Guardian GRD-1P
Mass: 15 tons
Chassis: Shield 1
Power Plant: Leenex 60
Cruising Speed: 43.2 kph
Maximum Speed: 64.8 kph
Jump Jets: None
Jump Capacity: 0 meters
Armor: Duralex Light
Armament:
2 Medium Laser
5 Machine Gun
Manufacturer: Silver Shield Security
Primary Factory: Capella
Communication System: Garret T10B
Targeting & Tracking System: Dynatec 990
Introduction Year: 2750
Tech Rating/Availability: D/E-F-E-E
Cost: 950,475 C-bills
Once a common sight guarding corporate enclaves all across the Periphery, the 1P variant of the high end Guardian security mech was built and marketed specifically for operations in the Star League Territorial States, competing and winning out against industrial grade security mechs and other light battlemechs alike due to its combination of cost effectiveness and raw deterrence value. To be completely unambiguous, the Guardian 1P was specifically marketed to Inner Sphere companies to protect their periphery investments, rather than being generally sold to private interests in the periphery. These foreign concerns often faced allegations of exploitation or profiteering from the locals, and were regular targets of protests, vandalism, theft, and outright terrorism. As the situation in the periphery rapidly declined in the last years of the Star League, attacks against foreign business interests only became more and more frequent, leading those same companies to beef up their local security forces.
The 1P variant of the Guardian was created with that environment in mind. Already a terrifying prospect for small groups of criminals or insurgents to face in its standard form the 1P variant drastically upped the mech's weapon load with the addition of two medium lasers, giving it the ability to quickly and easily eliminate light civilian vehicles or any improvised armor a rebel group might be able to muster. To free up the weight for this boost in firepower, two tons of machine gun ammunition was removed from the design, which still leaves plentiful amounts of ammunition for anything short of the most horrific of massacres. The weapon load was also redistributed, grouping the machine guns into two unified weapons bays in the right shoulder and left arm, with the lasers in mounts mirroring them. This layout was intended to simplify maintenance while also providing a wide arc of fire against both armored and soft targets.
Many hundreds of Guardians were in the Periphery when the New Vandenberg Revolt began. While Amaris seems to have passed on buying up this particular cheap and plentiful design for his Secret Armies, the Periphery states would still succeed in seizing dozens of the mechs from corporate entities operating within their own borders and turn them against their occupiers. Others would be forced to fight against the rebels, either when rebel forces attempted to storm their enclaves, or when the SLDF drafted these deadly anti infantry mechs into their own service. In the brutal fighting over the next two years, the Guardian would prove its effectiveness time and again, but it would also display its weaknesses, in particular its relatively poor mobility, frailty, and lack of ability to reach beyond knife fighting range. SLDF personnel would give the Guardian the nickname "Last Stander" due to its tendency to get cut off and surrounded by rebel forces, and a common saying about the machine stated "we traded hundreds of Guardians for tens of thousands of rebels".
Only a small handful of Guardians would survive the conflict in the Periphery, and its particularly blood soaked history in that conflict led to all of the surviving Periphery states to divest themselves of what examples remained. This led the majority of these survivors to gradually filter deeper into the periphery, where they are seen primarily as "just another mech".
Variants:
The more familiar standard version of the Guardian, the 1N, has only the five machine guns for armament, evenly distributed across the mech and fed by a single two and a half ton ammunition bay. This version was sold all across the Inner Sphere, and was even reasonably common in the Periphery before being supplanted by the 1P. Though never intended for battlefield operations, it wasn't long before these mechs were thrown into the cauldron of the Succession Wars, leading to catastrophic losses due to anemic mobility and limited weapon range. A wartime refit attempted to mitigate some of the Guardian's weaknesses by replacing a machine gun and half a ton of ammunition with a single medium laser, but it was likely only the cease fires that ended the First Succession War which kept the Guardian from going completely extinct. Despite chronic shortages in critical components (in particular engines which were reserved for the more valuable Urbanmech) the production facilities on Capella would continue to stumble on refurbishing and occasionally producing new Guardians until finally being bought out by Ceres Metals and shutting its doors by 2914.
A variant of the 1P sometimes seen in the periphery replaces the machine guns with a menacing battery of rocket launchers. This modification give the Guardian a ranged punch that it has always lacked, albeit only briefly, and pilots tend to use their rockets cautiously in combat rather than going for the more impressive looking but impractical alpha strike.
Type: Guardian
Technology Base: Inner Sphere (Advanced)
Tonnage: 15
Battle Value: 330
Equipment Mass
Internal Structure 1.5
Engine 60 Fusion 1.5
Walking MP: 4
Running MP: 6
Jumping MP: 0
Heat Sink 10 0
Gyro 1
Cockpit 3
Armor Factor 48 3
Internal Armor
Structure Value
Head 3 5
Center Torso 5 7
Center Torso (rear) 2
R/L Torso 4 6
R/L Torso (rear) 2
R/L Arm 2 4
R/L Leg 3 5
Right Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm
Left Arm Actuators: Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm
Weapons
and Ammo Location Critical Heat Tonnage
Heat Sink CT 1 - 1.0
2 Heat Sink RT 2 - 2.0
3 Machine Gun RT 3 0 1.5
Half Machine Gun Ammo (100) RT 1 - 0.5
2 Machine Gun LA 2 0 1.0
5 Heat Sink LT 5 - 5.0
Medium Laser LT 1 3 1.0
Medium Laser RA 1 3 1.0
Author's Note: The Guardian originally appeared in issue 13 of battletechnology, and got a partial canonical confirmation via name drop in TRO Irregulars. I'm featuring my own variant of it in Beyond the Frontier for three reasons. The first is that I feel it would be improper to just reproduce the stats and fluff of the original without adding anything. The second is that this layout is meant to match the art that is provided for the Guardian in the relevant battletechnology issue, which is quite divergent from the original stats. The third reason is... come on! Two and a half tons of machine gun ammunition? How am I not going to do something with that?
