I don't think their Mirage plating well help against missiles.
Their point defense helps against missiles, though.
Design: EAF-SE1 "Argus""Oh, I know!" said the foolish Quillus. "We can make our things invisible! Those Ertexites shall never get their way!"
But they were wrong.
So very wrong.
Finally, with our discovery of the Theory of Quantum Gravity, we can detect gravitons. While we're still figuring out how to
manipulate gravitons, we can at least see them. This is where the Argus - our first
gravitronic sensor - comes in. It's only possible with our newfound understanding of the Theory of Quantum Gravity.
The Argus, of course, senses gravitons. Through some processing of the data collected, we can see the location of nearby (in relative terms - we hope for the sensor to have a great range) collections as mass - hopefully as small as individual soldiers, but definitely at least tanks and spaceships. These mass signatures are sent to Athena to analyze for tactical and strategical purposes. And also holograms if a human wants to see it, we guess.
This allows us to sense mass regardless of position or stealth tech or anything of that sort. The Argus should be placed in as many places as it size and expense allows. The best case scenario is on every Aegis drone, on our spacesuits (even more optimal), every ship, Sarissa missile, etc.; the realistic but still hopeful scenario is putting one on every droid commander, Sarissa launcher, our ships, and any other emplacements with similar size and power not listed in our designs.
TL;DR: A new gravity-based sensor (to be hopefully fit on drone commanders, ships, etc. and
optimistically on Aegis drones/infantry armor), that also paves the way for gravity manipulation.
Design: EAF-SMW1 "Deimos"Smart Munitions Weapon
So it turns out Quillus thought it'd be a really good idea to spend two
turns years on countering our lasers.
We hope they like nukes.
The SMW1 is, initially, an infantry weapon. It's on the larger side, though is still very much usable in all infantry combat. It utilizes conventional gunpowder-based propulsion for the bullet.
The bullet is something special, though. The first thing of note is that it's nuke-tipped. Hearing from the radio how hilariously mad the Quillus engineers were over the Sarissa is the primary inspiration for this. The nuke-tip of course isn't a huge explosion. Relative to a bullet, it's big. Just nowhere near what you'd think if someone said "nuke", or even the Sarissa.
Tiny fins on the bullets and a supersmall Athena node allow it to guide itself. It can't just fly around the battlefield willy-nilly, but it can
significantly increase accuracy by changing near-misses to hits, and aiming for the weak spots in their armor (tank or infantry) or bodies.
TL;DR: A conventional gun that fires nuke-tipped smart bullets.
Design: EAF-CG1 "Hecebolus"It occured to our engineers that we could actually make better railguns than Quillus's coilguns. We have near-room-temperature superconductors. We have extremely strong materials (useful for one of the biggest railgun problems - barrel degradation). We have Nanoquantum Capacitors.
Libum-265k. Nanoquantum Capacitors. Insalloy.
It all comes together.So let's make railguns. The Hecebolus, to be exact. A monument of Ertexite engineering that will make the Quillus's coilguns (which they don't even know how to properly refer to) obsolete. They've barely even spent any time upgrading their guns! Pathetic, really. The Hecebolus will be designed to preferably be small as possible, though we're mostly just aiming to get it fit to a ship. It'll have a NQC bank to hold charges for firing, the barrel will be lined with Insalloy to prevent degradation, and Libum-265k will be used to generate the electromagnetic field.
It's kind of funny how these things all just fell into place for us.
TL;DR: It turns out that we can very easily make railguns because we just so happen to have all the parts for them. How about that.
Future Revision: EAC-TML2 "Sarissa" (or: Sarissa Mk.2)The Sarissa Mk.2 is mostly just two straightforward improvements to the missiles.
Its first improvement is a decrease in size. It turns out in a second pass, there are a lot of parts that could be smaller or removed without impacting the performance on the missile!
The next improvement is speed and agility. With some tweaks to the thrusters, better streamlining, and better fuel mixes, we can make them no longer as perplexingly sluggish as the TML1 missiles were. This takes a backseat to the size decrease, but is still notably important.
The Sarissa truck is quickly changed to fit 30 missiles instead of 8. Athena is given a five minute lesson on the concept of "swarm missiles".
TL;DR: We make the Sarissa into swarm missiles. More missiles = more explosions and more missiles getting through PD.
But now for the
main design:
Design: EAF-HDW1 "Alke" Spider Tank (
Heavy
Drone,
Walker)
Building on our knowledge of robotics, leg-based movement, new advances and more, we can make something truly devastating.
The Alke is relatively massive. It's a bit bigger than a tank. The "Spider" in its full name is relatively misleading, as it actually only has six instead of eight legs. But these legs aren't just flimsy struts - they're massive appendages as well armored as the rest of the thing. These legs form the majority of the spider resemblance - we aren't trying to model the rest of the thing after a spider, though it's not like we took an old world tank and stuck legs on it. If someone looked at it from a slight distance and squinted their eyes, they may say "that looks like a spider!", and anyone can at least tell the resemblance. The entire Alke is armored heavily in Insalloy.
It houses a proportionally-sized Athena node. While we don't plan on designing or using the Alke as an Athena logistical center, it could serve the role as commander for local Aegis drones. This shouldn't be planned around in strategy, however - putting extremely vital logistics in huge front line targets isn't the best of ideas.
While not particularly fast (at least not as fast as Quillus' speedtank), its legs allow for extreme agility and maneuverability. It can go in any direction, "crouch", lean in any direction, it can "climb" (covered later), and more. It's extremely stable and can traverse practically
any terrain that even the best of treads couldn't deal with. It has hooks on itself to allow either Aegis units or human soldiers to hitch a ride if needed, though it has no interior for people to go into and isn't designed in any way whatsoever for transport.
The Alke is equipped with an appropriately-sized Caduceus reactor, a single AX Spear turret (this turret is at the front, armored, and houses some of the sensors, making it vaguely look like a "head"), and two Sarissa missile hardpoints. It also has two lower-mounted Raiders for anti-infantry. Although, unlike the shortsighted Quillus, all our weapons should be good at anti-infantry.
All its hardpoints are designed to be relatively easily replaced with a different weapon of the same general type. Like replacing the raider turrets with other similarly-sized weapons, changing the Spear, or using different missiles.
Its legs are designed to be able to penetrate the terrain and potentially buildings, allowing it to almost - definitely not entirely - climb over obstacles.
It has an extensive sensor array - visual, IR, (very limited) radar, sound - etc. - distributed across itself for targeting and contributing intelligence to the overall Athena network. The sensors are designed with Quillus' mirage plating in mind.
It actually has a small Hermes thruster hooked to its Cadueceus reactor on its bottom, allowing it to make short "jumps". But more importantly, this thruster allows it to guide manage its safe descent from orbit. Luckily, with the heavy Insalloy armoring and the lack of any pilots, we can be relatively cavalier with orbital dropping. But we still need a way to reasonably slow it down. The thruster is designed to more-or-less vent the entire reactor in order to keep complexity down - the Alke should only really use its thruster for orbital descent and the
occasional hop.
This allows the Spider Drone to deploy directly from orbit (making a cool entrance,
especially if dropped during combat) [
Note: NUKE please let a combat drop be its introduction] without need for a cargo shuttle.
TL;DR: A spider-tank. Has a single Spear turret, two anti-infantry Raider turrets on the bottom, and 2x Sarissas. Heavily armored, six (not eight) equally-armored legs. Equipped with Caduceus reactor as well as its associated small Hermes thruster (simple and basically vents whole reactor while on) to allow for safe (relatively - for the heavily-insalloy-armored non-organic-piloted Spider tank) drop from orbit w/o a shuttle.
Dory missile (2): joha4270, FallacyofUrist
EAF-HDW1 "Alke" Spider Tank (1): Chiefwaffles
Author
Topic: Ertex Design Bureau - Battle for Aljadid - Strategy SY108 (Read 48470 times)