Horus AT-25A

Mass: 25 tons
Movement Type: Tracked
Power Plant: 100 Fusion
Cruising Speed: 43.2 kph
Maximum Speed: 64.8 kph
Armor: Standard
Armament:
     1 PPC
     1 Machine Gun
Manufacturer:
     Primary Factory:
Communication System:
Targeting & Tracking System:
Introduction Year: 3025
Tech Rating/Availability: IS Level 1
Cost: 615,208 C-bills

Overview
The Horus is the Common Heart program's answer to a procurement question nobody else was asking: what if the PPC carrier were priced like a tractor? The twenty-five-ton Horus is the smallest, cheapest member of the fusion family — a single Hellstar on tracks, launched in 3025 alongside the Hathor — and the one machine in the entire program that does not carry a StarHeart. Its powerplant is the family's single foreign organ: a 100-rated fusion reactor of Taurian manufacture, adopted through the quiet commercial ties that long preceded the famous Trilateral era, because the Concordat's colonial reactor houses build exactly what Common Heart preaches — cheap, proven, volume-produced, and fixable in a barn, which by Taurian tradition it more or less was designed in. The program office classified the exception as an import of philosophy rather than a violation of it, and the file has never been reopened. The sales pitch has never changed either: a full platoon of Horus for less than a Periphery customer will actually pay for one Schrek — a comparison Aldis Industries objects to on the grounds of its book prices, and the TriStar sales office defends on the grounds of what a Schrek costs by the time it reaches the Outback, a distinction the office describes as "the difference between fiction and freight."

Capabilities
The A-model is fire support by the pound: one full-weight Hellstar PPC in the turret, a coaxial machine gun for the infantry question, and nothing else to buy, feed, or resupply. It is not fast — the Horus makes no pretense of scouting — and it does not need to be; the type fights from overwatch, its TrackMaster-and-ArtiSpot suite tying it into the artillery net and the brigade's C3 chatter while its gun makes the far end of the battlefield expensive. The doctrine is distribution: where a Schrek concentrates three tubes behind one set of tracks, a Horus platoon spreads four across four hulls, four arcs, and four positions — a battery that no single lucky hit, breakdown, or bad decision can silence. Gunnery officers call the arithmetic graceful degradation. The crews call it not being the Schrek.

Deployment
The Horus stiffens everything. Expeditionary fire lances take it for the PPC density; Bast and Hathor formations take it as the overwatch element that makes their maneuvers affordable; the artillery train takes it as the armed spotter its ArtiSpot suite was named for; and the export ledger moves more Horus hulls than the rest of the family combined — the bargain PPC being the rare product whose vetted customers include planetary militias that could otherwise afford one big gun or none. Fusion remains too dear for the March's own reserves, who keep their fuel-cell 'Mal' hulls; the Horus is the expeditionary force's cheap insurance, bought in numbers because numbers are the point.

History
The Horus and Hathor launched together in 3025 as the Common Heart's first fusion tracks, and the pairing set the family's pattern: the Hathor runs them down, and the Horus makes standing still expensive. The type's résumé is written in the Periphery reaches — gun lines on the Dominion rotation, overwatch for two generations of pirate-hunting, and the 4th Succession War fire lanes where Horus platoons proved that four cheap tubes, properly netted, outlast three expensive ones. Its crews' regard is of the practical kind: the Horus is nobody's hotrod and everybody's covering fire, and the reactor, Taurian to its bones, has outlasted every joke ever made about it.

Type: Horus
Technology Base: IS Level 1
Tonnage: 25

Equipment		Mass
Internal Structure		3
Engine	100 Fusion	-
Cruising MP:	4
Flanking MP:	6
Heat Sinks:	0	-
Control Equipment:		1.3
Turret:		-
Armor Factor:	120	-

AT-25A - 615,208 C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Horus AT-25A.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
PPC	Turret	3	7
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5

AT-25B - 542,708 C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Horus AT-25B.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5
Large Laser	Turret	2	5
Medium Laser	Turret	1	1