“Angel†Light Strike Fighter - 10t, AT2/TRO3039
Originally posted 30 Nov. 2005. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread. Planetary militias and home-defence units need air-cover and ground-attack capabilities, too, and given that they are usually very far down on national procurement priority lists, they most often can’t get aerospace platforms, or afford adequate numbers of them even when they’re available; indeed, for most planets’ self-defence needs, surface-to-space capability is not an absolute necessity so much as an expensive luxury. Thusly, they find themselves in need of purely atmospheric aircraft which can move fast, deal damage... and be fielded in adequate numbers, often through indigenous manufacture. This is the thought process which brings us the assembly of generic conventional platforms known as the Strike Fighter family.
Taking “light†to a degree that few other combat craft can match - the lightest ASF available is twice its weight - the Light Strike Fighter (LSF) is explicitly designed for affordability and ‘swarm’ tactics, to saturate the defences of an invading DropShip/ASF force or ground units by speed and weight of numbers. It first appeared in AT2 as little more than a picture and a stat-block, but TRO3039 has corrected that, giving us a name: the base model in the First Star League era was called the Angel by its original makers, Andurien Aerotech, but it was promptly knocked-off by everyone in sight, and variants have proliferated across most of the IS to meet various factional requirements and limitations.
The LSF is generic Level 1 technology throughout, making it that much easier for worlds which have not yet experienced the benefits of the Inner Sphere’s technological Renaissance to mass-produce their own air-defence/ground-attack solutions. Of course, the LSF’s 10/15 movement curve utilises a 100SFE powerplant, which means that those worlds would have had to retain or rediscover the ability to build their own fusion engines (which is by no means a sinecure, pre-3049). Thing is, a couple of minutes playing with HM:A tells me that you simply can’t build a conventional fighter this size without using a fusion engine, which is a little strange when one considers the institutional experience of combat aviation in the twentieth century. ::) (I’m discounting the Boomerang, because it’s not a
combat platform; it’s a reconnaissance ’plane, and thus little more than RP-fodder for most CBT players. :-X) With the double-efficiency conventional fighters get on their fuel compared to ASFs, a single ton of gas is probably sufficient for the LSF’s likely mission profiles - short-duration ‘hops’ close to base - though use of external tanks can extend that.
Conventional fighters suck wind for armour, and the LSF is no exception: allowed only a half-ton of standard composites, 2/2/2, it has no thresholds to speak of and a single SRM (or AC/2 hit!) will strip any location it strikes. This means that unless your target-zone is completely devoid of air-defences, any force of LSFs committed to combat is going to suffer a fair few casualties, and fast. Their 10 SI gives them a decent chance of limping home from a few grazing strikes, but any sort of concentrated punishment - such as from decent-sized LRM racks, or God forbid a lance or two of
Pike or
Partisan SPAAGs - can tear huge holes out of an LSF squadron.
The LSF’s canon ordnance load is a little baffling: the fusion engine comes with ten free single heat-sinks, and the designers loaded on an SRM-4 and a ton of ammo? ??? I can only presume that they must’ve been thinking in terms of crit-seeking or Inferno-heavy tactics. The external-warload capacity is a mere two tons at 9/14, which is still pretty fast; you can load it down with a pair of drop-tanks for double the fuel endurance (which lets you RP a recon mission), or a couple of RL/10s to make the other guy’s life un-fun. A single LSF’s weapons and warload are unlikely to cause any heavily-equipped enemy any real grief... but at a mere 260
thousand C-bills and 137 BV per article, the odds of anyone fielding/seeing only
one LSF tend very much towards zero. }:)
At that price, anyone who doesn’t use LSFs to swarm a given target needs their head read - this is the aerial equivalent of the
Savannah Master! }:) However, you have to get them
to the target to do that, which takes a little doing. Plan your approach to the strike-zone carefully and avoid the densest concentrations of fire as much as possible... but once you turn in hot, go balls-to-the-wall and hit the target with a squadron or two - and I mean real-life-size squadrons, not the half-squads CBT considers ‘standard’. Even at full tilt, any meaningful air-defence is going to cause you grief - I’d imagine that losses on an LSF sortie against a defended target are rarely lower than 25% - but if you can put steel on target and cripple/destroy something vital, like a command unit or an assault ’Mech, or even the DropShip the bad-guys arrived on... well, in cold mathematical terms, trading three or four LSFs/pilots and less than six hundred BV for an
Awesome or a
Leopard is a pretty good deal.
Note: conventionals like this are found pretty much everywhere but see little glory. An interesting (and probably very common) scenario would be a pirate ’Mech lance arriving on a
Leopard (with the fighter bays ripped out to make room for loot) and facing a planetary militia equipped with LSFs and other such low-cost, home-made equipment. ;)
As for engaging enemy aerial assets: don’t. Not in the air, anyway. Bomb them on the ground, sure - but the overwhelming likelihood is that your opponent is attacking your planet with the benefit of ASF support, and any ASF which meets an LSF in the air is going to eat it for lunch. The LSF simply does not have the armour or weaponry to deal with enemy fighters in the air, unless they’re fellow conventionals.
If you’re playing in the Jihad era or later, though - or if your group likes to play things a little ahistorically - it’s
very interesting to note that the LSF is
juuuust big enough and has
juuuust enough XO capacity to dip into the pages of
TacOps and carry a single Light Air-to-Air missile. It’s not a
lot of added anti-fighter capability, but if nothing else it’ll derail the other guy’s train of thought. }:)
(
Do I even need to say it? :D)
For the defender, LSFs are like wasps: one is a painful nuisance, but a swarm can be deadly. Your anti-aircraft defences had best be dense and well-sited - as noted above, a lance of
Partisans will make mincemeat of a couple of LSF wing-pairs in short order. Don’t be afraid to devote ‘secondary-target’ LRM fire to AAA duty, either - the more fighters you knock down before they deliver their warloads, the less time you’ll have to take out to repair and reorganise around the damage they inflict. Friendly fighter coverage would be a great bonus - a squad of
Sparrowhawks will positively shred any LSF formation they encounter.
As noted above, the Angel LSF was cloned (and altered for local needs) across most of the Inner Sphere. Many forces tried to lower the per-unit cost to afford the swarms of LSFs they knew they’d need, and the most common choice was to trade out the expensive SFE for a cheaper turbine powerplant. House Kurita, never one to spend excessive amounts of money on ‘lowly’ militia formations, seem to have been the trend-setters on this score with their
Suzume (“Sparrowâ€) variant, which mounts a simple 70-rate Turbine, an LRM-5 in place of the SRMs, and uses the remaining half-ton to put another point of armour on each wing. :-\ I approve of the added range offered by the LRM rack, since it helps reduce your exposure to ground-fire, but I’m not sure the added armour is a worthwhile use of that half-ton. (See the Workshop for more details. ;))
Shipil of Skye built most of the Lyran Commonwealth’s Angel-clones - dubbed the Owl - and their Owl II remodeling clearly thought in terms of saving on ammunition costs. Retaining the 100SFE, it suppressed the SRM launcher and ammo in favour of three lasers - a nose-mounted medium and smalls in each wing - then doubled the internal fuel-capacity for better range. I’m not sure that gaining the ability to Strafe makes this a worthwhile choice, but loading up on external-ordnance RL/10s lets the Owl II put a noticeable degree of discomfort onto a ground target in a Strike attack and exploit any breaches with its beams.
Shipil weren’t done with the Owl design, either. The Owl III appeared during the FCCW, turning the Owl II’s collection of lasers into a pair of nose-mounted ERMLs for a very respectable combination of reach and punch - the Owl III can actually hit out to Medium range now, and as with the
Suzume, the improvement in survivability offered by the improved stand-off capability is hard to argue with. (Glancing at the Workshop I ran with the first iteration of this article, either TPTBs independently evolved a similar idea or subliminally cloned mine. Pretty cool either way. :D)
In their own turn, Andurien Aerotech returned to the Angel (once they’d rebuilt the production-facilities knocked out by the Cappies during the Succession Wars), and made an unusual choice in using foundtech by
downgrading the engine to a 70SFE and using the freed cubage for nose-mounted pulse lasers (a medium and a small), with an aft-mounted ERSL valiantly swinging its handbag at the ass-grabbers and tailgaters. On the one hand, the added accuracy of the pulse-beamers makes for better hit-rates, especially out of the undertrained militia pilots you’d expect to see in the things, and the SPL grants a certain degree of anti-infantry capability for COIN work. On the other hand, I really can’t say the idea of slowing down an already marginally-suvivable airframe warms what passes for my heart, especially once the other side starts deploying MANPADS or, heaven forfend,
actual AAA vehicles. :o
[VARIANT PROPOSAL(S) REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants - including my own - belong in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread: http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,3729.0.html Got any war-stories
or personal variants of the Light Strike Fighter? Put ’em up here for our edification.... ;)
Be advised: the attached .txt transcript(s) of previous runs of this thread contain numerous reader-proposals for variants. I’ll try to change those out for ‘sanitised’ versions of those threads when I can, but I can’t promise it’ll be soon - that’s a lot of ground to cover. ;)