I've been rereading this series, and as a consequence I've finally nailed down a lot more of the overall vibes, aesthetic, and chaos-gremlinicity of the Sir Cleghorn Stanley Boarding School for Young Ladies of Quality's Armoursport club. The girls of Cleggers are absolutely besotted with rocketry, close combat, and unconventional additions to their noble steeds. However, the club's mission statement is to put on a damn good show, with lots of pyrotechnics and deranged tactics and what I can only describe as Going Full Anime. This can be explained by a line from cult Scottish film Gregory's Girl, in which two minor characters are discussing whether girls have the physicality necessary to play soccer:

"Have ye no seen 'em play hockey? It's brutal, man. They're like animals."

Outside of the armoursport club, the girls are expected (and ordered, and indeed forced) to be perfectly demure young maidens who enjoy things like uncomplicated novels and whose most daring exploits are cutting the crusts off cucumber sandwiches. I get the feeling that Cleggers is not a nice school, instead being something of a combination dumping-ground and conversion-facility for rich folk's wayward daughters who dare to have things like opinions, dreams, and suchlike. The only reason the girls have the tankery garage at all is because a bunch of the girls banded together and sold it to the staff as a living history project that celebrated the glorious heritage of the Crown Colonies during the Second World War.

The club became insanely popular among the student body and (once they had done a few parades and mock battles with the local historical re-enactment society) became An Institution at the school. Those capital letters are important. British private schools like this absolutely revere tradition, even - perhaps especially - the really weird kinds. It also meant that the club was a safe place for students to be themselves, and the tank girls can experiment with gender and sexuality in an environment where they wouldn't be discovered and... disciplined. Like I said, Cleggers is not a nice school. The staff beat the girls, of course, because the British upper class truly believes that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. But it wouldn't just be that.

There's a room in the school that's completely silent, extremely complex sound-deadening technology within so deadening the sound that the noise level is negative. One such room was built at a laboratory in Minnesota in the 2000s and being in it for 45 minutes drives people nuts. Girls who won't conform are left in there overnight as a matter of course. There's always a way to be found in which the girls do not conform.

The girls in the Armoursport Club, which is basically all of them, cherish it. It's the only place in school where for a brief time they're free. Queer liberation in this place needs tanks, much like in real Britain. And so, the girls have their little patch of hope and promise, and they get really into it. They're not hyper-competitive tryhards like other schools, but instead they really value causing as much absolute chaos as possible. They strive to be the neutral's favourite; the more popular they are at home and abroad, the safer the club is from faculty interference. They use weird tanks with weird modifications; it helps with their "remit" as a living history project. They are taken abroad to away fixtures by former students rather than staff; it's cheaper for the school, and the girls get days away from the awful place. Sometimes they're even able to help someone escape entirely, if the tank girls can manage to extract all the tracking devices and suchlike - all implanted in the name of security, you understand, the scions of nobility and privilege must protect their investments. Daughters. Of course I said daughters.

They fight with a kind of berserk joy, with roller-derby warpaint and a commitment to warfare less Ungentlemanly and more Unhinged. They fight because they love it. They fight because it's freedom. And they fight because it's the only hope they have left.

So, with that in mind, here's the full list of tanks in the stable at Cleggers.

- A22 Churchill Mk. IV AVRE, "Labrys": The oldest standby and essentially the command tank for everyone in the team. It mounts possibly the biggest gun you're likely to see in a tankery game: the 29mm Spigot Mortar. This has been the subject of some confusion on my part before; the designation refers to the diameter of the spigot, not the barrel. It is used in combat essentially like a gigantic shotgun, and it even looks the part; after firing, the gun breaks open, and the gunner loads it by hand (with hands fully exposed). It might be slow as balls, but the armour of the thing's insanely thick and the complicated suspension means it can traverse all manner of terrain at maximum speed, even if that maximum speed is pathetic. In addition to Labrys' primary explosive armament, she also carries demolition charges, and sometimes a little something extra...

- Universal Carrier with "Conger" Mine Clearing Line Charge: This little number goes unnamed because it's not technically a separate tank, instead towed around by "Labrys" until it's time to be fired. The Conger is essentially a ground-to-ground missile with a hose attached to it, which was pumped full of nitroglycerine and detonated. Since this combines a rocket and an explosion of ungodly vastness, the Conger is very popular with the girls in all sorts of engagements, usually for the purpose of setting up a devious and ungentlewomanly trap during defensive engagements. Sometimes, though, you just need to fill a giant windsock full of nitro and wait for the splodey to happen.

- M4A3 (76mm) Sherman Crab II with Mine Exploder T4, "Goldfish Warning": The Sherman Crab II is one of the very few mine flails to see active wartime service, and it was highly effective at its purpose. One of the big benefits of the thing was having cutting blades on the rotor to prevent the whole edifice becoming entangled in barbed wire, which made it very popular. That's not how the team uses it most, though; instead, it is a melee weapon, used to rip up tracks and disorient opposition crews. Since this requires the gun to be facing away from the giant spinning Cylinder Of Sonic Violence, the gunner is able to use the eminently reasonable 76mm gun to scan for other threats while the mine flail is engaged. Their previous tank of this type, "Alarm Clock", was completely written off after a disastrous defeat to Kumomorimine Girls' Academy in an interscholastic invitational tournament some years prior.

- M4A3E8 Sherman Rhinoceros bocage-clearing tank, "Fix Bayonets": Rhino tanks were a kind of subdivision in and of themselves, being any manner of Sherman equipped with bocage cutters. These are big, spiky, saw-toothed blades mounted on the front of the tank, meant to hack apart French hedgerows and clear a subsequent path through them for other vehicles. Much like with "Goldfish Warning", the girls use it for a purpose not intended by the manufacturer, instead engaging it as a track destroyer at Full Anime Ramming Speed. It turns out that having giant metal spikes shoved into your tracks will mess them up quite a bit. Who knew. The team experimented with light tanks outfitted in this manner, but they were extremely vulnerable to enemy fire and could not mount effective attacks except via ramming. At least the Sherman's gun can do damage.

- A22 Churchill Mk.IV with Carrot demolition spikes, "Send Three And Fourpence": It's another melee tank! The girls do love them so. This time, though, there's more of a combat engineering bent to it. STAF is outfitted with the usual Mark IV Churchill armament, that being excellent armour and a reasonable gun. However, she's also equipped with an honest-to-God lance, and it even explodes! The Carrot demolition spike is a powerful explosive charge in the tip of a length of sharpened bar stock, intended for being stabbed into a wall before blowing it up. Of course, the Cleggers use it in a manner analogous to those anti-tank spears the Japanese used, with the difference being that the resultant detonation is a) much larger, b) much more effective, and c) not in a position to vapourise the user. STAF's name comes from a famous (and likely apocryphal) British military line; a message reading "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance" was so garbled by bad telephone lines that what HQ actually received said "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance".

- M4A4 Sherman Firefly DD "Daisy Duck": Daisy is one of the more well-known of the Cleggers' stable, due in large part to how she's used. The Sherman's a reliable old workhorse, and having it upgunned with the British 17-pounder main armament made it much better than its fellows (this is what makes a Firefly), but Daisy's key feature is her Duplex Drive. She's a swimming tank, and in arenas with water hazards, she can spring up from all sorts of flanking angles and get in a good shot on goal. It's tradition for Daisy's commander to wear piratical attire while in the field of combat, and once a commander even unloaded an array of old flintlock pistols at the crew of an opposition Carro Armato M13/40. This was dismissed as just high spirits, but was in truth a bitter dispute, centred on the fact that none of the M13/40's crew would let the Cleggers use their tank's (historically accurate, no really, we checked) espresso machine.

- A27L Centaur IV Dw with applique armour and wading gear, "Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjos!": The Centaur IV was the only variant to see active combat during WWII. It was equipped with a 95mm howitzer so that it could take on fortified positions, but it was also equipped with wading gear so that it could support the advance of the Royal Marines at D-Day. The Dw in the name means that the Cleggers' variant has the hull type D with welded armour rather than riveted. Paddle Faster is the other semi-amphibious tank in the girls' lineup, but rather than accompanying "Daisy Duck" in her advances, she tends to make daring flanks from the other side to cut off retreats and pin down the assailants until the others show up. Media Studies is not on the curriculum at Cleghorn Stanley, so the censorious faculty completely missed the 400-year-old film reference.

- A22 Churchill Mk.IV Armoured Ramp Carrier with demolition charges and PIATs, "O Angry Spirit Of Ricky Myran!": This is a bridging tank, more specifically a tank with a ramp on it. The reason why will be important in a minute. Ricky's used for bridging gaps and acting as a kind of lookout post in conjunction with one of the other tanks, allowing the girls manning her to co-ordinate with the rest of the formation. Nobody's sure who gave Ricky her name, not even the girls who were on the team when she was first added to the stable; there was simply a couple of short lines and a capital G left scratched into the ramp gear. Some would question the logic of bringing an unarmed tank to an Armoursport match. Those people are applying logic to tankery, and will therefore be shot at by posh queer British teenage girls wielding rocket launchers.

- A22 Churchill Mk.IV Great Eastern Ramp Carrier with demolition charges and PIATs, "We Honour Your Rage!": In similar but rather more spectacular vein to her sister tank "Ricky", Honour is an otherwise-unarmed ramp carrier. Why do I say otherwise? Well, this is because of the Great Eastern's unique little quirk. Rather than raising or lowering ramps via hydraulics like, say, a normal human being would do, the Great Eastern system instead barfs the ramp forward with the aid of a couple of clusters of three-inch rockets. This can, of course, be used as a scaling device and to make longer, more versatile ramps for one of the girls' other little pyrotechnic surprises. It also, and this is by far the more common option, means that this is a tank that can fucking deck you. Closing in with the rest of the formation means that, in addition to the fusillade of spare/extra three-inch missiles fired by the crew, there is a chance that a tank will be punched in the face by a rocket-propelled girder assembly, which is as ungentlewomanly as it is hilarious. For those wondering what kind of diseased mind came up with this, it was a man called Cecil who also invented an exploding trouser sausage. And that's not a euphemism.

- Valentine IX SADE with gap-jumping equipment, "Dragon Punch": This. This is why "Ricky" and "Honour" are in the formation. A Valentine IX is a pretty average tank, all told. It's got the QF 6-pounder for usable anti-tank shooting. It's got the American diesel engine that developed 165 horsepower. More noticeably, though, this model has twenty-six rocket boosters strapped to the sides. The IAF were presented with contemporary photographic evidence as well as a treatise on why a jump jet tank wasn't actually all that much of an advantage. They let the tank in, and Dragon Punch has risen to the occasion magnificently. She uses her rocket boosters sparingly, to get a positional advantage and also just confuse the absolute hell out of the opposition. It's a tank with jump jets. What more do you want from me?

- A27M Cromwell VII Tulip, "Princess Of Mysore": As described in the previous post, the Tulip system is a rail-guided rocket launcher arrangement that began life as a Canadian field modification to an armoured car. The Cromwell's version is much more hard-wearing and can actually be aimed, matching the traverse of the gun; this makes it much handier for blasting the opposition from long range. It's also very handy for close-range saturation bombardment, as very few IAF-approved tanks can withstand a barrage of 60-pound missiles. Princess uses her Tulip system to great effect in both capacities: sometimes she gets up on top of one of the ramp tanks for an elevated bombardment; others, she piles in with the rest of the formation and engages at close quarters with the sturm und drang of multiple very angry rockets and a 75mm main gun.

- M4A1(76)W HVSS Sherman M17 Whizbang, "It Goes Whiz, You Go Bang": The M17 Whizbang rocket launcher is designed to use 7.2-inch demolition rockets to smash open fortifications. Of course, if it can bust a bunker, it can probably do a number on a tank, and so that is how the girls use it: as a close-in source of massed firepower to supplement the rather underwhelming firepower of the M4A1 Sherman. Whiz is a potent addition to the team, and her extra payload doesn't appreciably slow her down; this may in part be because of the fact that every single girl assigned to her has driven her like a bloody maniac. Whatever spirit inhabits this tank clearly wouldn't have it any other way.

- A12 Matilda II Mk V Projector, Hedgehog, No. 1 Mk.I, "Alice Springs Eternal": One of the newest additions to the stable, the Hedgehog is a variant of the Matilda that mounted a hydraulically-actuated 7-chambered spigot mortar on the back so that the mortar rounds fired over the turret - except chamber 5, where it would hit the radio antenna unless the turret turned. If you asked a faculty member at Cleghorn Stanley why it was called that, then they would look at you as if you were an imbecile and tell you that the variant is Australian, and that therefore the name is a pun on the town of Alice Springs. If you ask an Old Girl or one of the Armoursport Club members themselves, they'll tell you about a girl who never gave up on her dream. She wanted to found an Armoursport club at her evil school, in the teeth of furious opposition from staff members. She put together proposals and letters and all manner of things, and all it got her was violence and, eventually, madness. Too long in the Silent Room drives you mad. It's torture, plain and simple. She was given an internal suspension for a week - a week in the Silent Room, only let out for thin meals and one bathroom break a day. Whatever it was that came out of that room, it wasn't their friend any more. Still, she never gave up. Even from the institution where she wound up, she signed about Armoursport to everyone who would pay attention. She had her dream, and her dream took her into the sport as an adult once she was released and stable. After her first IAF championship medal, she used the winnings to buy a tank for the Cleghorn Stanley club, the club she tried to found and never gave up hope for: a rare design, custom built on Niogi, for an Australian Matilda with a load of mortar shells on the back. Alice never gave up on her dreams of being free, and neither do the girls who are still caged in that horrible place. Alice, you see, is the symbol of their hope, and she springs eternal.

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"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Thank you for reading what is basically very bad Girls Und Panzer fanfiction.