar, to the point that the pilots were reporting significant nose-up at the instant the system ran out its recoil stops.
Second, the feed system and loader's compartment was totally unacceptable. Every step in the loading cycle was fraught with issues. Inserting a shell required a straight kick, followed by a careful maneuver to close the breech: loaders had great issue making sure the shell was fully inserted and the breech totally sealed. On firing, the mecha bucked wildly, resulting in loaders grabbing on to many things they shouldn't, causing nearly a dozen conscripts being injured in the process, with resulting issues ranging in severity from bruised fingers to an amputated foot (as said foot had been resting in the recoil path of the gun on firing) causing much tirade from the base's commander. On shell ejection, the shell rarely completed ejection fully, frequently striking the backrest of the system, and becoming stuck in the breech as they bounced forward back towards the gun.
Finally, and most critically, the gun was severely limited in firing ranges due to limitations of the mecha. This required a little explaining.
Due to weight issues, you and Gregorie had designed the mecha to have a permanent five degree pitch up at the nose in resting configuration, which would steadily 'droop' as the fuel tanks and ammunition racks in the rear of the vehicle were depleted. Therefore, in standard operation, the main spinal spar was at five degrees up pitch. Niels, then, to maximize recoil travel length and structural integrity, then mounted the Soixante-quinze at a negative five degrees relative to the main spinal spar: in short, in normal operation, the gun would be level to the ground.
Now, you had foreseen this might be a problem, and wanted to mirror the standard trailer's twenty degree elevation, which in turn meant elevating the main spar to twenty-five degrees on account of the cannon's inclination.
What happened when you tried using the gun at this position, well, was not pretty. On firing, the shell launched, the gun recoiled, and then math failed you as the legs on your mecha folded up with a scream as actuators gave out and it fell to the ground, ass-first.
Preliminary investigation revealed that the system had flat-out failed after the pilot had felt the mecha rock over the redline for pitch and therefore thrown the gyro and hips into a full downward press. Your preliminary estimate was that this couldn't compensate for the inertia of the armored nose, which had less downward weight due to the high angle, and as such couldn't handle the recoil of the main battery.
Testing revealed that +20 degrees on the mecha did not suffer the same failure, although relative 'bucking' of upward pitch did increase with higher angle fires, so the theory that the nose wasn't able to help control recoil was going to likely be part of whatever solution you came up with.
With weapons integration coming up mostly green- and yes, you checked, according to your liaison from the Army, this was a pretty good showing, you were sent back to the factory with an official notice: trials were going to be in six months, to allow for the adoption to come in with the 1928 fiscal year, first quarter.
According to your napkin math on the train ride back, that was exactly enough time to fix one problem with the mecha. Maybe two, if they were small ones.
-/-/-/-/
Votes
[] Fix the actuator arrangement so you don't have more catastrophic blowouts, and while you're at it see if you can perk up the gyro to improve handling. The automatic system works, but you know it can be better.
[] The gun. That damn gun. Recant against your personification of hubris, and find something smaller to fit in there.
[] The loader's compartment. Obviously, there were issues with how things went, and frankly speaking you knew, at least a little, that this would probably need some touching up.
[] The chin turret. Between the piper drift, the short magazines, and the reloading issues, you need to get that whipped. That might mean replacing one of the heavy machine guns, might mean finding out if you can get custom belt adaptors, you don't know. What you do know is this needs work.
[] General fine-tuning. Everything works fairly well according to the Army rep, and he's the sort you can trust not to talk out his ass. If you spruce the main items up and trust that you can submit revisions later, then anything that bites you in the ass should be rectifiable in the long run.
- Location
- USA
[X] The gun. That damn gun. Recant against your personification of hubris, and find something smaller to fit in there.
So... The gun is no longer knocking the mech on its ass when firing? What is it doing right now? We changed the angle? Is it usable as a weapon right now?
I'm thinking the gun and the loader are the most pressing concerns.
I'm thinking the gun and the loader are the most pressing concerns.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
go read the bloody update again if you don't get it, and continue reading until the problem is solved. there have been zero design changes since the 0-2 revision where you changed the armor and cockpit.
- Location
- UTC -6
[X] The chin turret. Between the piper drift, the short magazines, and the reloading issues, you need to get that whipped. That might mean replacing one of the heavy machine guns, might mean finding out if you can get custom belt adaptors, you don't know. What you do know is this needs work.
There may just be enough boom in the main cannon to put up with the issues. I'm very tempted to work on the loader's compartment instead, but having low magazine size and needing to dismount for reloads is just an awful combo. We need those weapons to be able to keep firing to carry the artillery into place. Accuracy and poor ammo would make them poor at nearly everything.
There may just be enough boom in the main cannon to put up with the issues. I'm very tempted to work on the loader's compartment instead, but having low magazine size and needing to dismount for reloads is just an awful combo. We need those weapons to be able to keep firing to carry the artillery into place. Accuracy and poor ammo would make them poor at nearly everything.