Vehicle of the Week: HW1 HwachaA lot of the time, we see older vehicles consciously updated to newer technologies, creating a superior unit, such as the Rommel's Gauss-armed variant from RS: Upgrades. Sometimes this goes awry, too. It's hard to argue that they really accomplished much with the Narc on the 3058 SRM carrier, for instance, and the armor is a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It didn't really downgrade it, exactly, but I can't really say that it's better, just that it can Narc it so the next one to die puts a few more missiles on target. Then you get things like the Hwacha, which go the other way entirely.
Let me put this in context. The Capellans were rebuilding after taking it on the chin during the Jihad. Well, they've been in desperate straits before, and last time they got the Po and they put the
Cataphract into mass production. This time, there was a whole range of new hardware, some of it high end, some of it... not. Hellespont 'Mech Works put the
UrbanMech back into production on Betelgeuse, a decision met with wide approval by BattleTech fans including the author and wide disdain by MechWarriors who had to actually pilot the pokey little things in combat, and decided they'd offer a companion urban combat vehicle just to spice things up. To keep things cheap, they built it to primitive standards, and it shows. Despite the price and firepower, sales have been slow because the name is Korean, referring aptly to an ancient Korean weapon capable of launching dozens of projectiles, annoying some Capellan procurement officials, although the Anduriens and Canopians have each bought some.
Since the design is reasonably similar as a
40 ton medium wheeled missile unit with a turret, they used the same artwork as TRO3060's light SRM carrier. (As a reminder, despite the art, this is not a souped-up car. It's just drawn that way, even more inappropriately since this is a 50 ton vehicle, not a 40 ton one like the light SRM carrier.) Everything was built to TR C standards other than the fire control suite, so for all my grousing about performance, it's really doing pretty well for itself. The engine is a fuel cell with enough gas supplied to drive 1,111 km, about the distance from Miami to Atlanta, but it's only the equivalent of a combat-grade 120, meaning your speed is 3/5, 4/6 in an urban area. Wile that's reasonably acceptable for urban defense, outside of pavement, I could really wish for more speed. The armor is similarly poor. 62 points arranged 15/12/10/13 looks passable compared to the light SRM carrier's similar armor levels. The fly in the ointment is that it's BAR 6, meaning Clan medium lasers, any large lasers, and everything else we all love so much will get automatic critical checks just for showing up. (Assuming it's not a class 20 autocannon or something similarly powerful, which will skip critical hits and proceed directly blowing the vehicle apart.) It
will work well against 5 point hits, so it's not too shabby, but it's still enough to make you nervous. The justification for all of this is the three 20-tube MRM launchers. That's a lot of little mid-range inaccurate missiles however you want to look at it. There's 6 tons of ammunition for them, two dozen rounds for each launcher. Whether that's ridiculous optimism or just a lack of better options, I don't know. BAR 6 is the maximum possible for TR C without the armored chassis a Hwacha doesn't have and there's certainly not room for the chassis modification. On the other hand, they could certainly thicken the armor quite a bit and maybe add the radios necessary to bring it into line with standard combat vehicle performance while still leaving 16 shots, so I'm interested to see what people think on the matter. The crew numbers are the sort of thing we're more used to on DropShips, with fourteen people aboard including a nine man gunnery crew that raises the question of whether someone's decided to give hand loading another go. Or maybe they just decided to haul an infantry squad around and opted to dance around the problem of providing an infantry bay.
Testing the Hwacha is difficult since I normally play MegaMek (which doesn't, to my knowledge, support SVs), not the tabletop, but I have some thoughts on the matter of use. First, you need to swarm someone just like you would with a light SRM carrier. Hit single targets with multiple units at once in an effort to overwhelm them and limit their ability to take the Hwachas out. Second, you absolutely need to get right in someone's face if it's at all possible. MRMs are inherently inaccurate and you don't have the armor to survive missing. You may not survive hitting. Third, try to have bigger, meaner friends around.
UrbanMechs are not going to distract the enemy from you. A
Pillager might.
Okay, fine, you're not silly enough to buy some, but the people you're raiding this week have a couple. What are you going to do about it? Well, if you know they're there, I suggest trying to put them down from MRM long range (9-15 hexes) or even further out but especially keep out of the 1-3 hex range. Inaccurate or not, getting pounded on by an average of 36 rounds is not going to do your armor any good. Some artillery, artillery cannons, bombs, or other such systems may be useful for flushing them if you corner them into a blind alley, as might indirect fire from LRMs. Otherwise, there's really not any tricks against something this slow and thinly armored. Just shoot it until it explodes.
References: The Master Unit List has yet to add the units from XTRO: RetroTech, but
CamoSpecs has a single light SRM carrier if you want to look at the miniature of the artwork they borrowed.
