MM-* Dragonfly - Historical: Reunification War
All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†(http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,10929.0.html) thread.
(http://www.sarna.net/wiki/images/d/d2/Dragonfly_%28ASF%29.jpg)
«Atlantia Death Squadron: attack!»
I know that I’ve ripped on Historical: Reunification War for perhaps needing one more set of eyes at the ‘spell-check/grammar’ stage of editing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was manna from heaven for the people (like me) who crave more details on the most legendary campaigns of BattleTech’s long and colourful fictional history. Only the Liberation of Terra is a more dramatic period of BT history, if only for the sheer scale of the forces Kerensky and Amaris were throwing at each other (those were the days when twenty WarShips was only a task force, not an entire national navy!), and frankly, after reading accounts of the tooth-and-nail fighting at places like Hill 475 on Diefenbaker, where the Taurian motto was “I die a free man with his teeth in your throat!â€, the BattleTech creative staff have set themselves a high bar if they want to top the epic, blood-soaked feel of the War of Star League Aggression Reunification War.
We Culture Vultures also half-expected the addition of battlefield units to BattleTech lore, and we weren’t disappointed. I don’t doubt that other readers were blissed-out by systems like the Talos ’Mech and the T-12 Tiger medium tank, but there were some surprise inclusions; for one, I didn’t need VOIP to hear Weirdo’s schoolgirl squeal of delight when he saw not one, not two, but three new canon WarShips in the back of the book (and damned if I can tell which is more awesome!). For another, I wasn’t actually getting my hopes up about getting any new fighters, so opening the .pdf and seeing mention of the MM-1 Dragonfly was... well, I’ll spare you the colourful metaphors, but I was exceedingly pleased. :D
On an aesthetic note, any fan of the true original BattleStar Galactica will understand the reference above, as well as my meaning when I say that if you chopped off the ‘V’ tailplane at that last joint with the fuselage, the thing looks like it came from the old Cylon Raider’s design-family. (Sadly, Sarna.net does not currently have an entry for the MM-1, nor is its artwork up; I'll have to edit in the image-link when this is rectified. :-\) I’ve mentioned before that Huda’s artwork is generally not to my preference, since it seems to rely a little too much on CAD/CAM work and ‘metal boxes’ than is customary for the BT aesthetic, but for the early days of BT, when ‘boxy and utilitarian’ was all the rage (/me waves to the Toro!), it works quite well, and this is a case in point.
The Magistracy of Canopus was still short of its gold anniversary at the time Ian Cameron had his little brainwave, and it didn’t have much of a military tradition, let alone a supporting munitions industry. Most of their ’Mechs and fighters were imported, especially the Primitive SB-26 Sabre, but the Canopeans had a lot of space to police, not to mention neighbours who were being distinctly and increasingly unreasonable about the whole ‘self-determination’ issue, so they looked at what they’d imported and how it worked, took out their draughting boards and pencils (’cause like Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Periphery does it old-school and still kicks ass), and whipped up a domestically-made fighter to bolster the MAF to face the inevitable. The MM-1 Dragonfly first flew in 2574, soon after the Malagrotta Incident made a full-scale shooting war all but unavoidable, and was built in ‘hundreds’ even before the Pollux Proclamation as part of the Magistracy’s pre-war armaments programme.
A forty-ton spaceframe powered by a mere 120SFE, the Dragonfly only develops 5/8 thrust and has only four tons of fuel. This is perhaps a reflection of the Canopeans’ institutional military inexperience, since they repeated some mistakes that the Inner Sphere nations had already made and corrected, but given that a lot of their hardware was still using Age-of-War (namely ‘Primitive’) technology and that they were trying to leap that gap while simultaneously creating their first-ever domestically-designed starfighter, I can understand why and how those mistakes were made, however much of a tactical impediment they might prove on the tabletop. The type’s armour is only six tons, 32/24/16, which leaves the type vulnerable to ML crits across all of its facings, something that I must again attribute to an unfortunate product of inexperience. Of course, it’s possible that the Canopeans were thinking in terms of ‘total annihilation!’ ‘maximum firepower’, because the Dragonfly has to be one of the most overgunned light starfighters I’ve seen in my years(!) of writing this column: while the nose holds only a single medium laser, each wing houses a full-sized laser cannon(!) and an under-and-over twin-mount of mediums as back-up, the whole cooled by eighteen heat-sinks. :o
I mean, this thing is like opening Antonio Banderas’ guitar-case in the Tarasco bar: that is an insane amount of firepower stuffed into a package that has no rational business holding it all!
Unfortunately, the Star League states had made their design gaffes and moved past them decades before they fought the Dragonfly, and frankly, the hardware they ending up burying the Canopeans under was not only more numerous, but just plain better-designed. The Dragonfly has the mobility of a heavy fighter - in fact less, since an eighty-ton 5/8 fighter has the sheer SI to constantly use its full thrust without cracking up, whereas the forty-ton 5/8 Dragonfly exceeds its SI every time it overthrusts, and had less fuel than the vast majority of IS fighters to start with. The agility differential between the MM-1 and its contemporaries in the IS’ medium and light-fighter corps... well, it doesn’t really make for pleasant ponderings. In the end, the Star League’s more efficiently-designed ASFs and ‘bigger battalions’ carried the day, and the Dragonfly factory on Canopus was put out of production during the fighting to take the Magistracy’s capital world, leading to the type’s numbers in-service dwindling over the following centuries.
The Dragonfly is a design which prioritised firepower above all other concerns, and suffered for it. Okay, you’ve got the sinks to blaze away with both large lasers all day and never tickle the heat-gauge, which I’ve always considered a plus in a design, and if you want to crit-seek, you can throw a large and three mediums at the other guy while still remaining under your max dissipation. Unfortunately, an alpha-strike hits a full +13 on the heat-gauge, which means it’s not a tactic that bears use two turns in a row, and that lacklustre engine means that you will almost never be in a position to choose where and how to fight - heavy fighters can out-run you and laugh as they do so, which means that your opponent will either dictate the terms of any aerial engagement (never a good way to do business (http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,2107.0.html)) or steer well clear and thumb his nose at you as he simply refuses to let you engage him. Worse, all those guns will tempt you to try ‘stand and deliver’ tactics against the heavies which you’re actually ‘fast’ enough to meet on near-even terms, but you simply don’t have the armour for it, and they sure as hell do.
On the other hand, while it slows you down to 3/5 a full external load still runs to eight ‘points’ of bombs or rockets (yay for RLs being pushed back to the 2300s!), and if you Strafe you’ve got a turn to cool off while you come back around for another pass. Looking at all that, I’ve really got to say that the MM-1 is better suited to use as an air-to-ground strafing machine than for jousting with other fighters.
ASF unit-commanders don’t have to look far for a countermeasure to the MM-1 Dragonfly: almost any modern fighter with a thrust-curve of 6/9 or better and a few MLs to throw at it can quickly chew it into uselessness almost at will, as long as it remembers to stay away from all those flashlights on the front bit. Hell, a few 5/8 heavies can take advantage of their higher SI and far heavier arsenals and smash entire squadrons in a few passes. Looking at the RATs in H:RW, the SL states field (either legitimate or analogues of) Sparrowhawks, Samurai, Stukas, Lightnings, Eagles.... (I mean, really: whatever happened to picking on someone your own size? [tickedoff] ::))
Ground commanders should look to their LRM-shooters and AC/5-bearers if they want to knock down Dragonflies on the cheap, and again, looking at the H:RW RATs gives you a laundry-list of options. Hell, just a single LRM Carrier will be enough to swat entire squadrons of MM-1s in a single salvo.
As the Reunification War went on and the Magistracy got lucky enough to capture more and more salvage from the invaders, more and more Star League advanced technologies fell into their hands (and Magistracy intelligence officers working in the Terran Hegemony managed to work their famous wiles on the right people long enough to get their hands on the good stuff). In 2583, just before the League invaded Canopus IV itself, the MM-2 was rolled out of the hangars and into service (possibly without even a coat of paint first). Better cockpit systems for improved situational-awareness were only the start of the upgrade, because the Canopeans got their hands on the one technology that anyone who’s ever played BT after the release of TRO2750 knows radically changes the game’s battlefield maths: double heat-sinks. Deleting four heat-sinks and changing the others over to freezers, the Canopeans kept it simple and uprated the nose-mounted ML to a third laser-cannon(!), possibly explaining the artwork (which looks like it depicts the MM-2). The type’s heat-curve is acres more forgiving now, and hitting the other guy with three large lasers all day is even better than just two; those in a mood to crit-seek can with-hold one LL and open up with two larges and all four mediums while remaining heat-neutral(!), and even a full alpha-strike is ‘only’ +8, which is still far from wise but can be done with a little less self-consciousness than a +13 would allow.
Sadly, the Dragonfly’s key, crippling flaw lay not with its armament but its mobility, and unless we get a surprise in RS:RW, it doesn’t look like the MM-2 did anything to address that, so the advice ‘for and against’ doesn’t significantly change. :( Not that it matters much; in the years after the MoC’s surrender, a lack of advanced parts meant that the upgrades were stripped out of the few surviving MM-2s, so they were effectively reverted to the MM-1 specs anyway.
THE WORKSHOP (http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,10929.0.html)
NEXT WEEK: MengqÃn (TRO:3085)
UPCOMING: SGT-** Sagittarii (TRO:3085)
TiG-15 Tigress gunboat (HB:MPS)
??? (I’m drawing a blank. Maybe I’ll throw darts at a list. :D)