F-100*/F-700* Riever - 100t, TRO3025
Originally posted 20 Jul. 2005. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop” thread. Debuting in the early twenty-ninth century, the F-100
Riever is actually relatively young compared to most of the ships it would encounter during the Succession Wars, which were often of Star League design vintage. Slow and ungainly, but tough as hell and packing a close-range arsenal not to be taken lightly, the
Riever is perhaps the flip-side of the coin shown to us by designs like the
Chippewa and STU-K5
Stuka.
SUCCESSION WARS ERA In this timeframe, a hundred-ton spaceframe like the
Riever pretty much had only one choice of movement curve: 5/8, with the default five tons of gas. The warload is explictly meant for close-attack duties: each wing mounts twin SRM-6s with two tons of ammo per wing, while the nose houses a colossal Imperator Zeta-a AC/20(!) with two tons of ammo and a token long-range weapon, an LRM-10 with two tons of ammo. (Note: not a single energy weapon. I’ll come back to this.) Twenty-eight heat-sinks is actually one more than the
Riever needs to be an alpha-baby, so you don’t have to be afraid of your heat-scale. }:) And while the armour isn’t up to the ‘magic’ 20% mark, but 86/61/48 from sixteen tons of standard plate is more than tough enough for the Succession Wars crowd: not a single section is vulnerable to ML thresholds, and the nose can shrug off anything short of a PPC. :o The fluff speaks of the
Riever specialising in absorbing punishment from longer-ranged opponents, then knocking them out with one or two devastating barrages when they get too close, and brother, I believe it. :o
As I say, the
Riever is the antithesis of the
Chippewa: while the fragile CHP-W5 counts on its arsenal to hit the enemy at long- and medium-range and avoid the suicide of close action, the
Riever is deliberately built to be tough enough to climb right into the other guy’s vest pocket and maul him up close and personal. Ground-attacks from
Rievers are to be feared; while their lack of energy weapons leaves them unable to Strafe, a single Strike from an F-100 can hit the target with a can-opening Class-20 autocannon, two clusters of LRMs, and up to
twenty-four crit-seeking two-point SRM hits. :'( Similarly, F-100 squadrons would just
love the anti-shipping mission, with Capital bays of 4 (LRMs), 12 (ACs) and two 10-point SRM banks. :o PH34|2 7h15, n00b! :smirk:
Unfortunately, if you’re tracking ammunition consumption (and I’m assuming that my readers are honest enough to do this without fail), the
Riever’s combat endurance is markedly limited by its magazines. It has no energy armament at all, meaning that overeager pilots/players can blaze off their entire magazines hitting their targets and suddenly find themselves completely defenceless when they try to get home. Moreover, the
Riever has no stern armament at all, meaning that dogfighters who get past the escorts are going to find themselves more or less unmolested when they start tailgating. :(
Rievers must be closely escorted without fail. My dogmatic adherence to my own
mantras quite aside, the simple fact remains that while
Rievers are tough, they are too cumbersome to evade trouble that comes looking for them and they don’t have the gas or the bullets to fart-arse about on the way to or from their target(s). Keep a flight or two of F-90
Stingrays nearby at all times to fend off enemy dogfighters; if you’re on an anti-shipping sortie, rather than the individual ’Mech hunting the
Riever would appear to relish, you’d also be well-advised to fold a couple of THB-D36
Thunderbirds into the squadron as well, both to provide long-range hitting power with its twin LRM-20s and to give the unit some ‘getting-home guns’ once they’ve exhausted their ammo-bins. Watch out for
Corsairs, enemy
Stingrays, and interceptors of any stripe, and remember to stick to your mission and go home once it’s accomplished.
I can’t say that the defenders are going to have too much fun knocking down
Rievers, though. You need at least a large laser to threshold the wings, so if at all possible, hit
Riever flights with
Corsairs,
Stingrays or
Seydlitz - anything else just doesn’t have the one-shot punch to get through the armour in any meaningful way. :-\ (On the other hand, if anybody’s dumb enough to commit LCF-R15
Lucifers against
Rievers, their LRM-20s and twin large lasers offer very good TAC chances, and they don’t give away anything in the way of performance - though if they get in front of the F-100’s SRM-packs (or worse yet, its Zeta-a!), it’ll be all over bar the crying. ::))
Two variants on the F-100 theme emerged during the Succession Wars. The F-100A wanted to improve its close-range hitting power and did so by trading out the LRM-10 for a pair of nose-mounted SRM six-packs and a fifth ton of SRM ammo. Giving away the LRM rack is arguably a good idea - if you start shooting at long range, they’re likely to actually
notice you, which is Not Good for a knife-range specialist like this - but I’m not so sure that more SRM racks were the way to go. You get another 10 Capital bay for antishipping work (or twelve more crit chances in a ground-strike), but an alpha-strike hits +3 on the heat-scale and you’re still SOL for ammunition endurance - in fact, you’re a little worse off, since you now have only fifteen rounds in your bins, rather than the twenty-four rounds the LRM-10 enjoyed. Useful, but not preferred.
The F-100B, on the other hand, looked to increase its striking range by deleting all four SRM pods and installing an AC/5 in each wing, with a ton of ammo per gun. Longer ammo-endurance = Good. Better striking range = Good. Loss of hitting power = VERY BAD. This thing is massively oversinked,
still can’t strafe, it can
still runs out of ammo for
all of its weapons, and its throw-weight is truly pitiful! “What were [they] thinking? Or were [they] thinking at all?” >:(
3049 AND BEYOND The F-700
Riever makes fairly judicious use of foundtech. It loses half a ton of armour, coming to “only” 81/60/47 (though the increase in vulnerability is mainly theoretical), replaces its twenty-eight heat-sinks with twenty doubles, gains another ton of AC/20 ammo... and uses the remaining freed tonnage to upgrade the engine to a whopping great 400XL and its thrust-curve to a dogfighter’s 6/9. Ye gods! :o This thing can
never overheat without major engine damage, its AC/20 ammo now lasts as long as the SRM bins do, and it can get into (or out of) trouble as fast as many smaller birds. The tactical value of the increased speed is hard to overstate: you can now match the turning performance of enemy dogfighters, improving your chances of successfully defending yourself when attacked, and you can get to the target, nail it, and get away again 20% faster, which makes for shorter sorties and lower periods of exposure to enemy fire. That said, however, you’ve still got those grevious ammo concerns, so despite your new speed, the old advice is still in force.
On the other hand, the F-700A uses only a 300XL engine and keeps its old 5/8 thrust-profile; the stray half-ton thus created is ploughed into stern armour, now coming to 86/61/56 and further limiting the tail-gater threat; the old heat-sinks are replaced by twenty doubles; another SRM-6 is loaded into each wing (without adding any more ammo for them); and the nose armament is completely overhauled, replacing the old LRM-10 and AC/20 with twin SRM-6s (with one ton of ammo apiece) and twin LB-10X autocannons with two tons of ammo per gun. More loyal to the ‘dedicated attacker’ mission of the F-100, this model loses the Long-range of the LRMs, but gains a bit of Medium-range throw-weight (depending on whether you use Slug or Cluster ammo in the ACs). On the downside:
still no energy weapons, and your SRM-ammo runs out faster (only ninety rounds between eight launchers!). I don’t know
what to make of this one, folks - maybe the Leaguers were using it as a testbed for what would become the
Shiva OmniFighter? ??? Tactically, handle it like you would the F-100 models.
[VARIANT PROPOSAL(S) REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants - including my own - belong in the corresponding “FotW Workshop” thread: https://bg.battletech.com/forums/aerospace/fighter-of-the-week-workshop-034-riever/ Be advised: the attached .txt transcripts 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. ;) Question of the day: why is it that I get more aggravated doing routine paperwork during a week off than when I’m actually at the job? ???
