Sir, we lifted this from Mr McCulloch's computer on a routine sweep of his systems for any signs of hacking or leaks, whilst we are 100% sure it has not been released and appears to just be an audio-log done due to boredom I have already placed flags on our systems alerting us of it, just in case.
Here is copy of the recording for you as per SOP.
**RECORDING BEGINS**So, I’m bored, I’ve a bottle of scotch and there’s nothing on the vid to watch, so here I am talking to myself. I don’t know if anyone will listen to this, and to be honest I don’t care but there it is.
[Sound of liquid being poured and the clinking of ice].So where to begin? Where it all started, Skobel Works on Terra, now I’ll say that it all started as a thought experiment, nothing more really. We were busy ripping apart the Blakist’s toys, studying them at a microscopic level and I’ll tell you it was quite a lot of fun! I spent god knows how many hours buried inside captured Celestials and other Mech’s and more tanks than I care to name even some of the rush job stuff which had its own dangers, crazy arse Blakist’s were cutting down on reactor shielding in a rush to get them out and it took me getting in a hazmat suit and being the first to study one of ‘em to get the rest of the team to come along with.
Of course the factory was a wreck, the fighting and Blakist scuttling charges had smashed most of the machinery but there was some very tantalizing clues that hooked my attention. There was these absolutely massive moulds for something, something big. I knew the Blakist’s had managed to successfully break the 100 tonne barrier and I was looking at a part of that puzzle.
During a break I got talking with some of my staff, we was all filthy as all hell, I’d spent that morning with my elbows buried in a Archangels knee actuator joint, I could go on about all those machines flaws but we’ll be here ‘til the end of the month. I could not stop looking at the mould for the Super-heavy, it was part of the head section and we’d not salvaged any in a good enough condition for us to really look into, they had all been smashed to bits so the mould for the head armour and a few other scattered parts were all we had to work on.
Still we talked, we discussed the viability of super-heavies, tactical uses and just how the hell the Blakist’s had broken the 100 tonne barrier. They tried it in the Star League and simply could not get round it, the problems were just not worth the effort and investment, and that says something if the bloody Star League wasn’t willing to pour money into it! Yet somehow those religious bastards had done it and we wanted to know how!
Still with our work load we could do little but talk about it and jot down a few ideas on the back of a computer and then we hit pay dirt! They found an Omega that had been part of the defences round Hilton Head, the machine had taken a serious pounding and had been buried under an arty induced landslide. During salvage and recovery ops a team found the machine, upside down at the bottom of a cliff, buried under tonnes of rock and soil. The cockpit was a wreck, two of the Gauss rifles had snapped off whilst another’s capacitor had exploded and one arm and a leg had been sheared off during the fall but otherwise it was fairly intact!
Thing was, it was cordoned off! Bloody Republic Security wouldn’t let anyone go near the damn thing! Even me and my team it was absolutely ridiculous and I said so loudly when I met the man who assigned me to this project yet we was told that due to 'operational needs and security' that no unauthorised personnel were allowed to inspect the wreckage.
So for months we had this 150 tonne treasure trove taunting us, and during those months we kept on hypothesizing, running simulations, working with what we had and what we was guessitmating. But it turned out that someone else was reading our mail. More things change the more they stay the same huh?
[Sound of drinking followed by a long sigh.]So one day instead of going to Skobel my driver kept on going and I was ushered into an office somewhere where I had a talk with this LOVELY lady, I mean jaw dropping gorgeous, something you’d expect to see and pay huge amounts of C-Bills for in Canopus space..she was clever though, asking lots of questions about our discussions, showing me some data files and the like and I answered truthfully. I had a feeling this lass was as deadly as her looks were beautiful. Turns out it was a job interview and it turned out that it wasn’t just me and my crew who were interested in Super-heavy tech, the Republic was too.
I insisted on my people coming with me of course, I knew what was being offered as soon as she started talking about it. It was the only terms I was able to lay down; everything else was at the Republic’s command.
Security was air-tight and I honestly lost count of the number of vetting processes we had to go through. They checked EVERYTHING, even school records, it was crazy, but with what we was doing I can kind of understand it.
I readily accepted all this of course, but damn if I knew what I was in for I’d have run screaming from that building and either put a pistol to my head or drowned myself in Rasauhague Brandy.
[Sound of drinking]Nothing was easy; everything was hard, from getting in the parts to having to rebuild our damaged Omega by hand. We was working off scraps of computer files and paper records as well as chunks of machinery that we had to fill the gaps with through creativity and our own interpretation.
And then we’re told ‘we are to build one’. I laughed out loud when I was told that.
“How!? We’ve got no moulds, we barely understand the actuators and the internals are so shot we’d be doing everything in the dark, going in completely blind!”
I remember saying, it was madness, but the Republic guys just smiled and said that it wasn’t going to be a problem in terms of resources and money and boy they were not kidding..
Still it was not easy, even with our data from the Omega we encountered roadblocks at every corner and I’ll admit that the first prototype was a disaster.
The problem lay with the skeleton, the Omega used an Endo-steel skeleton and this provided the strength and flexibility it needed. With that facility long burned up in Terra’s atmosphere we substituted it for a standard structure. After a two minute walk the prototype ‘Tiny’ had our alarms screaming at us. Evaluations showed that Tiny’s legs were riddled with cracks both internal and external, the skeleton was breaking under the weight of the machine and its steps were causing a growing web of fractures in its bones.
The damage was so extensive that we had to scrap the whole damn thing and start again otherwise the next step could see the bones of its legs shatter like a glass bottle. So yeah explaining to our superior's that we'd flubbed the maths was...'fun' and I was sure we was either going to be fired or thrown in some cell somewhere but I was fortunately quite wrong but I definitely got the feeling it was a case of ‘don’t screw up again, or else..’ that was left unsaid but I knew it was there.
Going back to the drawing board cost us even more time and it wasn’t until 3091 that our second prototype was completed. I'll say now that for all their cold blooded butchery the Blakists were clever bastards, the fibers they used for the musculature were damn clever and very effective, and the interlocking systems they had for the actuators as well as the way they reinforced them and got the movement needed, breath taking in its execution!
We’d increased the density of the skeleton and done a LOT of work on the actuators and joints, hell you could probably fill a swimming pool with the amount of lubricant we put on the knee and hip joints. That internal structure weighed in at 40 tonnes…a damn Medium Mech’s weight thrown into the structure needed to support the machines weight and the oversized actuators we’d developed that were in turn based on those of the Omega.
They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and yeah we imitated the Omega, the leg assembly was damn near identical but the added mass and thicker bones drove the machines weight up and up, finally peeking out at 200 tonnes, the biggest machine to walk on the face of the earth.
[Sound of another sip.]Our second prototype was a fully functional machine verses what Tiny who was ‘just’ a technology demonstrator. Sure he was a failure but a useful one, he showed us where we’d gone wrong, that some of our calculations were fundamentally wrong and we learned from those mistakes.
Prototype 02 though, my wee bairn was our first full scale demonstrator and I’m not going to deny that I was proud of what we’d done. We’d made the largest walking machine ever crafted by the hand of man and we didn’t scrimp on protection or firepower either!
Even with a 400 rated XL engine powering it we could not get 02 above 32kph so we went for an armament that would work for long range engagements without scrimping on close in defences either, this left us with a total of 36 tonnes for armour protection and here like the internal structure we stuck with standard plate, more for maintenance reasons really, it was simply easier to remove to allow us and the engineers to inspect the interior after every test.
Speaking of which..oh boy the engine..even with a 400 XL there was problems, I don't think the designers ever planned to put it in a chassis that big, so once fitted we found that there was at least a good foot all round it of play and we can't just have the engine hanging loose so we had to fit additional struts and reinforcing brackets, which of course meant re-working the wiring and re-running the cooling systems. I'm glad it was so damn roomy because you'd be crawling inside it after every damn test! Anyhow where was I? Ahh yeah the armour!
That armour was thick! Each leg would take an estimated four blasts from an AC-20 before you even got internal, the arms could take a quartet of Gauss slugs and still have a thin sliver of protective plating left and this was the same for the side torso whilst the chest..heh, six gauss slugs at least and the head could take a PPC hit without being breached, this was far more protection than the Omega and something I’m damn proud of.
We wanted a centrepiece for the armament, something that would stand out and give our baby the range to really reach out and touch someone. Initially we was looking at an Arrow IV launcher but the proliferation of ECM’s and AMS’s meant that the big missiles could be intercepted or put off course and rendered useless so we went for the simple option, tube artillery. We found that a Sniper arty piece whilst as heavy as an Arrow has a longer range and you can’t shoot a shell down, and thanks to the added internal space we could fit it easily in the right arm along with three tonnes of ammo in the chest protected by CASE II.
For added indirect fire we fitted a LRM-20 with another 3 tonnes of ammo in the left torso, and I’m not going to go into the row about the decision to NOT include Artemis guidance for it. For direct fire weapons we had access to all the factories on Terra and we indulged ourselves, who could not?
An ER Peeper in the left and right torso were backed up by an ER Large laser and a Gauss rifle that we placed in the left arm, hell we didn’t even have to remove the hand actuator for that! Only thing I’m disappointed in was the two tonnes of ammo for the Gauss, I pressed for a third tonne but was overridden.
For a final layer of defence we put a SRM-6 buried in the chest, here we got two tonnes of ammo and I’d say that it was primarily a smoke and frag round mix, or infernos whilst a small X-pulse joined the SRM-6 and provided protection against infantry and an ECM was integrated into the oversized cockpit. All this was safely cooled by 19 double heatsink.
The cooling system was a wonder to work on, thanks to the internal space we was able to fit them in just, and the chassis is roomy enough for you to crawl around it without getting caught up in everything. But…despite the technical achievement the problems with piloting the Orca proved the greatest challenge, that and dear god is she a hangar queen, but that comes with being hand built I guess and by all accounts she’s a mean bitch to pilot, one that will take advantage of any lapse by the pilot making it exhausting to control. We tried a 24 hour run with a pilot onboard and during the testing we found that it was just a killer to control, not literally thank god, but the pilot had a migrane that lasted a week afterwards. Tactically this mean that the Orca's best built for defence, not long term field deployments.
[Sound of drinking].I’d not say she was a failure, hell we built half a dozen of them, and there’s the quartet of rebuilt Omega’s although the structural changes there were a bloody nightmare…and there was yet another fight for resources with Krupp’s being arse holes, they drove hard bargains, but I drove harder. Still the Orca has her flaws and problems, but what do you expect for something so literally damn ground-breaking huh?
Heh, right, I think I’m done talking to myself, I need a refill and I’m damn hungry, I think curry tonight.
Oh and why the Orca? Because something that big don’t belong on land. Simple as.
End recording.
As always comments are most welcome, I thought i'd try something different for this one, hence the story/IC style.
