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...You Get The Horns (Battletech Alt-verse, Taurian Stronk)

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Similar idea to the colony fleets we see in Macross. Sure there they have artificial gravity etc but they do have dedicated industrial and farming ships etc instead of trying to have a jack-of-all-trades that is mediocre at everything.
 
One of the things most battleships do in BT is also show the flag.

The Nandis is the Taurians designing a battleship that will go to two places. From a shipyard to a battle and back.

They had to as they could not afford to match the inner sphere in battleship construction.

Also, despite it's slowness I expect the Nandis can go at least 1 G, meaning the crew can excersise on the walls.
 
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yeah, she has a 1G cruise speed, but her flank is only 1.85Gs and her maximum sprint speed is only 2.4Gs- and she can only pull that off for thirty minutes, at which point her exhaust nozzles literally melt, which is... bad.
and yes, Nandis were built specifically to be the largest, most powerful, toughest ship possible, and all other concerns were strictly secondary. they don't patrol, or tour, or show up to other people's wargames, they go somewhere, kill the heck out of whoever's attacking this week, then go home.

Anyway, some of you BT fans may, at this point, be going "well all this space navy stuff is cool and all, but what about the battlemechs?"
rest assured...




They're coming.

Fun game! Try to guess the weight class and manufacturer based on my WIP pics!
Bonus round: find the pic or model which inspired these (note: none are inspired by canon BT designs except insofar as I looked for things that would fit with BT's chunky heavy-metal ascetic and none of them are from some other franchise. have fun!)
 
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Mechanis said:
Bonus round: find the pic or model which inspired these (note: none are inspired by canon BT designs except insofar as I looked for things that would fit with BT's chunky heavy-metal ascetic and none of them are from some other franchise. have fun!)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Let's see, been a while since I examined mechs....

Nothing really pops out about the first.

The second? A LCT-5V class Locust (under-slung gun and pods on either side). Ironic considering that the Taurians apparently like it OTL.

Third seems a bit like the Bushwacker, narrow cockpit with guns on either side and pod(s) on the top.

The last one for some reason reminds me of the Raven with the jutting cockpit and two pods on the side.
 
note: not all of those four are Taurain, nor are they the only ones being introduced.

As for the Toro and Talos, both mechs will be mostly the same, the Concordat has a long and committed relationship with the LRM but has made room in its heart for its new loves the Laser and the PPC- I'll be producing original models of this timeline's versions, since they're arranged slightly differently, but by the 31st century things in this timeline are going to look quite a bit different- oh, a large amount of canon designs will end up getting made- the Atlas, for example- but some of the more, ah, questionable mech designs will never be leaving the drawing boards, and I have a whole mess of new 'mechs to introduce.
 
this is just a wild guess for the inspiration so i may be completely wrong but the design of them does remind me of some of the normals from the armoured core games specifically the bottom one.
 

Ze Toro, she is complete~
well, the mesh is. textures will come later, when I'm not burnt out from dealing with that fucking hand.
seriously if I ever express a desire to make a fully articulated hand in a program that doesn't have part linking again someone needs to smack me.
edit: also question- I'm making these all in Vectary, how interested would people be in me working out how to make them available for 3-d printing?
 
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Second FedSuns War: 2471, Part 2
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    • [=T*T=]
    2471
    [=T*T=]​
    April-July:

    While savaged by the Battle of Lindsey, the victorious TSDF navy has broken the back of the Fedsuns invasion- one-hundred of their brand-new Knight class cruisers and nearly all of the armed jumpships committed to the invasion have been destroyed, and the Concordat's new Nandi class is, even with only three examples, rampaging through the smaller units with impunity, leaving small numbers of shell-shocked survivors to flee bearing tales of four-kilometer monsters with guns that obliterate ships in a single hit.
    While many inner sphere powers, most notably the Terran Hegemony, dismiss the reports as propaganda- making an 'invincible super-ship' to cover their repeating losses against a 'mere periphery power,' the Federated Suns is beginning to realize it may have bitten off more than it can easily chew.
    But James Davion had one last card to play, and it would change the war to a true struggle.

    July 24th, 2471:

    Serri and her escorts- fifteen Supernova class Heavy Cruisers and ninety Balistae-II destroyers jump into the Federated Sun's final staging ground just inside the Concordat border after running roughshod over the Davion fleets for months. Waiting for them is James Davion's ace in the hole: one hundred and fifty Knight class Cruisers- eighty percent of the class' remaining supply- and twelve new ships, looming over the Knights and Supernovas alike.
    The Davions had deployed their answer to the challenge of the Nandi and Monsoon, built upon the knowledge gained from the Defender's failure.
    Twelve brand-new Prince Class Battleships are waiting for the Concordat fleet, and it is a dangerous fight; the Prince is well-armed, well armored, and most importantly, faster and more maneuverable than even the Supernova.

    The Prince class battleship was designed to be an economic, mass-producible vessel capable of countering the Terran Hegemony Monsoon class. She mounted few secondary weapons for her size, only ten standard PPCs and thirty medium lasers; almost all her hull capacity was given over to her main battery. Six NAC/20s in dorsal and ventral superfiring turrets gave her a decent foreward punch, but it was her broadsides that truely raised comment.
    The Prince carried a whopping sixty Heavy Naval Lasers, ten each in six specially designed ring-shaped mountings amidships. These rings could rotate at great speed even while the ship was under thrust, allowing the ship to fire all sixty of its lasers into a single target with extreme rapidity- where a normal ship had to split its broadsides with time between salvos, the Prince did not, effectively greatly enhancing its firepower. Further, the rings could also spin more slowly- specifically, just slowly enough that each of the ten Naval Lasers built into it would make a complete rotation in the time it took to charge, allowing constant, brutal barrages that could pound even a Monsoon to scrap.

    The resulting battle was brutal. Serri's opening barrage sunk two of the FedSuns battleships even as the lighter vessels engaged each-other, but then the Princes were on her like mastiffs- their more powerful engines let them dance around the behemoth Nandi-class, and an unending hail of Heavy Laser blasts destroyed her turrets one by one, slowly defanging the mighty dreadnought battleship.

    While the incredibly thick armor of her main belt shrugged off the lasers like rain, her secondary belts were being worn away with alarming rapidity- after only six minutes of battle, with nearly two-thirds of her weapons destroyed, Serri's captain ordered all forces to begin a fighting retreat- Serri was leaving the battle, and the Supernovas would be mince once those deadly broadsides were no longer occupied.

    It was the first time a Nandi had been defeated. It would not be the last.

    August-December:

    The war becomes a deadly game of ambush and counter-ambush- both sides only have a handful of their most powerful vessels, and the two rarely meet in battle. More commonly, they strike at each-other's support fleets, and the Princes prove superior there; for all that the Nandi is a warship of incomparable power, the Fedsuns simply have more Princes, allowing them to out-maneuver the TSDF.

    The TSDF is becoming stretched thin- Knight class cruisers, appearing with increasing frequency as the Federated Suns begins true mass-production of the battle-tested class, make their once-vaunted Ballistae Destroyers suffer near-total casualty rates with increasing frequency. Prince class battleships can force their Nandi class to retreat and outfight the Supernova unless the latter is present in large numbers.
    The simple fact of the matter is that, unless they can manage a miracle, the Concordat will be out of the war inside of six months- they simply won't have the ships to continue contesting the invasion, and that will be that.

    They'd get that miracle much sooner than they'd think.​

    [=T*T=]
    ​
    A/n: sixty HNLs in what amounts to Gatling mounts is a recipe for pain. Nandis may be nigh-impossible to actually sink* until the McKenna comes out to play, but you can still hurt one, and those turrets have a lot less armor than even her secondary belts.

    *without nuking the crap out of them, anyway
     
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    • yes. three go one way, three go the other.

    and of course they don't have to spin, if, for example, the actuators get damaged and force them to lock one pair (or even all of them) the ship is still perfectly capable of operating like a more typical BT warship and spinning the whole ship along its long axis to bring broadsides into play.
    edit: also, the fact that the ship has, by nature of its cylindrical broadside mounts, something like 30-36 lasers pointing at every conceivable angle save directly forward and directly back really adds to the Murderface, too- as long as a Prince has her long axis pointed at you, it doesn't matter what angle the ship is on.

    edit: a typical set of 'Famous last words' Re: one's first encounter with a Prince class: "Wait, those aren't Grav decks!"
     
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    I always love seeing other factions react in ATLs like this. All too often you have whatever the author's pet faction is doing all sorts of innovative things while everyone else just acts out the same dumb shit they did in canon like a bunch of robots (and get run roughshod over, for it). Even with something that's explicitly meant to be Taurian wank from the start, it's much more satisfying when their enemies are actually smart enough to make them work for it.
     
    my thoughts exactly.

    I mean, part of what separates a good AU from a bad one is the writer sitting down and going, "Well, if I do [thing], what would the consequences be?"
    in this case, I've made the Taurains a peer power to the Great Houses, able to do things like develop new weapons and field powerful units like Nandis. Logically, this would mean that things start to go differently- the first war with the Fedsuns and the Rim War were always going to happen, since those were both driven by factors outside the range of the metaphorical butterflies.

    but the current war is largely driven by those same butterflies- the Ballistae prompted the development of the Knight class, and eventually they took the lessons of those and their previous attempt int the Defender, combined it with a crazy idea that actually worked, and produced the Prince class- and so on.

    the knock-off effects are already spreading- the Davions have a Battleship and Cruiser that can be mass-produced much earlier than OTL, so are better able to combat the Hegemony and are pushing their own rivals to further their development plans, and so on. even some of the technological advances the Taurains have been making have started to trickle out, like the idea of allowing warships to fire nearly all their main battery in a single arc or set of arcs- it's why the Prince mounts its NAC/20s in turrets rather than bays, since that means at least three of them can add to its broadside at almost any angle- it also lacks a Grav Deck and carries only small amounts of cargo, much like a Nandi it's intended as a pure warship. That let them save enough space to do things like its crazy rotating broadside batteries without making the ship prohibitively expensive.
     
    Hmn, you could end up with a scenario where a Fedsuns and TauranCon sick of Terra being condescending decide they'd rather team up and naval superiority everyone else...

    But that's probably be against the meta-rules of the setting, where Taurus can only ever be paranoid about it's neighbor.
     
    well, that and the whole "invaded them multiple times" thing, and while I have been focusing on the Fedsuns and Taurain naval developments (as they're the most pertinent at the moment) the Capellans are getting some new toys, and everyone else is accelerating their own development programs because the Fedsuns have actual non-shit ships now and that's a major problem for, say, House Kurata...

    To quote a princess: "The technology of destruction surged ahead."
    also, because I am just on fire today:

    Jackrabbit
     
    more along the lines of "the Locust's Medium Command/Fire-support Mech bigger brother,"
    2 small lasers, PPC, 4x LRM/5, 4x SRM/6, BAP (or the Taurain home-grown version of it, anyway) and extra comm gear. it basically has two jobs- Being A Commander and Throwing Missiles At Things. it can fight fairly well in a pinch, those SRM pods are no joke and its PPC gives it a nasty sting, but mostly they perch on hillsides and use their long legs to pop up and down to get a quick visual of a battle. often the 'mech's two 'rabbit ear' antennas are the only part seen consistently.
    the version with Jump Jets has reinforced legs, and there's a couple other oddball versions floating around, such as one that removes the missile pods in favor of four PPCs ad three Large Lasers to really irritate people, but most of them are built as commanders.

    though they do wind up leading packs of Locusts a lot.
     
    a little taste of dangers yet to come:

    Word of Blake Phantom Drone (Stealth-enabled Assault)
    (100 tons of angry robot with Void Sig, Super RAC/20, Heavy PPC, three ER Large Lasers, two Hyper AC/10s, and a total disregard for self-preservation. Run away, Run away.)
     
    Second FedSuns War: February 2472: Operation Corona
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    • [=T*T=]
    2472
    February
    [=T*T=]​

    It is February 11th, 2472. For nearly a year, the Taurain Concordat and Federated Suns fleets have traded blows, and the Concordat is starting to run out of ships. Desperation is beginning to set in. The TSDF needs a miracle.

    They'll get it.

    Early morning, local time, the most audacious deep penetration raid in history arrives in orbit over two different worlds, both critical to the Davion war effort.

    New Syrtus…

    And New Avalon itself.

    It is Operation Corona, and it would cement the reputation of the Taurain Navy as one of incredible, even insane daring and courage.


    New Syrtis: Down to the Deckplates

    The strike on New Syrtis is surprising, but reasonable- as the closest major shipyard to the Concordat, striking it is logical; a raid here could set the Davion's ship-building programs back for months, buying time the TSDF desperately needs… if that was all the raid was concerned with.

    But the thirty ships that erupt into being in an insane run on the New Syrtis Pirate Point are there for far more ambitious reasons. Eight of them are Gaillions, mostly empty, save six divisions of crack troops- the best of the Concordat's best. The rest, save one, are Supernova class cruisers- and the final ship is TSDF Apis, fourth of the Nandi class battleships in her combat debut, resplendent in her glimmering golden war-paint.

    The raiders have taken the defense fleet utterly by surprise- the bulk of the New Syrtis fleet is three-quarters of the way to the Zenith point, reacting to the arrival of the other portion of the raiding squadron; another fourteen Supernovas and a handful of volunteer Fusillade crews, and what few ships remain are no match for Apis and her massive particle cannons.

    But it is not until two of the Gaillions hard-dock to critical portions of the shipyard complex and disgorge their troops that the true nature of the raid becomes apparent; for the Taurain troops have stormed the shipyard's control center and primary engineering control, and the remaining six Gaillions dock at points of interest, smaller units hastily hauling everything from personal datapads to entire pieces of industrial machinery into the Gaillion's cavernous holds.

    For three hours, Taurain troops haul away everything that isn't nailed down- and anything that can be broken loose with a prybar and determination does not, in their minds, count as nailed down- everything from server stacks to entire engine assemblies for Dropshuttles are hauled away, and while even eight Gaillions can only hold a bare fraction of the shipyard's machinery, the most expensive portions of it are prioritized.

    But it is the data that is most important, including the most critical advancement for the war.

    New Syrtis, after all, had just begun production of the K/F drive boom, and that system would change the face of the war in mere months.

    Finally, once all eight of the raiding squadron's Gaillions are filled to the brim- even to the point of lashing things down in corridors- the raiding squadron burns for the unguarded Nadir point, even as carefully placed explosives cripple the shipyard behind them.

    But it is the second portion of Operation Corona that is the most shocking.

    New Avalon: The One-way Trip

    It is late afternoon in Avalon City when eight hundred Ballistae and Ballistae-II destroyers, the Concordat's entire remaining supply of the classes, erupt into being spread across every jump-point in the system, standard and pirate alike. The long journey has been hard- not only have the raiders pushed their drives to far beyond what is safe even normally, the squadron has also been hot-charging their drives, further increasing an already incredible failure rate; when they began their odyssey nearly three months ago, there were nearly three thousand of them, but the massive number of jumps beyond the 'red line,' the point at which the Micro Core risks burning out with every jump, has taken their toll on the raiders.

    But arrived they have, and the mass of destroyers charge into the teeth of every FedSuns military ship and installation in the system.

    Missile launchers, HPS cannons and PPCs erupt into life as soon as they range on a target; Ballistae-Is, without any energy armement, expend their munitions before ramming the largest warship they can find. Balistae-IIs rave defiance at entire squadrons of Knights and Princes, even as heavy naval weapons blot them from the sky.
    There are so many missile tracks that New Avalon's Air Traffic Control computers fatally crash, and many other such systems follow.

    In a mere half an hour, eight hundred ships throw the capital of the Federated Suns into complete and utter chaos, and manage to destroy nearly a third of its garrison fleet and heavily damage nearly every military ship and station in the system.
    It is the last ride of the Micro Core-equipped Ballistae, and it will buy the Concordant nearly a year.​

    [=T*T=]​
     
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    • that is one hell of a death ride you crazy bastards running into the teeth of the enemies capitol world that's a charge that will go into legend and remembered in history.
     
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