Vehicle of the Week: Kamakiri Attack VTOLBuilt by Yan Manufacturing as their next entry into the military aerospace market (the last one I could turn up was the Crow back in TRO3075
The Kamakiri might be an attack VTOL but at 55 tons, it's the size of a
Griffin, and the firepower they pack in is 50% greater than the classic GRF-1N. That's right, 55 tons, bigger than classic heavy hovercraft like the Maxim. Kamakiris are stupendously huge for a rotary-wing aircraft, and their DAV 155 XLFEs give them a relatively high 118 kph flank speed for their size. For a VTOL, that's still not that fast, and enemies employing LB-Xs or SB Gauss (which are
extremely good choices) won't find you nearly as hard to hit as you want to be when you're attracting this much attention. Why are Kamakiris attracting attention? For starters, they're shiny. Literally. 7 tons of reflective armor is arranged 36/28/18/2, a little light on something this big and there's very little you can do about protecting the rotors without the Clans' ferro-lamellor - the reflective armor does not help unless you happen to eat an HPPC bolt up there. There's a lot of points of IS to burn through up there, comparatively, but every hit that lands is going to cut your speed and the enemy doesn't actually have to blow the sixth point out to completely wreck a Kamakiri - the seventh hit to the rotor will knock it right out of the sky. On the other hand, no VTOL under normal rules would even survive five hits, so sometimes you take what you can get, and VTOLs usually face relatively limited amounts of the damage types that tend to make reflective armor fall off (at least until they crash, so try not to do that, mmkay?). I might have gone with reactive, which would be more useful against your most common flak weaponry (autocannons), but long-range energy weapons are a useful standby in the anti-VTOL arena, so reflective does have some good points here. It's not like you really want to be at melee range with the weapons a Kamakiri (or the Shi Kamakiri) packs, and with the Ravens deploying a pulse laser-heavy VTOL, it makes sense. The point of all of this - the oversized VTOL, the 11 tons of structural tonnage, the small engine and (relatively) light armor - is summed up in one four letter word: Guns. A Tiegart PPC, the same type used on
Thugs and then
Hatamotos, is mounted on one side of the Kamakiri's nose, with a pair of Telos ThunderShot Thunderbolt 10 launchers on the other. There's only two tons of Thunderbolt ammo, unfortunately, so you're limited to 18 shots, but while the ammo lasts, a Kamakiri can match a classic AWS-8Q
Awesome for main firepower, and it can sustain that fire continuously until the bin runs dry with no worries about heat. One thing you don't want to be doing is courting close action the way an
Awesome can - Thunderbolts have a 5 hex range minimum, and inside it, they deal half damage. I
heavily recommend you use your speed to stay at a more optimal range than that.
Only one variant has emerged in the decades since the Kamakiri was deployed, the Shi Kamakiri or “Death Mantis”. Operated solely by the Ryuken, these VTOLs trade their weapons for a single improved heavy Gauss rifle fed by four tons of ammo. You lose breadth of firepower and some potential damage for the kind of single hit that can bring down a lot of light 'Mechs in a single hit to a torso. Hardened armor won't stop one from blowing a 'Mech's head straight off, either. The TRO article says a flight of these “death mantises” took out six 'Mechs repelling a raid, including an
Atlas III. Yeah, I can see that if they managed to start dismantling the smaller 'Mechs first before bringing the big boys down.
The Kamakiri is a flying gun platform. This is an up-scaled Yellow Jacket or Yasha and the same basic points apply to it, but Kamakiris need to avoid getting too fancy with their longer range minimums. Try to keep moving and pick your engagement opportunities. If it makes you more survivable to blow through an enemy's formation and come back, do that - the Kamakiri might match an
Awesome for firepower but it won't match it for endurance under fire unless all your opponent has available will be stopped by the reflective armor. Even then, the rotor hits could be painful. Look for opponents with flak weapons, especially LB-Xs or SB Gauss - those weapons will tend to eat into your speed as their clusters scatter and potentially hit the rotor, making you an easier target over time. If you spot a Phalanx, Aithon, or Rommel Howitzer, evade them if you can or take them out fast if you can't. (Given the armor levels of the tanks we're talking about, Rommel Howitzers and Aithons aren't easy to put down like chumps.) AE damage will blow your armor off in a hurry. While artillery cannons don't normally target individual units, Kamakiris are high on the list of the sort of nuisances that will convince your opponent to make an exception.
Stopping Kamakiris is harder than hitting them. 7/11 is fast with against a flak weapon's -2 target modifier, it's not as much protection as it is for an
Assassin. Your main weapons are big ballistics firing either flak rounds (LB-X cluster and SB Gauss rifles are particularly nasty) or straight up solid damage to start knocking off the armor in a timely fashion. Thunderbolts are also an excellent answer, packing the range necessary to counter the Kamakiri's stand-off armament and a sufficiently large and focused cluster to noticeably dent the armor, although LRMs aren't bad. If you happen to get up close and personal, a spread of SRMs or Infernos could be handy, but a smart Kamakiri pilot is going to be doing their damnedest not to give you the opportunity to get an accurate SRM shot off.
References: Not a one! The MUL hasn't updated yet and there's no miniatures. For now, here's some artwork:
