Burst Drone

**Key Features** | »» Solar powered wings»» Dual *"eyes"*»» Small bomb (liquid-based)»» Chirp sound generator»» Barrel-roll command processor

*\*various electronic chirps\**

- Encoded transmissions from a Burst Drone

## Tactical Analysis

 File:BurstDroneArt.jpg
* **Spy in the Sky:** The Burst Drone is the Empire's answer to other factions' animal scouts. Capable of detecting stealthed and disguised enemies, coupling that with its high speed and ability to ignore terrain by flying over it make it a great scout. Its flying nature makes it unable to be attacked by anti surface weapons (unless attached to a ground vehicle).

* **What is it, a spider? Get it off!:** It can also attach itself to vehicles (friend or foe, flying or grounded), slowing them down if they are foe. This makes them good to harass ore collectors or already slow units. Upon command, they can self destruct, damaging whatever they are attached to and destroying themselves.

* **Buggy Software:** While a useful scout, the Burst Drone is totally unable to attack infantry and lacks the armour to take any sort of prolonged fire from any anti-aircraft weapon and easily shot off anything it is attached to. Lacking weapons other than its suicide attack, it is also fairly useless for use on its own; and should therefore be used with a proper army or en-mass for best effect.

* **Expendable**: As expendable drones incapable of harming enemy units by any means apart from blowing themselves to pieces, any form of modification to the Burst Drone is considered a wasteful expenditure of resources by the Japanese.

## WWIII Operational History

In the Empire of the Rising Sun, everyone has a part to play in maintaining the orderly structure of Japan, and children are no different. From a young age, they are seperated by intellect into one of several groups, their schooling and knowledge playing a great part in determining ultimately which jobs, career, and role they will join as adults. The expectations of hard work and sacrifice in Japan means that many of them are practically abandoned by their parents, left to schools, homes, or the streets if not poor enough to already be working alongside their parents in a trade of field. In the late 50s, the statistics showed a rising increase in youth crime, and discontent among the offspring of the privileged workers. And as the amount of work and labour hours increased, in secret preparation for the Rising Sun's divine destiny, parents began to demand something that would both ensure their offspring became knowledgable enough to gain access to a great school and career path, and occupy them while the parents were working. The result was the **Model 80 Sunburst Drone**.

The Sunburst Drone was the first drone in the history of the Rising Sun specifically built for the young. It was powered by solar energy to replace the need for batteries or any kind of fuel. It was equipped with a liquid-mixture tank and several packets of commercial-grade chemicals for use in teaching chemistry. It was equipped with an internal camera and tranmission system that could be linked to the watch of a parent to monitor their child whenever they needed to. It was set into a cute-looking dragonfly shape to make a mental connection as a friendly pet. It was autonomous, though not sentient, so could somewhat respond to and interact with the child all the time to create a social connection. And best of all, it came completely unassembled, so the child given one could learn the basics of mechanics, drone engineering, and electrical systems.

The Drones were, surprisingly, a hit, and soon almost every household rich enough to afford one had them. When World War 3 broke out in 1965, Prince Tatsu noted the potential of the Burst Drones as supplementary scouting units - the Imperial Army's existing noise detection systems were too crude to do more than identify that there were attackers in the area, and these Drones could easily be sent out to identify and transmit accurate pictures of the area back to the Empire's Construction Yards, even latching on to vehicles like they would sometimes latch on to children's bicycles to continually communicate their location. And, with the chemical tanks on the drones, avoiding a trace back to the Empire's base would be easy - all they had to do was put in a liquid fuel bomb as an emergency explosive.

The only problem, of course, was that the Imperial Army was very, very large. They would need upwards of thousands of Burst Drones, and at first the Imperial military relied on simply 'conscripting' existing children's Burst Drones, often with a small pamphlet informing them of the brave and noble work their drone buddies was going to do for the Empire. However, after one top general recieved a video feed of his son bursting into tears after recieving news that his personal Burst Drone companion had been destroyed during a failed offensive, automated factories set up exclusively for creating Burst Drones were put in place around Japan. The factories themselves are still producing the drones, even in the end of the war, and to this day thousands of military-owned Burst Drones wait in storage for the day to spread their wings.

## Post-War Operational History

In the aftermath of World War 3, many committees were set up in the Empire to ask, exactly, what went wrong. One of these committees came up with a relatively minor but still interesting finding - while Burst Drones, the scouts of the Empire's forces, were used extensively to spy on enemy forces, no one ever thought to let them perch on friendly forces. With the keen camera eyes and ability to detect otherwise hidden foes, Burst Drones might have been able to save many Imperial pilots and drivers from ambushes had they been allowed to perch on friendly vehicles.

New Burst Drones have since been implemented with the ability to do so, but there did remain one problem - with the advent of the ability to latch to friendly things, new Burst Drones would instinctively and automatically latch onto the nearest friendly thing they saw when they were let out of the Instant Dojo - the roof. Unable or unwilling to detach themselves, the drones would futilely stay there for the rest of the fight, unresponsive to orders and creating a hassle for other infantry who had to get past the tangle of solar wings and potentially explosive liquid tanks. Many a new Commander ordered a flight of over thirty Burst Drones and then found all of them stuck to the roof of their Instant Dojo, before a patch to the software once more allowed the drones to take to the skies in service to the Empire.

## Just the Stats

 **Armour Type** | Infantry

 **DPS** | N/A