Malice AW-51C

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
     1 ISArrowIV
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: 749,375 C-bills

Overview
The Arrow IV batteries are the March's guided fist, and the reason the Eye of Ra chain has teeth as well as eyes. For two centuries the fire-support ecosystem was a tube affair — a spotter corrected, a Horus or a Ra dropped a shell somewhere close, and "close" was the best anyone could promise. The Helm Core changed the arithmetic: among the recovered technologies the March embraced was Arrow IV, the Star League's homing artillery missile, and Common Heart did with it exactly what the program does with everything worth keeping — it declined to build a bespoke launcher and bolted the system into the hulls it already made by the hundred. The 'Mal' family, the fuel-cell fifty-tonners that share a turret across wheels, tracks, and air cushion, gave the batteries their bodies: the wheeled Malice AW-51C and the hover Malevolent AH-51E, each an existing chassis with its gun deck rebuilt around an Arrow IV tube and its magazines. Now the spotter's designation does not merely correct a shell's fall — it steers the missile onto the target, and the difference between the old chain and the new is the difference between shelling a grid square and hitting the specific OmniMech standing in it. The Skink paints, the Glasshopper spots, the Sanddiver hides and marks; the batteries are what answers.

Capabilities
The AW-51C is the precision half of the pair, and the one the spotters love. It is a Malice with its whole gun deck given over to a single Arrow IV launcher and a deep magazine — and critically, that magazine carries homing rounds, the TAG-guided missiles that turn a designator beam anywhere on the field into a direct hit from a battery kilometers back. A Skink darts in and paints; a Sanddiver marks from cover; the AW-51C, sitting unseen behind a ridgeline on its unglamorous wheels, puts a missile through the mark with an accuracy no tube gun in the March inventory can touch. The recovered arsenal's mandatory CASE rides in the magazine, because a bin of Arrow IV rounds is exactly the kind of thing the program refuses to let kill its own crew, and a bow machine gun handles the infantry that a stationary artillery piece attracts. It is slow — wheeled cruise, built to shoot and not to run — and it does not care, because the whole point of a homing battery is that it never has to be anywhere near what it kills.

Deployment
The batteries deploy where the spotters do, which by 3050 was everywhere the March expected to meet the Clans. Each Clan-facing regiment — the 21st Morven Grenadiers, the 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry — fields its Arrow IV battery as the delivery end of a precision fire chain whose forward elements are the cheap and numerous: the Skink that paints, the Glasshopper that spots from its mast, and the rare, jealously-tasked Sanddiver DIN-G03 that marks from stealth. AW-51Cs sit deep and still, waiting for a designation; AH-51Es prowl the flanks, firing and repositioning, drawing the counterbattery fire the wheeled tanks cannot survive. A March artillerist's account of the arrangement is characteristically flat: "The Skink finds it, the Sanddiver confirms it, the C puts the missile through it, and the E is there in case it brought friends." The whole chain costs less, in forward assets, than the ammunition it delivers — which the Ledger Barrage's authors regard as the entire point.

History
Arrow IV came to the March the way all the recovered technologies did: heartily, and on the existing hulls. The Star League's homing missile was among the first systems the Helm Core gave back that Common Heart wanted without reservation, because a merchant house that had built its whole fire doctrine around spotting — the Eye of Ra chain, the Skink's TAG, the Glasshopper's ArtiSpot suite — had spent two centuries with excellent eyes and merely adequate fists. Arrow IV closed the gap overnight, and the program's discipline showed in how little fuss it made doing so: no new artillery chassis, no new logistics tail, just two more entries in the 'Mal' family's variant book and a magazine of recovered missiles behind the same StarSlab plate. The AH-51E came first, in 3049, the hover tank being the easier conversion; the AW-51C followed in 3050 with the homing rounds that made the TAG network suddenly lethal rather than merely helpful. By the time the Sanddiver DIN-G03 arrived in 3053 to paint from stealth, the batteries it would feed had been in the field for years — which is why the March, when it hears its guided artillery described as a Clan-era innovation, tends to point out that the innovation was the aiming, and the March had always been able to aim.

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.

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:	152	-

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