Design: AS-HA1 "Onslaught" [6+1-1, 5+1-3, 4+2-3]
The AS-HA1 is ambituous. Perhaps our most ambituous piece of equipment yet.
The cannon sheds its name in favor of a new one that more accurately reflects its function: Artillery. The steel barrel is the longest one we've built yet and stretches the limits of our metalworking capability - manufactured barrels require lengthy periods of tempering, sanding, shaving and chiseling to get within the correct tolerances, as such large, whole peices of metal tend to warp once cooled. The complicated series of steam valves, boilers, water-loaders, drains, and tubing requires careful maintenance, but is again the largest we've ever built. It requires three apprentices working in tandem to generate three separate PSFs to flash-steam several buckets of water to a super-heated state. This drives a shell the length of a mans arm from elbow to knuckle down the tube, sending it sailing beyond Extreme Range to Beyond Line-Of-Sight Range. The solid iron shell is devestating for whatever it hits, but the rounds tend to bury themselves in the ground otherwise and provide minimal splash damage. It is accurate at Beyond LOS to within 20 meters, within 15 meters at Extreme, 10 at Long, 5 at Medium. The rifled barrel is to thank for this unprecidented accuracy. Due to the larger inner bore it's much easier to chisel the rifling by hand, despite there being more material to remove. It's still not machine-perfect, but it's better than anything else in the world (and will be for six more centuries). The gold-inscribed circuit cools the barrel enough between each firing event that a highly trained team could get off four shots per minute. The heavy wooden carriage allows angling between -45° and 45°. It must be affixed to walls when firing downward, but doesn't jump like the HC1. At lower angles its shots will skip, tumble, and break apart into lethal shrapnel, but at higher ones it will make a small crater in the ground.
The ammunition is still unique to each individual artillery piece due to variences in construction, and stone ammo crafted in the field will break and jam due to the incredible stresses the cannon puts on it. The incredible weight and size of the ammo means an entire supply train is needed to bring enough into battle for sustained firing. Likewise, the sheer size of the HA1 and need to be set up and taken down before moving means we will have to destroy it when retreating, lest it fall into Moskurg hands. It is too heavy to be mounted on any of our existing boats, and even if we could a single firing would flip it. The gold circuit is also proving to be less reliable; attempting to fire too fast means it can't cool down quickly enough and the gold will melt and run out of the engravings. Weapon failure generally occurs soon after. Additonally, the incredible rate at which the cannon consumes water means it must either ship water with the ammo or set up near a stream or lake. It is also very obvious - the cannon sticks out above our lines, making it a target if the enemy gets within firing range.
The Circuit, Metal Cost, and Rifling all hurt the cost of this device, offset by our metal bonus in the mountains.
The ambituous nature hurt the effectiveness and bug probability, but our experience building cannons helped offset that.
Having never built an artillery piece this big introduced some further bugs, but our experience integrating steam, circuitry, and rifling helped offset that.
Despite my better judgement, it is merely Very Expensive.
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Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 393501 times)