I haven't seen the show, so if it's addressed there I'm sorry. Just a weird thought I had, y'know?

---
"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.

--G.
Soviet bomb dogs are not allowed
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ah. I shan't worry about it then. Technically it's more within the rules than the E-series because it actually saw combat action in WW2, but it's schoolgirls piloting tanks so the rules are "whatever needs to happen to look goofy and enable moe shenanigans".

I'd like to reiterate my burning desire for the Sir Cleghorn Stanley Boarding School for Young Ladies Of Quality to make an appearance with their Armoursports team, considered the least violent of all the school clubs. After all, they're not a patch on the synchronized needlepoint team, those girls are animals. They are, at least in my head, fielding the following:-

Item: One (1) Churchill AVRE with 290mm petard spigot mortar, demolition charges, flying dustbins, external loading maniac.

Item: One (1) M4 Sherman Crab II with Mine Exploder T4 for mine clearance, ramming, general making of hullas balloo.

Item: One (1) M4 Sherman "Donald Duck" with amphibious screen and duplex drive for engagement via unusual and ungentlewomanly angles.

Item: One (1) M4 Sherman V "Prongs" Variant with bocage cutters for fast traversal through off-road conditions and general pointiness.

Item: One (1) Churchill IV with high-explosive Carrot demolition spikes for ramming, wall clearance, Vitamin A.

I don't know how many tanks per team you can operate, but frankly the idea of an overconfident team in overpowered tanks coming utterly unstuck against non-standard opposition feels very Eyrie to me. So does the image of Miho and the rest of the DSM Armor Club watching in slack-jawed horror as a demure-looking girl in a blazer and straw boater hanging out the side of a tank to jam a forty-pound bomb down the barrel of the main gun like it's a bloody musket. Albeit, that feels Eyrie for rather different reasons. =]

>Soviet bomb dogs are not allowed

I bet they've banned the British chicken-powered nuclear landmine and the pigeon-guided cruise missile too. Honestly, these people have no sense of fun.

---
"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.

I was tempted to also include Mine Exploder T12, which consisted of twenty-three small spigot mortars nailed to the front of the tank, but that thing was a cancelled experimental project and we're not using Cheat-25 rules here, squire.

What, no bobbin? No fascine? No embridgement vehicle of any kind? And where, I ask you, is the Grand Panjandrum?

>I don't know how many tanks per team you can operate, but frankly the
>idea of an overconfident team in overpowered tanks coming utterly
>unstuck against non-standard opposition feels very Eyrie to me.

Funnily enough, that's basically the premise of the original show. The protagonists, the sensha-dō team of Ōarai Girls' Academy, are configured from the start to be the ultimate underdogs. The school didn't even have a sensha-dō team at the beginning of the school year concerned, only two of its members have any idea what they're doing, and one of them is participating under duress. Compounding this, their equipment is a mismatched ragbag of mostly joke tanks. They start out with:

- A Panzer IV Ausf. D, which was one of the models with the stubby 75mm gun that was only of any real use against infantry and machine-gun nests (two things notable for their absence from Tankery battlefields);

- A Panzer 38(t), which is a Czechoslovakian tank that was obsolescent when the Germans captured a bunch of them and found that they were marginally effective against older Polish tanks, but not much else;

- A Type 89 I-Go, possibly the least formidable of Japan's not-very-formidable tanks;

- A StuG III Ausf. F, which is a pretty decent tank destroyer, but is unfortunately crewed by a group of people whose conception of stealth and tactics is akin to the sports savvy of that Chinese kid from Better Off Dead who learned to speak English from watching Howard Cosell on TV; and

- A Char B1 bis, France's slowest, least mechanically reliable tank, although it does have the undeniable virtues of having a huge gun and being practically indestructible.

Later, in need of reinforcements, they scrape up a Type 3 Chi-Nu, Japan's last-minute answer to the Sherman, and--of all things--a VK 45.01 (P), Ferdinand Porsche's failed entry in the development process that led to the Tiger I. The Porsche Tiger (or Tiger-P as it is known in World of Tanks) was particularly noted for its ability to catch fire without the aid of the enemy.

So yeah, on paper this is a team that is obviously not going places. They do anyway, of course, mostly because none of their more orthodox opponents can ever have any idea what the hell they're thinking at any time. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...And then there's Shark Team.

-----
Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

You yourself argued against the utility of the Panjandrum when discussing the Goliath, but that aside, they're not using them as engineering vehicles. These are specialist engineering vehicles used as melee tanks, or at least tankery at very short range. The girls' whole doctrine is that of Nelson: "Engage the enemy more closely". That giant mortar was only accurate to about 80 yards, the mine flail is used like an actual flail, the bocage cutters and Carrot spikes are used as anti-track ramming devices like that Japanese grenade-on-a-stick. The Duplex Drive Sherman is there to make flanking attacks from unexpected angles through things like rivers and such. If they were to have a Short Box Girder bridge on staff, as it were, they'd have to deal with a tank that couldn't do much else and was a sitting duck for the enemy. Plus, it was usually Valentines that were used for bridging... but. BUT. If they're gonna have a bridge vehicle, it's gonna be the one with the ramps for one specific reason that would not even slightly confer a military advantage.

Reinforcements are as follows:-

One (1) Churchill ARK (Armoured Ramp Carrier) equipped with additional demolition charges and PIAT launchers for crew of armoursporting pyromaniacs.

One (1) Valentine IX SADE variant, equipped with QF 6-pounder, 165hp variant engine, rocket jump boosters, no really, we've got contemporaneous photographs.

The Gap-Jumping Valentine is one of those projects that never really got off the ground (so to speak), with a few attempts involving a lot of upside-down Bren Carriers and one spectacularly unsuccessful attempt involving a Valentine. The problem, as it turned out, was that the rocket engines were causing a bowl-shaped depression in the ground upon firing, and this was what was flipping the UCs. Therefore, if you're not on the ground, that shouldn't happen! So the ARK is there not just to act as a bridging vehicle, but also as a literal stunt ramp.

Oh yes. It's Big Brain Time. Because what could be more fucking anime than the tank with a jetpack?

---
"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.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

T13 B3: The tank-hunting tankette. Yes, really. It's from Belgium, and Cleghorn Stanley uses Allied tanks exclusively, so there's room for it on the docket. It used a 47mm indigenous Belgian AT gun to considerable effect against Panzers of all contemporaneous stripes, and its small size and manoeuvrability made it difficult to draw a bead on in the Ardennes forest. Of course, it's got sod-all armour, but such is the lot of the tankette. In Tankery matches that use large amounts of forested and other kinds of rough terrain, I think it'd make for a sterling addition to a lineup. Sure, that kind of armament was outmoded by the end of the War, but it's perfectly serviceable as an ambush weapon.

Cromwell VII Tulip: At first an adaptation to the well-known Sherman Firefly tank hunter (after a little inspiration from Canadian troops upgunning a Staghound armoured car), the Tulip system was so named for the resemblance of its payload to tulip flowers. The payload in question was RP-3 60lb air-to-ground rockets that had been mounted on brackets stuck to either side of the turret. The Firefly had two, but the Cromwell prototype had four of them, along with proper pointability rather than guesswork. Given the general levels of rocketry and similar pyromania on the Cleghorn Stanley squad, it seems fitting to give them some assault rockets rather than just jump jets. "Just" jump jets. What the hell even is this school. =]

M4A2 Sherman M17 Whizbang: Aside from the superlative name, there is much to recommend the M17 variant of the Sherman. It's a descendant of the much more famous Calliope system, in which an angry pipe organ is nailed to a tank turret and barfs rockets at the enemy. The M17 is smaller, having only 20 launch tubes, and has a much shorter range. The tradeoff is the use of 7.2" demolition rockets for extra up-blowing of stuff, as well as a fully armoured shroud for the launcher itself. Additionally, the launcher's direction of fire is controlled by the main gun, and has the same degree of traverse. I don't know just how legal such a system is in Tankery, but the idea of a fusillade of giant rockets just appeals to me on a base level, you know? And to the girls of Cleghorn Stanley, whose pyromania is beyond reproach.

Are these sensible entries into the Armoursport arsenal of a well-to-do British boarding school? Probably not. They're deeply satisfying ones, though, at least to me. Cleghorn Stanley's team, in my mind, wants to lean into the weird shit. Tankery is a fundamentally silly sport, and therefore they favour armour doctrine and battle tactics that vary from unconventional to certifiable, all in the service of putting on a better show. They go for close-range engagements with bombs on spikes and assault hedge-cutters because it's more fun, and that's more fun for everyone. And if they win? All the better. =]

---
"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.

Also I am unnecessarily proud of the reference in the school name. =]

I keep having these visions of a timeline where Sir Percy stays the entire war as a lance corporal in the Home Guard but, like in the movies where the crime kingpin runs his syndicate from prison, he runs the British war effort.

-VR
"Ah, Winston, right on time I see. The envelope on the kitchen table has the plans you were asking for...""
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

---
"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.

"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.

---
"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.

Okay, Gryph? That felt... kinda hurtful. I went out of my way to make the setting hopeful rather than just wall-to-wall bleak. I wanted to show that in dark places, a shared hobby can be a source of joy and hope and light when you need it most. This school is horrible, yes, but the girls aren't hopeless. I wanted to make the girls and their graduated alums feel Eyrie As Fuck as a specific counterpoint to how horrible the school is. So comparing it to the ridiculous horror of 40K feels... I dunno, dismissive, I guess. And a little unnecessary.

Sorry. I'm probably being overly sensitive. It just felt a little mean, that's all.

---
"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.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And then it occurred to me that this would actually do very little good. In a setting where there is one school that caters to rich parents who want their children molded into compliant little minions, surely there are others. If Cleggers were to burn down under mysterious circumstances, its former students would just be packed off to another such school...

... but if Cleggers continues in operation, then so does the club, and it can continue to be a lifeline for those that need it. And perhaps the alumnae of the club will, as time goes by, get themselves onto the faculty and the board of governors and turn the whole school into that kind of lifeline. Keeping up the appearance of molding rebellious teenagers into compliance, though, in order to keep attracting the students who need this particular kind of help.

That's not a complaint, I should add.

Craig

----------------------------
IAMTW-Nominated Author

Author of the Battletech Novels, Icons of War and Elements
of Treason: Duty

Co-author of Four Outcast Ops novels -- African Firestorm, Red
Ice, Watchlist, and Shadow Government.

Author of the upcoming The Russia-Ukraine War Factbook
(Vol 1)

It's clear that big parts of this came from someplace deeply personal, and I respect that in a way that my off-the-cuff, on-the-fly first response did not convey. That's a major reason why we do this kind of stuff, after all, is to express these things in creative ways, and this is very creative. The premise of a team that's not out there for money or glory or even honor in the conventional sense, but just for the sheer joy of it is very compelling.

That said, a lot of the school's practices as described are straight-up war crimes, of a caliber that would get a prison shut down if anyone on the outside heard about them, much less a high school in the 25th-century "first galaxy". The brutality of the place, and the corresponding mania it engenders in the students, are... disturbing, particularly in the context of a side series that's meant to be more comedy than tragedy. And I get that it's meant to be. The whipsaw switching-up between flights of whimsy and the revelation that what motivates them is manic desperation is powerful stuff, but it also messes with my head in a way I just wasn't prepared to deal with this week.

TL;DR: It's very personal, and very powerful, and it doesn't fit very comfortably in the corner of my head where DSMP lives.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>And perhaps the alumnae of the club will, as time goes by, get
>themselves onto the faculty and the board of governors and turn
>the whole school into that kind of lifeline. Keeping up the
>appearance of molding rebellious teenagers into compliance, though,
>in order to keep attracting the students who need this particular
>kind of help.

Yeah, that's pretty much the goal for the ex-students, Alice in particular. Playing the long game, setting the trap, and springing it only when there's no possibility of escape. They're also counterbalancing that by using the Armoursport Club as a haven from the casual cruelty of the teaching staff.

Not everyone agrees with the premise or the plan, and they're kind of right; Cleggers as it is would better serve the galaxy as a smoking crater, as would every vile institution like it. In an ideal universe there wouldn't be any. But these are moneyed, privileged people sending their children to these hellholes; even if you wiped them all out, they'd just build other ones. The plan is therefore to build out Cleggers as essentially a brand for parents "in the know", so to speak, with them buying out and taking over and merging with other vile finishing schools to enact the same changes there.

It's a compelling story in its own right. For an EPU work, especially a lighter-toned one like DSMP, it probably works better as, like. Backstory or something.

>Feels like a Thirsty Sword Lesbians setting. Thirsty Tank Lesbians?

As a Thirsty Sword Lesbian who is also a Thirsty Tanks Lesbian, I do feel seen with this comment. But it is still a school, and TSL games in my experience have been preposterously horny, which I don't think would fit the environment at all. Now, a collegiate Armoursports program, with a bunch of queer women and trans women and enbies and such, that there's a good Thirsty Lesbians setting. =]

>I hear the matches between then and St Trinian's are downright
>INSANE...

The St. Trinian's Armoursport club very rarely attends matches, since their tanks are a) in violation of IAF/FISB rules and b) being used by the hockey team for their own dark and violent purposes.

>It's clear that big parts of this came from someplace deeply personal,
>and I respect that in a way that my off-the-cuff, on-the-fly first
>response did not convey. That's a major reason why we do this kind of
>stuff, after all, is to express these things in creative ways, and
>this is very creative. The premise of a team that's not out there for
>money or glory or even honor in the conventional sense, but just for
>the sheer joy of it is very compelling.

That was what I was trying to get across, yeah. It's a riff on the idea of "amateurism" in the Victorian sense; doing a sport purely for The Love Of The Game, so to speak. I initially had in my head that the first interactions between the DSM Armor Club and the Cleggers Team would be very comedic, with the setup being "This is going to be a demure Teddibly Teddibly British boarding school, they're going to be pushovers" and the punchline being "One of our tanks just got rocket-punched by bridgelaying equipment and I think Sasuke just saw the face of God". It's only after the match that the teams really interact with each other, and it's then that the Armor Club figures out that there's something really wrong with the opposition team's actual school environment.

>That said, a lot of the school's practices as described are
>straight-up war crimes, of a caliber that would get a
>prison shut down if anyone on the outside heard about them,
>much less a high school in the 25th-century "first galaxy".

This is a commentary on British public schools in general. Abuse runs rampant in them, be it pupils or staff committing it. My primary school was private (from Year 3-6) and it was a traumatizing hellscape. There's also, especially in schools like Cleggers, a culture of silence bred into the students. It takes so long for abuse survivors to speak up and speak out even when their abuser was a single private citizen; an institution of authority and means and privilege makes speaking up orders of magnitude more intimidating.

The other part is that there's a certain kind of British parent (some call them "traditional", I call them "demonstrably unsafe to be around children") who genuinely believes that forced freezing showers, bad food, beatings, and solitary confinement in dedicated punishment chambers is not only acceptable, but beneficial to a child's development. They say things like "It never did me any harm", "It builds character", "Better than having them be knife-wielding feral hooligans". I'm sure there are US equivalents, both in homeschooling and in private education.

>it also messes with my head in a way I just wasn't
>prepared to deal with this week.

For which I apologise. It wasn't my intent to cause anything like that at all, and I'm sorry for doing so. Thank you for taking the time to spell out why as well, I appreciate it very much.

>TL;DR: It's very personal, and very powerful, and it doesn't fit very
>comfortably in the corner of my head where DSMP lives.

Yeah. I mentioned it briefly earlier in this super-long post, but I've given it a lot of thought and I think this kind of story as it stands would work best in a DSMP context as backstory rather than something actively ongoing. Like, the horrible abusive school environment makes a lot of sense as taking place in the late Exile period, with the Old Girls Network taking over Cleghorn Stanley and making it a safe harbour for independent teenage girls with attitude during the 2390s and 2400s.

The school would therefore be a genuinely Nice Place by the time DSMP is set. The Armoursports Club retains its pre-eminence among the school sports teams, but it's now a Campus Pride society in all but name as well as home to a brigade of joyously ultraviolent teenage tank weirdos. Ironically, they'd still promote the living history angle, with demonstrations on tank maintenance and the role of women in WW2-era Britain at local village fetes and things. They spin it to the parents as merely a quirky but longstanding tradition, no different to any other school team with the exception of needing specialist equipment, which is basically the same as equestrianism. The students are informed well in advance of parents arriving so the school can have an appropriate aura of formalised gloom, but once they're gone the teachers apologise and get everyone ice cream and such.

I'm not asking for anyone to include a Cleggers team in DSMP, even as a passing footnote. I'm just... seeing how I'd do it, given the feedback from both Gryph and the other forumites. The story as I first wrote it is dark, with spots of hope like stars. Tinkering with it to more closely fit the DSMP tone was an excellent writing exercise in itself. The school's been stuck in my head for a long time now, though, and I had to get it out on paper (so to speak) before it started turning into an unremitting slogfest of bleak, grim hopelessness, like a rain-soaked camping holiday in a disused Welsh slate quarry.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments. I really do appreciate your taking the time to engage with my weirdness. And if nothing else, at least now Gryphon knows about rocket-propelled bridging equipment. =]

---
"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.

Italian tanks in North Africa really did have espresso machines as a standard fitting. It probably almost made up for how shit everything else about them was. Then again, this was the military whose solution to rations not containing fresh meat was to paradrop sheep out of low-flying aircraft, so Christ knows what the hell any of them were ever thinking.

A LOT bigger.

Those are TT Tank Torpedoes. They weighed in at 250kg. Each. The BT-5 wasn't a bad little tank as light tanks went, and compared to some of the other coal barges on the roster it's extremely fleet of track, but adding an extra half a tonne in weight probably didn't help its manoeuvrability. However, the problem rather solves itself; select anything smaller than the average hillside that you do not wish to see any more, and deploy your anti-tank torpedo. Given the girls' proclivity for Macross levels of rocket spam, I couldn't not let them have a go. =]

As such, I've collected three further additions from the weirder end of the Allied tank forces below. I do hope this does not constitute spam.

---

- RBT-5 with two TT 250kg tank torpedoes, callsign "Noisy Cricket": It's canon that the more junior members of an Armoursport club cut their teeth on tankettes, armoured cars, and light tanks. However, Cricket's very much the team's secret weapon, as most teams assume it will be a spotter, or at the very least not be carrying a couple of small localised earthquakes in rocket form.

- AMX ACG-1 with APX2 B turret and FRC 47mm, callsign "Big-Boned Armoured Car": This is a medium tank based on the French AMC35. It has a two-man turret, a reasonable turn of speed, and an indigenous Belgian anti-tank gun that actually did something; however, it's under-armoured for a medium tank. The name comes from the fact that "tank" was a very, er, politically charged word, and instead the Belgians called it a "heavy armoured car". No, really.

- Marmon-Herrington MTLS-1G14, callsign "Twins Out Front": The MTLS was an attempt to make a medium tank that went up against the Sherman and... lost. Badly. However, it did see usage during WWII: several of them were sold to the Dutch for use in defending their colonies from the Japanese. It's distinguished by having a brace of 37mm cannons in its turret. This is the only reason a bunch of teenage lesbians would pick that name. The only one. Honest.

---
"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.

You're all just lucky I can't get the picrews of the girls to load properly. =]

Change the "static" part of its address to "vignette" to make it show

Now if only I could fix my brain problems so easily...

---
"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.

given my girls' propensity for melee sensha-do, i really ought to give them a canadian m5 ram...

In which case, I'd like to put in a bid for St. Trinian's, the school voted "most likely to invent a Bolo".

On a semi-related note, what are the Armorsport rules regarding sentient tanks? I could see Warpath & Blitzwing being interested...

No data in series, of course. Probably there was lot of yelling and screaming about them having some kind of “inherent advantage due to their body development” or somesuch by the AI Critical activists, and others asking if it’s fair to discriminate against them for how they were made, and ended up with some kind of compromise no one likes (like “you can have them but they only can drive, you have to have a different sentient as gunner and commander” kind of thing)

no I am not relating this to a current kerfuffle in real-life sports at all

>I could see Warpath & Blitzwing being interested...

Or maybe just huge fans. I could see the former enemies, now both Autobots, on a Sunday afternoon, setting up viewing parties in a conference room with snacks and drinks, talking smack and making small bets, while some of the others in there watch, kibitz, and think about what a universe this is.

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

A web search suggests that they are reproductions of a GM M551A1 and a Mitsubishi Type 74, respectively, which would bar them from Classic Armorsport events.

It's possible that they're barred from Modern events because their armament is not a proper reproduction, and thus can not load the AS ammunition.

Peter Eng
--
Going completely off-topic, I now imagine a Minicon that transforms into a Napoleon mini-tank.

If you can find one that was built (IN THAT FORM) before May 8, 1945, sure, go nuts.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Probably not. Despite their legal status in some parts of the galaxy, supernatural beings rarely figure in organized human/humanoid sports rules.

Peter Eng
--
How is it that I remember things like this, but I can't remember where the flash drive with my CV is?

Welllll, yes and no. It's a debate on whether or not a partially-built E-100 chassis qualifies as "built." But that's a bit like arguing that the H-class battleship existed because the Kriegsmarine managed to put down some steel for the keels before the whole thing was put on hold for resumption "after the war."

>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).

Then they must love BC Freedom, whose heavy tank force in GUP das Finale consists of the ARL 44 which only existed as a wooden mock-up by VE Day. The first prototype didn't even roll out of the factory until June '46.

The GUP approach to rules is in the "more like guidelines" vein, such as Yogurt Academy (aka Bulgaria) who quietly managed to acquire heavier tanks to make their school competitive, but did so in a way that makes it look like they looted a junkyard and welded together whatever they could find into functioning tanks. Then there's Continuation Academy (aka Those Whacky Finns) who like to "borrow" tanks from Pravda and Kuromorimine.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

You don't want Simo Häyhä coming for you. :)

Hey now, I'm not being mean to the Finns, it's a perfectly legit way to get armor...at least in time of war. It's just the girls of Continuation have a habit of "borrowing" tanks from Pravda without asking permission. It's how they got their hands on a KV-1, after all. They were also "gifted" a Type 95 Ha-Go by Chi-Ha-Tan Academy when the latter school appeared at a Tankathlon meet.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Heh, this connects up in my head to my earlier conclusion that Hōrai people respawn in the last place they slept when their bodies are destroyed, Minecraft style. :)

"Professor Fujiwara?! But I thought you were dead!"

"Nah, what're you talking about? I had to run home real quick, forgot my lunchbox. What's going on?"

The funny thing is that Moko doesn't really need to hide her immortality nowadays. She just did it in "Fait Accompli" it out of force of habit, and because it was the quickest way to keep Hoshino from freaking out. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.