After informing your pilots about the holiday scheduling, you quickly and efficiently vacated the area, before returning back to Paris so you could take the wife and kids on vacation to Marseilles. While none of the test pilots were displeased, the commandant of the Brest garrison was very unhappy about having to host your mecha for a month. Aside from housing and booking ranges that would need supervision, the simple fact was that with Brest turning into a de-facto mecha testing facility that it was no longer a vacation post. The more active bases on the German and Italian borders were known promotion hotspots, while Brest was a nice, sleepy place- until you got there, apparently.
Once the holiday was completed, you ended up straight back to Brest for testing. There would be five mecha in this contest, surprisingly, and all of them were looking rather potent.
First on the blocks was your design; the 0-3 prototype and derivatives. While you boasted the thickest armor, you also boasted the thinnest weapons arrangement, operating only two heavy machine guns and the soixante-quinze. Ideally, your theoretical cannon resistance would come up, but the fact was you were already detecting bias from some of the officer's convention that was in charge of serving as the judgemental panels
Second was the Workshop 1 design. With plantigrade legs and no arms, the main weapon was a pair of 80mm standard mortars buried in the torso, with a dedicated loader-gunner to operate them. In addition to operating the mortars, the gunner also manned a topside pintle mount Riebel, along with the pilot's turret of one 13.2mm Hotchkiss and a mle.1908 Hotchkiss refit to take belts. Unfortunately for them, they were still stuck with the 90-round drum for the 13.2mm gun, so you had a distinct advantage there.
Third was the Renault design. With plantigrade legs and limited-transversal arms, their main weapon was the eighty-millimeter gun-mortar with an autoloader located in a high, off-centerline torso mount, as well as a Riebel in each arm to accentuate the push-pad at the end (for self-recovery from falls) and another two Riebels in fixed mounts next to the cockpit and in the sleeve of the 80mm gun-mortar. That all said, you could actually see something a little odd about it, with several areas under textured grip-plates, without actual armor.
Fourth was a newcomer to the military mecha scene (since Renault had been involved in the production of the Lièvre), with the Americans opening a branch of Christie-Ford Mecha Works in Bordeaux and in Alsace. Their design was a clear derivative of the Lightfoot, with the signature half-arm gun system carrying a pair of unidentifiable light machine guns and a pair of Colt mle.1921, while the normal back-mount had been replaced by a 75mm mountain howitzer on a long-recoiling arrangement. Loading would be handled by a pair of desant crewmen, who would also help serve as flank security.
Fifth, and least important to you, was a design from the Société Nouvelle des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée, which being a nightmare of a sentence of a name, would henceforth be shortened to FCM. They had bought into the concept of rocket combat wholesale, and had therefore designed a revolutionary fighting mecha. Armed with four 13.2mm Hotchkiss guns in an armored forward armored ball turret on an incredibly long and narrow chassis, the mecha-destroying payload was four detachable batteries of the 96mm rocket, each pack loading 15 rockets. The worst part was it was disgustingly similar in appearance to your own design, thanks to a pronounced set of digitigrade legs.
After some mandatory socializing and three days to 'formally' teach the French Army crews how to operate the mecha with crews drawn from the 13e régiment de dragons, you finally got down to the first test. As expected, it was a series of courses of fire. What wasn't expected during your staff ride that the length between each course of fire could be up to a kilometer, and more importantly over some impressively shitty terrain. The fellow in charge of this must have had a certain raging hatred of mecha, considering that of the ten courses of fire, three were cross-slope engagements, one was uphill, the other downhill, and the remaining five were all placed to ensure they were subject to 'bracing' crosswinds of at least twenty kilometers per hour for the duration of testing.
First on the course was the Renault. Thanks to the magnanimity of the staff, you were allowed to observe all courses of fire, although you pointedly couldn't get back in contact with your own mecha operators. As such, you watched it engage the first three courses of fire fairly adequately on both mecha (all high-wind courses) but the minute you got to the cross-slope course things started going violently wrong. The core issue was that the Renault had no traversal of the mortar, which meant it had to rebalance itself for every shot. Whatever gunnery system the pilot was using was having trouble with this, and it took him discharging his entire magazine of six rounds to score hits on the four 'explosives weapon' targets. This issue repeated itself on all the cross-slope courses, although the machine guns did serve much better in their use with the arm-mounted units just walking fire into the target. What was interesting to note was the difficulty the unit driven by 13th Dragons suffered in multiple occasions, causing more than a few delays and halts to re-arm their mecha. All in all, it earned a mediocre score, with much judiciary disappointment in both the long loading time before starting a course of fire and poor shooting on the scree slope courses of fire.
Workshop 1 was next, moving in to the range without much trouble at all. With about 10 degrees traversal in each mortar, it was very easy for the gunner to engage some of the targets with only marginal changes in footing of the mecha, and between the chin belt-fed mle.1908 and the pintel Riebel, there was no need to go through the no-doubt problematic reloading procedure for the 13.2mm gun. However, range was a notable issue, with several long-range targets requiring two or three mortar bombs apiece to address to judiciary satisfaction, and wind drift played merry hell on some of their shooting. The 13th Dragons shot about as well as the Hotchkiss team did, here, and more importantly actually managed slightly better maneuvering in some sections. Still, the end score was notably higher than the Renault design, and left you very nervous for your round.
After Workshop 1 was your team, with Vans in the cockpit and a volunteer laborer in the loader's seat. The first three courses of fire, surprisingly enough, didn't bother your mecha at all, with unerring accuracy in both the cannon and in the machine guns. The cross-slope courses, however, were much more difficult: much like with the Renault design, lack of gun traverse caused some very uncomfortable foot repositionings. Unlike the Renault, however, once the mecha had settled into position there was very little issue with accuracy- likely because of the work you put into the gunsight and the high fill of your shell creating a powerful shrapnel pattern that gave it excellent area of effect. The only serious difficulty to be had was on the downhill course, where Vans had to override the fire control safety in order to get the knees low enough to put the mecha at the correct angle for one very frustrating target at what was later revealed to be sixty meters. The 13th Dragons team did relatively well during this course of events, with the caveat that they still had massive inefficiencies over Vans' more experienced marksmanship. In the end of things, you received high marks for gunnery, and things dutifully continued.
The next team to take to the course was FCM, and right away you felt a distinct dislike for their mecha. Aside from the visual similarities, the main issue was that they were fast, and more importantly had a doctrine of use. Using the ball turret to determine exact azimuth and elevation to target, they made sure none of their explosive targets needed a double tap with the rockets, and the rocket barrages made sure that accuracy was a very faint suggestion. Not even the highest wind course managed to get the rockets to disperse enough to prevent a fatal pattern on the target. However, their good performance ended with the factory drivers: 13th Dragons had a massive issue following along with the performance. While the ball turret point trick seemed to work for them, they had distinct issues maneuvering, and more importantly had extreme difficulty interfacing with the reloading mecha. While their actual time on shooting courses was worlds better than yours, the time it took to re-mount the topside rocket packs more than made up for those gains. In the end, you scored slightly better for them, but only because the 13th Dragons had a positioning accident and had to take a controlled grounding.
Last, but certainly not least, was Christie-Ford, and quickly enough they started beating the pants off you. Thanks to the open-top back mount, they could get a whopping twenty degrees of traverse out of their 75mm mountain howitzer, and the two-man crew made loading and firing a breeze. Rock steady in the shooting and fast on the move, there wasn't much that seemed to affect it. At most, the mecha seemed to have some slight trouble with the uphill portion, having to knee back hard and nearly spade itself in the ground, but that didn't slow the working team down much. Interestingly enough, the 13th Dragons troops actually did better than the American sales rep crew, mostly because they were a lot more cautious about follow-up shots and didn't bang out three shells in the time that more disciplined gunnery crews popped off one. With reasonable reload times and rates of resupply, they scored highest in the contest, barely edging you out of the top spot.
At the end of the day, in order of performance, there was the Christie-Ford entrant, your Workshop 3 entrant, the FCM entrant, the Workshop 1 entrant, and the Renault entrant. Tomorrow or the next day would be the field run. As such, you might as well get the next pilot briefed on it.
VOTE
Tomorrow's Pilot
[] St. Ignacio has the most experience in handling bipedal mecha, send him in.
[] Chompevsky has more stick time on this particular model of mecha, and more experience with heavier mecha in general. Let her take the lead.
(Riveting vote, I know. Don't expect fun votatibles until the end of testing. Next update should be road march + destructive tests)
