GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 5 – Saxon Armour’s – Berserker & Ettin

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So in the last post I started designing some of the Saxon Armours, we designed the basic “footsoldier” unit, the Ceorl as well as two versions of the officer unit, the Oegn Standard V and the elite Oegn Beowulf Variant. In this post I’m going to design two of elite Saxon Armors. The Berserker and the Ettin.

Berserker

Berserker

1. Concept

The Berserker has one purpose, and it sullies me to use this phrase, but it’s sole purpose is to “flip the shit out and kill stuff”. In terms of general capabilities its more or less on par with a standard Knight Armour. In terms of killing shit, its a good bit beyond. Only the most skilled Saxon Thane’s pilot a Berserker and only the most glorious knights can stand against them. The Berserker unit has a unique system referred to as the B-MODE system, when used it temporarily pushes the unit beyond its capacities, greatly increasing all its abilites, but once used it leaves the unit in a weakened state.

2. Construct a Frame

2a Choose Body Form / 2b Buy Servos / 2c Wheels and Treads / 2d Buy armour

Humanoid form, no wheels or treads. The Servos are a bit of a mix, medium striker for the core servos, slightly weaker servos for the legs and arm servos similar to a medium KA. Then Heavy Striker class (5 CP) alpha type (x1.25) armour on all servos

Servo            Class          Cost/Space/Kills

Torso Servo      Heavy Striker  10
Head Servo       Heavy Striker  5
Right Arm Servo  Mediumweight   7
Left Arm Servo   Mediumweight   7
Right Leg Servo  Medium Striker 5
Left Leg Servo   Medium Striker 5
3. Choose your weapons

3a Build Weapons / 3b Do they fit / 3c Ammo

Unlike the majority of Saxon units the Berserker (and indeed the Ettin) has no ranged combat ability. In fact the Berserker has one weapon only, the blade Gram.

Gram

A powerful blade in its own right when combined with the Berserkers B-MODE there are few that can stand against it.

As this is the only armament that the Berserker unit will have we’re going to go all out with it, so a pretty high damage of 7 Kills (3.5 CP) at +1 Accuracy (x1.5). Its going to be both Quick (x2.0) and Armour-Piercing (x2.0). Which gives us a total cost/space of 21, which is far too big as it needs to be able to be used one handed, so thats 14 levels of space efficiency for a final size of 7 and a final cost of 28.

4. Consider Shields / 5. Buy Crew and Sensors / 6. Buy other additive systems

No shields and for once no space for passengers, just going to go with the basic Heavy Striker class sensor suite and an escape pod and liftwire as extras. All of which takes up 3 spaces and costs 8.3 CP

7. Figure base weight / 8. Weight efficiency / 9. Flight and other propulsion systems / 10. Figure Base Cost

At this point the base weight is 40, going to reduce that by 2 to reach a lower weight class. No flight or special propulsion systems but we are going to give it a limited boosterpack, with a pool of 10 MA and which can be used up to +5 at once.

11. Choose multiplier systems

11a. Choose powerplant / 11b. Buy cockpit controls / 11c. Maneuver Verniers / 11d. Environment protection / 11e. Transformers and Combiners / 11f. Other multiplier systems

Here’s where we add our usual Thought Control (x0.5) and Techno Organic Regeneration (x0.67) multiplier systems. Its also where we’re going to add our “B-MODE System” by using the Turbocharger option. Turbocharger is pretty expensive but gives some very nice benefits for a limited time (up to a maximum of three turns per turbocharger installed). I’ve a feeling it may push the price up above the Pendragon though. Which means I’ll need to go back and beef the Pendragon up a bit because it should be more than a match for a Berserker 1-on-1 (though its ok if the Ettin ends up more expensive as its meant to be a monster).

So you can have either a single tubrocharger that lasts 1 (x0.75), 2 (x1.25) or 3 (x2.0) turns or you can have dual turbochargers, each of which can last up to three turns. Apart from the benefit of more turbocharged turns having dual turbochargers gives two more advantages. The first is that you dont suffer the post turbocharger penalties until both have been used and the second is that you use both in tandem which doubles the turbocharge bonuses (while also doubling the resultant penalties). I was thinking of a 2 turn and a 1 turn setup, that would push the price to 495 CP. A good bit over the Pendragon. Or I could go with two 1 turn TC’s, which would give a more reasonable cost of 436 CP. So I’ll go with that for the moment and save the longer turbochargers for the inevtiable Berserker upgrade (which will be called Úlfhéðnar). Not going to bother with the standard Saxon “Ninja Leaping” ability as the boosterpack serves a similar purpose.

12. Calculate your mechas multiplied cost / 13. Overview Mecha / 14. Figure stats

Well the multiplied cost is 436.32. In terms of overview I’m worried that the sword, especially when combined with the B-MODE system may make the Berserker unit too lethal in combat. I might need to run some sample combats with it first. With a MV of 0 and a MA of 5 the Berserker is one of the more agile and quick units I’ve put together so far. The B-MODE will push that MV even higher again.

15. Buy command armour / 16. Scale as appropriate / 17. Remotes / 18. Finishing touches

No command armour, no scaling, no remotes and no finishing touches.

 

Ettin

Saxon Giant

1. Concept

The Ettin is a monster. The Saxons only have a handful of these and only deploy them under the rarest circumstances. The Ettin is the largest armour in both the Saxon and English forces, towering over other units it stand around 25 metres in height.

2. Construct a Frame

2a Choose Body Form / 2b Buy Servos / 2c Wheels and Treads / 2d Buy armour

As one of the largest Armours out there the Ettin is going to use the second highest class of servo’s, the Super Heavy one. Again the body form is humanoid and we have no wheels or treads. As well as being the biggest armour the Ettin is also among the most heavily armoured, with Super Heavy class (10 CP) Gamma type (x2.0) armour on all servos. Just with the frame alone we’re almost over 200 CP. This is going to be expensive

Servo            Class        Cost/Space/Kills

Torso Servo      Super Heavy  10
Head Servo       Super Heavy  20
Right Arm Servo  Super Heavy  11
Left Arm Servo   Super Heavy  11
Right Leg Servo  Super Heavy  11
Left Leg Servo   Super Heavy  11
3. Choose your weapons

The Ettins only weapons are its giant fists which tear through smaller Armours with ease.

3a Build Weapons / 3b Do they fit / 3c Ammo

Giant Fists

These are going to be pretty monstrous. Damage of 8 Kills (4 CP) at +1 Accuracy (x1.25), theyre going to be Handy (x1.5), Quick (x2.0) and Armour-Piercing (x2.0). Which makes them actually take up too many spaces to attach to the arms, which is a problem. So some massive (-20) space efficiency later they take up 4 spaces and cost 34 CP each.

4. Consider Shields / 5. Buy Crew and Sensors / 6. Buy other additive systems

No shiled. Its massive so were going to expand the cockpit a bit and put in space for two passengers. Going with a basic Super Heavy sensor suite and for extras its the old faithful liftwire and escape pod.

7. Figure base weight / 8. Weight efficiency / 9. Flight and other propulsion systems / 10. Figure Base Cost

Unsurprisingly the base weight is coming in at a hefty 76.5, which gives us a MA of 3 and a MV of -7. I’m going to leave weight efficiency alone for the moment but it may be revisited later on. No flight or propulsion systems and we currently have a base cost of 297.3. Which is about to rise sharply

11. Choose multiplier systems

11a. Choose powerplant / 11b. Buy cockpit controls / 11c. Maneuver Verniers / 11d. Environment protection / 11e. Transformers and Combiners / 11f. Other multiplier systems

For the moment I’m going to leave the powerplant at the basic options, no controls, MV, EP, transforming or combing required. We also wont be adding any ninja leaping capabilities. So that leaves us with Thought control (x0.5) and Techno Organic Regeneration (x0.67). But we’re also going to add another multiplier option which we havent looked at so far. I was thinking of including this with the Pendragon but ultimately didnt. We’re going to look at the “Hydraulics” multiplier, basically this allows us to increase the power of the units “muscles”. In this case we’re going to ramp it up to the max superheavy hydraulics (x0.2) which gives us extra kills of damage and extra lifting capacity.

12. Calculate your mechas multiplied cost / 13. Overview Mecha / 14. Figure stats

Our multiplied cost is 699.12 CP. The most expensive unit yet. Looking over it I think it should be ok, my one worry is that with a MA of 3 it might find it hard to close in on enemies. I’m also slightly worried about how tough it is, an attack will have to do 8+ Kills of damage before it even effects the armour.

15. Buy command armour / 16. Scale as appropriate / 17. Remotes / 18. Finishing touches

I’m tempted to give it some command armour but I wont for the moment. Once all sample units for all factions are done I might end up tweaking each unit a bit. But thats for when I have a more solid idea of the power spectrum for all factions. No scaling, no remotes and no finishing touches.

Those units were quick enough to put together as they were both minimally armed “gimmick” units. It took a bit longer than planned though as I ran into some issues along the way (had to modify the construction sheet to account for hydraulics and weapon properties, had to spend some time looking up how EMW and AP interact with armour and armour DC and also how to create ranged meleed weapons).

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