Cray
04/19/04 03:28 PM
147.160.1.5
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More in the setting of the Gladius, Rasalhague, Miyogi, Taragi, and M7 MBT...
HISTORY
The innocent-seeming name of the Turtle belies what a shock (or at least pain in the ass) this behemoth tank was for Combine forces attempting to "exert the Draconis Combine's rightful hegemony over the misled peoples of Hachiman."
The Draconis Combine had been slow in approaching Hachiman after the Clan War because War-era records and early scout missions indicated the planet had suffered badly from genocidal orbital bombardments, but this turned out to be anything but the truth when the Combine could spare a jumpship to re-scout the planet in 3110. The orbital bombardments of the Clan War had left Hachiman with dramatically wrecked cities, but the bombardments had been perfunctory and Hachiman had been one of the planets to actually implement effective city evacuation procedures when the new Clan strategy became clear. Of course, Hachiman's cities were badly damaged and hundreds of millions of subjects would die in the poorly supplied refugee camps, but Hachiman was a model of post-War reconstruction and the spirit of the Combine's people.
Because Hachiman lost communication with the rest of the Draconis Combine and because no jumpships appeared to re-establish even courier-style communications, the nobility of Hachiman decided that they were the only organized survivors of the Combine. Clearly, they would have to rebuild the Combine one world at a time, starting with Hachiman.
And, oh, Duke Samsonov would clearly have to be the new "Brevet Coordinator" until such time as contact with other survivors of the Combine could be established. If none were found, then Samsonov's descendent who led the return to the stars could drop "Brevet" from their title.
Hachiman's isolated recovery showed trends typical of the Inner Sphere. Without raids, without the drain of interstellar government prosecuting centuries'-long war, and without pirates, Hachiman recovered with due speed. The first generation was pretty rough as hundreds of millions of people died of famine and plague in the refugee camps and the Clan orbital bombardment had cost Hachiman much its wealth as an industrial planet, but the nobles of Hachiman effectively managed and led the commoners through recovery. While Hachiman did not have a space program when the Combine returned in 3128, it was certainly advanced enough to have one. (The government had been waiting until it developed fusion rockets rather than bothering with the chemical rocket intermediaries.) It was also advanced enough to have substantial military technology, and it was advanced enough to have a substantial industrial base.
When the Combine realized what it was up against, it was both delighted and dismayed. Hachiman would be an outstanding eighteenth planet to have in the Combine. The populous was literate, motivated, and honored the (false) Coordinator. The planet was industrialized and resource-rich. Unfortunately, the leadership thought of itself as the Combine (pretenders) and it had the military might to make correcting its incorrect beliefs difficult and expensive. Coordinator Oharu saw exactly how to deal with the problem - it was a method widely used by the starfaring powers of the Inner Sphere, particularly the Marian Empire.
First, the Combine contacted Hachiman's government from orbit, then landed with all due pomp and circumstance. The first negotiations settled the important question: was Hachiman going to "come along quietly"?
Of course not.
The initial meetings also established something else: despite the united front presented by the Brevet Coordinator and his court, not all nobles were behind him. For some, this was ideological. They were backing the BREVET Coordinator's claim to be Coordinator on the basis that Hachiman was the surviving remnant of the Draconis Combine. This was obviously not true, so it was time to back the real Coordinator. For others, it was pragmatic. Hachiman was one planet. The Combine had seventeen planets. Hachiman did not have energy weapons or fusion engines. The Combine had those and interstellar travel. Even if the (Space) Combine could not defeat the (Hachiman) Combine on the field of battle (and it was clear the starfaring Combine had a shortage of interstellar transports), the starfaring Combine could still exterminate Hachiman with impunity.
So, second, the Draconis Combine landed troops, engineers, and workers elsewhere on Hachiman, in the domain of isolated nobles who favored the Combine over Hachiman's pretenders. There, the Combine began aiding local industry, spewing pro-Combine propaganda, and creating a military from the locals steeped in the finest traditions of the DCMS. This was because the DCMS simply lacked the spacelift capacity to deliver an adequate number of its own units. Of course, the Combine hardly advertised its goals to the rest of Hachiman, and simply passed it off as "industrial investment in selected local test markets."
Third, it began a series of lightning strikes against nearby (or important) Hachiman nobles who sided with the Brevet Coordinator. This blooded the DCMS's new, local troops and gave the Combine a sizable local population and industrial base.
Finally, when the lightning assaults on nearby fiefs began meeting significant resistance and Hachiman's government began denouncing the Combine, the final phase of Hachiman's conquest began: global, industrial-era conquest warfare.
Divide and conquer, baby.
The continued high-tech input from the Combine to "loyalists" on Hachiman kept the war to a brief 41-month span, despite the 2:1 numerical superiority of the "pretenders" who remained loyal to the Brevet Coordinator. The Combine also managed to put 24 aerospace fighter regiments in orbit over Hachiman, a back-breaking feat of interstellar logistics made possible by Coordinator Oharu's 3125 whirlwind diplomatic visit to the Federated Boeing Corporate State that secured critical technical assistance for the Combine's struggling jumpship shipyard effort. By the end of the war, eighteen of the jumpships supplying the DCMS efforts on Hachiman came from the Combine's own shipyard. The aerospace fighters proved critical to the war effort because their ability to strike to and from orbit with near-impunity. (Later efforts by the pretenders to launch chemical fueled rockets at the Combine's dropship carriers resulted in some disruption of fighter availability, but the dropships easily out-maneuvered the sub-orbital rockets and their payloads of steel pellets.) The majority of the pretender surface warship strength went to the bottom in the first weeks of the war and industrial complexes, transportation choke points, and air bases were all struck at unpredictable intervals. The DCMS was very pleased that loyalist industry was able to produce fuel (liquid hydrogen), build bombs, and manufacture other common consumables for the aerospace fighters and their carriers. This spared it the trouble of shipping in tens of thousands of tons of consumables on a monthly basis.
While the aerospace fighters and technical advancements from the Combine were critical to Hachiman's loyalists, they did not perform the majority of the work in the war. The seven hundred million loyalists put over fifteen million men in uniform (not nearly so many frontline combatants, of course), rapidly converted its prodigious industry to a war footing, and provided a critical propaganda element that eased conquest. The loyalists had a much easier time convincing conquered pretender populations (former friends, family, and neighbors) that the Combine was no threat to the common Hachiman native and, indeed, was the very Draconis Combine that Hachiman had so long sought to recreate.
While whole duchies suddenly shifting from pretender to loyalist prevented scorched earth warfare from being necessary, the war for Hachiman was still over three years of hard-slogging war. Eleven nuclear weapons were used, one by the pretenders on a large loyalist army, ten by the Combine on important pretender military bases. Millions of tons of shipping were sunk. Hundreds of armored regiments and thousands of infantry regiments were destroyed. Thousands of aircraft were shot down.
And no fewer than ten companies of the Draconis Combine's MB-1B Miyogi main battlemechs were destroyed by the pretenders' "Turtle Assault Tanks."
This led to a shake-up (*cough*purge*cough*) of DCMS officers on the planet. Coordinator Oharu had been pleased with Hachiman loyalists' innovative tactics and strategy (they used both!) and had kept a relatively hands-off approach to conquest of Hachiman, leaving the matter to the competent locals and handpicked lieutenants. She was busy juggling the simultaneous conquest of two other planets, both more primitive than Hachiman and thus requiring more attention from the Coordinator than the "simple" task of making war. (One of the planets, Luthien, was more of political hot potato than Hachiman. The Coordinator there was actually of the blood and had a legitimate claim to the throne, despite the iron age state of Luthien.) When she found out the DCMS troops had wasted a whole regiment of painstakingly imported and supported battlemechs in a profoundly old school DCMS "banzai charge" and, worse, had attempted to denounce the tentative local critics as dishonorable morons for questioning their (lack of) methods, the Coordinator had stepped in personally. She made heads roll, personally and literally. It wouldn't do for her handpicked men to convince the local loyalists that the Draconis Combine's high command (<--which included the Coordinator) had all the tactical sense of a charging bull. With supreme diplomatic grace, the Coordinator replaced the removed officers with local commanders and some DCMS liaisons. This transfer of power cemented the loyalty of the, er, loyalists. They, a bunch of backward hicks representing a few hundred million people, were granted the authority to command starfaring spaceships, space-to-ground attack craft, and giant robots by the supreme ruler of 25 billion people.
While that mollified the loyalists, it did nothing about the Turtles. These lumbering tanks had blocked routes across a key land bridge between loyalist and pretender continents. From their fortified positions, they had weathered thousands of bombs of tons dropped by loyalist aircraft and storms of artillery fire. Instead of allowing the loyalists to use sneaky, treacherous special forces to sabotage key underground fortresses where the Turtles lurked, the DCMS officers on Hachiman had decided to charge the fortresses with Miyogis and storm into the large, underground bases. (Which did, in fact, have tunnels large enough for the squat Miyogis - the same tunnels the hulking Turtles used). The particular Turtles on the land bridge were defeated as originally planned (thermite grenades into the central fire suppression coordination computers - irony, that - and thermite grenades into the endless thousands of tons of kerosene stored for the Turtles), other Turtles provided a stalwart defense on the plains beyond the land bridge. The thickly-armored assault tanks could weather the hail of projectiles from the Loyalist's locally-built variants of the M-7 MBT (equipped with a light gauss rifle and ICE, instead of a standard guass rifle and fusion engine) long enough to destroy whole platoons of M-7s, given ideal defensive ground.
The Turtles threat diminished when loyalist officers applied the DCMS's aerospace fighters in a more coordinated anti-industrial campaign. Ballbearing factories, microchip factories, oil refingeries, and even the assembly lines for key vehicles (like the Turtle) were demolished in a high tempo campaign that brought pretender industry to a grinding halt. The remaining Turtles, of course, just had to be dealt with in the old fashioned way: on the battle field.
CAPABILITIES
The Turtle Assault Tank is a 100-ton behemoth. Depressingly, it is mechanically reliable, has a low ground pressure, and good off-road performance. The worst that could be said about its turbohydraulic power system was that it was fuel thirsty (which was pretty bad). Its *secondary* weapon was a liquid propellant 140mm cannon with an autoloader that could sustain 6 rounds per minute despite the 35kg shells (and 15kg of propellant). The flat turret and snub-nosed barrel barely raised the profile of the squat tank, which was dominated by the quad tracks (the hull was only 2/3 as long as the tracks) and huge, hull-mounted main gun (a Long Tom-class artillery piece). A full squad of supporting infantry could fit into the roomy hull. The slow tank was not meant to be fielded alone - the low speed and firing arc limits of the Turtle were understood - but rather to be escorted by a platoon with main battle tanks and their organic infantry platoon.
Used defensively, the Turtle was a pain to the loyalists. Used defensively against stupid opponents, a regiment of Turtles (using their infantry as spotters) proved able to defeat a regiment of assault mechs. The giant tanks were eventually defeated by mobile warfare (their escorts simply could not wait around for the Turtles to pace them, allowing the Turtles to be stranded alone and unsupported) and by air strikes.
DEPLOYMENT
Throughout the "process of re-establishing the Draconis Combine's hegemony over Hachiman," over three thousand Turtles were produced (and the Pretenders were able to provide them with the escorting main battle tanks). Over five hundred were simply abandoned when they ran out of fuel, or when their escorts had to move faster than the Turtles could. Most of the remainder were destroyed by air strikes and a lot of loyalist M-7s.
TURTLE ASSAULT TANK
100 tons
10 tons internal structure
17 tons 200 ICE
....Cruise: 2
....Flank: 3
0 tons 0 SHS
5 tons controls
1 ton turret
18 tons armor
....Front: 80
....Sides: 52
....Rear: 40
....Turret: 64
30 tons Long Tom (front)
6 tons Long Tom ammo (body)
0.5 tons CASE (body)
8 tons AC/5 (turret)
2 tons AC/5 ammo (body)
1 ton 2x MG (turret, front)
0.5 tons MG ammo (body)
1 ton infantry (body)
VARIANTS
VARIANTS
While the planet of Hachiman was backward compared to the leading edge of the Combine's technology, Coordinator Oharu found a wellspring of talented individuals on Hachiman who could (and would) revolutionize the Draconis Combine's industry and military. The industrial engineers of Hachiman knew how to design assembly lines (and, indeed, entire industries from raw material to finished goods) more efficient than anything in the hidebound Combine. To Coordinator Oharu, who had been struggling to implement millennia-old tactics of mechanized warfare from book learning, veteran officers who had lived and practiced those tactics (and others) were a godsend. The talented, veteran loyalist officers of Hachiman provided personnel to replace the hidebound high command of the DCMS and, even better, they had none of the bothersome political ties of the old officers. They certainly accelerated the rate that the Combine was able to "re-exert its hegemony." By 3140, the vibrant people of Hachiman had not only completed a high-capacity jump shipyard that was producing over a dozen jumpships per year, but they had also enabled the Combine to annex 4 other industrialized (non-spacefaring), ex-Combine planets and 7 other more primitive ex-Combine planets.
Of course, the new blood from Hachiman was not without its shortcomings. The scarred Hachiman armored officers had been impressed with the Turtle and tried to apply the advanced technology of the Combine to modernizing the tank. The end result was a lot of money spent on forcing what was really a self-propelled artillery piece into the role of a main battle tank, which the Turtle should never have been. The Turtle got no faster when the Combine fitted a revised design with a fusion engine, but its secondary weapons developed a lot more punch when the AC/5 was replaced with a PPC. The tonnage freed by the fusion engine was used to mount a pair of anti-missile systems and several tons of ammo. The DCMS's Turtle was dubbed the H-2 (Heavy Tank) Turtle.
In 3133, the H-2's innovative quad-tracked suspension and some frame elements would migrate to the H-3 "Beast," a 100-ton tank that deleted the secondary battery and anti-missile systems to give the H-3 a 300-rated fusion engine and turret-mounted Long Tom.
These are some excellent pics of a pretender Turtle at the New Samarkand War Museum. These pictures are of a variant Turtle that removed the autocannon and turret for heavier armor and more main gun ammunition. The pretenders referred to their normal models as the T28, while the turretless model pictured was the T95.
Assorted Turtle Pics
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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tgsofgc
04/21/04 04:08 AM
209.110.234.56
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Loved the story as per usual. This is the timeline where those Dracs basically survived by nuking anything and everything right? Anyways the tank is pretty cool to. It is something rare in battletech to actually see a tank you think translates well as a Battletech version of modern armor. Great Job.
I find that 'pinpoint' accuracy during a bombing run increases proportionally with the amount of munitions used.
-Commander Nathaniel Klepper,
Avanti's Angels, 3058
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Cray
04/21/04 06:51 AM
68.200.111.17
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Quote:
This is the timeline where those Dracs basically survived by nuking anything and everything right?
That's how any survivor, er, survived but, yes, basically. The M-7 MBT thread should give some more background. The M-7 MBT thread on www.heavymetalpro.com answered a lot of reader questions and really expanded on the setting.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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