Welcome to this week’s VotW. It’s been a while since I wrote one, but I’ve been having a itch to write one for a while. The first vehicle I ever covered was the 90 ton Ajax. I’ll be returning to the assault class with my first article in a while. That assault vehicle is the Trajan Assault Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
So, basics. We’ve got an eight-five ton, tracked, assault tank, which is about what you’d expect to find. The tank is produced by Aldis Industries, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we have a 3/5 movement profile coming from the standard 255 fusion engine. This is a pretty bland opening, but it means that we’re going to have, as assault tanks go, a fairly cheap one.
Wrapping the guts are a total of thirteen-and-a-half tons of standard armor. Again, nothing special, but it provides a solid enough 52/44/36/40 pattern. Unfortunately, “solid enough†only works if you have the firepower to back it up, and we shall see, it doesn’t. At that level of protection, the distribution is not as important. However, the armor, I believe, could be equalized better. Keep in mind, this is an infantry fighting vehicle, it’s going to be fighting where infantry fight, and that means cities where your enemy isn’t going to be coming at you from the front all, or even most, of the time.
The Trajan’s weapons load, for an eight-five ton tank, is actually rather anemic. The turret bags a pair of MML-7s, a LAC/5, and an ER Medium. The ammo, four tons for the MMLs, two for the LAC, is contained within the body of the tank. Supplementing that weaponry are a quartet of light machine guns, spread out across the front, both sides, and rear. They share a full ton of ammo also in the turret. Defensively, the tank has not one but two Anti-Missile Systems, each with a full ton of ammo, an ECM, and a C3 Slave.
That weaponry is all well suited to the role of infantry-support, but it’s not taken to the logical point. It’s as though Dickens was writing A Tale of Two Citie and wrote “It was the best of times, it was whatever...†It starts well but goes nowhere. A quartet of machine guns are pretty good for anti-infantry defense, but the TRO states that they were for close in defense. Close in, heavy machine guns are the better choice.
Now speaking of deficiencies, the TRO spells them out quite well. It notes the low speed, weak weaponry, insufficient armor. This is all balanced out both by the low cost, and one other factor: it’s cargo.
I hadn’t mentioned the cargo until now because it’s really the core of the tank. An eight ton cargo bay is not something you expect to find on an assault tank. It’s really large for a tank. Now the concept is nothing new, the Israelis have been doing it for decades with the Merkava. However, the Trajan, for all practical purposes, takes this to an absurd extreme. This thing can carry four, yes Virginia four, platoons of foot infantry. By current rules, that’s no less than 112 fully armed infantry. To put that in perspective, that would require SIXTEEN M2 Bradleys.
Now I will confess that I’ve never been in the Army, much less an M2 Bradley. However, I’m pretty sure that simply by tripling the size of a Bradley, you couldn’t fit sixteen times more people in there. Nor do I think that you could simply just cram more people in. It’s my understanding that elbow room is at a premium in most IFVs these days.
But back to Battletech. With four platoons of foot infantry, two of mechanized, or two platoons of Battle Armor, the Trajan has plenty of organic support. If you’re equipped with infantry, the Trajan proves to be a decent way to get many of them to the battle. It’s weak firepower can easily be supplemented with Hauberks and Grenadiers for extra missile power. Both of those battle armors are used by the Republic, the primary user of the vehicle, and therefore good choices to use to supplement this.
The most effective way to use the Trajan is to simply go straight towards the battle. Your armor is greatest on the front and you’re too slow to take a circuitous route. The Trajan’s primary goal is to get the infantry to the battle and if it does that at the cost of being immobilized, that’s alright. What would be far worse is to be immobilized too far away for the on board infantry to be able to contribute to the battle.
Now there are two variants, but neither is all too prevalent. The first was a Blakist variant, and the original design of the vehicle. The only difference is the abandonment of the ECM and C3 for a C3i. Without Blakists ordering equipment (or existing) anymore, C3i is no longer much useful, and the swap being so simple means that anyone who still had C3i has had ample opportunity to dispose of it for the newer ECM/C3 combo. The second variant is infinitely less useful. It uses an ICE to power the vehicle and that less useful engine requires the MMLs to be downgraded to an LRM-10 and Streak-6. It also loses an AMS and the ER Medium Laser. That’s not at all worth the cost savings. At somepoint, if you’re going to invest in an eighty-five ton tank, you should be ready to invest in it.
As for changes I would make, well, there are many. However, as I often said in the old VotWs, where is the point between making improvements and just outright designing your own vehicle? The Trajan has so many flaws, to fix them all would leave you with a vehicle that does not bear much resemblance to what you started with. Nonetheless, there are some changes that are simple and worthwhile. For starters, I would dump the C3. Your job is to deliver infantry, not spot for a unit. The Trajan doesn’t have the firepower to stay back and snipe, nor should it since it will probably be carrying lots of infantry. Nor is the objective of a spotter one that the Trajan is equipped for either. It doesn’t have the speed and it doesn’t have the weaponry suited for a close in fight. So dropping the C3 buys a much needed ton. The LAC/5’s justification is that is usually carries precision ammo. That doesn’t work too well for me on this tank. I don’t think the biggest threat to it will be fast movers. I think it’s anemic long-range firepower is a bigger threat. Consequently, I would drop the LAC. This frees up seven tons. I would use my free heats and keep max potential damage the same by adding another ER Medium to the turret (this will also keep the turret weight the same). The remaining six (seven with the C3) tons, I would split. Two tons would go to the MMLs for Artemis, giving a potential boost at both ranges, but more so long. I would also invest another three tons in upgrading them to MML-9s for more firepower. The ammo longevity would decrease, but a Trajan is not that long for the world anyways. With the final ton I would give a half ton to CASE in the body and move the front machine gun ammo there too. That last half ton has no better place than armor. A mere half ton doesn’t do much, but I would give it as follows: 52/46/40/40. Another variant idea would be to not upgrade the MML-7s and use those extra tons for more armor. That would substantially improve the survivability, though I would not say it improves the overall quality of the Trajan that much.
So that’s the centerpiece of the Republic of the Sphere Armed Forces mobile infantry units. It’s slow, undergunned, underarmored, and unwanted. But it’s cheap, carries a lot of infantry, and very common in the RAF. I give them props for trying to make the best out of an altogether lackluster assault tank. If you can get your hands on a smaller, faster, APC/IFV, do so. If you need a lot of infantry space, try and get a Karnov. If you really need eight tons, well, you could do worse than the Trajan, which I guess is the best way to sum it up.
The Trajan: you could do worse.
