TiG-15 Tigress - 150t, Handbook: Major Periphery States
All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop†(http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,11735.0.html) thread.
(http://www.sarna.net/wiki/images/5/5b/TiG-15_Tigress_Close_Patrol_Craft.JPG)
The Taurians have always placed great faith (and financial investment) in their space-combat arms and those forces’ ability to protect the Concordat against foreign aggression. This didn’t work out entirely well when the whole weight of the Star League landed on them, but as eagerly as the League marched to war, the Concordat made damned sure that they limped on the way home (twenty years later). At the fall of the Star League and the general outbreak of insanity throughout the ruling Houses, the Taurians found themselves with a lot of space and space-based assets to patrol and protect, some of those assets being far out of the reach of aerospace-fighter life-support, too far inside gravity-wells for the TCN’s few remaining WarShips(!), and/or too dispersed to set up permanent defensive installations near every one. Vandenburg Mechanised Industries took a look at the problem and proposed a solution: an entire range of combat small-craft intended as WarShip escorts and patrol craft, designed to loiter where and when better-armed fighters couldn’t, providing at least early-warning and attrition if an enemy showed up at places nothing else could reach in time. The fluff-text for the Tigress explicitly says that there was a whole range of these ships, of which the Tigress was neither the heaviest nor the fastest, but unfortunately thus far it’s the only exemplar for which we have stats and specs. :(
Intended to patrol the relatively dense asteroid-fields of the Hyades Cluster, the Tigress weighs in at a hundred and fifty tons, exactly in the middle of the small-craft weight-bracket. While only developing 4/6 thrust, meaning it’s got worse tactical mobility than even the heaviest ASF, fifteen tons of fuel (a 10% fuel-fraction!) give the type vast endurance, on the order of eight days at 1g transit thrust, and that’s the design’s mission: to fly between outposts on asteroids and other heavenly bodies, keeping its eyes on the skies. With an SI only up to its max thrust of 6, and armour laid out 64/57/46, it’s got marginal survivability against heavy weapons; a Large Laser will threshold every section, but it can stand up to a couple of salvoes - certainly long enough to use its radio, which is long enough for the mission. Seven tons of cargo allow a Tigress crew to pack in a fair amount of food, consumables, and entertainment options to make the duration of their patrol less tedious (as long as they remember to keep their minds on the job when they’re in areas of particular interest, instead of ‘pulling a Racetrack’). Neither the TRO entry nor the record-sheet stat-sheet explicitly mentions what sort of quarters are allocated to the four crewmen (nominally three flight-crew and a gunner, though personnel shortages mean many often fly with short complements), but I presume these are what TPTB have declared to be the standard for small-craft, namely basic five-ton steerage accommodations. (A quick reconstruction in HM:A actually suggests seven tons per person, speaking to an all-enlisted crew... and possibly the designing PTB not looking at those particular numbers too closely? :-\) And there’s even a fairly decent armament to go with all that: a nose-mounted PPC and LRM-15 with four(!) tons of ammo provide long-range coverage, while at closer quarters a pair of medium lasers in each wing provide their usual workhorse service, with twenty heat-sinks making sure that almost all the firepower that can be brought to bear on a target will be available to the joker at the fire-control station. It’s no Stuka, of course, but it can let someone know they’re somewhere they’re not wanted.
Operationally, the Tigress is more of a ‘flying tripwire’ than a combat platform. Its real job (as demonstrated in my recent ficlet (http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,11573.msg275332.html#msg275332) /shameless plug ;D) is to keep eyes on an area that needs watching, and if it spots someone who shouldn’t be there, it screams about it on the radio as loud and as long as it can, gets to where the bad guys are ASAFP, and gives the defenders the most accurate and timely tactical intelligence it can for as long as it survives.
And then the Tigress crew get to die gallantly, fighting a battle they can’t hope to win, selling their lives as dearly as possible to buy the defenders more time to prepare a typically Taurian warm welcome for their hostile visitors and maybe, just maybe, hurting one of the bastards badly enough that someone else can finish him off.
Because make no mistake, being built as a small-craft means that the Tigress’ only advantages over an aerospace fighter lie in operational endurance, which matters not a whit in a tabletop scenario, and possibly in very reasonable per-unit C-Bill costs (ditto). Fighters thirty or forty percent of its weight have more speed, better armour, and as much or more firepower (witness the famous Corsair and Stingray). The only hope Tigress units have of victory over even small groups of aerospace fighters lie in concentration of firepower and mutual support - fairly basic stuff (http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,2107.0.html) - and even if they should prevail somehow, I’d expect to see some holes in their order of battle once the wreckage cooled.
Of course, the ‘tripwire’ function can also put them in a position to clobber enemy JumpShips and DropShips. JumpShips are generally lightly armed, if at all, and there are many cargo-haulers which would be outgunned(!) by individual Tigresses in given arcs (or overall!), so if you’re ready to pay the price in lives and treasure to cripple an enemy’s ability to shift his troops from system to system, without regard for 3SW-style ‘tacit agreements’, there are worse choices.
I shan’t bother making specific recommendations on dealing with Tigresses from across the game-board, because almost any fighter you brought to the table will do the job. They have no rear weapons, so interceptors can get behind them and simply pound them to death (though it’d be a long process); for that matter, pretty much any medium or heavy fighter you can think of outguns and out-turns the Tigress.
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