The Super Heavy Rifled Cannon was at best a minor footnote in military history with only references to development programs scattered over hundreds of years with only fragmentary records surviving and only unconfirmed rumors of production and deployment still existing. This changed several years ago when a copy of a BattleROM from the deep Periphery was discovered. The BattleROM was unfortunately fragmentary with the location and even the date unknown, but a basic sequence of events was able to be established. A small mercenary unit went bandit and attacked an unidentified world. It seems that the luckless mercenaries stumbled into a local conflict and engaged a substantial force of primitive tanks armed with Rifled Cannons. While the mercenaries destroyed a large number of the tanks, three of the four mercenaries Mechs fell to massed fire with the lone survivor retreating.
This BattleROM garnered little interest and was occasionally used as a teaching tool for a number of years until someone noticed that several of the tanks were able to hit the BattleMechs at a much greater range than normal and did more damage than expected. This caused a slightly larger amount of attention to be paid to the BattleROM and as part of a student project a computer simulation of the Super Heavy Rifled Cannon was created. Other than a single unknown location in the Periphery, no faction is known to be using these weapons. However, the possibility that one the development projects in the Inner Sphere or Periphery did produce working prototypes or even small production runs cannot be discounted.
Heat: 7
Damage: 12
Minimum Range: 3
Short Range: 1-7
Medium Range: 8-14
Long Range: 15-21
Tons: 13
Critical Slots: 5
Ammo Per Ton: 4
Just had the random urge to create a BT weapon again. It's possible that a weight of 14 tons may be a little better balance wise. The "math" for Rifles Cannon points to this weapon being only 12 tons, but that doesn't track all that well. Since Rifled Cannon do 3 less points of damage against BT armor this does 9 points of damage, but still it's 9 points in one location at a good long range. A good chunk of a tanks weight would need to be taken up with ammunition though for it to be effective long term on a battlefield. sm
