Toxn

You can sneak, but it's hard (you can't let you silhouette show). Thankfully the average player has no object permanence, so moving cover to cover works. Another thing I realised that arcade has going for it: no nations. This helps to balance things out a bit too.

Huh. I decided to try a bit of ground forces arcade, and it's also been fun. Not even better game-wise, but at least I don't wish screaming death on the developers. I think the higher overall speeds (which balances the speed meta from RB at bit) and lack of choice in aircraft options (which removes the german go-to of dropping a satan on your head) makes things a bit better. Also, the implementation of spotting mechanics (however shoddy) helps to remove the issue of people dropping settings to see through foliage. So you're not constantly getting nailed by invisible enemies. Again, ground RB is like an anti-game at the moment. Change literally anything and it inexplicably becomes better.

I feel like there should be a separate thread for cunning mechanisms with applications in tanks:

That's the joy of balancing by player performance rather than inherent stats - if the players are a pack of drooling idiots then your 90km/h/fully traversing turret/100+mm pen gun/sub-4 second reload vehicle ends up palling around with the SAu-40 while the 3" gun carrier is nearly a full BR higher. It's just one of the many, many factors I was talking about.

Ya, the fucking german 20mm that can run all-tungsten all the time and shows up at tier 1. So fucking historically accurate.

So, to amuse myself I sometimes think what game I'd rather play in the same genre, and what I've come up with so far is something sim-esque in the same way, but divorced from historical teams and vehicles. Preferably where you could put together components (at least to a limited extent). And where you'd get rewards based partly on how hard you've handicapped yourself (kind of like the system used in Brigador). So, basically, WoT in the WT engine but with a handicap system where your rewards (XP, currency) are higher for taking out underpowered vehicles.

For me it's up and down the line, although the lower tiers are better. It becomes nigh unplayable around tier 6, but even tier 2 has plenty of 50mm pumas and the like run by lvl 100 players who seem to see effortlessly through smoke and cover and repair damaged components in seconds. Agreed that the game is very obviously designed for folk with disposeable income and hours a day to put in. And also that it's very pretty.

I'm honestly not qualified to say. I think part of it is that WT, like a lot of FtP games, caters heavily to folk who can either put 6 hours a day in, or pay for premium. I think you'll find that those folks get plenty of fun out, and can rack up huge kill counts etc. Which is fine - I'm used to this dynamic whenever I play anything multiplayer just because I'm not 20 and don't have hours a day to put into them. But somehow they go above and beyond this baseline level of feeling like a pinata for whales, and manage to inject frustration into every part of the experience.

So I fired up WT after a six-month hiatus and... it still sucks Or, at least, realistic ground forces still does. I'm not sure how Gaijin manages it (and honestly you'd need a PhD in game design to do the topic justice), but it's just so frustrating on so many levels. It's like an anti-game.

Final Judgement Third place: Carro Armato P.35/105 I hate having to place this vehicle third, as it's the most impressive in terms of paper stats and just looks so... right. It looks like exactly the sort of late-war (for them, anyway) prototype that the Italians would have produced, only for it to become forgotten under a fountain of "hurr durr pasta tank" memes. And talk about performance! What @Lord_James has managed to do here is wring a Tiger-analogue out of a 28-tonne pre-war vehicle. Unfortunately, when I try to game this thing out the numbers end up being stark. As something closer to a ground-level rebuild there would never have been more than a handful of these things around by the time that the Allies hit the beaches on Sicily. In combat, of course, this thing is a beast - a fully-equipped force riding in at the right moment would have easily made it to the outskirts of town and perhaps to hitting the beaches beyond. So I gave it its moment in the sun. From there, however, you're left with only a handful of these things pootling around amidst an ever-worsening spares situation. Which is a recipe for expensive bunkers. Second place: T-28/43 As with the previous entry, I hate having to place this vehicle second. @heretic88did a great job in terms of coming up with a vehicle that required the absolute minimum amount of fabrication, but still materially added to the effectiveness of the tank. His additions were all well-chosen with the task in mind, and would have resulted in a very workable vehicle for an Italian army and industrial system that was rapidly backpedaling. Unfortunately he also chose the vehicle that I left in as a poison pill - the one which could only ever have been produced in miniscule numbers. I ran the math on all the vehicles captured by the Germans over the course of their first year on Soviet soil, and there's no way that they ever got ahold of more than a hundred T-28s in total. Add in a year and a half of back and forth warfare, neglect, wastage and (most likely) some tanks being fed into steel mills and you're never going to produce a fleet of these things worth talking about. This version of an up-gunned T-28 would, I feel, be destined to become an unfairly-forgotten curiosity that Allied crews chalked up as some sort of lesser-known German tank that somehow ended up being confined to a single island campaign. Winner: Carro Armato BT-5-76/43 Yet again I have qualms about this one, not least because N-L-M is my eternal rival (flattering myself). I'm also decidedly leery of the look of the thing and his (admittedly brilliant) solution to up-gunning it. In the end the thing that swung it for me was this: the Germans probably had more BT-5s than they knew what to do with, and once you take away the 76mm autoloader thingy (and maybe the gun-linked HMG) all the changes N-L-M is proposing are eminently sensible. I feel that the BT series of tanks was and is criminally underrated, and its reputation for poor performance probably had more to do with how many of the damn things were captured in depots rather than in fighting. In my mind, the BT-5-76/43, with its horrific (and probably accurate) name, comes the closest to giving the Italians a foreign-derived vehicle that they can actually use effectively and in numbers. To @N-L-M: congratulations and please contact me about your $25 prize! To the rest of the contestants: well done, and damn you for making me work so hard to pick out a winner

Scenario 3: Carro Armato BT-5-76/43 Production In late February 1943 captured tanks, guns and various other components begin to stream into Palermo from all points of the compass. The stock is being used as part of an ambitious project, by one Nicola Leonardo Mancini, to rework and upgrade the copious amounts of equipment that the Germans captured in the first years of the war, and which has been since sitting idle at depots and scrap yards across Western Europe. Nicola, who had reputedly suffered a mild stroke (which he later jokingly called his ‘stroke of genius’) a few months before, has come up with a design whose looks and features are both highly unusual. Over the lean, angular frame of a captured BT-5 tank, there were now multiple faceted plates which produced a bulky, wedge-shaped profile. The VER, which spent time late in the previous year preparing for just this moment, promptly gets to work on converting the vehicles to the designer’s scheme. The main factory floor is soon humming as eight tanks at a time are worked on: stripped, cleaned, reassembled, repaired, added onto and generally attended to. As the tanks are expected to be fielded in two configurations (a 45mm and 76mm version), the work is split to allow six or seven 45mm vehicles to be produced for every one or two 76mm ones. In the event the modifications to the 45mm tanks are extensive but not particularly taxing, and proceeded more or less at pace. The 76mm tanks, on the other hand, initially suffer a bit from production and calibration defects related to the innovative cartridge ejection system and auto-rammer. These take a few weeks to sort out, with the result being that only a comparatively few 76mm tanks were ready by July. One thing that the factory does not have to worry about was numbers. There are many hundreds of BT-5s available, and at least hundred 76mm guns to put into them in place of the 45mm weapons they come with. With the factory running at full tilt, the VER can expect to produce around 6 vehicles a week indefinitely. In the event, by July around 70 vehicles have been converted (59 of the 45mm versions, and 10 of the 76mm versions). Combat The soldiers of Mobile Group E were initially somewhat befuddled by their new mounts. With more than enough time to get familiar with them, however, a suspicion had begun to form that the Russians had been onto a good thing with their cavalry tanks from the get-go. The angular vehicles were fast, reliable, clad in an impressive-looking coat of plates and armed with guns that were either equal to or better than anything they had hitherto experienced. The turret crews of the two “big gun” tanks found their stations to be unbelievably cramped and strange to work with, but rapidly acclimated to the quirks of their new vehicles. On the 10th of July, at 07:30, they set out to attempt to push the Americans back into the sea. Almost immediately, one vehicle drops out – a victim of fuel shortages. Even moving out gingerly, the BT-5-76/43 is phenomenally quick. When shells began to fall beside the road, Captain Granieri gives the order to gun it and the tanks begin to race away. They hit the town at nearly 50km/h, and are through the initial line of defence almost before the befuddled Americans know what is happening. One, failing to judge a turn, manages to ditch itself on the outskirts of town and then spends some time engaging with it’s 45mm gun, coax and roof-mounted HMG. The highly spaced armour proves to be very resistant to explosives and bazooka rockets, and as a result the crew manages to expend its ammunition before jumping out and retiring in good order. The ten vehicles that remain, moving more slowly now, push towards the town square. Here things start to unravel at bit for the two 76mm tanks, as their very limited elevation makes aiming at the upper stories of houses impossible. In one tank the commander exits to disconnect the linkage on the HMG, and uses it successfully in this role for a time before being shot out of his hatch. The other, commanded by sub-lieutenant Angiolino Navari presses on to look for targets on more open ground. One 45mm tank blunders into a 37mm gun and sustains two hits to the turret and hull. Undeterred, it then proceeds to wreck the gun and scatter the crew. Another tank becomes the unlucky recipient of a satchel charge thrown from above, which lodges in the gap created by the rear radiator housing and the hull. The resulting explosion wrecks the vehicle. With enemies to the front and rear, a third tank finds itself engaged from behind by American soldiers armed with rifle grenades and bazookas. They succeed, after a time, in hitting the rear hull and setting the tank alight. The crew, trying to exit the burning vehicle, are shot down as they do so. With eight tanks having made the square, captain Granieri decides to split his forces. Navari, leading three 45mm tanks, moves to the East to find a good location to shoot at the beach from. Granieri then heads directly for the landing zone. The eight tanks open fire on the men and equipment from two directions, stopping to dart back into cover as the ships covering the landing open up on the town. The ranges still holding the town begin moving towards them, before heading back to deal with a follow-on attack. In the end only Navari’s vehicle, which heads back after an ill-timed jolt manages to jam the ramming mechanism against an unfired cartridge, survives the day. The rest are slowly picked off in ones and twos, but serve to weaken the defences of the town in the process. Captain Granieri survives his tank being knocked out, and manages to make his way across the town to friendly lines. Gela ends up becoming a see-saw battle which draws in forces on both sides. By the end, the town is more or less a wreck, and the Allies have established a secure beachhead at a higher cost than expected. The campaign goes on a few weeks longer than it otherwise would have, which gives the staff at the VER enough time to evacuate with their plans and some of their tooling. The last Sicilian-manufactured BT-5-76/43, a 45mm model, goes into battle unpainted and armed only with machinegun ammunition. When the Germans take over the remains of the Italian industrial base later in the year, they re-start BT-5-76 production under the incomprehensible name of Panzerkampfwagen BT-5-745 (r)(i). This didn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, with only perhaps a 150 such vehicles produced. The American experience with the unusual tank did have some unexpected effects, though. Firstly, it got the inevitable nickname of “Musso’s Funnies”. Secondly, inspection of the novel auto-loader system kicked off a slow-burning interest in autoloaders that eventually culminated in the adoption of a turret bustle autoloading system in the then-new M1 tank many decades later. The add-on armour, quickly dubbed 'wedge' or 'razor blade' armour, arouses interest due to it's unusual resistance to shaped charge attack. The sight of rockets futilely bouncing off of sharply-angled turrets and hulls infuriates the rangers who took part in the action at Sicily, and results in a crash program to improve the fusing of the weapon (eventually an piezo-electric fuze with good characteristics comes into service to arm the Super Bazooka). The final effect of the BT-5-76 is to cast Nicola Mancini as an unsung, iconoclastic genius. His unorthodox vehicle, which proved to look eerily like vehicles that would only be developed decades later, earns him a spot in the pantheon of lesser-known designers who should be more appreciated. Fittingly, and like its creator, the BT-5-76 defies its overall negligible impact on the wider war and becomes a relatively well-known vehicle amongst military history nerds.

Scenario 2: Carro Armato P.35/105 Production In late February 1943 captured T-28 tanks, 105mm guns and various other components start arriving at the harbour in Palermo. The hulls come originally from Germany and the occupied territories – the fruit of the first, furious years of the war in the East. There were maybe a hundred T-28s captured amongst the thousands of Soviet vehicles netted in the first year of the campaign there, but time and the exigencies of war mean that only around 70 are available to serve as hulls and component donors for the VER’s work. The lead designer on the committee which birthed the P.35/105 project, one Giacomo Signore, has set the VER a hard task. Each tank chosen for re-manufacture is to have its hull radically remodelled, with the front being cut away completely and the turret ring re-cut to accommodate a massive new turret fabricated from welded sections of 30 and 60mm plate. The gun chosen for this behemoth is equally impressive: a 105mm Ansaldo gun modified to fit into a large, square mantlet. The gun, which is normally issued with HE, has been recently modified by Fiat-Ansaldo (as part of the project which produced the Semovente da 105/25) to use both a capped AP round and a HEAT round. Both of these options give respectable performance against armoured vehicles, with the HEAT round proving especially devastating when presented with targets which allow it to fuse easily. The process of arranging the turret ring cutting equipment proves to be especially difficult, with VER engineers eventually managing to rig up a dedicated station for the task. While they solve the problem, the machinists and welders work diligently on modifying the hulls and fabricating the turrets. Here welders, brought in all the way from the shipyards of Trieste, initially have problems in mating the cut plates together without cracking or defects. The end result is that assembly only really begins in earnest in April, with five vehicles being worked on at a time on the factory floor while a sixth has its old turret removed and a new hole cut for the turret race bearing (which ended up being produced by a subcontractor for one of the Trieste shipyards). By July, a bare 20 vehicles in total have been remanufactured to the new standard, with more trickling in slowly as the kinks in the production process are worked out. At some point the VER hopes to produce perhaps 40 vehicles from the stock it has available. Combat With a nearly-full complement of 10 of the new behemoth P.35/105s in hand, Mobile Group E is possibly (and unexpectedly) the most heavily-armed unit in Sicily. The tanks are brand-new, with a few crews having been introduced to their mounts the previous day as they formed up in Niscemi. Even so, the crews are all eager to get into the fray. At 07:30, the attack is announced by the 75mm howitzers, which begin pounding away at their contemporaries on the American side of the line. The vehicles move off down the road as the motorised elements start their fateful engagements. Almost immediately the crew’s inexperience with their mounts begins to show, as one driver manages to ditch his vehicle and render it hors de combat before the fight even starts. Through the bursting shells called in from the ships lying offshore, all of the vehicles miraculously make it through (although Captain Granieri’s vehicle is rocked by an explosion and peppered with shrapnel). Nine tanks make it to town, where one of the vehicles promptly breaks down and acts as an impromptu pillbox until being abandoned later in the day. The remaining eight then go on to fight a furious battle with the Americans they find there – demolishing structures that rangers are sheltering inside while explosives rain down from the roofs above. One is rendered immobile by a lucky hit to the engine deck, and then proceeds to mount a heroic last stand as mortar fire is called in on top of it and the surrounding infantry shower it with rockets and grenades to little effect. Another, encountering a 37mm gun run up from the beaches, has its gun jammed by a shot which pierces the mantlet but fails to find its way inside the thick turret face. The tank then runs over the gun before going on a rampage across the length of the town. It survives long enough to make it back to its lines that afternoon. Captain Granieri’s vehicle, which had sprung a leak from the battering it took, sputters to a stop just inside the market square. It too becomes a fortification, sweeping the surrounding area free of infantry until a few brave rangers manage to hurl a satchel charge under the hull. Lacking fuel it does not really burn, but the shaken crew exits the smoking vehicle and runs to seek shelter amongst the nearby buildings. The five final survivors storm the roads leading to the beaches and pour withering fire on the equipment and vehicles huddled there. They then manage to retire in good order to the Northern outskirts and meet up with a follow-on wave of troops later that afternoon. From there the town becomes a site of furious fighting as the Americans take it for a second time, and the hulks of that initial wild advance end up being used as stout cover for advancing infantrymen. Over the coming weeks there end up being a few, inconclusive clashes of surviving P.35/105s with American forces. None ever fires its gun in anger at an M4, but the general consensus is that it would probably have fared well had such an event ever come to pass. In the end, the P.35/105 earns a reputation all out of proportion to its limited numbers and impact on the campaign. The vehicle is promptly (and lazily) nicknamed the “Italian Tiger”, and becomes an object of fascination for future military historians. In time, a lot of rancorous internet debate springs amongst the dimly-lit corners of the internet about whether such a drastic modification of an early-war tank was really worth it from use of resources point of view. Meanwhile, Italian army enthusiasts (all five of them) point to the vehicle as an example of the ingenuity and skill of Italian engineering during the war.

Scenario 1: T-28/43 Production In late February 1943 captured T-28 tanks, 75mm guns and various other components start arriving at the harbour in Palermo. The assorted cargo has come the long way to the island, having been sourced at depots and scrap yards in Germany and the occupied countries before being taken by rail to the Italian mainland. From there the cargo had been shipped to Sicily, where it was now filling up dock and warehouse space at the harbour and railyard. Roughly 70 tanks in various states of disrepair are slated to be remanufactured by the VER at their newly-upgraded facility in the Southwestern end of town. The main factory floor, which had been designed (rather optimistically) to service up to four Class 691 locomotives at a time, was quickly reconfigured at the end of the previous year to work on six of the ex-soviet vehicles in parallel. At, the workshops began the fabrication and assembly of the applique armour plates which were to be rivetted to the hulls and turrets in preparation for the arrival of the vehicles. The vehicles are triaged as they come in, with the most decrepit specimens being cannibalised to provide parts for the least. All in all, the factory fully expects to eventually be able to produce 40 working vehicles from the stock they have available. With the winnowing done, the chosen tanks are placed onto platforms and moved on rails into the factory floor. Once there they are stripped, cleaned, reassembled and painted. The mini-turrets and part of the hull front are removed, with new plates being riveted and welded in to produce a v-shaped turret platform. The turrets, meanwhile, are worked on in parallel to the hulls, with the original mantlet being replaced by a new one designed to accommodate the 75mm Pak-97/38 guns chosen to rearm the tank. Conversion of the former field and anti-tank guns has proceeded relatively smoothly, with the result being that the supplier for the factory is able to keep pace with production. Conversion of the existing coaxial DT machineguns to operate with 8x59mm ammunition, however, is slow. As a result, some vehicles leave the factory floor with their DT machinegun replaced with an 8mm Breda M38. Cutting, riveting and addition of the commander’s cupola, periscopes and the like proceeds smoothly, although hold-ups of a few cupolas and radios from Germany result in some delays. All in all, the remanufacturing process is completed well before the due date, with the initial batch of 40 vehicles being given over to the army for familiarisation at the end of May. The factory than turns itself over to maintenance and a slower, ongoing effort to wring out a few more useable vehicles from the picked-over hulls that still sit in storage. Combat With just under a month’s worth of rest and training behind them, the soldiers of Mobile Group E felt confident in their new mounts. The 12 tanks (formally indexed as "Carro Armato P.T-28/43") comprise a large proportion of a fleet that, to tankers used to 13-tonne vehicles, seems truly imposing. The 40-odd R-35s that make up the rest of the Italian heavy armour on the island look comical and sad by comparison. So it is that, confident in their vehicles, they set out on the tenth of July 1943 to push back the Americans from their beachhead near Gela. Setting off at 07:30 down highway 117, Captain Giuseppe Granieri feels glad for the supporting fire provided by their small battery of 75mm howitzers, which managed to set up in stealth and then open fire on unprepared US 105mm gun teams. Almost immediately, however, elements of the mobile group begin to get into trouble. The motorised MG company, which had moved ahead to engage US infantry, finds itself under attack by naval gunfire and is forced to withdraw. The accompanying motorised AT gun company, meanwhile, manages to push into range of US mortar teams and takes a beating. One tank, which is a bit balky to begin with, retires immediately due to mechanical issues. The rest, racing down the road at top speed, comes under fire from the ships offshore. By some sort of miracle, only one of the vehicles is damaged by a near miss from a 5-inch shell, and is left by its crew to burn at the side of the road. The ten survivors of Granieri’s wild ride make it to the town, where they sorely surprise the Americans there and touch off a series of running battles. In the ensuing chaos, US rangers fling grenades and satchel charges down from windows onto the vehicles as they race by. The tanks, moving in small groups, move and fight as they are able amongst the narrow confines of Gela’s streets, heading towards the town square and the beaches beyond. The Americans are at this point throwing everything they have at the beasts – engaging them with mortars, bazookas and a 37mm gun hurriedly brought up from the beach. The front of the T-28/43 proves remarkably effective against all of these measures, shrugging off rockets and 37mm shells. One engages in a direct duel with the AT gun, destroying it after an unequal exchange of fire. The rangers are persistent, however, and manage to flank several tanks to put rockets, grenades and rifle grenades into their less protected sides and rears. In all, seven vehicles make it to the square and begin to push out of the buildings there engage with forces on the beach directly before being driven off. This continues for most of the rest of the afternoon, with follow-up forces trickling in to retake the town. The T-28/43s remain mostly confined to Gela during the fighting that follows, finally meeting their match when M4 Sherman tanks are brought ashore and engage the survivors from amongst the packed streets and alleyways of the town. At such close ranges the low-velocity guns the Italian tanks are armed with hardly matter, and they give as good as they get. In the end, the battle of Gela becomes a little-remembered but bloody chapter in US military history, as the town changes hands multiple times and becomes the target for naval gunfire and a bombing raid intended to drive the Italians out of the Northern strip of buildings. The T-28/43, which US infantrymen initially mistake for some sort of Pz-IV variant, becomes one of the little-known oddities of the war. Its service is limited to the Sicilian campaign itself, with the entire production run being thrown into the fight. In the final analysis, the few score of vehicles that are produced manages to substantially even the odds on a 1-to-1 basis, but fails to solve the essential problems of numbers and quality that the Italians faced throughout the war.

Setting the scene: It is January 1943, and things are looking dire. The writing is on the wall for the Italian army in North Africa, with a lot of equipment having been lost and the enemy on the brink of kicking the axis out of Tunisia and then heading across the Mediterranean. However, all is not lost. Il Duce himself has stepped in and, with the assistance of the Germans, procured both some of their finest captured vehicles for use in the upcoming defence of the homeland. The reconstituted Victor Emmanuel Railway company, now an Italian locomotive service and repair company located in Palermo, has been tasked with undertaking work to modify the captured equipment for Italian use in the defence of the homeland. To aid them in this endeavour, VER staff have been given permission to work with local weapons, automotive and engine manufacturers. Specialised equipment for welding, cutting circular apertures and the like has been rushed in and installed into the VER workshops and factory floor. The floor itself, a 30x10m space designed to service the largest Italian locomotives and rolling stock side by side, has been converted into an impromptu production line to remanufacture tanks. Preliminary notes: I was very impressed by all three entries, which each bring something different to the table in terms of fulfilling the requirements. This proved a challenge, as there is no obvious winner here. So, to determine the outcome, I’ve decided to run each tank through a manufacturing and combat scenario, centred around Sicily in early 1943 and culminating in a re-run of the battle of Gela. In the scenario I had the VER acting as earnest and committed – with issues (as I perceive them) being solved to the best of their ability rather than having the factory staff throw up their hands. In terms of the battle, I’m playing out the scenario as it would have been if the available tanks had been rushed to the defence of Gela in July 1943. These vehicles would be given on a priority basis to Mobile Group E and, specifically, captain Giuseppe Granieri’s group of (historically) 12 vehicles. These vehicles would then be available to take part in Granieri’s death ride along highway 117. Tanks would then be divided out amongst the rest of the Italian forces which operated out of Niscemi during that battle, with the remainder replacing the ~120 R-35s that were used in the defence of Sicily historically.

A winner has been selected, explanations to follow.

Please do

So our processes are basically opposites of each other

I'm going to pack up shop on my end and get to judgin' in the morning. Final call to all who want to submit an entry

@N-L-M Quick questions about the trapeze ejector and flick rammer: For the ejector - I assume that the ejector and tube are fixed to the gun carriage and so are always in alignment, but then how does having a ~90mm tube on the top of the barrel affect the depression? For the flick loader - my understanding is that the rack is fixed to the turret, and that the mechanism sits on a loading tray fixed to the back of the gun. Does this mean that there's some sort of flexible linkage betweem the rack and tray to guide rounds in? Or does the gun have to be levelled between each shot? Or are the distances small enough so that rounds can just fall onto the tray without issue?

You found a way to stick a bigger gun in

There's your solution

This might be of interest to @Lord_James and @heretic88: removing the miniturrets saves about 300kg each (not counting crew) by my calculations. At the same time, simply extending the superstructure and relocating the cabin while retaining the same armour thickness (as Lord-James did) nets you just under 600kg of mass. So for him the weight difference is a wash. For Heretic the situation seems a little more complex. From the model I have available, it looks like he changed the angle of the cabin (from around 20' to 30' from the vertical), changed the angle of the upper front glacis and put in triangular side plates that go from the turret platform to the side of the cabin. That and the extra armour means that I'm not sure what the weight difference would be over the original.

Looking good, although I have to ask why you settled on the short 75 after going to all the trouble to make a turret ring which could mount a 100mm gun

So I bought the DLCs when they came out on sale recently, and I'm now happy to report that I'm regularly running two Archers and a Marauder in my lance. No Warhawks yet, though, and I'm miffed that no Hatchetmen have showed up yet for salvage despite being available. COIL weapons, which were supposed to fix the fast-but-useless mech issue, have also proved to be underwhelming, although running a Firestarter that could rear attack for 100dmg + 6MGs was fun for the early game :)