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.

Current Equipment

Rosa Luxemburg

By 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.