Hurricane - 25t, XTRO:Primitives, Volume #1
All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop” thread.“The Hawker machine was a reliable, rugged, and hard-hitting workhorse... which makes me a disgrace to the name ‘Hurricane’.”
An air-breathing fighter from deepest BT antiquity (first deployed: 2297), the
Hurricane was one of the ‘main’ medium strike fighters of the Terran Alliance and the two squabbling factions within that body. With proper transatmospheric ASFs still in a far-off future that designers of the time probably thought might never come, atmo-fighters were opposed within their domain only by their own kind, and as the Alliance kept sliding and sliding towards civil war between the Liberals and the Expansionists, both sides made sure they had access to large fleets of
Hurricanes and similar designs in readiness for when the shooting finally started. On that day,
Hurricanes from all three major factions - Liberal, Expansionist, and neutral peacekeepers/peacemakers loyal to Admiral James McKenna’s Space Navy - fiercely contested control of the skies over the Alliance capital of Zurich, with the horrific casualties on all sides that you’d expect of such an unmitigated charlie-foxtrot, and it was primarily sheer weight of numbers that saw the TASN’s forces emerge from the carnage ‘victorious’.
(It is worth noting that Martinson Aerospace, the
Hurricane’s manufacturers, went on to design the as-yet-unstatted
Chimera, the first true ASF.)
Now, in all honesty I really, really don’t like using the Support Vehicle rules for building primitive combat-vehicles and CFs. Perhaps all these years of using the ’Mech and ASF design-systems have spoiled me with straightforward mathematics and reference-tables that I’ve virtually memorised, but IMO the SV rules involve too many fiddly little details and table cross-references to an unnecessary number of sub-factors for building a BT combat system, not to mention the fact that the designs which emerge are ridiculously overcrewed (a tank with a crew of
ten? What is this, 1916?). Hopefully, whenever
Interstellar Operations is released, we’ll see a design-system for primitive conventionals which is a little more intuitive, perhaps even a credited yoinking of the rules whipped up by
PsyckoSama.
But unless and until that happens, as Commandment VI of the Great Marcinko says, I don’t
have to like it - I’ve just got to
do it. ::)
In essence, the
Hurricane exists to demonstrate how far the BT state-of-the-art has advanced in almost eight centuries, and how much pre-AoW designs really, truly
suck compared to anything at the disposal of the Successor States. At Tech Level D, the SV rules mean that the chassis costs ten percent of all-up mass right off the bat, which is at least mercy enough to give the design
some mass to work with. The designers didn’t go for an armoured chassis, whether for financial reasons or simple technical limitations I couldn’t say; this sharply limits the type’s toughness but also keeps the cost and chassis-weight down. The engine that pushes the Hurricane to a 6/9 thrust-curve weighs in at a whopping 15 tons, fully 60% of the airframe’s mass(!!!), and is fed by 150 points of fuel (that’s three tons’ worth under the SV rules, for those following along at home).
This already accounts for over eighty percent of the airframe’s mass-budget. :(
The armour is the maximum available at this mass, 29 points in a 10/7/5 layout, but without an armoured chassis BAR-5 armour is about the best you can do, so in terms of TACs you’re doubly screwed (thresholds of only 1 all over, plus the ‘soft’ armour giving you automatic checks for heavier weapons). On the plus side, if you can call it that, the armour only weighs another ton or so.
Basic fire-control costs the Hurricane another half-ton, but gets it tracking capabilities that gets its rounds at least within the same zip-code as its targets (‘only’ a +1 TH penalty). Part of the internal armament is about what you’d expect from a real-life tactical fighter, a single forward-firing machine-gun (probably a rotary 20mm or so) with the minimum half-ton of ammo; the SV rules (argh!) limit a twenty-five ton airframe to carrying only two bomb hardpoints, at a cost of half a ton each; but the last item is... well, until this document was released, everyone kept screaming that rocket-launchers were so primitive that they should go back to the pre-space days, rather than being a Marian invention in the Clan era. It looks like TPTBs heard those complaints, because the Hurricane’s other internal weapon is a Primitive RL/15, now nailed into the BT timeline as early as 2297 (and apparently very common during the Reunification War), so if you have the rules, you can use them in every era of BT play from the Age of War on forward. The rocket-launcher’s ‘primitive’ status at this point means that it has to eat a -1 Cluster Hits penalty (down to a minimum CH result of 2), but as the three-sided savagery over Zurich demonstrated, a shower of sixty-kilo high-explosive projectiles can still ruin your whole day.
(Incidentally, those of you who have
XTRO: Primitives #1 may have noticed that the Hurricane’s stat-block doesn’t mention its crew-complement. If I’m following the process correctly - Medium-sized Fixed-Wing vehicle (minimum: 2), Basic fire-control with 1.5 tons of weapons (1 gunner) - it comes to three people.
(When a fighter IRL 2011 with two men in the cockpit is, in many eyes, overmanned.
(Wow, they
really aren’t kidding when they say BT =/= reality. >:( )
Frankly, other than the use established in the fluff-text - massed volleys of rockets in a single pass - and as a ridiculously cheap bomb-truck, I can’t see a single tactical use for the Hurricane if you have
anything more modern at your disposal. Its primary purpose is, AFAICT, to demonstrate the exact degree to which BattleTechnology has advanced in the eight(!) centuries(!!) since it was first flown, and how badly outclassed such ancient technology is against Jihad-era systems. That said, if you don’t have anything better, the type’s BV of only 92(!!!) means that they can be deployed in swarms which almost
do ‘blot out the sun’, so if you’ve got a hankering for a real back-of-beyond scenario - like, “pirates in ’Mechs raid an isolated Deep Periphery world and must contend with their hordes of twenty-third-century-equivalent war-machines”, and you want to see how much of a butcher’s bill the natives would have to pay to drive off their visitors - it does make for an interesting ‘what if’ kind of machine. Just make sure you lay in a good supply of caskets first, because pretty much
anything and
everything more modern is going to scythe them down in job-lots, and I’m not sure that even
the Dicta Coburn can do much to keep down the price of victory. :(
THE WORKSHOPNEXT WEEK: C-*** Katya (Handbook: House Liao)
UPCOMING: Morgenstern (TRO:3085) ****** ****** SMF denied my login seventeen ****** times before I finally caved and asked for a new password. I ask you: what’s the point of having a ‘security question’ if the software refuses to accept the right ****** answer six ****** times? [tickedoff]
[Sigh] And now the archives are gone, which means I’ll be obliged to repost the rest of the now-lost FotW articles in the near future. Work has been nine kinds of SNAFU and bureaucratic BS, the forums went kerblewie, I’m about to take on a mortgage for a house I don’t even live in... this is not my best week ever. [tickedoff]
