Yeah, yeah, I seem to be on a "silly stuff about mecha" bender...

Weird Weapons of the WDF
By Colleen MacKinlon

Not all of the Golden Age Wedge Defense Force's weapons systems were as hugely successful as the venerable VF-1 and VF-6 Veritech fighters, the iconic Destroids, or the mighty SDF-17. During the Force's nearly 400 years in action before the 2288-2381 hiatus, it had its share of flops, miscalculations, and just plain bad ideas too. Here are a few of the "best", in no particular order.

ATAC-X1 Spartas Veritech Hover Tank

The Spartas Veritech Hover Tank was proposed in 2050 by Kallon Industries, long-time equipment contractors to the WDF and Royal Salusian Armed Forces and creators of such famous mecha as the WHM-6R Warhammer (RSN designation: MBR-04 Tomahawk) heavy Destroid. On the face of it, the concept seemed like a slam dunk. After all, Veritech aerospacecraft were a big success, as were smaller Veritech ground vehicles like the Garland variable battlemover and the Cyclone series of combat motorcycles, and both Destroids and tanks served with distinction in the WDF's ground forces.

However, once the ATAC-X1 prototype went into testing, certain shortcomings of the design became obvious. For one thing, the concept wasn't really as useful as it seemed at first blush. Tanks and Destroids complement each other in battle, and units that can change from one to the other are really not bringing anything new to the table. Still, that wasn't the real problem with the Spartas.

The real problem with the Spartas was that it just wasn't a well-designed vehicle. Not only did its design place the crew on the outside in two of its three modes (hover tank and walker tank), it could only use its main weapon in one mode: walker tank, which was the slowest and least maneuverable of the three, and one of those that exposed the pilot. Admittedly, that main weapon, a devastating long-range particle projection cannon, was a good one, and would later be adapted to revised versions of the Warhammer and the VA-1 Judicator Veritech attack fighter - but the ATAC-X1 was not a suitable platform and was never adopted. The project quietly folded after prototype testing was complete.

YVB-10 Königsmonster

The 300-ton MHP-2 Monster super artillery Destroid is one of the iconic war machines of the 21st through 23rd centuries, a hulking bruiser of an armored fighting vehicle mounting four 400mm naval cannon - essentially a walking battleship turret with armor to match. Huge, massively armored, indifferent to attack from anything short of a capital ship, the Monster can only manage a maximum speed of about 15 miles per hour - a man on a bicycle can easily outrun it - but it's nearly unstoppable and virtually anything that comes under is gigantic guns is dead, no questions asked. Armies have surrendered to the WDF on the rumor that one of these things was on its way. It's not the most practical of weapons systems, but it was and remains one of the most beloved of WDF mecha.

The YVB-10 Königsmonster (the name means King Monster in German) was a proposal by a Niogan company, Bundeskanzler Waffenfabrik AG, to develop a Veritech MHP-2. Powered by fusion engines of a type usually employed to drive small warships, the Königsmonster would have been able to transform into an aerospace vehicle or assume a fully humanoid battroid mode, with a form very similar to the well-loved Monster profile as its "GERWALK"-equivalent. With access to all of its weapons in flight mode and a pair of the 400mm guns in battroid mode, it would have been a more mobile and flexible weapon than the MHP-2. There were even tentative plans for a version that dispensed with two of the 400mm cannon and replaced them with bays for two dozen Cyclone-equipped infantry. The bomber configuration would have been able to carry a pair of the VB-9 Beta Legios bomber's trademark "drum bombs".

On the minus side, each operational VB-10 would have cost cr2 billion, roughly the same price as a Salusian ARMD-class spacecraft carrier - more than a hundred times the already hefty price tag of an MHP-2. Besides which, it was designed to fulfill a need that, as far as the WDF's strategic planners were concerned, simply didn't exist. There are rumors that the WDF's top brass liked the concept enough that they ordered one just to have it - not inconceivable to those who know them - but no YVB-10 was ever officially ordered, nor seen in testing, to say nothing of deployment of a full combat model.

X-9 Ghost Automatic Fighter

The Northrop Aerotech X-9 Ghost was a proof-of-concept test vehicle for a fully AI-controlled aerospace superiority fighter. At the time, in the early 23rd century, many military theorists believed that the performance limits of human-piloted aerospacecraft had been reached and that the future of space combat lay in fully automated weapons. The idea of fully autonomous aerospacecraft was nothing new - GENOM had been using Boomer fighters for decades - but it was believed that an AI sophisticated enough to function usefully in combat would be too large and costly to use in mass-produced starfighters.

In 2210, Northrop's Advanced Space Technologies Team developed the X-9 prototype without a direct solicitation from the WDF and asked the Force's commanders to let them station it aboard WDF Daedalus (SLV-111) for testing. The hope was that the WDF brass would see the vehicle in action, be impressed, and issue a spec for a fully production-ready combat model.U nfortunately, the Ghost project team lead was the famed computer scientist and AI engineer Richard Daystrom, whose development of duotronic technology in the 2190s revolutionized starship computers. Daystrom, who took personal charge of the Daedalus tests, did a few things wrong. For one, he openly ridiculed the idea that humanoid pilots might remain behind the controls of starfighters - which did not make him many friends among the WDF officers assigned to oversee the project, not least Commander Benjamin D. "Gryphon" Hutchins, who led the renowned "Eight-Ball" Valkyrie squadron throughout the Golden Age. Daystrom boasted to Gryphon's face that the Ghost and its visionary multitronic "brain" would put him, and all the WDF's other organic pilots, out of a job.

Worse, though not even he knew it, Daystrom suffered from an undiagnosed latent mental illness that, if triggered, would manifest as full-blown paranoid psychosis. Worst of all, the special computer system he developed to house the Ghost's artificially aware operating system was based on a recording of his neural engrams - and so contained the same fatal flaw, hardwired directly to a high-performance aerospacecraft fitted with powerful weapons systems. The outcome was almost predictable. The Ghost prototype suffered a mental breakdown, went rogue, and caused serious damage to the flight decks of Daedalus and Prometheus before Eight-Ball Squadron managed to destroy it. The WDF has never again allowed any contractor to develop fully automated combat mecha.

MHP-X3 Monster II

Affectionately known around the Vickers Armor Works design shop as Superbeast, the MHP-X3 was a design spec for another variation on the time-honored Monster artillery Destroid. Sporting ten of the Monster's famous 400mm cannon and possessing increased ground speed thanks to its colossal Vlar 22500 fusion plant (originally developed to power cities), the Superbeast was, on paper, a perfectly viable piece of technology - it was just that no one could figure out any practical use or need for a 700-ton mega-Destroid. Calculations showed that the MHP-X3, if built, wouldn't even have been able to stand on the SDF-17's foredeck in standard gravity without buckling armor plates at the corners. On any reasonable planetary surface, it would sink to its hips almost immediately, becoming a formidable but rather static artillery emplacement. Though the concept art became a popular series of posters and was eventually used on the cover to Card No. 1's 2158 album Heavy Metal Thunder, the MHP-X3 was never prototyped.

XV-74 Synthetic Super Battle Trooper

Originally developed in the 2280s by the New Japan Strategic Self Defense Force, the XV-74 was devised by maverick technologist Gendou Ikari (a classmate and fraternity brother of the late Katsuhito Stingray) as an urban defense weapon. Code named Evangelion by the NJSSDF, the XV-74 was an attempt to use GENOM's semi-biological Boomer technology to produce daikaiju-class combatants more quickly and economically than they could be constructed using standard Destroid technology. When the money ran out with the prototype half-completed, Ikari turned to the WDF, hoping to interest its commanders enough that they would fund completion of EVA-00.

Though intrigued by the concept, the WDF had precious little use for 300-foot-tall combat bioroids. Being semi-biological, Evangelions could not operate in space, where the WDF did most of its work in those days, without complicated and costly secondary equipment that had been theorized, but not designed. Also, their design precluded installing conventional power generation equipment of sufficient mass to make the monstrous bioroids work, forcing them to rely on broadcast power, umbilical power, or onboard batteries with an extremely limited life of only 300 seconds. Worse, the prototype's command and control systems were hugely temperamental and had already almost killed one test pilot with neural feedback. The WDF passed on the project and the half-finished prototype was dismantled.

Ironically, had the SDF-17 had an XV-74 or two fitted with space combat gear aboard just two years later, it might have been able to fight off the attack of GENOM Corporation's Star Destroyer Executioner. Certainly GENOM had nothing in its arsenal that could have coped with a direct assault by two daikaiju-class battle bioroids on the Executioner's hull and command tower.

AJACS Veritech Helicopter

Another of those ideas, like the Spartas Veritech Tank, that looked great on paper, the AJACS was a proposed Veritech attack helicopter. The problem was, for some reason the design team at ExoSalusia decided that the AJACS, instead of filling the usual helicopter combat roles of ground support/anti-armor, would be a spacecraft, with a function similar to that of the VF-6 Alpha Legios fighter. Accordingly, it was designed with air-to-air weapons and elaborate aerospace-combat-oriented sensor and fire-control systems.

Let's just go over that one more time. It was supposed to be a helicopter... for fighting in space.

To be fair, the computer simulations showed that, with its thruster configuration, it would've worked, and the "rotor system" was really more of an adjustable vector control system, with adjustable thrusters at the tips of the four blades. The fly-by-wire system would have been capable of adjusting between rotary-wing and spaceflight modes transparently to the pilot, and by all estimations, it would've been a fairly capable space combatant. Still, the whole concept was just weird, and didn't address any actual need the WDF had, so they passed on the idea. For a while it looked like the Royal Salusian Armed Forces might buy it, but budget cutbacks in 2179 finally killed the project altogether.