IAF standard Armorsport - The Interstellar Armorsport Federation is the sanctioning body for most interscholastic Armorsport, Panzerspiel, Tankery, and/or sensha-dō competition that takes place within the United Federation of Planets. Its ruleset is an attempt at standardizing all of the various others in use within the various leagues scattered around known space, so that, for instance, a Crown Colony Commonwealth Tankery team and a Greater Rigel Sector Co-Prosperity Sphere sensha-dō side can have their internal matches under their own local variant rules, but play each other under the IAF's guidelines.

to start fielding the E series - The Entwicklung ("development") series was an attempt by Nazi Germany to rationalize and standardize its increasingly scattered and chaotic armored vehicle production in the middle stages of World War II. If completed, it would have replaced all of Germany's various tanks, assault guns, armored heavy weapons carriers (Waffenträger), and suchlike with a comprehensive range of five simplified vehicles, each designed to have as much parts commonality as possible with the others, and each designated by its approximate expected tonnage:

- E-10, a light tank destroyer;
- E-25, a heavier tank destroyer-cum-assault gun that could also be used in a reconnaissance role;
- E-50 and E-75, a standard medium and heavy tank respectively (to replace the Panther and Tiger series); and
- E-100, a hypothetical super-heavy tank that would have been the replacement for the Panzer VIII Maus, if the Maus itself had ever reached serial production in the first place.

In practice, the E series was never realized. Germany lacked the resources and industrial base that would have been necessary to institute full-scale development and production of a whole new range of armored vehicles, while still keeping the older models in production until they were ready in order to support the still-ongoing war. No E-series vehicle was ever built, nor even completely blueprinted, before the whole effort was abandoned in favor of emergency production of existing designs.

As such, E-series vehicles do not meet the IAF's rule that vehicles fielded by Armorsport teams be faithful reproductions of ones that were realized during the war (a requirement that the Maus barely satisfies, since a whole one and a half prototypes were built before the project was abandoned). In order to get permission to build and field them in sanctioned matches, Kuromorimine's sensha-dō program had to apply for a waiver to that rule, and prove to the IAF's Engineering Committee that the vehicles didn't embody a technology advance that would have provided an unfair advantage vs. those teams fielding authentic wartime equipment.

Kuromorimine's E-series waiver was granted in 2389, though there has been grumbling from some of the other teams that the vehicles do provide such an advantage ever since—particularly the E-25, which is so capable in its designated role that the common nickname for it among Standard-speaking Armorsportists who have to deal with it is "Cheat-25".

anybody at the IAF or FISB about it - FISB is the Fédération International de Sport Blindé (International Federation of Armored Sport), a Geneva-based organization that governs Armorsport competition in the Centaurus sector (as one of the sector-level sanctioning bodies below the IAF, as discussed previously). Matches played between teams that are both within the Earth Alliance or neighboring territories, including the B'hava'el system, would fall under FISB jurisdiction.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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