HMR-HD Hammerhead - 75t, TRO2750
Originally posted 30 Mar. 2005. All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding "FotW Workshop" thread. Y'know, I came to CBT only a few years ago, well after seeing the first (and only! >:() season of '
Space: Above and Beyond', so I was conditioned to think of a fighter named
Hammerhead as sleek, agile, tough, hard-hitting, and flexible.
I guess three out of five ain't too bad. :-\
One of those Star League designs that gives you the sense that they hadn't quite figured out what they were doing with their proprietary technologies, the HMR-HD is sheathed in eleven and a half tons of ferro-aluminium armour, laid out 76/50/30 - vulnerable to ML thresholding aft but nowhere else, which is probably good enough; the five-ton fuel-tank is expected, and given the
Hammerhead's armament, ten SHS is more than sufficient. The rest of the spaceframe makes less sense at first glance - I know that seeing a 75-tonner turning out 7/11 performance on a 375SFE provoked a sturdy "WTF!?" the first time
I opened TRO2750 ::) - and arming it
only with an AC/20 and three tons of ammo!? ??? They seemed to want to make a heavy dogfighter to rival the
Transgressor, but the armament choice turns it into an horrific kludge instead.
Until you look at the external warload capacity and do the maths.
75 tonner @ 5 tons of spaceframe per ton of bomb load = a maximum of 15 tons of bombs; 7/11 speed (-1 Thrust per 5 tons of bombs) = 4/6 at full warload. The
Hammerhead isn't an air-to-air fighter; it's a 'fast' bomber and ground-attack specialist, meant to inflict PSRs on Assault 'Mechs in strike attacks after scattering the rest of the company all over the grid with a few sticks of Mk-84-equivalents, thus softening them right up before they make contact with the friendlies' front line (or even mid-battle!). It's the closest CBT is likely to see to a transatmospheric A-10 Warthog. ;D
While they can out-turn some smaller fighters like the
Stingray, and their AC/20s can threshold any fighter in the sky bar none,
Hammerheads have no business getting into an aerial battle
at all.
Stukas and such have enough range-advantage and firepower to compensate for their sluggish handling; the HMR-HD has no such redeeming features. (This might well be a deliberate effort by the bureaucratic overseers to 'encourage' pilots to concentrate on their mission rather than going glory-hunting. Gawd knows they've perpetrated idiocies like this before - remember how the RFC/RAF actively refused to issue parachutes to pilots in WWI, despite numerous loud appeals from the front lines? >:() The
Hammerhead is a specialist bomb-truck/'Mech-buster and in the presence of enemy fighters must be escorted and supported all the way to and from target, preferably (as the fluff states) by energy-heavy birds that don't have to worry about going 'Winchester' in their defence. In a pinch, a
Hammerhead squadron can make for a viable threat against capital targets - the 12 Capital damage those AC/20s produce is an eye-opener for most DropShips and some light WarShips - but they should not be one's primary antishipping weapon, if only because most defensive weapons out-reach them. :D
Going fishing for
Hammerheads?
Stingrays would be my choice for a turning fight, though Clan players would do well to reach for the suitable-for-all-occasions
Visigoth-A; fire-support from platforms with LRM-20s or ERPPCs probably wouldn't hurt your cause much, either. Try and stay outside the reach of those Zeta-20s, instead hanging back around Medium range to chew pieces off of him from where he can't hurt you.
[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,2003.0.html 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. ;)