So for your ‘Mech of the Week pleasure (with some Alpha Strike Unit of the Week mixed in) we have the
Blitzkrieg. This Coventry Metal Works product comes to us in TRO 3060 and was born during the Jade Falcon Incursion of 3058. Martha Pryde and crew made the planet of Coventry and it’s valuable ‘Mech factories their playground and invited the rest of the Inner Sphere to come blood their warriors. One of the casualties to almost no one but the Coventry Metal Works board of directors surprise was the
Hollander. Its weak armor couldn’t stand up to return long-range fire that the Clans tend to bring when they go on the warpath. So a lot of them went down and they did a poor job of defending the factory. Thankfully for CMW, the Falcons weren’t there to collect, just destroy, and they eventually left. They also left behind several examples of intact Ultra Autocannon 20-class weapons. This got the wheels turning and CMW decided to do something that on the surface of social generals, assault ‘mech recon lances, and general incompetence stereotypes of the Lyran people might seem strange, actually follows in the steps of many of the Inner Sphere’s greatest medium `Mechs. Well, maybe.
So to start off with, we look at the weapon. With the help of the Free Worlds League, who’d been setting the Ultra Autocannon 10-class weapon up, Defiance Industries developed the Inner Sphere Ultra 20-class autocannon and slapped it on their
Demolisher II tank. CMW took this weapon and decided to mate it onto something different. Clocking in at fifty tons, the
Blitzkrieg is in the upper bands of medium `Mech units. It mounts the massive autocannon which, when the dice gods favor you, can dish out two twenty point hits. This is combined with endo-steel and a 350 XL engine which sends said weapon moving at up to 119kph. Wait, back up! A weapon that has the potential to drop forty points of damage while moving around the battlefield that fast? Well, yes, though the
Saladin has been doing it for a while, a BattleMech has not.
The Lyrans went one further and gave it four tons of ammo, which means that at full rate, you have ten turns of hurling lead down range. This is decent endurance for most encounters, although in an extended, running battle or a campaign, you have to be careful of your ammunition expenditure. Ten double heat sinks are standard and laugh at the attempts of the
Blitzkrieg to overheat. You’ll need some inferno or plasma help to accomplish that.
One of the complaints of the old
Hollander is that it has no secondary weapons to protect itself. Apparently the engineers, in their haste to
MAKE IT FASTER didn’t glance all the way down on the
Hollander complaint sheet. And since I said “one of” you know there’s another problem. The armor. We chose firepower and speed and left the armor back on the assault `Mechs. At 6.5 tons of ferro-fibrous armor, you get a measly 116 points for a fifty ton `Mech. Not good. To put it into perspective, the bog-standard WLF-2
Wolfhound has a 119 points of armor on a thirty five ton `Mech.
So, using a 3F
Blitzkrieg goes two ways generally. You are either leading lighter elements that can keep up with you (at the time of it’s introduction, I believe only the
Stealth could do that in the Lyran arsenal or the occasional
Wraith as far as medium `Mechs are concerned) or you are waiting for an opportunity to race in and unload on someone. Both are dangerous, though the latter has a higher chance of surviving. See, when a weapon like that with a shorter range is on the battlefield, people tend to get a little trigger happy and send you extra love, no matter how fast you are. While some people might consider 7/11 fast and fast enough for the
Blitzkrieg to do it’s job, I disagree and have watched these things get blasted out of existence. No one likes for some little guy to try and play with the big boys. Some players are very irrational about big guns moving fast and will open up with their whole force to remove the offender. That said, if you can hang out on the flanks scaring the excrement out of medium and light `Mech jocks and wait for that moment when the Wall of Steel is fully in the thick of it, THEN race in, well, now there’s target priority. And because you can get in someone’s rear and really ruin their day, you may still die. At least you made the choice tough for the enemy right?
Combating one is pretty simple. It has light ‘mech armor and annoying but not unhittable speed. Any time it is sporting a +3 THM, light it up. It can’t take much abuse. It can only get the magical +4 when it moves it’s full movement in a straight line or it turns once. Pulse, precision AC rounds, artillery (what? It’s a 7/11 UAC-20,) and targeting computers all make the job easier. It does have to die though. Any half-way competent player will be in your face spraying twenty point hits like a lawn sprinkler working over a yard.
Before moving on to the variant, I thought I’d also toss a little Alpha Strike love here.
Pretty simple to digest. No specials, 3/3/0 damage curve, speed 14” which misses out getting a +4 TMM. It’s armor and internals are ho-hum (people will kill this guy pretty quickly) and while 25 points isn’t bad for what you get, you lose out on one other aspect that wasn’t mentioned above: no head capping or blowing open/off torsos for kills. See, Alpha Strike simplifies things down and pesky time consuming things like individual hit locations are gone. This is good for time, but bad for things that like to lop off heads (or blast out XL engines.) On top of this, for three more points, you can get a 4S
Nightsky which does everything you do in the damage department, except gains an armor point, the ENE and MEL special, and can jump, albeit two less inches so has to jump to equal the
Blitzkrieg's TMM.
So, moving onto the 4F variant. Like all of the `Mech of the Week articles that I've penned, I’ve covered units I’ve been forutunate enough to add a variant to during the 3060 and 3067 volunteer unit creation thank you that FanPro/CGL/whoever gave us. We designed a ‘mech or two, submitted it along with a fluff reason for existence, crossed our fingers hoping it beat out any competitors, and then they announced what was chosen. I want to say there was at least one other
Blitzkrieg variant, but mine won out and the 4F was born.
My fluff reason was pretty simple: The Word of Blake was in the midst of producing their own version of the
Blitzkrieg to add to their armies. When the coalition rolled into Coventry they found all the necessary parts to make a few production runs (two IIRC) and so with the factory already set up, thought why not?
Of course, in the real world, we were tasked with using the “newly introduced” Total Warfare technologies to create variants. It could be as simple as tossing a small cockpit or XL gyro or much more extensive. I chose to use three for this one. The XL gyro, Heavy PPC, and light ferro-fibrous armor. The weight savings from these and the weapon/ammo swap was invested into armor, jump jets, a C3 slave and a targeting computer. And when I mean invest, I mean max jumping distance and max armor. Gone are the days of “good enough” for the
Hollander/
Blitzkrieg mess! Combined with the C3 slave, you have a spotter that can still issue head capping goodness, now out to a much longer range, or use that range and other spotters to send in highly accurate lightning bolts. I kind of liked how it turned out.
I will also confess that my “Word of Blake version” had C3i and an ECM in place of the targeting computer and C3 slave, but that’s unofficial. In my quick backstory the coalition used what was on hand (or something) and not wanting to use the C3i instead went with other components. I was just getting back to BattleTech when this happened and hadn’t read how coalition forces replaced Blakist equipment with certain combinations of stuff.
What did the 4F lose? Well, for starters, it can only ever do fifteen damage to you. This means that you can't force a piloting skill roll. Ever. At least from range. A 4F jock doesn't really want to be point blank with anything to kick or "punch" so he will need a partner to get another five points of damage to force that PSR. Now, that fifteen points of damage is in one place and if you hit the head or go deep inside a torso you’ve ruined someone’s day, but there is no more “here’s forty points of damage!” I’m a bit pragmatic and unlucky so the appeal of the UAC weapon never took with me. I’d rather have the consistent damage than not. Beyond that, the roll changed for the `Mech, with spotting and sniper duties being common. I’d say armor improved, though the XL gyro is a gamble and makes it easier to slip gyro crits in when you hit it. Both units rely on Inner Sphere XL engines to go zoom zoom so it's no surprise that if you lose a torso for any of them they are toast.
How to use one? As I was just starting, it makes a good spotter for the limited Lyran C3 networks. Sadly it is very expensive in terms of BV (1740) and that’s before any C3 BV calculations are added. It’s a good skirmisher and lone wolf, as the targeting computer will help you land shots, even when jumping. You do have to watch your heat a little, though it’s very manageable and with the jump jets you can afford to burn into the red a little. You can play the finesse game with this one, keeping at medium-to-long range due to the weapons range. You won't make any friends playing this way, but you can stay alive.
Fighting against one? ECM is a good start if it’s networked. After that, you shoot it with guns. Lots of guns. It’s armor will help it more so than it’s parent design, but the XL engine and XL gyro will make it more vulnerable to your fire. It gets to be
Wraith-annoying with it’s jets, though the Heavy PPC does have a minimum range to consider.
So, for Alpha Strike, the roll of the 4F changes to Skirmisher. It's fast with decent armor and firepower, fitting the definition nicely (the author was able to get it changed from Ambusher, which was an error when you look at the Alpha Strike Companion definitions.) You have six armor now and still two internals, and now you strike two damage out to all ranges. It’s consistent, though less than the parent. The long range helps with C3 nets, where it’s 33 points already has the C3S special figured into it. The speed, just like it’s BattleTech self, allows it to be either a spotter or stand off and use someone else’s data. The other two specials are ENE (no ammo hits!) and MHQ1, which if you are using the Battlefield Intelligence, can be handy (and tends to come hand in hand with C3S.)
I think each
Blitzkrieg has it’s place as they are different for how you use them in Alpha Strike. They are fragile and neither’s head capping potential translates into this aspect of the game. You win some and you lose some! With the 4F, you do keep the duel nature I was going for in that you play the midfielder or backup spotter in the lance, and so I am glad that translation made it!
CamoSpecs has a few
Blitzkriegs for you to see (I even painted one!!)
http://www.camospecs.com/MiniList.asp?Action=Detail&ID=177 Check out the
Blitzkrieg on the MUL:
http://masterunitlist.info/Unit/Filter?Name=Blitzkrieg
