GblaRCS Chpt 14

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 14 -==
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"Frederick the Great said that 'Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl' but as an artilleryman myself I'm not sure how much dignity there is to being hit with a 155mm shell that scatters your bodyparts over an area the size of a football stadium. Don't let the egotists riding Battlemechs fool you, artillery reigns supreme when it comes to the business of killing your fellow man on the battlefield and we don't glorify the process by pretending to be chivalrous when doing so."Colonel Daniel Hammerick - 2830CE
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===How some losses can snowball a fight===
Najd Plateau - Algenib – 2829
It was perhaps almost inevitable if your name was Hammerick that you would end up with the nickname 'The Hammer', and if you got a few drinks into him Daniel Hammerick would admit the reason he decided to become an artilleryman was that it was just so damn apt.
Putting aside nominative determinism he had actually shown considerable aptitude at dropping high explosives on people from a great distance over the years, earning much acclaim from Khan McEvedy for how well he served his clan during Operation Klondike whilst simultaneously receiving the opprobrium of ilKhan Kerensky for just doing his job.
It was at the Battle of Stavka on Circe, where Clan Wolverine defeated the rebel Pentagon faction calling themselves the Rasmussen Elite, that Hammerick had come to Nicholas Kerensky's attention in a bad way. The ilKhan had a soft spot for the Rasmussen Elite because of their preference for honorable single-combat between skilled mechwarriors, indeed he once described them as the 'shadow brothers' of the clans. As such he had decided to come observe the battle taking place personally, presenting Khan Sarah McEvedy with specific rules of engagement that her Wolverines should meet their foe valiantly one-on-one like the knights of old.
McEvedy took stock of the situation, determined how many of her people would likely die if she fought the battle with one hand tied behind her back, and on the basis that the whole idea was just wasteful and ****** stupid she ignored the ilKhan's 'request' and brought up artillery.
Daniel 'The Hammer' Hammerick's artillery unit, they called themselves 'Ravager Battery', blasted Rasmussen Elite right out their lair with indirect fire from maximum range, Hammerick eating a ham sandwich between correcting his fire according to the calls from his artillery spotters.
Nicholas Kerensky, ilKhan of the Clans was not impressed.
Things had changed a lot for Daniel Hammerick in the eight years since then of course. The Wolverine Secession had seen him leave Circe far behind, he had been promoted all the way up to Lieutenant-Colonel and now commanded a far greater and more varied artillery park, with multiple batteries of guns and MLRS systems. The enemy that day on Algenib was much better equipped than the Rasmussen Elite had ever been, though less numerous overall, and the sandwich he was eating as his artillery was pounding the crap out of them was tuna mayo.
A sonic boom overhead caught his attention and he looked up to see a squadron of SLDF Tomahawk aerospace fighters, followed by a flight of the larger Rapier, burning hard towards the battlefield. General Romanov must have given the order to stop messing around with the pirates and get them out of her sky and they were undoubtedly only too happy to obey. Clan Wolverine was fond of the Rapier, having upgraded the fair number of the already excellent 'Royal' model already in their touman still further with improved weaponry even before McEvedy declared independence from the Clans. The Tomahawk fighters up there weren't quite as much of a step up from the standard model, Hammerick knew from briefings, but all of them would had gotten their original armament of Large Lasers replaced with the Improved Large Laser, the tonnage saved by that switch-out devoted to mounting additional heatsinks.
"Vali batteries alpha, bravo and charlie switch to cluster for the next three salvos. Fire at my command." Hammerick instructed his crews via his radio headset, getting back to business. General Romanov wanted their aim thrown off when her assault up the hill began and cluster-munitions tearing up the whole ridge they were stood on would do that nicely. "Delta battery, reduce your rate of fire, you'll overheat your tubes and it's a long way back to Niops to get more ammo as well" he added, warning his Thor crews not to get too carried away.
The crew of one of the Thor SPG's had stencilled a phrase in Latin on the side of their machine, Ultima Ratio Regum, the final argument of kings, that one being an artillery classic. It always put Hammerick in mind of the notion that after their invention battlemechs had replaced infantry as the so-called 'Queen of Battle', that paradigm shift failing to alter the fact that artillery had ruled over the battlefield before mechs came along and still reigned supreme now as long as it was correctly employed.
Battlemechs might be the queen of battle, but artillery was king, and you know what kings do to queens in order to make princes.
The real bitch of it was, just prior to this operation he had spent some time modifying a pair of Lightning reconnaissance hovercraft to carry both a NARC Missile Beacon launcher and a specialized TAG system (Target Acquisition Gear) that could paint targets for the homing version of the Arrow IV. As a result he had brought along multiple reloads of the high-tech guided missiles for his Vali launchers as well as standard loads, cluster and FASCAM, only finding out mere minutes ago that the Rimjob pirates were loaded down with Guardian ECM pods and Anti-Missile-Systems that would negate his damn NARC beacons.
Fortunately, each of his Vali launch vehicles had pulled a trailer load of extra reloads along with them so he could still put plenty of munitions down-range, but it was a shame he couldn't poleaxe a few enemy assaults with a direct hit. Getting struck by an Arrow IV carrying a single full-sized warhead as payload was like getting hit by an express train.
Oh well, could be worse, could be on the receiving end of that., he thought to himself before giving the order to fire, taking another bite of his sandwich as his three missile batteries, eighteen Vali launchers between them, rippled off a full salvo of cluster rounds off towards the enemy.
Up at the frontline, Colonel Jax Benedict commanding one of the three SLDF battalions was waiting for the signal to advance, that signal being the ridge up there where the enemy was being rendered very difficult to see by an epic mass of explosions.
Formerly the commanding officer of Clan Wolverine's 444th Cluster, the battalion Benedict now commanded contained fewer battlemechs than he once had at his disposal but thanks to the upgrade program they had been through probably more firepower overall. This was particularly noticeable for machines like the Stalker he was currently piloting, a mech that relied on LRMs for their long-range firepower. The Improved LRM launchers only weighed half what the original models did, so in the case of the Stalker they swapped out the twin LRM 10 launchers for LRM 15's and added Artemis IV fire-control and CASE protection against ammunition explosions for the same mass. Then, thanks to the additional two tons in weight saved by switching from Large Lasers to Improved Large Lasers they added more ammunition for the launchers so you could be much freer as to when you let rip with your missiles.
Which would have been fantastic if the damn pirates didn't have so many battlemechs with Guardian ECM or Anti-Missile-Systems that would respectively jam his Artemis IV FCS and shoot down some of his now effectively dumbfire missiles before they hit, Benedict thought bitterly to himself, wishing he had taken out that spare Thug rather than let that old duffer from the 295th use it. All Benedict could do now was throw LRMs like crazy and count on the fact that if you threw enough shit at the wall some of it was going to stick.
Benedict switched his radio to his battalion's command frequency. "Your lance commanders will designate your targets. We want to reduce the number of guns shooting back as fast as possible so I want four mechs engaging a single machine to knock it out of the fight quickly before switching to the next target" he ordered. "If possible engage their Phoenix mediums first, they've got an ER PPC and they'll die a lot faster than their heavies and assaults" he advised before switching to the frequency being used by his own lance. "Donovan, I know it might be tempting to try and blow some heads off with those Enhanced ER PPC's but you'll never score hits at long range so aim center-mass' he instructed the old mechwarrior to his left piloting the Thug. "Same goes for you Sampson, I know you're hot shit in that Marauder but wait until we're closer until you try and prove it" he continued. "As for you Engels, just because you've got more armor on that Orion than you used to that does not mean you're an assault mech, so don't be in a hurry to get close enough to use your autocannon."
"Nice to be officially recognized as 'hot shit' Sir" Sampson responded, perhaps sounding a little smug. "Seeing as how I'm not proper 'Warrior caste' and all."
"Can we go one day without the Labor caste hero bullshit please, Sampson?" Benedict requested pointlessly. He was sure that Hallis had only assigned him the man because it was well known Benedict had some misgivings at the time about Khan McEvedy's loosening up of the castes which had resulted in the likes of Sampson swapping a shovel for a battlemech. It wasn't like Sampson had even been Labor caste very long, certainly not long enough to have developed a genuine grievance about it, the man had been a mechwarrior in the Rasmussen Elite that was captured after the fight at Stavka went very badly for them. Sampson was not generally well liked because the Rasmussen Elite had been monumental dicks that had basically ran a protection racket on Circe, but you couldn't deny he was one hell of a mechwarrior.
"Yes Sir, today I'm happy to only be a regular hero." Sampson replied, sounding even more pleased with himself.
"My God, son, are you always on?" Donovan interjected. He had been mostly lost in his own thoughts, concerned about his wife Claire who was out on the other flank sat in the cockpit of a Pillager, but was still in the game enough to listen to what was being said.
"If there's an off-switch short of knocking him out we've never found it." Engels told him.
"Enough with the chit-chat, focus on the job at hand." Benedict ordered. "Everyone ready for action?"
"Aff" Engels confirmed.
"Affirmative, Sir." Donovan added for himself as he offered a silent prayer that the XL engine in his wife's Pillager didn't take a hit because those things were more fragile than you would want them to be. At least the upgrade package they had received included CASE to protect it from being crippled due to the capacitors exploding if one of the gauss rifles took a hit, and you couldn't fault the amount of armor it carried.
"I was born ready," Sampson declared. "Ready for anything."
"Except artillery you mean," Engels responded, chuckling. "How did Klondike go for you anyway?" he asked rhetorically, needling the younger man.
Imagining Sampson's expression, even the generally humorless Benedict almost laughed himself as the order arrived from General Romanov for the entire regiment to advance.
Considering the bigger picture as he led his heavy and assault mechs up to the ready line, just out of ER PPC range, Benedict had to admit that the old lady in charge seemed to know her business very well, despite not being a Wolverine. The Blood Rain had the high ground, plenty of long-range weaponry and would be stationary when the fight started, giving them the advantage in accuracy, but she had a plan to deal with that.
What the SLDF needed was to throw them badly off their game. Given that hardly any of them up there were likely old enough to have ever been on the receiving end of an artillery barrage like the one about to drop on their heads that should do nicely, Romanov has reasoned.
It wasn't so much that a cluster submunition was a mortal threat to a battlemech, at least not one that had all or most of its armor still intact, it was that the experience of being right in the middle of a bombardment of Arrow IV cluster for the first time was, in Romanov's own words, 'absolutely ****** terrifying'.
Each of the eighteen Vali MLRS vehicles had unleashed five Arrow IV missiles, each one of which carried three dozen HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) submunitions that had about the same explosive yield as a bomb from one of the 60mm light mortars infantry platoons humped around.
As the missile housings broke open just before they arrived, scattering their payloads, three-thousand, two-hundred and forty submunitions rained down all over the former 141st Amaris Dragoons over the space of less than half-a-minute. The ridge they were standing on turned into a sea of fire, explosions rippled right along the line, shrapnel and pieces of dirt and rock being sent high into the air as it seemed like the planet itself was being torn asunder.
Spectacular as a description in no way did it justice, though describing the sight as hellish would be fairly apt as the SLDF began their advance towards the Blood Rain.
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Right in the middle of it all Stefani Marcus gritted her teeth as memories came flooding back of being under bombardment by Arrow IV cluster a couple of times before when she was fighting for Amaris and the Rim Worlds Republic. It wasn't so much that the damage caused to something as heavily armored as most battlemechs was all that severe, although you wouldn't want to be in a light mech with submunitions coming down like hail, it was that even when you knew you weren't going to die it was very hard to concentrate on what you were supposed to be doing when the entire world around for a few hundred metres in all directions turned into explosions. The only thing that was worse subjectively was being hit by a massive salvo of LRMs from an Archer or similar, because those would rattle your mech around something fierce and you never knew when a lucky missile would hit something important, but that didn't go on for anywhere near as long and didn't happen to your entire force at once.
Given how few of her mechwarriors had ever been through this before themselves Marcus rightly assumed that they were freaking out more than a little, her thoughts confirmed by just how ragged and inaccurate their fire was when the cluster stopped falling and she ordered them to open fire on the now advancing enemy.
For her part Marcus kept her own nerve and began firing methodically, imploring her people to do likewise via radio. To their credit the overwhelming majority of her mechwarriors had actually opened up with ER PPC and gauss rifle fire almost as soon as the enemy got into range, unfortunately their accuracy was for shit and far below what they usually achieved in battle, let alone on the firing range during training. They weren't coordinating their fire properly either, despite their superiors imploring them to do so, simply shooting at whatever was in front of them instead of concentrating the fire of several mechs on one target.
The blinding bright-blue flash of particle projector cannon, lightning crackling around the bolts of energy as they blazed across the battlefield, was mixed with bursts of shells from LB-X autocannon and the occasional crack of a hypersonic projectile from a gauss rifle.
Leaving sonic shockwaves in their wake the gauss rifle rounds distorted clouds of smoke left behind by propellant gases and explosions, and when they hit their sheer momentum staggered even hundred-ton assault mechs and dented or shattered armor plate.
The trouble from Marcus's perspective was that too few Black Rain mechs were making their hits at the start of the fight when they should have had the biggest advantage. It's said to be better to give than receive, and that is certainly a truism on the battlefield when you were receiving incoming fire. Now stood on what seemed to be a lunar landscape covered in a mass of small craters, and the occasional larger one caused by incoming Thor SPG rounds that still arrived periodically, battering any mech that was anywhere near the point of impact, she took stock of the situation and decided it wasn't great.
With scores of battlemechs engaged in a colossal slugfest it was hard to keep track of what was going on but even in the early stages of the fight there was a nagging feeling Marcus couldn't shake that something was wrong. The other side was making their hits better than she would have hoped for, they were clearly well trained, but they also seemed to be getting very lucky when it came to how much damage their ER PPC's were inflicting she thought to herself as one of her Phoenix mediums nearby took a couple of hits from particle projector cannon that just shouldn't have stripped quite that much armor from her.
Shaking off their initial nerves the Blood Rain had just about got their act together, reliably scoring hits and properly coordinating their fire, when a second salvo of cluster munitions arrived and the ridge thundered under another thirty seconds or so of continual explosions. In the back of her mind Marcus wondered if the timing there was deliberate because the enemy had nearly closed to LRM range and the bombardment screwed up her peoples opportunity to get a well-aimed full salvo off before the other side could. It was either military brilliance or sheer good luck, and she didn't like either possibility one bit because the only thing worse than finding yourself up against Alexander the Great reborn was fighting some bozo that couldn't help but correctly predict a random coin toss every time.
Amidst all the new set of falling submunitions the inner calm in the centre of Marcus's mind that was ignoring them noticed a Stalker moving up the slope that would soon be close enough to let rip with its LRM 10 launchers, to her it looked like a lance commander since it was leading three other mechs. Taking aim with both of her LB-X autocannons and her ER PPC she pressed the fire button on her controls and sent HEAP rounds and weaponised ball lightning down range. If they were messing up her people's aim she was sure as hell going to mess with theirs too.
Benedict's Stalker shuddered with the impact of autocannon rounds against its armor just after the energy bolt from a particle projector cannon had seared into the battlemech, leaving a vivid scar on the front torso and turning armor plate to vapour. Heedless of the damage, he was driving an assault mech and soaking up incoming fire was what they were for, Benedict identified the machine that had just took a potshot at him and continuing forward a few more steps until he was in range he let rip with a full salvo of LRMs, thirty in total, though he knew the number that actually hit their intended target would be a fraction of that. Freaking pirate sonofabitch riding a freaking Dragoon with a freaking Guardian ECM system, he muttered to himself as his Artemis FCS refused to achieve lock-on.
"Donovan, Sampson, that Phoenix you're still shooting at is done, light up that Dragoon I'm exchanging fire with." Benedict ordered his lance-mates. His LRMs might not be scoring the hits they should but let's see how that pirate enjoyed having four Enhanced ER PPC's turned on them, he thought to himself before switching to the battalion command frequency and instructing one of his companies to try and force a breach in the enemy line where it seemed a Thor had scored a direct hit on an enemy Rampage, sending it crashing down, and the Awesome beside it had gotten its cockpit, and the man or woman inside, completely smashed by a gauss rifle.
The last time Donovan had seen action he had been thirty-five and had done so sat in a Thug doing battle with a regiment of the Amaris Dragoons on Terra. Now, five decades later, he was sat in a Thug shooting at a different regiment of the Amaris Dragoons hundreds of light-years from Terra, and he couldn't help but wonder if the huge grin plastered all over his face was a sign that he was regaining his lost youth or losing his mind. Even if he died, hell, at least it wasn't as a reluctant farmer on Buffalo Meadows, so that was pretty sweet compared to the alternative.
Back during the war his Thug had been a THG-11E model, standard issue for non-royal SLDF units, and he would have given five years off his life to have swapped it for a THG-11Eb Royal that had ER PPC's instead of PPC's. Now he not only had an THG-11Eb, those ER PPC's were the new 'Enhanced' type that hit twenty-percent harder. "Baby, where have you been all my life" he said to himself gleefully as he scored a hit on the Dragoon heavy that he had been ordered to engage, burning a huge section of ablative ferro-fibrous armor right off the thing.
Donovan would have been feeling pretty damn pleased with himself if Sampson in his MAD-2R Marauder hadn't put eER PPC bolt into the Phoenix they had been previously engaging to finish it off completely, while simultaneously scoring a hit with his other particle-projector-cannon on the Dragoon and at the same time peppering a third enemy machine with his autocannon. Sampson's given name was apparently Wilhelm, which in conjunction with his age and the North American culture of the 331st had inevitably earned him the nickname 'Billy the Kid'. Having seen a few soldiers back in the day who had been through the SLDF's so-called 'Gunslinger Program' intended to produce elite mechwarriors Sampson's nom-de-guerre certainly seemed apt. Samson hated the nickname incidentally, which only helped guarantee that it stuck.
Sat in the Dragoon heavy that had now found itself, at least temporarily, subject to the unwelcome attention of an entire enemy lance Stefani Marcus was enjoying herself rather less than her opponents. While issuing demands for assistance from her own lance-mates, or anyone else on her side close enough to help, she considered the current situation in as calm and measured a manner as she could manage under the circumstances.
That Stalker had opened up on her with twin LRM 15 launchers, not the LRM 10s it should mount, and unless she was badly mistaken the Orion in the enemy lance had an LRM 20 not the LRM 15 it should be carrying. The only way that could be done was to devote weight and space saved elsewhere towards the larger, heavier launchers and since she could see they still carried their other shorter-ranged weaponry they must have reduced armor and/or fewer heat-sinks.
That tallied with reports coming in from right up and down the line. The self-declared 'SLDF' battlemechs were hitting her people harder than they should be, increasingly so as the distance between the two sides shortened and more weapon types came into range.
That could only mean one thing in her experience, there was no such thing as a free lunch so if you re-built a mech to hit harder that meant you had to sacrifice survivability and endurance. More tonnage devoted to weaponry, LRM launchers with more tubes for example, meant less tonnage available for armor, or heatsinks.
If they had less armor then at some point they would hit a tipping point and their machines would start coming down in droves, if they had fewer heat-sinks then they couldn't keep firing their energy weapons much longer, particularly ER PPC's which were far from heat efficient. A mech that was overheating to the point it was close to shut-down was just a liability, not an effective weapons platform.
Just got to hold on, Stefani Marcus determined and started issuing orders and instructions to her people following that chain of thought, explaining why if they did the Blood Rain would win this because the other side must be riding glass cannons that could dish it out but not take it. Once they were stripped of what little armor they had then the Dragoon and Rampage firing cluster rounds from their LB-X autocannons would tear their internals apart.
It never occurred to her at the time that the opposition might be using weaponry that was lighter and more compact than normal so the normal rules of battlemech construction simply didn't apply. None of the upgraded SLDF machines carried less armor or fewer heatsinks than the original models they were based on, most had more of both, and in a plurality of cases they not only had increased armor they had both more firepower and the heatsinks to keep them running cooler than before.
As more and more battlemechs mounting LRM launchers as part of their weapons loadout got into range the sky filled with hundreds of the things every second, leaving smoke trails that were soon dense enough that they dimmed the battlefield below. The SLDF had proportionally fewer machines with AMS or Guardian ECM systems so the Blood Rain's Rampage assaults with functional Artemis IV fire-control punched above their weight here for a while until the sheer number of incoming missiles overwhelmed the ability of their Anti-Missile-System to shoot them down. If this went on much longer then any AMS would simply run out of ammunition anyway so it would be a short-lived advantage.
The third and final barrage of Arrow IV cluster missiles arrived in the midst of the massive exchange of LRMs and between all the explosions it became impossible for Stefani Marcus to maintain any kind of grip on the wider situation.
Because battlemechs are built tough, heavily armored and resilient, and more stable on their feet than those unfamiliar with them might assume, a battle involving them can go on quite some time before losses on either side become heavy. You have to burn off a lot of armor before you can score a hit on something important, like an engine, or a gyro for example, so to an outside observer it might look like both sides are evenly matched because they've been shooting at each other for seemingly ages but neither side is actually losing machines, or mechwarriors.
In reality one side can be losing badly, it's just that they're only losing armor so far not actual mechs or men, at least they're not losing mechs or men yet.
There is a phenomenon in battlemech warfare known as 'Combat Loss Grouping' which tends to be the point at which you notice just how badly things are going for one side. A single battlemech that has been stripped of its armor protection takes a hit to something critical to its ability to fight, or just stay upright. Perhaps a bolt from a particle-projector-cannon hits an exposed ammunition storage bin for an autocannon in a battlemech's right arm and the ton or so of ammunition there reacts just as badly to such treatment as you would expect.
The battlemech in question is nearly knocked off its feet by a titanic explosion that sees it's right arm completely blown off, severe blast damage to the centre torso, and the mechwarrior inside left with a ringing in his ears that might stop sometime next week, or it would have if the next salvo hadn't killed him outright because his mech was now a complete wreck.
Because the lance he was part of is now down a mech his lance-mates are now at a numerical disadvantage, one not helped by the fact that they've also already lost most of their armor as well so they simply can't take any more hits than they were already taking.
A single battlemech going down quickly turns to two, then three because now things are going really badly.
Combat Loss Grouping, because once you lose a mech you tend to lose several more in quick succession and it just snowballs from there.
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===Fair Fights are for Idiots===
Captain Bernard Critchly, formerly of the Legos's Lancers though the mercenary company was better known by it's adopted nickname the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', was not enjoying himself. He would swear on a stack of bibles a mile high that the ERPPC hits he had been taking were more powerful than they should be, assuming that he didn't burst into flame the instant he touched a bible because both current Catholic Popes wanted his head on a plate and they reputably had friends in high places, and his Rampage was hurting bad. Worse, if he switched to the radio channel used by the Blood Rain's badly outnumbered, and according to them also badly outgunned, aerospace fighter squadrons they were screaming about getting their asses kicked so there was no prospect of calling in air support.
If it wasn't for the minefield behind him he would have been tempted to do what he did during the Battle of Ferrara and use his MASC gear to beat a hasty high-speed retreat, a Rampage could move fast on its feet for an assault 'mech when it had to, but that damn FASCAM dropped earlier had him pinned.
Already underneath a storm of incoming LRMs, the barrel on his anti-missile-system must be glowing red by now trying to knock at least some of them down, the arrival of yet more Arrow IV cluster missiles threw up so much dirt and smoke he could barely see.
Someone must have decided to use all those explosions to get closer, using jumpjets to leap some of the way because as the smoke and debris from the last of the cluster submunitions cleared he found himself with a Pillager in SLDF colours bearing a Red Cameron Star right in front of him.
The Pillager fired both its gauss rifles before he could react, the heavy hypersonic slugs slamming into his Rampage and hitting like wrecking balls that sheered off much of his remaining torso armour. Following up with an alpha strike of directed-energy weapons, four ruby-red medium lasers and two of the more powerful Large Lasers that fired a coherent beam of high-energy gamma rays, since when did a Pillager mount two Large Lasers, a little voice in the back of Critchly's mind wondered, every warning light in the cockpit of the Rampage lit up just before a ton of Streak missiles exploded internally crippling it.
His mech burning Critchly reflexively hit eject as soon as it looked like the fire was going to spread to the rest of his ammunition stowage. As well as the Stream SRM launchers, the Rampage had an autocannon, an LRM launcher not to mention rounds for its AMS so there was a lot in there to go boom. It only crossed Critchly's mind that it might have been better to have just blown up after he ejected because now he might have to shoot himself instead.
After the battle Claire Donovan salvaged part of Critchly's Rampage and hung it over the mantlepiece of her home next to the picture of her, her future husband and the other two members of their lance taken after the liberation of Terra in 2779. If you're going to drive a Pillager it behove you to pillage the battlefield at least a little, she maintained, and it was something she and her husband could show off to their kids once the Iron Wombs gave them some.
Losses amongst the Blood Rain started to cascade, particularly once the SLDF got close enough to use their Improved SRM launchers that just flat-out outranged those of their foe. Not knowing exactly how this was all happening, but not deluded enough to not accept that it was, Stefani Marcus played her final card and used an old trick to get as many of her remaining battlemechs off this damn ridge.
The Dragoon heavy mounted an ER PPC on one arm and an LB-X autocannon on both of them. Thanks to its Lancelot inspired design it could flip either arm around to shoot backwards so keeping the arm with the ERPPC firing at the enemy she aimed the other towards the ground behind her and started walking backwards, firing shotgun-like cluster ammunition from the LB-X into the dirt to set off the FASCAM mines as she went.
Having made sure years before that all her mechwarriors in Dragoons knew you could, at least partially, clear a minefield with LB-X cluster, she ordered the rest of them to do likewise. Then once clear fire more cluster to try and clear a path for the rest of their surviving machines.
You wouldn't get all the mines that way, it would limit damage not eliminate it, but in conjunction with her Phoenix mediums using their jumpjets to escape, and Rampage's adding in their own LB-X cluster to assist, Stefani Marcus managed to pull back more of the Blood Rain than Jenna Romanov had ever expected her opponent to.
It was all for naught however, the remaining Blood Rain mechs had only just pulled out of the line of fire when two squadrons of SLDF Stuka aerospace fighters, each armed with an AC-20 in the nose and a pair of Enhanced ERPPC's in each wing began a series of devastating strafing runs.
Later, trapped in the wreckage of her Dragoon, Marcus considered taking her pistol and shooting herself in the head but curiosity got the better of her. Who were these ****** anyway? And where did they get such wonderful toys?
I've got to at least ask, Marcus decided, waiting patiently to be captured as she listened in to radio transmissions from the settlement where her light mechs and tanks were now getting their asses handed to them royally, despite being dug in.
Faced with entrenched positions at the settlement, Romanov had called up her artillery and ordered rolling air-strikes before advancing her battlemechs into range because fair fights were for idiots like Nicholas Kerensky.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Daniel Hammerick commanded the artillery for Clan Wolverine during Operation Klondike, the conquest of the Pentagon Worlds by the clans. When his clan faced off against the skilled (but unpleasant) warriors of the Rasmussen Elite ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky wanted the matter settled in a fair fight, but Sarah McEvedy saw things rather differently and was never one to treat the ilKhan's instructions as holy writ that had to be obeyed without question.The Vali combat vehicle carries a Arrow IV missile launcher and enough ammunition storage so you can bring a selection of missile types (plus you can always drag a trailer along with you carrying spare ammo). The most effective against a battlemech is the Arrow IV homing missile which delivers a stonking great warhead right on top of the target but Guardian ECM jams those. If you want to obliterate an entire area there's always a payload of Cluster Submunitions (I've got with the notion that these are larger and more powerful than the ones used today because battlemechs are heavily armoured all over). An Arrow IV launcher throws five 200kg missiles at once, which gives you plenty of payload mass per missile (they're much shorter ranged than a real-world M270 MLRS for example).As well as messing with Arrow IV homing missiles and Artemis IV fire-control systems Guardian ECM also stops NARC beacons working (and AMS can shoot down incoming NARC beacons anyway) otherwise the Imprived LRM launchers of the SLDF here would have utterly pulverised the Blood Rain (Improved LRM systems only way half as much so you can carry far more of them).LB-X autocannons are both longer-ranged than standard autocannon and can fire cluster ammunition (think gigantic shotguns). The use of LB-X cluster to clear minefields isn't in the game rules, but it does comes from canon fiction, so it's not an ass-pull on my part.Battalion, company and lance commander Jax Benedict has a upgraded Stalker assault mech. Improved model LRM's means he has more missile firepower and Artemis IV FCS now but the latter isn't working (in this battle). Lance-mates Engels and former Rasmussen Elite member (and Labourer Caste) Wilhelm Sampson have an ON1-K Orion and a MAD-2R Marauder respectively (also upgraded).>Donovan is riding a Thug THG-11Eb, upgraded with Enhanced ERPPC's (eERPPC), his wife Claire has an upgraded Pillager which has benefitted greatly from lighter (and more compact) improved weaponry.The STU-K5b Royal version of the Stuka aerospace fighter isn't fast or manoverable but it's extraordinarily hard-hitting (especially if you switch out the four ERPPC's for eERPPC's). The Blood Rain mechs that made it off the ridge are only lucky the Stuka's weren't carrying a wing-load of Inferno Bombs because they had been fighting Vulcans earlier (and you don't carry Inferno Bombs into a dogfight).x
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Chapter 14