Befriare Bomber Bombards With Bombs

Project Skytiger's experiments with aerospace fighter turrets found them to be of minimal utility by 3020, limited solely to small blisters with a maximum of five tons' capacity. As Skytiger was transformed into the conventional Yulbaris over the course of the year, the basic limits of turrets filtered their way to other aerospace design groups. These groups of the 3020s and 3030s were the beginning of TME Industries' design teams, inspired by the slowly budding renaissance in the Inner Sphere to stretch boundaries and collect around common interests and complimentary capabilities, and the Strategic Air Command was not only one of the first 'modern' TME design teams but decided to continue Skytiger's turret research on their own time. Named after a pre-Western Alliance military formation, Strategic Air Command--or SAC--included several aerodynamicists and turret architects from Skytiger now that the Yulbaris did not need them and several enthusiasts of dedicated heavy bombers used to destroy enemy infrastructure at long range.

SAC, like the Historical Revisionists and Pop Occulture after them, found inspiration in history, particularly in and around the era that they acquired their name from. Their unofficial side project, using company overhead when it would otherwise be idle, quickly gained the working name of "Emancipator" and was designed as an aerospace fighter-scale version of an ancient heavy bomber using a high wing with mild anhedral, an H-tail empennage, and fusion-fired turbines mounted in nacelles embedded into the wing to open up more room in the fuselage for internal ordnance. This required a heavy and awkward tubing network connecting the fusion reactor's plasma loop to the combined-cycle turborocket's combustor, but it did have the side advantage of making the Emancipator somewhat more heat efficient as the plasma loop could be used as an open-cycle cooling system at the cost of a small degree of propulsive efficiency.

Using a seventy-five ton airframe as a baseline, the Emancipator used a 225-rated fusion engine with a maximum acceleration of three and a half gravities, fueled by an unprecedented nine tons of diatomic hydrogen. It was protected by two 'shoulder' turrets mounted just outboard of the wing box; each turret carried twin medium lasers controlled via remote control from secondary 'cockpits' abaft of the pilot's cockpit. Defense was prioritized with fourteen tons of armor, and the internal bomb bay could carry over twenty tons of bombs. SAC also imagined that flights of Emancipators would be protected by "Emancipator-As" with more powerful fusion engines, smaller or nonexistent bomb loads, and shoulder turrets mounting a single large laser apiece. Intended to operate in flights or squadrons, an Emancipator strategic bombing force would require dedicated mass DropShip transport such as a Vengeance-class or, for smaller raids, a Leopard CV-class. This 'defense in numbers' strategy would be the only way that the slow Emancipators could effectively protect themselves against more agile and better armed attackers.

As SAC developed the Emancipator through 3025, they determined that it was simply too weak to make an effective combatant, especially as additional difficulties appeared. The basic aerodynamics were sound, but the internal bomb bay doors posed a problem: a rotating cylindrical or clamshell system would take up too much internal volume and could not be properly sealed for transatmospheric flight or reentry, but conventional 'shutter' doors would force the Emancipator to slow to low subsonic speeds to be able to drop bombs without ripping off its own doors. The outrigger nacelles made the well-armored Emancipator relatively more delicate; while other fighters could (in space) theoretically survive the loss of a wing, the Emancipator could not. Even if it didn't explode, its remaining nacelle was so far off the centerline that it would produce severe amounts of adverse yaw that could not otherwise be corrected.

Deciding that it was a fun hobby while it lasted, SAC split up before the turret members could argue with the bombing members. They archived the engineering files for the Emancipator and Emancipator-A just in case someone could make use of them and several scale wind-tunnel and remote controlled flight test models were split up amongst the team as souveneirs.

The bombing members, who retained the SAC name by mutual agreement, went on to eventually develop the Rajidae. They first decided to modify the specs for the Emancipator to drop the turret mechanisms and secondary cockpits for more bombs and upgraded the powerplant to a more powerful 300-rated extra-light fusion engine, but trade studies indicated that the performance of this "Emancipator Plus" could be met and exceeded by a hundred-ton airframe that lacked the one-wing-out failure mode. This became the Rajidae, which has its own story.

The turret members split up and eventually recoalesced with apprentices in tow around 3050 as Tactical Air Command. TAC reinvented the Emancipator as a tactical strike aircraft where the bomb bay served more as a technical access point for weapons mounted in structure above the landing gear sponson, structure originally needed for the landing gear themselves but otherwise acting as dead weight and aerodynamic drag increasers. Their independently developed Super Emancipator also upgraded to a 300-rated extra-light engine and double heat sinks. The standard Super Emancipator retained the twin medium laser shoulder turrets of the Emancipator but added an LB-10X shotgun autocannon over the port landing gear and a ten rack of long-range missiles over the starboard gear. The Super Emancipator-A upgraded the shoulder turrets to ER large lasers but deleted the autocannon and long-range missiles, using both gear sponson to mount short-range racks instead. The minimal remaining tonnage in both models were relegated to bombs carried internally at the bottom of the 'equipment' bay.

Management took an interest in the Super Emancipator but, institutionally remembering the failure of Skytiger and doubting the capability of a crew to coordinate turrets in a maneuverable aerospace fighter, required the turret mechanisms and cockpits to be deleted. The resulting aircraft, renamed Befriare, filled the seven tons freed by the deleted systems with a larger missile rack, more ammunition, and more bombs. Capable of a respectable four gravities and armed with weapons both effective in air-to-air and air-to-ground roles, the Befriare found itself suited for long-range strike missions where neither slowing to bombing speed nor being unable to survive wing loss increased risk or decreased survivability.

To improve its strike capability at the cost of its air-to-air and bombing roles, the Befriare-A of 3061 upgraded the heavy shotgun autocannon to an assault Ultra-class rapid-fire autocannon. This made the Befriare a conventional aerospace fighter in all regards, which improved its standing amongst the more conservative aerospace forces of the Inner Sphere.

Additionally, with experimental Battlemech shoulder turrets somewhat automating the tracking and control of turrets with only a single operator, TAC returned to its roots and looked at adapting those turret systems to the Super Emancipator. The level of complex automation gear and data linkages, combined with the Super Emancipator's intentionally open structure and built-in modularity regarding turrets, convinced them to turn the Super Emancipator into an OmniFighter. TME Industries approved the Omnifighter version of the Befriare-AO while leaving the turreted Befriare-B as a proprietary experimental model.

As an experiment, the Befriare-B succeeded and failed beyond expectations. By 3060 so much work (official and otherwise) had been done on turret aerodynamics that as long as the armaments group followed the "five tons rule" aerodynamicists could keep the Befriare-B safely in the air. Its broad wing planform and distributed mass damped its aerodynamic responses, making it safer and more stable to fly with turrets on aerospace fighters with more conventional near-centerline exhausts. However, shoulder turrets could only engage targets across sectors in the dorsal hemisphere and adding ventral turrets overtaxed the automation systems. The original SAC's vision of self-protecting formations simply would not work. Nevertheless, the turrets did improve the Befriare-B's combat efficiency and the 'inefficiency' of one ton dedicated to the turret mechanisms was not an appreciable loss.

With the Jihad reintroducing strategic bombing, TME Industries was well-situated to exploit the need for bombers that didn't have to always be bombers. The Befriare-AO led the charge in this regard, as it could be converted from dedicated strike aircraft to dedicated bomber in extremely short order and, in the latter role, it well exceeded the capability of the ancient Torrent heavy bomber. In 3074 TME Industries finally released the Befriare-B into limited production on an at-demand basis. Functionally identical to the Befriare-AO except for the turret rings, the Befriare-B required additional pilot training to make full use of its systems and so remained a poor seller through 3090, though the regular production of the Stiletto STO-6S in 3083 did mark the beginning of increased interest as auto-turret technology gained experience and acceptance.

(SPECIAL RULES: The 'shoulder turrets' on the Emancipator, Super Emancipator, and Befriare-B work identically to BattleMech Turrets (including fire arcs) with the turrets presumed to be mounted on the wings in analogy to the side torsos of a 'Mech and with the additional limitation that dorsal turrets cannot fire at targets at altitudes lower than the firer's and ventral turrets cannot fire at targets at altitudes greater than the firer's. The exception to this limitation is if the target is also being engaged with nose weapons; at this point, it is assumed that the pilot is pointing the nose at the target and therefore the target is within the turrets' dome of fire. If there are no nose weapons, or they are not being fired, the player can instead declare that the turret weapons are acting in lieu of nose weapons, assuming that the target is within the nose firing arc.

COMPLEX SPECIAL RULES: If a turret-bearing aircraft changes facing in an atmosphere, dorsal turrets may fire into altitudes lower than the firer's on the 'inside' of the facing change (so to the left hexsides if the firer turns left) and ventral turrets may fire into altitudes higher than the firer's on the 'outside' of the facing change (so to the right hexsides if the firer turns left). Otherwise, the 'no firing above/below' limitation remains the same.)