Rusty
Purveyor of Fine Weaponry
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To create a unique artillery platform using real world experience that will be the envy of gun bunnies the galaxy over.
- Image Source: The Hammer's Slammers Crucible page.
- Canon Link: Power Fusion Generator, Z-6 Rotary Blaster Cannon
- Restricted Missions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: Rusty's Custom Firearms and Cutlery
- Model: RC-155 Mk 1
- Affiliation: Open Market
- Production: Mass-Produced
- Material: Durasteel, Iridium, Cannon Components, Hovercraft Components, Fire Control System, Computer Components, Communications Array, Guidance System, Blaster Components, Heavy Power Fusion Generator
- Classification: Artillery
- Role: Medium Artillery
- Size: 7 meters long by 4 meters wide at the plenum chamber, 3.5 meters tall
- Weight: 20 metric tons
- Minimum Crew: 1
- Optimal Crew: 5 (1 driver, 1 Fire Direction Specialist, 1 Vehicle Commander, 2 Loaders)
- Propulsion: Fan driven air cushion hovercraft
- Speed: 100 km/h
- Maneuverability: Medium
- Armament:
155mm howitzer, cupola mounted Z-6 rotary cannon - Defenses: Low
- Squadron Count: 5 to a platoon, four platoons per battery
- Maneuverability Rating: Low
- Passenger Capacity: 0
- Cargo Capacity: Internal storage for 20 shells, plus 50 charge bags
Utilizes air cushion suspension/propulsion system that overcomes some of the disadvantages of repulsorlift system. Versatile cannon plus advanced fire control software gives the Highball unparalleled accuracy and flexibility. Iridium armor provides protection for the crew and the ammo storage against small arms fire.
Strengths:
- Versatile: The Highball is capable of firing a wide array of munitions at a variety of ranges. This, combined with state of the art fire control system, makes it an extremely versatile weapons system.
- Accurate: The advanced fire control software, in conjunction with a guidance system that keeps precise track of its location on the battlefield, allows the Highball to fire accurately even without presurveyed firing points. This allows it to place an unguided HE shell within a meter of its target at 45 kilometers, when firing from rest. Accuracy on the move drops off considerably, a general rule of thumb being 5 meters of accuracy lost for every 15 kilometers per hour.
- Rugged: Though the air cushion suspension/propulsion system is far more primitive than repulsorlifts, it's also far simpler, and thus easier to fix under field conditions. Furthermore, the system can shrug off damage that would cripple a repulsorlift platform.
- Stealthy: There's no such thing as a truly stealthy artillery piece. That said, use of the air cushion suspension and iridium armor instead of a standard repulsorlift and shield dramatically lowers its electronic signature, making it more difficult to detect. Furthermore, without the standard cues that sensors rely upon when looking out for modern vehicles, the chances of misidentification go up dramatically. It's not foolproof, and an alert sensor watch will certainly know something is out there, but exactly what that something is may not be readily apparent.
- Armored: Though the Highball lacks the heavy armor of a tank or modern shielding systems, it makes up the shortfall through the use of iridium armor. Iridium is both extremely dense and highly refractory. Furthermore, it's extremely resistant to chemical reactions. This makes it an ideal armor material in a world of energy weapons. Though a sufficiently energetic bolt will burn through, the cab and ammo storage are well protected from small arms and light mounted weapons, increasing vehicle survivability dramatically over more conventionally armored artillery pieces.
- Despite the advantages the air cushion suspension has over repulsorlifts, it comes with plenty of drawbacks. First and foremost, the air cushion acts as a fluid coupling and provides no friction. Thus, the Highball on the move can be buffeted by shockwaves more easily than a wheeled or tracked vehicle. Also, it's more heavily affected by inertia than a repulsorlift, making it significantly less maneuverable. Though it has a top speed of 100 kilometers an hour, acceleration is slow, and rapid braking relies on intentionally grounding the skirts of the plenum chamber to scrub off speed. Though effective, this stresses the skirts, and rattles the crew around.
- The durasteel skirts are the Highball's greatest vulnerability. Though the thick durasteel is capable of shrugging off small arms fire, they can be holed more easily than the iridium-armored hull. Too large a breach will prevent the plenum chamber from doing its job, and can effectively ground the vehicle.
- A great deal of skill is needed to control the Highball. Since the learning curve is much steeper than it would be for more traditional vehicles, the driver's position requires more training than it would on other armored vehicles. Since drivers take longer to train, they're a valuable commodity to any unit that relies upon the Highball.
57. Artillery exists to launch large chunks of budget at an enemy it cannot actually see.
A grunt craves a few things above all else: a quiet place to sleep without anyone shooting at them, a chow section that's less likely to kill them than incoming fire, and enough ammo to get the job done. Of course, a true grunt knows that when it drops in the pot and they're short on everything but targets, the one thing they'd trade anything for is fire support that's worth a damn. An artillery barrage can blunt an enemy assault, crush fixed defenses, seed mines over avenues of approach, or scratch the back of an armored column on the move. The uses of artillery are limited only by the quality of the crew, the equipment, and the imagination of the commander.The Highball was designed from the ground up to provide sufficiently skilled crews and sufficiently creative commanders the tools necessary to maximize their potential. This required several radical departures from conventional wisdom, but without change, there is no progress.
The first change was the suspension/propulsion system. For generations, self propelled artillery pieces had relied on either tracks or wheels to get from place to place. Tracks allowed them to travel through the toughest terrain at the price of speed. Wheels gave them speed, but denied them the cross country capability of tracks. The advent of repulsorlifts allowed them to glide effortlessly over even the roughest terrain, but as repulsorlifts became more common, so too did the practice of developing weapons to counter them and sensors to track them.
The Highball's air cushion suspension allows it to go anywhere a repulsorlift can, but isn't susceptible to the specialized weapons designed to target them. It doesn't throw off anything like the same electromagnetic signature, which means that it won't immediately trigger sensor alerts set to detect repulsorlifts.
The heart of the air cushion suspension is its fans. 8 ducted fans blast high pressure air into the plenum chamber. As the chamber is pressurized, the air tries to escape the only way it can: under the durasteel skirts that line the bottom of the vehicle. As the air escapes, it lifts the vehicle up, creating a ground effect that causes the vehicle to effectively float on a bubble of air. Steering and propulsion is accomplished by directing the fans. Usually, four fans provide lift while four fans provide propulsion. Though this is the standard configuration, skilled drivers and reconfigure the fans for maximum efficiency on the fly. In addition to being able to control the direction the fans blow, the driver can control the speed at which they turn and the pitch at which the blades bite into the air. Though the Highball will never be anywhere near as maneuverable as a repulsorlift vehicle, a skilled driver can make it dance in its own inimitable way.
Another advantage of the air cushion system is its ruggedness. The fans themselves are protected by armored nacelles that can take a severe beating. The air inlets are protected by armored louvers that can be angled away from incoming fire, and that are backed by a screen that keeps debris from getting through. As a result, the system is quite a bit more durable than the average repulsorlift, and because of its relative simplicity, it can be repaired under field conditions without specialized tools. In the event that a fan is damaged, it can be deactivated, and its share of the load can be distributed to its neighbors. A minimum of four fans are required to maintain lift. Although the Highball can't be steered with only four active fans, it can be towed.
The thick durasteel skirts that form the sides of the plenum chamber are also capable of taking a beating. Though they can be damaged by incoming fire, it would take one hell of a lot of small arms fire to make a big enough hole to ground the vehicle. Larger weapons can do it, but holes are easy enough to repair, even in combat. Each vehicle comes supplied with plastoid patches, which function like an umbrella. Simply ground the vehicle, shove the patch through the hole and expand it, then pull it tight. The combination of adhesive around the edges and air pressure will hold it snugly in place until you can safely weld the hole shut.
In another departure from common wisdom, the Highball doesn't rely on shields for protection. Though energy shields are often considered the final word in protection on the battlefield, they come with their own sets of problems. Furthermore, once they're gone, they're gone, and a vehicle the relies solely on them for protection will find itself vulnerable when that happens. The Highball eschews modern shielding altogether in favor of thick iridium armor.
Iridium has a number of properties that make it ideal for use in armor against energy weapons. Firstly, it has an extremely high melting point, which is useful against weapons like blasters that convey most of their payload as thermal energy. Secondly, it's extremely dense, which offers it a great deal of protection against projectile weapons as well. It's also nonreactive to just about every conceivable corrosive agent that might find its way onto the battlefield, which takes burning through it with acid out of the picture.
It should be noted that the Highball is under no circumstances designed to get into close quarters combat. Its armor is designed to protect it largely from enemy infantry that might make it through the lines to attack the rear areas. It's fairly well proofed against small arms and even vehicle mounted or man portable crew served weapons, but it's not designed to get into a slugging match with tanks. A shootout with a proper fighting vehicle will almost always end in a loss, barring exceptional luck or skill on behalf of the crew.
To give it some means of fighting back against enemy infantry and sappers, the Highball is equipped with a cupola mounted Z-6 Rotary Cannon. The Z-6 is a formidable weapon, capable of laying down an impressive hailstorm of fire. In the right hands, it should be able to provide enough suppressing fire for the Highball, and its crew, to disengage from a fight it has no business being in.
The heart of any self propelled artillery piece is the cannon. The Highball uses a 155mm cannon that, in and of itself, is nothing to write home about. It's fed from a five round rotary magazine that is in turn fed by the gunners. The FDC specialist computes the fire mission, and the Highball's onboard processors select the correct round and charge and convey that information to the gunners. The gunners then set the round and charge on a trough, allowing a hydraulic ram to drive it home into the magazine. Once the round is loaded into battery, a second ram shoves it into the breech, which closes and fires automatically. A slug of compressed nitrogen is forced through the barrel immediately after, cooling it and smothering any lingering sparks before the next round is loaded into battery. At optimal efficiency, the Highball can sustain a rate of fire of one round every 3 seconds until the magazine is expended. For sustained fire, the time between rounds is 7 seconds, giving the gunners enough time to load the empty chambers on the magazine in between shots. Loading it completely takes a trained crew roughly a minute. It has internal storage sufficient for 20 rounds and 50 powder charges. If external rounds are available, the gunners can extend a conveyor that carries the rounds and the charges into the vehicle and drops them into the trough.
Though there are literally thousands of varieties of 155mm shells, RCFC designed 5 specifically for use in the Highball. It can use off brand ammunition, but reliability cannot be guaranteed. Range for a standard shell is 3-45 kilometers, and the HE Extended Range is 40-80 kilometers. The 5 round types are:
- High Explosive (HE): Standard high explosive shells. Can be set to explode on impact, on delay after impact, in proximity to target, or variable timed (VT), which randomly assigns an impact method. Has a kill radius of 50 meters and a casualty radius of 300 meters.
- Firecracker (FC): Cargo shell containing 100 walnut-sized bomblets designed to explode on impact. Depending on the angle, the FC shell can concentrate its bomblets on a 30 square meter area, or disperse them over 150 meters. The bomblets are designed purely for taking out personnel. They utilize a fiberglass fragmentation shell, and have a kill radius of 2 meters. They're harmless beyond that. Though they lack the blast radius of larger, metal fragmentation devices, the fiberglass shell has better dispersion, and its needle shards kill far more consistently. Though even light cover can protect the targets, the fiberglass shards have an alarming habit of finding gaps, and while one bomblet might not do the trick, it has 99 little friends coming along for the ride.
- Armor Killer (AK): An AK round is essentially a giant shaped charge. Fired at a steep angle, it's designed to attack the top of armored vehicles, where the protection is weakest. A seeker head, in conjunction with fins, allow it to track targets. If it can't find an obvious armored vehicle, the seeker will direct the shell towards any other likely targets, such as buildings and bunkers. Though it only has a kill radius of about three meters from the explosion itself, the self forging warhead can potentially penetrate up to 30 centimeters of standard durasteel, assuming a direct hit under optimal conditions.
- HE Extended Range: Exchanges some of the explosive potential for a rocket booster that greatly extends the range. Drops explosive charge in half.
- White Phosphorous (WP): White Phosphorous, or Willy Pete, as it's more commonly known, is infamous for its horrific effects. Chunks of burning WP are nearly impossible to extinguish, and will happily burn through just about anything, including people. However, it's also damnably effective as a smokescreen. A thick screen of WP not only blankets an area in burning hellfire, it is also extremely effective at screening movements, and a smart commander will make use of both aspects of it.
What really sets the Highball apart from the crowd is its fire direction software. Rather than relying on a separate FDC section on the battery level, each Highball comes with its own FDC station. The stations are in turn linked together through the Battalion FDC, which can assign missions, keep track of vital statistics such as ammo count, coordinate between the batteries and individual units, and collect intel from a variety of sources. Each Highball's FDC specialist is fed exactly the information they need at any given time to get the most use out of their vehicle. They, in turn, tell it where to shoot, what to shoot, and how much of it they need to shoot. Coordination among the vehicles makes it easy to mass fire, making each one several times more effective than it would be on its own.
For instance, a battery mass Time on Target Mission, in which all of the Highballs are coordinated, allows 100 rounds to impact the target area all at once. Time of flight of the shells is adjusted by adjusting the elevation and the powder charge, and by getting everything just so, they can make sure the shells all get there at the same time, regardless of when they were fired.
It's said that the Force fights on the side with the best artillery. For anyone fielding the Highball, the Force will be very strong with them indeed.
