Mackie - Father of Titans.“One of the tanks opened fire. Its shot was true and hit the Mech just above the right hip. Everyone in the brightly lit bunker seemed to hold their breath as all the readouts fuzzed into snow at the blast interference. No damage! A piece of steel no thicker than my finger, strengthened by radiation casting techniques and impregnated with a sheet of woven diamond fibres, had stopped cold an armour-piercing shell. That same shell would have gone straight through a third of a meter of normal steel….”
“…The tank operator was sitting at his remote control panel next to me. I’ll never forget the expression on the young man’s face. Outside, Kincaid had disabled the last tank. As he stood over it, he raised the Mech’s right foot and brought it crashing down onto the tank. Before the hulk had a chance to explode, Kincaid twisted the Mech’s foot deeper into the tank’s carcass. Next to me, the operator of the tank was trying so hard not to show his fear that tears were streaming down his cheeks.”
“It hit me that hit me that my colleagues and I had just turned loose one of the most powerful weapons ever conceived by man, but we were celebrating like giddy children. While my companions jumped up and down with glee, that poor boy was trying to hide the fact that in the instant his screens went black, he had wet his pants.”
Those words by Professor Htov Gbarleman indicate the sheer psychological fear of facing a Mech and the impact that the Mackie had. After being in top secret development for over 30 years under the auspices of firms like Krupps, Ford and Skobel who worked under orders from Director General Jacob Cameron to make a viable weaponised industrial Mech.
The combination of breakthrough’s in Myomer development as well as new types of armour and decades of work on systems like the early neurohelmet’s that made the machine work.
When the first prototype stepped out of its gantry under the command of Colonel Charles Kincaid on Terra in 2439 into a combat test against four drone tanks the future of warfare was changed utterly and irrevocably.
By modern standards the first ever Mech would be woefully primitive, the early engine and control systems were larger, heavier, more bulky, less efficient and less reliable, but this is only to be expected of a prototype, but even then the test was a complete success, the prototype Mackie destroyed the four drone Merkava tanks in short order.
With this success the Mackie went into production still under the tightest secrecy and was eventually made public in the most public way when Macke was used against raiders from the Draconis Combine on the world of Styx with the raid being crushed, quite literally in some cases, by elements of the 801st Heavy Armoured Regiment in 2443. The result was everything the Hegemony wanted, fear and shock and just how advanced they were compared to the other houses and then envy as all the other Houses sought their own Battlemech’s.
The first House to get their hands on the plans was House Steiner in an audacious raid in 2455 which netted them the technical specifications. This then started the spread of Battlemech technology amongst the other houses with either stole it off one another or in House Davion’s case, traded with the Lyrans for it.
This started the march of Battlemech technology that continues to this day and saw the Mackie or cloned versions of it spread to every state in the Inner Sphere. But as more modern machines came into service most of these were retired, but the Hegemony, either out of respect for the grandfather of Mech’s or because they had been built in huge numbers and were easy to upgrade, retained theirs.
Whilst the Mackie never got a Royal variant, they were progressively upgraded throughout their long career whilst in service to the Hegemony Militia. With a Skobel factory on Terra still producing them in small batches right up to the end of the First Star League, the Mackie fought at the League’s birth and death. The Skobel factory that produced the Mackie was destroyed by vengeful Amaris troops who had seen their forces defeated several times by ‘primitive’ Mackie forces and the Amaris war was hard on the design.
By the time General Kerensky liberated Terra, there was barely a hundred left to take into EXODUS with his forces, and half of those were junk. This marked the final tolling of the bell for the design. With its factory in ruins, and almost no existing variants left in House service the surviving machines marched into the long night of EXODUS and finally disappeared from the Inner Sphere.
Design.Because there’s basically a few flavours of the design I’m going to give details on both the first Mackie’s design and the last. As was expected with a prototype things were large and bulky.
The Mackie 5S, the initial prototype design (and the one stolen by the Lyrans and then cloned by EVERYONE), could hit 56kph. But to do this it needed a massive 360 rated engine. This massive primitive engine weighed 33 tonnes whilst its primitive cockpit was also heavier at 5 tonnes.
The armour was also of an earlier, heavier type and despite being slathered with 20 tonnes of the stuff, it only had average protection by modern standards.
9/20/31/20 (10/10/10)
24/24/28/28
But for its time this made the ‘box with legs’ a veritable fortress that no force in the Inner Sphere had a counter for.
A bit of head canon thinking here, perhaps one of the advantages of the Mackie over tanks was simply its height. Tanks are built to take opponents of their own type on. They have well protected fronts and the front of their turret is well armoured. But if something is firing down on their upper hull, this tends to be bad for the tank crew. And with its height advantage, the Mackie is shooting down onto a tank most of the time. Just personal thoughts but you never know!
When the Lyrans stole the 5S’s plans the Hegemony were already looking at newer designs, the 6S was more a weapons swap and retained the primitive cockpit, engine and armour. But the later 7, 8 and finally the 9H all had modern components and protection and firepower went up. The 9H had protection equalling the much later Atlas.
9/32/50/32 (10/11/10)
32/32/41/41
Thanks to 19 tonnes of modern armour whilst retaining the same speed as well.
Variants5S – A machine that can truly claim to go “I am the Alpha.” For it was the first, the 5S is the Progenitor of every Mech that walks in the Battletech universe. By modern standards its laughably bad for an assault Mech. But in the decades following its introduction, it was the Lord and Master of all it surveyed. With a PPC in its left arm and an AC-5 in the right the final punch was a large laser buried in the chest. The AC-5 had a ton of ammo in the adjacent torso but it had a neat little trick too. The Mackie could flip its arms and fire both the PPC and AC-5 backwards. I don’t know if this was an intended feature but considering how slow the Mackie was, it’s quite possible.
With its heavier engine, armor and cockpit the Mackie wasn’t efficient and ran hot with 17 heatsinks to keep it cool that would struggle under the load of combat and movement. But still, considering what it is, what it represents this machine was a HUGE quantum leap in technology.
6S – More a kissing cousin to the 5S as it retains all its primitive features, the 6S was a reaction to the theft of the designs of the 5S by the Lyrans. Fearing their Mech’s would be outclassed, the Hegemony worked to up gun the Mackie and this was the result. The PPC was retained but the large laser was removed and replaced with two medium lasers. Two heatsinks were also dropped but the weight saved then went into an AC-10 and two tons of ammo. This net increase in firepower then made the 6S the standard combat model of the Mackie and the 5S was upgraded to take the new gun. This sadly meant that few actual original 5S’s remained outside of museums and all were gone by the Succession Wars.
7A – As technology marched on so did the Mackie and the 7A was the first to benefit from advances on Mech construction. Featuring a 300 rated engine instead of the far heavier 360 rated one as well as a normal cockpit and normal armor (with the same layout as the 9H) the Hegemony now had a lot of tonnage to play with.
And play with it they did. Firepower increased dramatically, with the addition of an AC-20 and a pair of large lasers whilst the arm mounted PPC was retained. Cooling also was increased with 21 heatsinks added whilst the AC-20 was fed by a pleasant 4 tons of ammo.
But this was just one variant if the 7 series. Thanks to a huge amount of spares, a roomy chassis built by Ford and ongoing production there was a huge amount of ‘after-market support’. And the Mackie was customized by various commands to their own purposes.
8B – The 8B is either a cousin of the 7A or a stand alone variant. Built more for long range the 8B retains the AC-20 and 4 tons of ammo but now features a pair of PPC’s as well as a pair of medium lasers for close in work. Both the 7A and 8B are formidable machines with a punch at long and short range and really its personal preference on what one you want to take. One thing of note is that this is the first Mackie to mount CASE to guard its 4 tonne ammo bomb in the torso.
9H – The last Mackie to enter service the 9H is more a mix of the various developments of the machine over the years and is an upgrade of the 8B featuring more advanced technology. It was this variant that saw service until the last days of the Hegemony and Star League, and it was the 9H that defeated the Usurpers forces. Like the 7 and 8 variants the 9H benefitted from the megatons of spare parts made for the Mackie, as well as it being a joy to work on with its big roomy chassis.
Keeping the same weapons loadout as the 8B the 9H is armed with a pair of PPC’s and an AC-20 with its yummy 4 tons of ammo. That ammo is now safely stored in CASE. Two medium lasers are still there in the belly and now a Beagle Active probe is fitted as well. All this at the cost of one heatsink for a total of 20. The end result is a very potent Mech that would stand well in the battlefields of the Succession Wars and I doubt anyone would turn their nose up at it in the Clan Invasion either! To fit the probe the Mech also sacrificed half a ton of armour but the changes were done intelligently to keep from thinning out everywhere.
9HKR – ‘Kill-Roy’s Little Buddy’ was a unique Mackie 9H variant, and the mascot for the Star Leagues Martial Olympiad’s Desert Section was also its master of ceremonies despite being painted like a clown with its cockpit painted in a yellow grinning face. Kill-Roy is also the closest we’ll probably ever come to a Royal Mackie. Out goes the AC-20 and the Beagle active probe, but don’t scream in alarm. Thirteen double heatsinks are fitted instead of the 20 single’s and in go a pair of LB-10X autocannons, each fed by two tons of ammo stored in each side torso and safely protected by CASE.
Oh and the medium lasers are still there. All in all, whilst used for a unique scenario, you could quietly go “Well this is a Royal Mackie now” in a campaign. The pair of LB-10’s and PPC’s work very well together and realistically, no one would want to be tapped by 50 points of damage if Kill-Roy hit you with everything.
(Please note I got the 7 and 8 from Megamek and am not fully sure of their canocity.)
ThoughtsOf course by modern standards the Mackie is quite quite obsolete, but the 9H would be a superb 3025 machine (just replace the Probe and CASE with heatsinks or lasers). But when it was introduced, the Mackie was an unholy terror to all who it looked upon. With far greater armor than the tanks of the time, greater firepower and without its mobility constrained by rough terrain or rivers, the Mackie was without a doubt THE weapon of its time.
And it was a weapon that made an age and changed the face of warfare forever. Even when the other Houses started their own Mech programmers the Mackie was still a monster, the other early Mech’s of the time were out gunned quite heavily by the big lumbering brute. The Hegemony could also (and indeed did) simply out build the other Houses and could churn out Mech’s by the hundreds, whilst their production lines lagged far behind.
And as technology advanced the Hegemony was able to keep pace and either refit or build new Mech’s whilst everyone else still built more primitive equivalents. Indeed, by the time that the other Houses had their own clones of the Mackie in production the Hegemony had moved on, and those clones, were all of the 5S and would be left behind by the rapid pace of technology.
Fighting one depends on the era, if you’re facing Mackie’s for the first time and all you’ve got is tanks, hope that you outnumber them because they out gun you and have thicker hides and have more mobility in rough terrain.
With Mech’s it’s a case of concentrating fire, against the 9H you might want to try hitting the side with the AC-20 ammo in it, sure it’s got CASE, but that’s all that’s in the torso save some heatsinks and you’ve a good chance of hitting the ammo. But the 9H is a meaty machine, equal to an Atlas with weapons covering all ranges, as well as having very good protection.
http://i.imgur.com/BnfKd.jpg
As always, any thoughts, comments criticism etc are most welcome!
*Edited to reflect up-to date info on the 8 and 9 variants*
