AHB-443* Ahab - 90t, TRO2750
Originally posted 12 Oct. 2005. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread.“And how many barrels of oil will thy vengeance buy thee in Nantucket market, Captain Ahab?â€
Now, for the life of me I can’t decide what the
Ahab resembles more - a bus with wings, or
Thunderbird 3; it certainly doesn’t give the impression of being especially light on its feet. Whatever design principles the Harvard Company were adhering to when they came up with this one, it’s pretty clear that they
didn’t pay much attention to Dassault’s admonition that to be effective, a warplane must be beautiful. ::) But then again, beauty is as beauty does, and when they flew into harm’s way supported by blizzard after blizzard of missiles from this heavily-armed fire-support gunbus, SLDF pilots must have found the
Ahab a lovely sight indeed. }:)
With its 270SFE and five tons of gas giving it 5/8 handling characteristics colourfully described by one jock as resembling those of “a moose in molassesâ€(!), the
Ahab is clearly not cut out for the racetrack - or a turning fight. On the other hand, its relatively light engine leaves it a very, very healthy proportion of internal volume for other concerns. }:) Fifteen-point-five tons of standard armour, 86/59/46, render the
Ahab all but immune to the threat of medium-laser thresholding and put it into much the same ‘lumbering mini-Juggernaut’ category as the
Stuka, long the measuring-/beating-stick of the heavy category. ;D Fourteen single heay-sinks aren’t nearly enough to cover all of the
Ahab’s fearsome arsenal, but with proper bracket-discipline they’re adequate to the task. And the actual weapons loadout? Hold onto your hat, mate! The nose-mounted large laser and the twin MLs aft are pretty clearly ‘getting-home guns’, and it’s very handy that those 14 SHS exactly cover their heat-burden. Each wing houses an LRM-20 with three(!) tons of ammo, meaning that the
Ahab can stand back and pour fire into a target pretty much all day if it chooses to; the back-up SRM-6s in each wing, with one ton per launcher, make for a dreadful ‘finishing punch’ at close quarters. The final piece of ‘offensive’ equipment is a nose-mounted Narc launcher and four(! :o) tons of pods, intended to improve the effective hitting-power of the missile-racks and quite possibly the sole flaw in this formidable design. Leaving aside the fact that Narc is effective only in the air-to-mud role under AT2/R, requiring ‘in to Narc, out to shoot’ manoeuvring from a platform explicitly intended for long-range fire-support like the
Ahab (or that craptastic -5S refit of the classic ARC-2R
Archer) Just. Don’t. Work. >:( (And who the feth needs
twenty-four Narc pods - especially on a 5/8 ninety-tonner? Unless you’re flying a prep-bombardment mission and Narcing for the benefit of your front-line ground forces, which is a slightly odd way to do business but just might work.... :-\)
With that sole failing, the
Ahab presents a commander with a hell of a lot of firepower. Striking with one can put as many as fifty-two missiles onto a single target (which is well up into ‘Pre-Ejection Check-List*’ territory :o); a squadron offers two Long-range 7-Capital LRM bays, two fairly-solid clouts from 4-Capital SRM bays, and a sole 5-Capital LL bay
which can crit-seek quite well on lighter hulls. Bombload isn’t much to talk about, only ten tons at 3/5, but if you turn all of that into external fuel, you can double your operational radius and really give the other guy headaches... arguably making the
Ahab almost ideal as a surface-based attack ship. :-X
The
tactical fundamentals of employing heavy attack/fire-support platforms like the
Ahab should be second nature to most players by now, but they bear repeating for the newbies: keep them well-escorted/-supported by friendly dogfighters, lest they be molested by the enemy; go for your primary mission target(s) while avoiding direct confrontations with enemy fighters wherever possible; and don’t linger where you have killed - do the job and go home, don’t get greedy. One might note that such ‘defensive’ SLDF ships as the
Zero,
Spad, and
Gotha make very good ‘bodyguards’ for the
Ahab, and that the RGU-133E
Rogue is not only a natural companion in the fire-support tasking, but also mobile enough to play ‘Little Friend’ if need be.
Gunning for an
Ahab unit? Forget throwing your interceptors at ’em unless you’re a Clansman or your light-pilots did something to piss you off - twin MLs will beat the hell out of most IS interceptors very quickly, and their own MLs won’t achieve much against armour this thick. Draw off the escorts, then hook around their flanks or aft with your (fast) dogfighters. Don’t get in front of all those missiles if you can possibly avoid it, and bring some decent-sized guns to chew bits off of the AHBs - only C/ERMLs or better need apply. ::)
Pre-dating the ‘current’ standard of
Ahab by six years, the 2697-vintage AHB-X ‘original’ model differed from the ‘accepted’ production standard in only one significant respect: what would later become the Narc mount was home instead to a triplet of medium lasers and four more heat-sinks. (The Narc was a later substitution, supposedly to improve the accuracy of the missile racks. Yeah, right: WTF-ever, fellas. ::) ) With sufficient dissipation capacity to fire all of its forward energy weapons (or its LL and both SRM racks) without overheating, or to suffer only from a +2-per-turn when emplying both the LRMs and the LL, the AHB-X was fluffed as having better self-defence capability once it depleted its ammunition... but who the hell is going to burn through eighteen full turns of ammo from twin LRM-20s
and fifteen turns of twin SRM-6s in one fight? You’re far more likely to have run out of enemies or/gas before you empty your magazines - assuming you haven’t been rendered combat-ineffective yourself by then. ::) Definitely the ‘stock’ version to be preferred - especially since it’s
IS1-legal Intro-Tech. }:)
[VARIANT PROPOSAL(S) REDACTED] All proposed fan-variants - including my own - belong in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†thread: http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,3574.0.html*
Pre-Ejection Check-List:
- Remove helmet
- Spread legs
- Bend over
- Kiss your ass goodbye! :o Be advised: the attached .txt transcript(s) 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. ;)