MNG-8L MÄ›ngqÃn - 95t, TRO:3085
All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread.CCAF/MAF: “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.â€
Outsiders: “‘MÄ›ngqÃn’: it’s Capellan for ‘butt-ugly’.â€
When I look at the
MÄ›ngqÃn, I realise how much I hate the Cappies.
I’ve spent too many years(!) on these forums and have witnessed far too many vitriolic flame-wars to ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ of fully investing in all the ‘my faction is the best!’ BS, mainly because it tends to blind one to the fact that
every single canon BT faction is validation of the Dr. Cox Maxim, but in looking at the CCAF’s latest heavy fighter and its weapons-load, I am filled with a deep, abiding loathing for the Capellan Confederation and its addiction to the dirty-tricks style of combat. Don’t get me wrong: when you’ve spent that long as the underdog and need every equaliser and force-multiplier you can get, it’s not only a valid way to approach warfare but a sheer survival mechanism, and in their place I’d likely do much the same thing. Hell, I’ve long held the view that only a sucker gets into a ‘fair’ fight - witness the first quote above. The problem is that when I look at systems like the
MÄ›ngqÃn, my first ‘take’ is usually to wonder what it looks like from the receiving end... and the picture I get is a study in aggravation, frustration, and humiliation, an admixture of emotions that in the context of a tabletop game could very well end with me flipping the table and storming out, swearing sulphurously about ‘cheating Cappie bastards’. I’d
like to think I’m too mature and adult to rage-quit in such a public situation, but frustration is not something I wear at all well, so I just don’t know. :-\
Rashpur-Owens found themselves in the position of a lot of other corporations with the end of the Jihad: a dedicated arms
profiteer manufacturer, the looming ‘outbreak of peace’ was pushing them towards bankruptcy, but diversifying into the aerospace fighter marketplace as a supplement to a line of DropShips that were pre-sold three years in advance proved to be a catalogue of headaches. Merely establishing the base blueprints put the project a half-year behind schedule, and negotiations with munitions suppliers produced similar slippages, cost-overruns, and an awkward situation where two different makes of ER medium laser had to be fitted to the fighter, in defiance of logistical logic, in order to meet contractual obligations to both the primary
and the alternate suppliers. Even reaching the prototype stage didn’t end their problems: in light of the horrendous effects the Jihad had on everyone’s prduction-capabilities and orders of battle, Rashpur-Owens expected people to be falling all over themselves to buy a new and potent heavy fighter, but the Taurians flatly told them to get stuffed - probably in so many words - and even the Confederation’s new bosom buddies (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the Magistracy of Canopus haggled long and hard for the new design, settling for nothing less than licenced production on Detroit instead of simply buying direct from R-O. (And good on ’em for it!) All of this means that Rashpur-Owens isn’t going to get into the black on the
MÄ›ngqÃn project until they deliver (and receive payment for) the last unit of the 3088 production-run, and whether or not they’ll
stay in the ASF business after the experience remains an open question.
The funny thing is that the
MÄ›ngqÃn isn’t exactly a supertech machine, so while Rashpur-Owens seem to have taken an admirably-sensible ‘one step at a time’ approach to moving into ASF production by avoiding unnecessary technological risks, it remains to be seen whether the difficulties they had in ‘merely’ developing a relatively modest heavy fighter were them working out the glitches in the system, or harbingers of the disaster a more ambitious project might have/will run into. :-\
Whether from the mentality of avoiding tech-risk, or a simple realisation of how tight military budgets were soon going to get, Rashpur-Owens chose to centre the
MÄ›ngqÃn’s ninety-five ton spaceframe on a standard-grade 285 fusion engine, providing the type with only typical mobility for its weight-class in a 5/8 thrust-curve and five tons of fuel. Survivability is respectable but not extraordinary/ridiculous, as an 80/70/39 layout of the fourteen-point-five tons of ferro-aluminium leave the type vulnerable to ML threshold-crits only across the after sector, although you can TAC the nose with ‘only’ an LPL and the wings with a standard/ER large laser. Seventeen double heat-sinks manage the type’s warload as best they can (see below), but the fluff rightly and explicitly says that alpha-strikes are the province of ‘only the most insane aerojock’.
The secondary weapons carried by the
MÄ›ngqÃn are quite reasonable: three pairs of ER medium lasers are mounted, one set in a tail-turret (presumably the Diverse Optics weapons mentioned in the fluff as the secondary supplier) and one more (the Ceres guns?) in each wing. A small pulse-laser in the nose isn’t brilliant as a PD weapon for the fighter itself, but means that a squadron of MNG-8Ls would make a respectable contribution to the point-defence of a ’Ship, and also provide a limited degree of anti-infantry(!) capability for the fighter. (I wonder: do SPLs get their ‘anti-infantry’ 2d6 roll against PBIs in a Strafing attack? The
Poignard fluff suggests so.... Must come back to that thought later.) The primary weapons are an array of an SRM-6 in the nose and one in each wing, with two tons of ammo, backing up wing-mounted LRM-15s (with three tons of ammunition) and the weapons that make me loathe the design on sight, dual nose-mounted plasma rifles with a ton of reloads per gun.
Those plasma-rifles are the only weapons which
don’t deal their damage by five-point clusters, meaning that the
MÄ›ngqÃn is a singularly poor choice for gunning for heavy fighters or heavy assets like ’Ships. However, against fighters or ’Mechs, they also make its tactics pretty obvious: first you go for the ‘soft kill’, hitting them with the plasmas to spike their heat-scale and punch some holes in them, then go after the ‘hard kill’ with beams and missiles when they’re heat-hobbled and weakened and (or ’Mechs) potentially sporting armour-breaches for the missiles to crit-seek through. Heat-management is a
basic premise of BT piloting, and having the other guy keep externally imposing unpredictable heat-spikes that force you to with-hold your arsenal or eat various, numerous penalties is enough to drive any pilot
crazy - hence my loathing for the design when seen from the working end. #P Unfortunately for
MÄ›ngqÃn pilots, with only ten shots per gun they’ll probably have to husband their plasma-ammo for good TNs, which means they’re not going to get as much use out of them as they’d like.
Similarly, like the fluff says you do NOT want to alpha-strike this bird. All the forward guns come to sixty-four heat, which when run over 17 DHS takes you straight to +30 - meaning that even if your alpha doesn’t actually cook off your own missile-magazines, you WILL shut-down. You really, really need to juggle which systems you want to fire at what ranges - a task slightly eased by the fact that consciously or not, the IC designers have used a lot of weapons that are interchangeable heat-wise.
Although the
MÄ›ngqÃn isn’t really suited to fighting anybody else’s medium or heavy fighters, any defending squadron-commander who throws interceptors at the thing will have a long, gloomy spell of writing ‘Regret to Inform You’ letters to reflect on that particular tactical error. What you need are fighters that can out-turn the MNG-8L, with Long-range weapons that generate TACs against that stout armour while remaining out of the effective reach of those ne’er-sufficiently-accursed plasma-rifles, then get behind ’em and pick ’em to pieces. Ideally, you need to stay beyond the reach of the ERML tail-guns, but the armour to ignore their TAC threat would be just as good, so the CSR-V14, F-92, or equivalent designs would be ideal from the AFFS or (former) FWLM standpoint; I can’t speak for the Republic of the Sphere as a whole, since FM:3085 is still unreleased and I know SFA about them or what designs are prevalent in their military, but
TRO’85 offers the
Sagitarii, which has a SNPPC to punch big-enough holes from astern, great agility, and more than enough armour across its forward facings to ignore the ERML tail-guns once it gets inside. Mercenaries or other second-line units facing the
MÄ›ngqÃn would be well-advised to lean on any SYD-Z4
Seydlitz they might have picked up along the way, although something heavier certainly wouldn’t go amiss - EGL-R6
Eagles would be just dandy, especially if they’ve had some upgrades.
The
MÄ›ngqÃn write-up in the TRO says there aren’t any variants of the design just yet, which I would speculate is partly due to Rashpur-Owens being undecided on whether aerospace fighters are sufficiently lucrative to make it more than a one-off design. Of course, that doesn’t mean we fans can’t grant our own demented creativity free rein.... }:)
THE WORKSHOPNEXT WEEK: SGT-** Sagittarii (TRO:3085)
UPCOMING: TiG-15 Tigress gunboat (HB:MPS)
Hurricane (XTRO:Primitives #1)
C-*** Katya (Handbook: House Liao)
Morgenstern (TRO:3085)