Saturday 11 December 2010

In The Pipe........ Revolutionary Firepower

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Way back when, in my early days of playing 15mm Sci Fi with classic Traveller: Book 4 Mercenary, 1977-80,  I conceived the idea of an orbital-dropped, 'spider-legged', A.I. battlefied MRLS artillery drone battery to support my ground troops. 30 years later, following some discussion, the combined talents of Jon at Khurasan and John Bear Ross, have brought my vision to life and gone a step further to realise a family of Near Future and Sci Fi combat drones.

I can exclusively reveal the "Automata of the Revolution" series war robots developed by Nova Respublik to give the infantry mobile heavy firepower. They are all given heroic revolutionary names, but the soldiers think of them as beloved girlfriends or doting mothers because of their helpfulness on the battlefield. Fondly called the "darling little robots," each type is given an unofficial nickname by the grunts by which they are more commonly known.

The Marka is an MLRS variant and can fire 20 high explosive rockets by direct or indirect fire. The original idea grew from a book I received one Christmas which had a dramatic photo of a T66 'Honeycomb' 4.5" rocket launcher being used by US Marines in Korea.


The Olyusha ("darling little Olga") variant has eight heavy anti-material missile tubes to take on enemy tanks and walkers. This is Jon's baby. Inspired by the Pentomic era M50 Ontos, with a little input from yours truly.


The Zhenia ("darling little Evgenia") is an ammo carrier robot capable of  resupplying any of the other Darling Little series. The front of the Zhenia is designed to feed ammo directly into the rear of the shooter bots.

The Svetlana robot mounts two 25mm autocannons for direct fire support.

The "Little Darling" series are approximately 28mm tall, and they will be ideal as either heavy infantry support robots in 15mm/20mm scale or sentry robots in 28mm scale. They are scheduled to be available in late winter or early spring.

Cheers
Mark
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4 comments:

  1. Wow, these look really good, not hat i would expect otherwise!
    I can see great employment as larger Droids for Clone Wars-esque gaming!

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  2. Pretty darn cool concept. Do these drop in as they are, or do they require an insertion pod or chute of some kind?

    I could see these being dropped into areas for some special operations as well as reinforcing ground troops...
    -A model with some detailed sensor and communications equipment (and possibly a small weapon for temporary self-defense) would be great to throw into an unspecified enemy position, and provide a greater level of detail than a UAV drone. It could relay footage of civilians or sensitive objective items back to the main force, making for more precise attacks.
    -A "soften them up" model could also be dropped into a heavily fortified position. A model like this would have 360-degree short-range weapons, like a multi-shot claymore mine.

    It will be interesting to see how this line develops!

    Chris

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  3. I'm getting really interested in the Nova Respublik; I wonder how their infantry will come out!

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