Malice AW-51B

DOC-06 · TECHNICAL READOUT

Mass: 50 tons
Movement Type: Wheeled
Power Plant: GH PowerMaxx 180 FuelCell Plus
Cruising Speed: 43.2 kph
Maximum Speed: 64.8 kph
Armor: StarSlab Standard
Armament:
     1 ISCASE
     1 Machine Gun
     2 LRM 15
     1 ISTAG
Manufacturer: TriStar Intersellar
     Primary Factory: Sherwood
Communication System: TriStar Multilink II
Targeting & Tracking System: TriStar TrackMaster III W/ ArtiSpot
Introduction Year: 3050
Tech Rating/Availability: IS Level 4
Cost: 1.41 million C-bills

Overview
The Malice is the cheapest thing TriStar builds and, by a margin the company finds funnier every year, the most versatile. It began in 3011 as a number on a requirement — a fifty-ton tank the Tennessee Star Guards could field for under a million C-bills — and the answer the design bureau returned was less a tank than a socket: a rugged wheeled hull, a Greene & Harvester independent suspension with automatic tyre-pressure regulation, a deliberately "soldier-proof" electronics suite, and a modular turret ring onto which the March could bolt very nearly any weapon in the inventory. One chassis, one drivetrain, one training pipeline, one spares bin — and a turret catalog that turns the same vehicle into a skirmisher, a missile carrier, a door-knocker, a tube-artillery piece, a TAG spotter, or an Arrow IV battery depending on which turret cleared the depot that morning. It is the wheeled eldest of the 'Mal' family — the Malcontent put the same idea on tracks, the Malevolent on air cushion — and it is Common Heart's whole thesis rendered in the humblest possible metal: buy the hull by the hundred, and let the mission pick the gun.

Capabilities
The Malice's capability is a turret list, not a loadout. The 3011 original mounted an SRM-6 and an AC/5 and cost exactly what it was told to; the fuel-cell rebuild of 3020 swapped the ammunition-fed autocannon for a Sunglow large laser and adopted the hydrogen economy the March already runs at home, and from there the catalog simply grew. The -50 series alone spans an LRM missile carrier, the Defiance Killer AC/20 door-knocker, a twin-LRM heavy, and the Trolland & Trolland Thumper and Sniper tube-artillery variants that are the Ledger Barrage's cheapest guns. The recovered-tech -51 series poured the Star League tier into the same forgiving hull: the LB-X autocannon, CASE in every magazine, the TAG designator — the AW-51A and AW-51B paint for the same guided munitions the Skink does — and, in the AW-51C, a full Arrow IV homing battery on the fifty-ton chassis that started life as a budget line item. Critics called it a jack of all trades. The March, which has never once been unable to source a part for one, calls it the answer.

Deployment
The Malice is the connective tissue of March armor: the hull the reserve battalions, the capital-world militias, and the Security Regiments field by the hundred, because it is cheap enough to lose and common enough to always replace. Home-defense formations keep the fuel-cell variants and their hydrogen bowsers; the artillery members — the Thumper, the Sniper, and the AW-51C's Arrow IV — anchor the Ledger Barrage's tube and guided fires, and the TAG variants ride forward with the spotting screen. A March quartermaster's fondness for the type is unsentimental and total: it is the one vehicle he can promise a commander in any configuration, from any depot, in any quantity, on any world the March can reach — which is the entire reason a shipping company built an army around a socket and a turret catalog.

History
The Malice is where Common Heart learned that "cheap" and "modular" were the same virtue wearing two hats. The 3011 requirement — a sub-million-C-bill fifty-tonner — forced a hull with no expensive anything, and the modular turret that made it affordable also made it endlessly re-roleable, a lesson the program spent the next forty years scaling to the whole catalog. The fuel-cell conversion of 3020 gave the reserve fleet its hydrogen economy; the -51 generation, after the Helm Core, dropped the recovered arsenal into the same hull without changing a bolt of the drivetrain. The 'Mal' siblings followed the wheeled original onto tracks and air cushion, the escalating naming convention hardened into an institution, and the budget omnitank that nobody outside the March took seriously became the most numerous fighting vehicle the Guards field. The design bureau's private name for the whole program — recorded, like most of the best March jokes, in a cost-review footnote — was "the tank that is also all the other tanks."

Notes
The A model was released with a standard AC/5, with a SRM-6 as a back up weapon. The A1 swaps out the AC/5 for a LB series weapon with more ammo, with the A2 packs a rapidfire cannon with 2 tons additional ammo. The B series denotes missile carriers; the B packing twin Holly LRM-15 launchers with 4 tons of reloads, and the B1 with a close-range punch of 4 Hovertek Hex launchers. The AW-50C carries a Trolland and Trolland Thumper series artillery canon, providing medium armor units with integral artillery support. The C1 model packs a Trolland and Trolland Arrow IV missile artillery system.

Type: Malice
Technology Base: IS Level 4
Tonnage: 50

Equipment		Mass
Internal Structure		5
Engine	180 Fuel Cell	-
Cruising MP:	4
Flanking MP:	6
Heat Sinks:	0	-
Control Equipment:		2.5
Turret:		-
Armor Factor:	160	-

AW-50A - 716,875 C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malice AW-50A.blk

ARMOR 160Front 39Sides 32/32Rear 25Turret 32

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Ammo SRM-6	Body	1	1
Ammo AC/5	Body	1	1
Ammo AC/5	Body	1	1
Hitch	Rear	0	0
SRM 6	Turret	2	3
Autocannon/5	Turret	4	8
Infantry Bay (2.0 tons)	Body	-	2.0

AW-50A2 - 1.18 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malice AW-50A2.blk