Heavy Armour Brigade

Basics

The Heavy Armour Brigade, or HAB for short is a private usergroup on SDN.

Mission Statment

"Formed to discuss armoured vehicles in real life and their counterparts in science fiction. Destruction of childish mecha fanboy claims of feasibility or superiority is an ongoing mission."

The HAB basically exists to create wanking material realted to all things military, especially the mighty rumble of heavy armour. It was formed in response to a surfeit for mecha wanking present during the early days of SDN.

The Great Leader

The Heavy Armour Brigade is led by its illustrious and mighty Great Leader Sea Skimmer. Under his leadership the HAB strives to eliminate the Mecha Scum.

HAB Designations

The minimum needed for the HAB heavy tank classification is that movement of the vehicle causes cracking of tectonic plates to a depth of at least 75 kilometers.

HAB of course,has beyond heavy, very heavy, super heavy, ultra heavy, exceedingly heavy, semi uber heavy and uber heavy tank classifications. This is followed by the ultra lightweight, super lightweight, very lightweight etc… breakthrough tank classifications.

No known limit exists on the HAB capacity to classify new types of tanks. Loyal HAB minion researchers continue to work on miniaturized anti viral and anti atom tanks, alongside projects measured in multiples of solar masses.

Current Equipment

Objective Interim Light Repulsortank

The Death Star.

Objective Interim Coffee Thermal Overmatch System

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

Is able to induce fusion in the very water being used to brew the drink. This has led to several minor catastrophes, but nothing that more suffering by the glorious HAB population cannot overcome.

Rosa Luxemburg

Inventor: Pablo Sanchez

The only vehicle in the entire historical HAB inventory which has ever been solely-track driven and approached the designation of Medium-Heavy Tank was the NKVD-designed and constructed Object 292-1, code-named Rosa Luxemburg.

This was a design based on an upscaled A7V concept, and it's proportions were roughly

length: 70 AU width: 30 AU height: 30 AU

although certain unavoidable inefficiencies in NKVD measurement devices and the refusal of Carl Zeiss GmbH, controlled by Sheppard's Reich, to supply us with better tools made these figures somewhat imprecise.

The mass was also difficult to determine, because artificial gravity generators had to be used to prevent the tank from collapsing into a black hole, and the hypermatter reactor with it's complex mass proved impossible to properly factor into calculations.

Initial tests with this tank were hampered by several problems:

1) Conventional in-tank communications were not up to the task, as it took hours for orders to travel at the speed of light from the commander's cupola to gunnery control. These systems were subsequently replaced by instantaneous "ansible" communications.

2) There was no surface in the universe large enough to provide a field for road tests, so the NKVD was forced to construct Object 480-3X, which was a colossal flat sheet of unobtanium measuring 700x700 AU and 10 AU thick, equipped with artificial gravity generators to secure the tank to its surface. This was itself an achievement on a grand scale, unapproached by any other effort on the part of rival HAB fiefdoms.

3) The endless tracks had to move at considerable velocity to propel the vehicle at any speed perceptible relative to the size of the vehicle. During road tests, many of the transmission components reached the speed of light and exceeded the ability of HAB lubrication and materials science to maintain them. The unobtanium pistons inevitably seized and the vehicle became immobilized. Also, the drive shafts were so long in absolute terms that deformations in the space-time curve made it difficult for them to transfer power efficiently to the tracks.

4) The main gun of the tank, a 1.05E15 millimeter cannon which fired neutronium shells the size of a Red Supergiant star at hyperspace velocities malfunctioned during its first test with consequences that even now cannot be fully understood. NKVD physicists believe that the firing of this cannon caused a distortion in space-time which reverberated back to the beginning of the universe and may have been the approximate cause of the Big Bang, although this avenue of research is still being pursued by our time-space paradox experts.

As a result of these problems, testing on Object 292-1 ("Rosa Luxemburg") experimental Medium-Heavy Tank has been suspended until advances in physics and materials science enable a second attempt.

HEAT Hose

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

The objective of the weapon is to create an effect similar to a continuously detonating shaped charge. To achieve this copper pellets are continuously mixed with the exhaust gas of an AIE power source and then forced through a series of turbopumps driven off the AIE crankshaft. The results are directed by fictionite piping (also used for the turbopump blades) to a turreted nozzle. On firing a stream of molten copper traveling at approximately mach thirty with a volume of many thousands of gallons, minimal possible target damage is heavy armor reduced to Swiss cheese.

Nuclear Flamethrower Tank

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

The US Army built a steam powered flamethrower tank in WWI, the steam pressure powering the forward firing flamethrower.

For HAB take the concept and replace the boiler with a nuclear reactor, add side sponsons with fire hoses for thickened Soman nerve gas and mustard gas (both also pressurized via radioactive steam). Add a top turret which fires shrapnel shells manufactured from spent uranium reactor fuel (you know the stuff that glows bright green in the cooling ponds) impregnated with ricin. It will be fitted with grenade dischargers that fire smoke grenades which give off smoke via burning PCB laden plastic.

Don forget that the tracks are lubricated with mercury; the crew is perpetually drunk on Isopropyl alcohol while smoking blunt wrappers and eating McDonalds food. On leave they feed chocolate to dogs, pee in reservoirs and are known to huff diesel fumes.

M-894A8E4MkII Mecha Impersonation Bot

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

The only mecha authorized for HAB use is the HAB M-894A8E4MkII Mecha Impersonation Bot; which appears to employ humanoid locomotion but is in fact propelled by very small caterpillar tracks hidden on the bottom of each foot.

Normal combat use calls for either infiltration tactics or massed charges, either employing the Type 3 Thermonuclear Pole Charge; Tsar Bomba on a 100 meter steel pole or the units own internal 35 megaton self destruct charge. I think you can take the spirit of the idea from here.

Deathwing Class Kill-o-Tron Advanced Super Heavy Dreadnought Fleet Battleship of Doom

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

Length: 78,000,000 meters
Beam: 25,000,000 meters
Height: 35,000,000 meters

Armament primary: Full auto planet vaporising gatling superlaser
Armament secondary: 500,000 500 yottaton turbolasers
Armament third battery: 75,000,000, 1.5 gigaton turbolasers
Armament fourth battery: 1,000,000,000 point defence quad lasers
Missile Armament: 80,000 ultra heavy missile tubes each launching a shielded proton torpedo with FTL and point defences the size of an ISD.

Power source: Hypermatter reactor fed by fuel tanks denser then black holes
Armor: 150,000 meters of laminanium and durasteel
Shielding: 1E55 watts
Method of construction: 50,000 world devastators turned loose in a remote star cluster for a century or two.

Parasite craft: 5 planets
36 assorted moons
50 Death Stars
100 trillion fighters of assorted types
1000 sector fleets

Embarked troops: 650 trillion personnel

Other features: World Devastor's ability to build additional equipment
Cloneing labs with 1 trillion clone per day capacity
Sith Academy and the entire Jedi order
Tractor beam, which can move planets
Holoshroud that allow it to disguise its self as a sun after deploying the planets and moons.

Materials

Special Type Atomic Element 474 (Pz-474)

Inventor: Sea Skimmer

Has a melting point of 4,000C

Special Type Atomic Element 909 (Brownium)

Inventor: Sheppard

Special Type Atomic Element 909 is extracted from this material. When STAE-909 is sprayed onto a B-52, it becomes invisible to radar, and when injected into HAB Lab slaves they can fire 20mm cannons from the hip. Recently involved in a disastrous experiment to create the Objective Interim Mammalian Kinetic Heavy Assault Horn Breaching system, Rhino based.