TR-13 Transgressor - 75t, TRO3025 and beyond
Originally posted 12 Jan. 2005. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding "FotW Workshop" thread. I am told one should never give in to rage (or, in this case,
Rage ;)), but in this case, we have a welcome exception: the TR-13
Transgressor. Some people complain about the 'fiat-ridden' way the Capellan Confederation got curb-stomped by Hanse Davion; others complain that they shouldn't even exist after that same mauling. Those in the latter camp would do well to look at designs like the VND-1R
Vindicator and the TR-13
Transgressor and realise that, as much as the CapCon might have been written as Generic Dumb Baddies in the Warrior Trilogy, they actually had some damned good hardware at their disposal and it could have caused the Fox's forces a great deal of grief if half Max Liao's senior officers hadn't been Davion plants (or if the man himself hadn't been nuttier than a muesli bar). Those in the former camp can point to these same designs and say "You see?
These are what kept you from finishing the job back in '28!" (They usually go on to gloat about how those same designs did the job right in '57, which rarely endears them to the other gamers in their group. ;D)
SUCCESSION WARS: Like a thin man trapped within the body of a fat one, the base TR-13
Transgressor is a medium fighter in a heavy's tonnage; seventy-five tons is the lower limit of the 'heavy' category, but intriguingly, it remains just light enough to use the largest L1 engine going, the 300SFE. Seventy-five-tons of aerofighter moving at 6/9 is the sort of weapons platform that always makes the other guy a little nervous, and the standard five tons of fuel means it has legs as long as most other fighters, too. }:) No less than fourteen tons of the all-up weight is devoted to standard armour, making for an 82/51/40 profile - this means that the nose is immune to TACs from almost anything short of a PPC and that the ubiquitous medium lasers can threshold only the stern. And the weapons fit? [whimper!] The nose and wings each mount a large and a medium laser, with a fourth ML in the tailplane to discourage the little guys, and the thing mounts twenty-five heat sinks.
Twenty-five heat-sinks, people - the
Transgressor can fire all three of its larges and still remain
under its maximum capacity, or hammer the other guy with two larges and three mediums at close range
while remaining totally heat-neutral! }:) An alpha-strike puts you eight points in the hole, making it a tactic of last resort, but with that exception, the
Transgressor's medium- and short-range arsenal is like a woman's Little Black Dress: it's suitable for virtually all occasions. ;D
Another point of interest is the
Transgressor's formidable attack capability. While
Transits' AC/20s make them hole-punching monsters, the
Transgressor makes a fearsome strafer (remember that flashbulb arsenal with the great heat capability to cool off between passes? }:)) and carries a maximum external load of fifteen tons while retaining a 3/5 curve, which makes for all kinds of "Owch!" And while an individual
Transgressor's lasers are not grouped together in a fashion that makes them ideal for anti-ship duties, a six-plane squadron is a valid threat: three 5-point and three 3-point Capital bays are enough to trash a DropShip or JumpShip but good, and even smaller WarShips of the SLDF era like the
Vincent,
Essex or
Lola-III classes should view a
Transgressor squadron with a certain degree of unease. :D)
Given all this, the
Transgressor must necessarily be the CCAF's workhorse - the
Thrush is far too speedy and delicate to be anything but a first-layer interceptor, and the
Transit is manifestly a specialist attack bird. Being that it matches Free Worlder
Stingrays and FedSuns
Corsairs for performance and has better armour and a weapons-to-heat ratio slightly superior to either of those normal adversaries, the TR-13 can ruin their days quite easily in the right hands.
As utility fighters with a strong accent on dogfighting prowess,
Trangressors can be used to mix it up with almost any other medium or heavy fighter at will - they have the guns, the armour, and the attitude to hang-and-bang with almost anything else flying - but they need to be careful that they don't get arrogant. Lighter aircraft can still out-manoeuvre them, so teamwork and mutual support are essential; never leave your wingmate, never let the enemy isolate a wing-pair and concentrate their attention on it, and always, always keep escorts close by to complicate the other guy's plans.
(Momentary aside: this above point leads to an interesting tactical gambit I personally refer to as the 'skeet shoot' method of tail-clearance. A friendly wing-pair finding itself pursued by hostiles can simply fly across the noses of a
Transgressor wing-pair and watch in relief as their assailants blow away on the solar wind. Alternately, one can use
Thrushes (which are of little other use and need to earn their pay somehow) to lead, herd or otherwise lure/force enemy wing-pairs in front of such a
Transgressor formation... then the TR-7s come up short to stay clear of the fire zone, shout "PULL!", and enjoy the ensuing fireworks. ;D)
Also, you must remember to respect heavier firepower. A
Stuka's LRMs or a
Stingray's PPC can threshold you from all angles at extended range, so either avoid them like the plague, or make them your primary target, in which case you should get in close and knife 'em before they can make best use of the rapier those weapons systems represent. Similarly, the primary threat from FWL
Rievers is that godawful AC/20, so once again you should either stay out of its reach, or use your agility to get in behind him fast and rip him to pieces before he can shake you off.
Unfortunately for the opposition, the TR-13 takes a lot of handling, so if you expect
Transgressors, you'd better bring three things:
1) a plan, an alternate plan, a contingency plan, and the readiness to improvise if/when all those plans don't work,
2) your 'A' game,
3) a goodly supply of "The Defence Department regrets to inform you..." letters. }:)
AFFS players have the better options list: they can bring
Stukas to soften up TR-13s with LRMs before the merge, and
Corsairs to mix it up with them after;
Sparrowhawks should be reserved to keep the
Thrushes from making pests of themselves. FWLM players have only one real response to the
Transgressor, the F-90
Stingray, but it's a good one, possessed of both decent enough heat-management and weapons that can generate TACs from most angles and at ranges matching the
Transgressors' own. Once again,
Cheetahs should be used to fend off the
Thrushes and the
Rievers should stick to their attack runs.
In this time-period, there is only one variant on the
Transgressor, the TR-14 model, which trades away all the large lasers and a ton of armour for an AC/20 and ten bursts' worth of ammunition. This variant is described as 'popular', but I'm not quite sure why: the heat problems are gone (firing everything you have leaves you eight
under your maximum dissipation capacity), but you've lost the Medium range bracket that made the TR-13 more than a sitting target, you now have to worry about running out of ammunition, and large lasers can now threshold your nose and knock out your primary weapon from outside its own range. This one's an overgrown
Transit and if used at all, should be used as such (mix a couple into a squadron of TR-10s and watch its heat efficiency soar!)
[VARIANT PROPOSALS REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants, including my own, belong in the corresponding "FotW Workshop" thread: http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=1340.0 .3049 AND BEYOND: Foundtech brought the Capellans the TR-13A
Transgressor, and there was much rejoicing on Sian, for what was once good now became sublime. ;D Reflecting the Capellan lack of infrastructure and the attendant inability to make gross structural alterations, the changes were strictly plug-and-play - DHS for the old singles, ER large lasers for the old Selitex Radonic standard larges - but the results undoubtedly lit up the eyes of every
Transgressor driver in sight. Simple maths tells us that the -13A has a heat-dissipation capacity of 50; however, it can generate only 48 heat, and
that only by shooting both ways at once, so a formidable flashbulb now became an outright alpha-baby - an alpha-baby whose ERLLs now let it reach into Long range, offsetting range advantage of the enemy's counter-weapon of choice against
Transgressors, the LRM rack.
What was once a heavy-hitting brawler can now be used as a sniper as well, standing off to knock piece after piece off of a heavy target or an enemy formation with no worries about overheating; return fire is a concern, especially as more fighters begin mounting systems like the Gauss rifle and the ERPPC, but other than that, both your tactics and theirs remain about the same. One key exception to this, however, is the need to beware of newer mid-size fighters like the FedSuns DARO-1
Dagger and the FWL LX-2
Lancer, both of which combine heavy firepower with superior mobility (and in the
Dagger's case jaw-dropping toughness): do not, repeat do
not try to turn with these aircraft. If you must engage these new types, boom-and-zoom the bastards - shock 'em with your firepower, then get the hell out of Dodge before they get the number of the hovertruck that just ran 'em down. ;)
[VARIANT PROPOSALS REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants, including my own, belong in the corresponding "FotW Workshop" thread: http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=1340.0 . 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. ;)
