Fusilier Medium Mech Hates Meetings

Following the generic Barbarian and the highly specialized Mizrak, TME managers wanted a medium-class Battlemech that fit somewhere between the two extremes. As medium platforms have always been the best for generalist designs, some multirole capability was expected, though the engineers were expressly told to keep the 'Mech from being too flexible (the SHD-2H Shadow Hawk was mentioned as an example of what not to do). The engineers listened, decided simplicity was best, and went to work.

The first thing they did was to de-simplify the project by automatically using an extra-light engine as they always did at the time. While most other design houses in the Inner Sphere did this to add more weapons, the TME engineers took advantage of the mass savings to let their new 'Mech keep up with the aforementioned Shadow Hawk but out-jump it by sixty meters and out-armor it. Their proposal weighed down the chassis with as much standard armor as it could bear, which left only a modicum of mass left for weaponry.

Simplicity being best, they decided on a single twenty-tube long range missile launcher for a respectable standoff throw weight, four new extended-range medium lasers for an equally respectable close-range punch, and an anti-missile system for defending itself at all ranges against enemy barrages. On paper, the new design--now dubbed the Fusilier after the nature of its primary weapon--was an effective all-range fighter that avoided the stigma of being yet another "poor man's Archer" by not sacrificing short-range capability.

In detail design and the prototype phase, however, the Fusilier was plagued. Managers said it was plagued with 'issues.' Engineers said it was plagued with 'problems.' Technicians said it was plagued with 'gremlins.' They often argued on the proper name for the 'conditions' (which is what the quality inspectors called them). Whatever the terminology used, it was unarguable that coding bugs caused the anti-missile system to shoot down missiles freshly launched from the tubes, the launcher's fire control system mistimed missile launches to lead to pyrotechnic displays of 'missile fratricide,' the cooling jackets around the lasers degraded from overheating, and the legs simply didn't work.

The first two problems were software related and relatively easy to solve. After intensive line-by-line checking of the anti-missile code, a single sign was changed to ensure that the system shot at missiles whose range was decreasing, not increasing. The timing circuits for the missile tubes were modified to fire missiles missiles with a 'skipping' beat, firing two missiles in different columns of tubes almost simultaneously then waiting for those to clear before moving down a row and firing two more.

The laser cooling system issue took more effort to resolve, though the root cause was equally simple. Because the form factor of the extended-range laser was effectively the same to the standard model, the designers had simply imported the cooling jacket from the former to the latter whilst neglecting the 67% increase in heat. Since the jackets couldn't pump coolant through the tubing faster, the tubes were exposed to more run-off heat than they were designed for and quickly vulcanized and crumbled, leading to localized coolant leaks that could disable both lasers in a given side torso's coolant loop. Redesigning the coolant system for a higher flow rate and switching to metallic piping solved the problem.

The legs were the largest problem. Chicken legs were generally uncommon in TME designs, so the design engineers at the time had little experience with them. While the Fusilier could walk, whenever it attempted to run it would immediately lose balance and fall over. Continued tweaks and patches to the leg architecture on Fusilier Article 001 quickly lead to it being dubbed "the Futzilier" as more blisters for creative myomer arrangements and augmentative actuators gave it a piecemeal look. Going back to the original computer models to try and figure out why these problems weren't predicted beforehand, a second group of engineers discovered that the original designers had cribbed the leg design off of the Caliban--a highly unconventional heavy 'Mech produced as a second-generation contemporary to the Mortus--because its leg and stride design were very stable. They were very stable, however, because the Caliban's hunchbacked profile gave it an extremely low center of gravity, and they had cribbed the design so far as to keep this low center of gravity in the gait model.

To fix the problem, Futzilier Article 001 was bisected at the upper torso-abdomen interface and completely redesigned from the engine down. The original, cobbled-together, waist, hips, and legs were scrapped and rendered down into raw materials for the new leg design. Keeping the top half of the 'Mech as a given, the new lower half was made much more flexible, with additional articulation points in the torso-waist-pelvis system and broader hips. The legs were changed from the Caliban's two-jointed system to a three-jointed model, but the relative simplicity of the Caliban's feet were retained. The new joint system, properly modeled, gave the Fusilier the flexibility to always keep the driving foot under the line of the center of gravity. When mounted to the Futzilier, its rolling gait during walking tests caused the more cynical of the observing technicians to rechristen it "the Fabuluous Futzilier."

Fabulous or not, though, the redesigned Fusilier with its rolling hips could certainly run, and after initial trials and launch sale agreements were complete, it was approved for full production starting in 3052.

(Author's note: I don't like meetings that waste my engineering time. On the plus side, I can draw during them.)