The mech warriors, Aerospace pilots and armoured officers sat around the big strategy table in Winter Moonrise and basked in the glory of their victory. The status of C Ranked Mercenary company, Com Star accredited with a 100% mission satisfaction rating and an official victory over Miller’s Marauders, The Vindicated were no longer no name mercenaries. They were legitimate mercenaries who had proven themselves against a veteran regiment on its own turf, and done so as fellow professionals. The mood at the table was joyful, but I was putting on my CO hat and going over the battle ROM’s again as I would a tactical exercise at under Sao-Shao (Major) Edith Tang. I could almost hear her voice, in fact, I heard her words slipping out right now and silencing the room.
“Well that was about as sad as watching a pair of three legged blind dogs try to hump.” I said, echoing Sao-Shao (Major) Edith Tang’s traditional after action opening, as she discussed what worked, what didn’t what glorious success could easily have been disaster if the enemy had been even partially awake. She had reduced several officers to tears over the years, and several nobles had either transferred out or left the CCAF rather than deal with another one of her after action debriefs. Those that stayed became the reason he got a full company out with their machines, and enough pilots for most of a second company even when outnumbered three to one by heavier machines with total air superiority.
“Lets have a look at what worked, why it worked, and what could make it work better. Then we are going to look at what didn’t work, what could have been done to stop us, and what we do about that.” I said, tossing a slow smile to the painful winces her officers gave remembering Sao-Shao (Major) Edith Tang, the witch who trained them all to survive the battles nobody expected them to win, in the service of a war they could not afford to lose.
It was the Stiletto Sisters who spoke first. Lucy Liu spoke first.
“Davion fought stupid. These were third line pilots, the one’s Miller’s Marauders didn’t bother to take with them for a real war, and Davion couldn’t be arsed to use with his regulars. They fought stupid. The Corsairs were waiting until they crossed medium laser range to balance a full spread from their full wing against Vampire and I. Had the Corsairs fired when they ranged, and the Sparrowhawks only when they closed, they would have punished us more. Maybe got lucky.”
I turned, curious. “I watched the ROM’s, you had them clearly outranged.”
Kate snorted. “Ground pounders.” She sighed as she tried to dumb down Aerospace combat for people who stomped around in the dirt for a living. “Listen, the Star League ER advantages are deadly in any sort of chase situation where you are both going the same direction and you have a speed advantage or parity. You can stay in the sweet spot where you do a lot more damage than your enemy, and bleed them with it. When you are attacking a planet, the shoe is on the other foot. Your dropship is falling towards the planet and either you get between his fighters and the fragile little egg trying not to crash and kill all your fancy robots, or that dropship flips to decelerate and they blow your engines off. Screening fighters have no choice but to get between the defending Aerospace fighters and the dropship or all you mechwarriors and your toys rain down as scrap metal when the Overlord fails to brake and hits atmosphere like a cracked egg hits a hot griddle. We were forced into a meeting engagement. We crossed between extreme range and point blank in seconds. Had he put his fighters in pairs, heavies in front, we would have had no choice but to hit only his heavies, who could take one exchange, while taking it from all six of them, and we aren’t that much better armoured.”
“So the advantages of the Star League technology?” I asked. Kate and Lucy exchanged a look and a shrug.
Kate answered for the pair of them. “It’s good. It’s like having a match grade laser pistol while your enemy has a snub-nosed revolver. You will outshoot him, but if you get close enough, you will both definitely get shot badly in return. In a dogfight? Mostly we run cooler and can fire more weapons more frequently, but skill and tactics can overcome that, and four of our six pilots are somewhere between green and barely qualified.”
I turned to my own lance leaders. “What did you notice?”
Tina grinned. “It was piloting a Battlemaster, I could go toe to toe with a Marauder and put it on its ass. What I did to Locusts isn’t even fair. My Vindicator can face a Hunchback or any heavy you care to name at close range and hand it its head.”
Hawk, tapped the table with his stylus, worked his cowboy hat on his head a few times, then drummed on the table a little more before speaking. “They were bluffing, if they had been going for a straight up fight, they could have hurt us pretty badly.” Hawk answered.
I pointed to him. “Bingo, I spotted it going over the battle ROM, but you got it during the fight didn’t you Hawk?”
“I figure.” The cowboy said, sucking on his teeth a bit before speaking. “The Marauder is more heavily armoured than us, but its not an Atlas or Stalker, it isn’t really an assault mech, but idiots keep using them as one. They aren’t really suited for it, and if the Marauders were fighting their normal way, we would have left machines on the field, and maybe pilots with them.” Hawk said grimly.
“Fuck you, why? We owned their asses.” Tina said, looking at the battle ROM sequences from our close quarter battles, where indeed, we owned the larger, but heat challenged, machines.
“Range.” I said simply. “Sure we outrange their maximum pretty hard with our extended range particle cannon, but we have about the same ground speed, so if someone is trying to keep the range open, it can take a long time to cross between long and medium ranges where our laser battery can cut them apart. The Marauder were hiding the forests with a bunch of Locust tricked out to emit sensors like other Marauders. They deliberately hid until we were close, only showing us token machines at extreme range to back the bluff that everything in the woods was a seventy five ton monster, not a twenty ton target with feet.”
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I replayed the opening exchange, and showed who did what to whom.
“If they would have kept the range open for a few exchanges, we might have lost a machine, and even closing at that point would have left the fight close to even. I am not saying we give up the VND-1V we designed, it is like Tina pointed out, a baby Battlemaster, but Battlemasters suck at long range, and usually have fire support. I think we go with Hawks VND-1F, fire support version for half our pilots, and the VND-1V for the rest. Two with ER PPC, LRM-15, and three medium lasers for backup, basically a baby Thunderbolt, and two with ER PPC and six medium lasers, basically a baby Battlemaster. That gives us four ER PPC at extreme, adds two LRM-15 for a sustainable indirect fire support all the way through the long and medium range bracket, then the laserpocalpyse when we finally get the Vindicators inside medium laser range.”
Tina glared, not wanting to reduce her Panda lances close range fighting power. “Look, we don’t really gain anything in missile range from the Star League tech, we can’t make any of that Artemis IV Fire control work, because all we have are the dumbed down half blind LRM that people can still make today, and just putting ammunition inside when we have engine dripping over all three toros sectors is begging to get your engine blown away.”
Hawk pulled up his screen for the test bed we built from one of our four spare Vindicators. “Look, we added that CASE crap, the Cellular Ammunition Storage Equipment we copied from the Royal Wyverns. If the ammo gets hit, it will blow, and it will eat the internal structure, there is no question there. What it won’t do is blow the reactor or kill the pilot. The blow out panels will vent the excess boom outside the machine, we don’t lose irreplaceable XL engines or our own semi valuable asses. Plus, without the double heat sinks, this thing would run hotter than Romano Liao at a cock fight.”
The chuckling around the table told me how far we had come. Jokes like that could get us killed in the Capellan Confederation. Romano Liao was beautiful, fierce, twisted as fuck and stable as First Succession War land mines beaten with hammers; she was also one of the two daughters and only beloved children of Chancellor Maximillian Liao, and he was a tad protective of them.
Irina Korakova from my own lance finally spoke up. “Listen, on the ‘they fought stupid’ front, everyone is laughing at those Locust we killed. We killed them because they were pretending to be Marauders. Had they been racing around between eighty and a hundred twenty kilometers per hour, they would have been a problem. We have no ability to scout, no ability to screen against scouts. Literally our fastest machines sprint slower than a locust walks. I am not saying I want my Wasp back, and I am not volunteering to pilot a Locust, but we need scouts or at least a screen against enemy scouts that is faster than our Vindicators.”
Combined arms wins battles, and it isn’t just about armour/mechs/infantry/aerospace, it is about different classes of each. Scout mecha did not survive the line of battle encounters; they lacked the armour and weapons for it. Mecha armies on the other hand fought for information with light fast machines like scout mechs, hovertanks, and air assets. Of all of those, scout mecha were best fighting the war for information. They could get in on the ground with a full sensor and communications suite, and get out on their own to report. We lacked that asset, and if Miller’s Marauders had been there with a full force of Marauders we would not have noticed the trap until we were solidly in its jaws.
Our Head Technician Al Leong stroked his mustaches and finally thrust out his chin putting his two credits into the ring.
“Look, we have spare 180XL, that is it. If you want something faster than a Vindicator, I could maybe so something with a Javelin or a Valkyrie, but the Valkyrie torso is a bitch to work in. The Javelin I could do lots of things with. I could do a Spider, but it would actually be slower, if a lot better armed and armoured. That is what I can do with the engines I have. For the fire support though, those Marauders I can do something with. Something pretty savage.”
Al played around with the schematics and flashed a new Marauder up on the display.
“Standard engine, I can’t build new ones, and all we are the 180, but with the big machines you face choices about what you have room to stick in anyway. The Marauder was supposed to be fire support, so I stripped out everything else, jammed as many double heat sinks as I could fit, and whatever tonnage was left after weapons I bumped up the armour just a tad to get this.
Marauder, 75 ton heavy mecha, top speed 64kph. Right and left weapon pods hold ER PPC, and the right torso mounts an ER Large Laser. Spread over the machine are a total of twenty one double heat sinks, allowing it to fire all weapons at will without building any heat. At the very edge of extreme range, this thing was enough to kill any light or medium mecha in one trigger pull. As the range dropped, a few exchanges in and the Marauder right up until medium range was as deadly as most assault mecha, and ran cool doing it. At close range, it was outgunned by many other machines, but few enough would survive crossing the long range brackets to close with it. On paper, it had fewer weapons than the original, in battle, it would eat other Marauders alive at any range.
At that point Lt Tyrone Jackson spoke up from the Armoured officer group.
“We got by with our ground armour being all BUFF (slang term for Big Ugly Fat Fuckers)”, but you know our doctrine was always a mix of wheeled or tracked long range fire support and fast attack hover scouts. We don’t have any hovertanks left, and kind of like the scout mecha problem, if we face anyone out in the open, we are going to get screwed at our low top speed.”
There it was, we were soldiers from a combined arms background, given a new lease on life by the most powerful technology that had ever graced mecha combat. We had excellent mecha, and the potential to make an even better reenforced mech company, but to be a proper combined arms battalion, we needed a lot more speed, or our firepower would be too slow and too late. We had won because the enemy was pretending to be something they were not, and when the bluff failed, they had a losing hand. Being mercenaries on the attack meant you did the job you were hired to do, even when your employers were either lying to you or being fooled about what the enemy was. Being mercenaries in the defensive role, you had no idea what the enemy was bringing to the party, but generally nobody crossed the stars at a cost of a small fortune without a very good idea they had enough force to win when they got there.
We had good pilots, we had good vehicle crewman and even a lot of experienced infantry, but we were not yet a full combined arms battalion. Given a few contracts, we might make it to be a formation that could stand on its own. Between what we needed, and what we could afford, lay a few years of border warfare, a new government, a new star nation, and the ever present fear of the grasping hand of Hanse bloody Davion, the Fox of the Federated Suns. We had escaped his grasp, and embarrassed his forces. We hoped dearly that he had enough on his plate fighting a war of conquest with our beloved Capellan Confederation and stalling for time with the Draconis Combine. If he chose to notice an annoying little bug like us, the fleets and armies he could swat us with would no more notice our superior performance than you would notice how shiny the fly was you just swatted.