Horse Sanctuary Transport

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

 **Key Features** | »Dual purpose harvesting *"arms"*»Switch (to deactivate reactor core shielding)»Tea duplicator (somehow empty)»Nuclear reactor core»Intentional lack of safety features

*"Take me to the troops and let me drink."*

- Horse Sanctuary Transport
## Tactical Analysis

* **Draft horse**: The Horse serves the only purpose of transporting the clones, officers, and vehicles to the frontline. It is specialized for that job, don't expect it to perform on the frontline.

* **Mechanical horse**: Due to being an important element in maintaining the Kingdom's logistical mobility. The Horse is the few units that is uneffected when moving out of Kingdom terrain without an officer and uses its own generator to power itself and planar shield, so that it won't drain on the Kingdom's already large electric grid.

* **Warm blood**: A hidden defence of the Horse is its very own Nuclear Core that can be lifted to emit dangerous radiation all around. It will also irradiate the area if destroyed.

* **Dead horse**: Manned by clones, it has a remarkable lack of general defensive features, relying solely on its planar shields for defence.

## Background

Why does the Kingdom need ore? This is a question posed by many scientists and commanders; after all, the Atomic Kingdom mechanical divisions are created by duplicators in orbit, and clones hardly need metal to create.

However, there is a simple explanation behind all of this: the Law of Conservation of Mass. To create something, you need either mass or energy to convert into mass. Although some incredibly high-end duplicators can do the latter, their expense, complexity, and time of manufacture prohibit this. In fact, even these super high-end machines are restricted to creating elements up to hydrogen, or lithium if safeguards are ignored; the excess heat from this process can melt the duplicator in five seconds!

Thus, the Kingdom needs raw materials to duplicate its tanks, just like any other army, and asteroid mining can only go so far. The second reason is, surprisingly, soil. For soil to grow plants, certain minerals are required; minerals that can be synthesized from ore. In space, there is little other choice. Thus, ore is needed to feed the Kingdom, and grow the biomass (food scraps) used to create clones. The Atomic Kingdom resents this fact greatly, and the pilots of these collectors know it acutely.

Formerly this was done by the Horse Ore Collectors. But as the Kingdom's doctrine and technology evolved the Horse started to become a liability.

The first issue was that their refinery equivalent, the Planetary Assembly, was directly built into their OCV which forms one-half of the Ground Base, since it is also responsible for creating their structures. Meaning that they can't make multiple refineries like the other superpowers without calling down multiple OCVs, which are so expensive that a commander requires both a clearance code and has to sign a massive amount of documents to call one down (often taking minutes to finish the paperwork before being allowed to call down another).

And even if they could make cheaper, quicker to deploy, refineries they saw it as a liability. Their inability to create underground power grids (since everything is called down from their upper atmospheric ships via Space Elevator), and the giant Transmission Towers responsible for keeping their defenses up when away from the Ground Base fields, means that deploying Refineries close to the mines was either a risky endeavor since the enemy can sneak behind and completely shut down a sector, or extremely slow, leading to their enemies gaining superior economy.

Finally, the simple fact that they needed a vehicle to transport ore from the mines into a refinery meant that the collector could easily be destroyed by raiders, or worse have their cargo stolen. Whereas other factions have a rapid enough response force that can ward these raiders, the Kingdom doesn't as their forces are either static defenses or clone units that are slow and absolutely utter rubbish when fighting without the support of the defenses.

The final nail in the coffin for the Horse was the advent of teleportation. Once it was fine-tuned the Kingdom could simply build a small refinery, that doesn’t require a the base or Transmission Tower to function, right on top of the mines and simply teleport the ore to the bases once processed. Rendering the Horse Ore Collector superfluous at best.

Once the Extractors were finally perfected the Horses were initially mothballed, waiting for the day they would be recycled.

All that changed after a particularly devastating ambush by the PLA who destroyed a Transmission Tower that completely severed the Kingdom from one of its key resource sites. Unfortunately, as the Ground Base in that area was only tasked with mining they had only a few garrison of troops who while able to easily take down these bandits had to rely on teleporting to the area, but since it was cut off they had to get there by foot, but by the time they would reach the bandits would have already solidified their hold of the region.

It seemed all hope was lost until the overseer was notified that they had a surplus of mothballed Horse Collectors gathering dust, and the overseer had an idea. Forcing the former Horse drivers to retake the helm of their vehicles he ordered the Horses to hold and transport the garrison forces to the PLA holdout, though he had to beat a few since they struggled to understand how to transport infantry, in a desperate attempt to save the site.

And it worked, the reasonable speed of the Horse and its spacious cargo hold had allowed the garrison to reach the PLA before they could set a proper defense and soon reestablish the Transmission Tower. The Horse Ore Collector was rebirthed into Horse Sanctuary Transport after that, retrofitted with additional armour and proper seats with the removal of its harvester, an APC that not only transported troops but also survivors to one of the many Kingdom sanctuaries.