Let this turkey be...REHEATED!
I'm playing a scenario this weekend that will feature a Turkina of some flavor or another, so logically I came here for a refresher course. Aside from the usual wealth of information, I noticed there was very little said about the Turkina U. This makes sense, given how few mechs-in-spaaaace games most people will play, to say nothing of how poorly mechs perform compared to...well, any true spacecraft.
That being said, within the limited expressions of SpaceMechs, the Turkey U is good. REAL good.
Acknowledging the fact that SpaceMechs are almost helpless in open vacuum, they come into their own as giant boarding marines, landing on the hull of a(hopefully immobile) spacecraft and threatening grievous harm to the hull. In this role, the Turkina is surprisingly optimized. First, fuel tanks give you decent endurance before your movement becomes solely the realm of calculus. Ideally your DropShip will kick you out right on top of your objective, but having insurance(and a larger threat envelope) is always a good idea. Once you've achieved rendezvous, the talons make things easier to latch on, essential if your target is moving, and making landings on stationary targets downright easy. Once on board, the Turkina becomes downright vicious. The missile racks are primarily to defend you from any counterboarding mechs(or other ground units) that venture out to repel you. Their range gives you full command over the single mapsheet that most hull fights will take place on, and their cluster-hitting nature matters far more than raw damage, triggering hull breaches that can quickly disable an enemy mech(and you have harjel to foil their attempts at the same). Once the outside is yours, it's time to turn your attention to the enemy at your feet.
Mechs aren't exactly suited to the task of rampaging through narrow passageways, so what does a giant robot pilot turned impromptu marine do to his target? The answer is deceptively simple.
Option 1: Shoot it.
Option 2: Shoot it.
Option 1 is simple. Look down and pull the trigger, with the express purpose of turning your little island in the cosmos into a rapidly expanding cloud of confetti. There's a whole lot of good news here, and the only bad news is merely bad by comparison. Good: Your guns auto-hit and all cluster weapons do max damage. Good: you can throw in a physical attack into that salvo while you're at it, even though aero combat lacks a physical phase. REALLY good: Go look at the Turkey U's record sheet. As a spoiler, I'll go ahead and tell you that a short round of addition reveals a maximum potential damage of
One Hundred Thirty-Four points, ask for some paltry overheating you can easily handle. Even better: Go dig through 3057r, and take note of the things that kind of damage will threshold(120 capital armor or less). More spoilers, things that fall into that category include every DropShip, JumpShip, and Station in that book, and the bow armor of a
Cameron-class battlecruiser. If you're not seeing a way to get declared a ristar in one fight, you're not Falconing Hard Enough. "Bad" news: You still have to roll locations for each gun, so even though all the damage that hits one facing gets combined into a single slug, you're still going to see that huge chunk of damage split among a handful of hit locations. Still enough to break the threshold on just about any non-WarShip unit in '57r, though. Heck, you can probably outright destroy most space stations in disturbingly short order.
Option 2 is subtly different. Instead of just shredding armor and structure, you can make what is essentially an aimed shot at a single critical hit slot that can be legally hit from the side you're standing on. Bad news: You actually have to make to-hit rolls and such this time, so max damage is not assured. Good news: There are no modifiers at all, so
almost any Clan pilot in existence should have no trouble getting his shots on target. After that, you just need to make the usual crit roll. Weird news: Regardless of how you roll, this attack doesn't inflict any armor damage to the target. No idea how that works, but it does make this attack useful for trying to capture a target intact. Just keep going for crew crits, and eventually you'll have spaced all the crew, but the ship/station is ready for your own use.
It looks weird at first glance, but if you analyze it closely, the Space Turkina is actually a min-maxed monster.
