Holy crap, it’s Wednesday, the forums are up, and I can post! Time for WorkMech Wednesday!
Take one Kintaro. Rip out nearly all the guns and specialty electronics. Leave the ferro-fibrous armor, and fit an 8-ton cargo bay, a lift hoist in each side torso, and a salvage arm in place of the right hand. Your only offensive weapon is a center torso medium laser. What do you have?
The answer is the
HYN-KTO, the prototype Hyena SalvageMech. The infamous Vining Engineering and Salvage Team , or VEST, refit two Kintaros into these bad boys, taking advantage of their fusion engine, BattleMech grade structure and armor, which came with environmental sealing, to make for swift, durable SalvageMech capable of hauling over a hundred tons relatively swiftly.
Rather than continue to convert existing BattleMechs, VEST decided to go a different route for their production Hyena SalvageMech, the
HYN-4A Hyena, which debuted in 3066. Keeping the 275-rating fusion engine, but switching to an IndustrialMech base, the Hyena can still keep pace with ‘Mechs like the Griffin, or its progenitor the Kintaro, but loses some of the durability the prototypes retained from their parent design. Armor is reduced to 5 tons, with only the center torso able to take a single PPC without going internal, while a large laser will penetrate the arms, strip the side torsos, or leave only a single point of armor protecting a leg.
Why such a loss of armor? Because you had to get environmental sealing from somewhere, and a SalvageMech can certainly use environmental sealing to protect it from the caustic chemicals it risks coming into contact with on battlefields. There is a bit of good news here, though, in that Industrial Triple-Strength Myomer has been fitted to the HYN-4A, doubling its carry capacity. Armament has been downgraded to a single small laser, but you don’t want to get into a fight with a HYN-4A anyway: not only is the armor weaker, but the IndustrialMech internal structure makes you critically vulnerable to physical attacks. Sadly, the production run for the HYN-4A only lasted two years, before being interrupted by the Word of Blake sacking Solaris VII in 3068.
Continuing our downward spiral, we have the
HYN-4B. Introduced in 3072, during the middle of the Word of Blake’s invasion of Solaris VII, we basically have a Hyena that’s been cobbled together from whatever the VEST facilities had left behind after the Word of Blake blew them up good. Serving with the Solaris Home Defense League, these Hyenas sported a downgraded 220 ICE engine instead of a fusion plant, dropping their top speed to 64 KPH. Industrial TSM? Yeah, that’s gone. Small laser? Replaced with a machine gun. All the way around, the HYN-4B Hyena is the least capable of the bunch, but that’s not surprising given the pressures that VEST was under at the time.
It was those pressures that spelled the end of the Hyena. After the Jihad, VEST was down to 15% of their previous industrial capacity, after losing 95% of their staff and production lines. The Jabberwocky, the Hyena’s competitor, hadn’t suffered the degradations the Hyena did, and so was a much more attractive option for potential buyers, anyway. While they did an IPO to raise 600 million Kroner in 3079, in the end, VEST had to settle for producing two ‘Mechs: the Valiant and the Helepolis, ending any chance of a Hyena comeback.
If you’re one of the few people to have a Hyena, how should you use it? Odds are, you don’t have one of the two lost prototypes, so the answer is as a SalvageMech, rather than as a super-durable SalvageMech. Haul crap with it, whether it’s stuff you’re securing on your current raid, that assault ‘Mech that was mission-killed when its XL engine took three crits, or whatever else you need to haul.
Are you the Word of Blake, wanting to blow up a pesky Hyena? Well, you’ve got two options. The prototypes, as you learned in 3072, are actually kind of durable zombies, since they have BattleMech grade ferro-fibrous armor, 86 kph ground speed unladen, and a medium laser, combined with a 55-ton BattleMech’s melee attacks to deal with. I recommend standing off and whittling their armor down until you can finish them off.
For the production HYN-4A or hodgepodge HYN-4B models, whittling it down with guns remains a good option, but now you’ve got the added bonus of using things like those retractable blades you love so much, or even just your ‘Mech’s own fists and feet, to brutalize them. Melee combat does bad things to IndustrialMechs, and when combined with their thin armor, their Hyenas cannot resist firepower of that magnitude.
“Gio,” you say, “I’ve got this busted-ass 55-tonner lying around here doing me no good. Should I try my hand at my own Hyena-style conversion?” If you think you’ll get more use out of it hauling cargo and salvaging parts on the battlefield than you will shooting people, sure, why not? For added hilarity, skip the salvage arm, which doesn’t get you much under most rules sets, and carry a handheld light AC/2 or light AC/5 – the former nets you a ton of ammo and half-ton of armor, the latter loses the armor but does nearly three times the damage. Bonus points if you make it look like the Wolverine’s traditional handheld gun.
So, what are your thoughts on the Hyena? Post below!