I was disappointed at first about the Duke but after some thought I think it's a pretty good result.
For comparison, our current artillery is a Cheap crappy horse&ski-moved extremely close-range field gun, and a Very Expensive very slow self-propelled version of that gun that can't move and shoot at the same time.
We made a gun that's
significantly longer-ranged, should do more damage, and can be transported by helicopter or infantry or Hippo or boat or anything in addition to being moved via skids.
@Ebbor: The Wallace Truck is actually Legal - it just can't move troops. But it
can move TC. I believe an unarmored transport revision of a light walker tank will only be good for moving equipment (not TC - since I doubt it'd provide >1 TC) and whatnot behind front lines. We'd need to get 2 TC in either Sea/Land or 1 TC in Air in order to take advantage of the new resource.
Lucky for us, we have a component that we can (relatively) easily improve:
Revision: NAF-TS-52 "Shire"The new improved TS-52 Shire is essentially an effort to improve the TS-51 Shire to the point of "not absolutely awful" when compared with
modern turboshaft engines. While we aim to just generally improve the engine, the main goal here is to make the fuel economy
also "not absolutely awful" and fix minor flaws such as flaming out in the rain. The new version will of course be retrofit onto the Draft.
We largely hope to achieve 1 TC capacity in the Draft with the new Shires equipped, and to spend less on fuel.
NAF-TS-52 "Ant" (0):
NAF-TS-52 "Shire" (1): Chiefwaffles
The TS-52 will let us take advantage of our new Ore resource, decrease the Oil cost of the Draft (which was stated to be high due to poor fuel economy), and just generally have a better helicopter. Better lifting capacity (that leads to the +1 TC)) should mean more troops carried and potentially even the ability to carry all of one disassembled Duke on board.
The best part is that this shouldn't actually be that hard - we're working off of an existing design that's been deployed for a (relative) bit and we're just bringing it to relative parity with modern stuff, not beyond.