[Infinities: Candle in the Dark] Thread for CitD (Needs Name)

[Dartz]

Since it seems to have been cut, I might aswell squeeze it out here

Welcome to Crazy Stan’s

Excerpt from “Life in the Machine” by Mackie Jaguar (Mechhead Press, A Baoa Qu, 3066):

“The invasion showed just how bad our existing stuff was: XR-71 got hammered so bad during the Long March that we had to scrap her. Her old autocannon were great for surprising the sort of belt pirates we normally saw – they ripped right through conventional waved craft – but against dropship armor? Like trying to stop a car by flinging flies at it. So once the situation had calmed down a little, everybody was on the hunt to find the perfect mech-killer.

Sis figured we should get in on the action. It was a chance to make some good money with hardware sales, and with the catgirls on the other side of the rock we could get some factory time, too. We could win by being in at the start of the new arms race. So we all got together and voted to bet the farm on grabbing a sales contract, the sort of thing that’d set us up nicely for a few years. Anyone with the right idea could get in and secure a place in the market, it was a great time.

The first thing we did was to find a way to replace the XR-71. I’m sure you’ve heard of the result. Lun herself was armed to fight the last war - among other things. You know the details of that mission already.

With that taken care of, what we had to do was figure out what our best niche was. Conventional helicopters showed they could take on mechs and hurt them, so we dusted off the plans for the waved Havocs and the Hokum. We had the tanalloy batteries, which were great for storing energy but we didn’t have the generators necessary to charge them fast. Not to mention the problems we had when people figured out where tanalloy came from. We had some pretty good fusion tech – we knew how to use a fusion engine to drive a turbine, and we sort of knew how to use one to drive a bullet, too. The main problem there was the prototypes didn’t scale very well. Ford managed to build four pistol-sized versions for the collector’s market, but anything bigger just didn’t work right. And we had Lun’s missiles, which could drop a dropship the same way that Soviet pilot did.

There was one last thing we had; thanks to Daryl’s promotion to Sailor Frigga for (ahem) ‘conspicuous service during a classified mission for the Crown’ we managed to get a genuine battlemech and ASF to mess around with. For ‘testing purposes,’ you understand. This gave us a better understanding of how their guns worked than almost anybody else in Fenspace at that point.

We didn’t have the money or the gear to step into the ring with the big names, so we played to our advantages. Which is why, out of all the people looking for customers in the dealers room, we had the biggest variety of stuff. Nobody else was willing to throw it all at the wall and see what stuck. We had slightly improved fusion engines, super-high density batteries and an autocannon plus ammo bin combo that wouldn’t cook off no matter what you threw at it. To show it all off at the Convention, we put all of it into the best tech demonstrator Sis could design. We couldn’t beat them on armour, so we decided to go for something fast, to use sheer speed as armour because it was the one big weakness of the Spheroid mechs. The things lumbered along. Move and shoot was our mantra, rather than a fair stand-up fight.

All this was based on the experience in Africa with Lun and the Indians. The faster we could move and re-deploy, the better. Aerospace mode let us do some real hit-and-run fun.

What we ended up with was a replica Zeta Gundam, armed with a real fusion cannon that actually worked, powered by Stonewell-Bellcom engines and tanalloy battery backup. The thing was huge, but it was seriously nimble for its size thanks to the cyberframe interface. The size and complexity of the build sucked up all our factory time for the year, and I ended up flying it all the way to the Con (Saturn that year; I think they did it just for the pun.) because we didn’t have a ship big enough to tow it. Got it up to 0.11 though, so the trip was sort of quick.

We get into the dealers room, and the whole thing is heaving with mecha. Sis spent most the first day just goggling over the competition. So did I, though my goggling was more over the flightsuits than the mechs to be honest. Anyway, we thought we had awesome, but for all the magnificence of our Zeta Gundam we could barely keep up. There were Zakus, a Freedom with full railgun compliment, a Unicorn that claimed to work but never showed anything, a couple GMs, a Kshatriya, one guy who offered to build anything for the right price, a whole boatload of eclectics offering stuff as obscure as Gypsy Danger, Heavy Gears, Arm-Slaves from Full Metal Panic and I’ll swear to my dying day that there was one madboy in the corner shilling designs for an Evangelion. (I don’t remember if I ever told Shinji about that one.) Not a lot of BattleTech replicas though; I always thought nobody wanted to try it since the real deal was just over the hill, so to speak.

We ended up selling a grand total of two [i]Zeta, to enthusiasts, and left with a Kshatriya because Elpeo demanded it. The Freedoms sold pretty well – can’t argue with full burst – but the Zaku just caught on fire. XCOM saw that and made some guy very rich indeed. Looking back on it, I understand why too: it wasn’t the strongest mech in the hall, it wasn’t the coolest either, but it was cheap, tough and robust. After the Torrington trials, the number crunchers calculated it would take four Zakus to kill a Zeta, but you could build six Zakus for every Zeta. And that’s not counting the cyberframe; without that, it only took three Zakus to take one down. While in the aerospace regime, it still suffered from all the weaknesses of ordinary fen-craft, but our argument was that we never intended it as an aerospace fighter.

Our gun designs went over fairly well. We sold a few based on ease of retrofitting to older designs, but ultimately they were just niche products. Most folks took a look at the heavy railcannon on sale and just fell in love, especially with the phrase ‘percentage of light speed.’ Sheer potential punch-through sold better at that point than our more flexible design.

Our choppers went over far better in the aerospace section. Helium’s defense forces bought a squadron’s worth. But really, we were just there to get a look at the new anti-Sphere designs. Atalante’s prototypes caused a pretty big stir; BAT took the Land-Air Mech concept and just ran with it to insane new heights and I desperately wanted one. Basically the exact opposite of the Zeta, I was almost ready to sign up with the Roughriders for one, they were so sexy, and then there was Gina in the new LAM duty flightsuit and… well, that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, the dealer’s room. It looked like we were going to lose the bet. The Zeta was too expensive and too niche, the choppers and the guns were selling, but not enough to quite recoup expenses for building the prototype Zeta. It looked like we were about to go back to the old ramen days when someone spotted the Judy.

The Judy was… well, we didn’t even think about it. It was one of those designs we’d put together for our own use and hadn’t even thought of selling. We only had one with us as a glorified forklift. That is, until a man in a dress uniform with medals down to here strolled up and told me he represented a major group looking for a long range, lightweight, airdroppable reconnaissance mech that could fit in as small a space as possible. And then he handed me an invitation to a competition.

Sis shat a brick when she saw the number of zeroes on the potential contract. The only problem was, we knew Prometheus Forge would get a similar invitation for their Tachikoma, so would Nemmelworths out of Mars and BAT was likely going to be involved. Did we really want to play in the big leagues?

Ford said it best: ‘Screw it, let’s do it.’ So we did.

Mackie Jaguar is a senior technologist at the Aznable Center for Mecha Design and a former battlemech test pilot with the Asagiri Engineering Works.

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I'll go hide now.
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