Hellstorm Medium Fighter Fires Zee Missiles

The BATAV line was not the only time TME Industries targeted lower-technology customers. Having made a mild name for itself with the Peregrine aerospace fighter but not wanting to risk its delicate political position by selling everything to everybody, the Board of Directors looked to leverage their new aerospace "brand" into more poorly-served markets through expanding into conventional turbine-powered aircraft, a vehicle class generally ignored by most major manufacturers due to their relative inefficacy compared to aerospace fighters. The BoD saw conventional fighters as an opportunity to make a fast C-Bill, especially since final assembly could be externalized to the customer and the materials required were plentiful and practically cheap as free around Sorange.

Most of the Inner Sphere used conventional fighters dating back centuries, with a few late-Succession War models thrown in for flavor. Ancient platforms like the Guardian, Defender, and Angel were simply good enough for government work, as it were; more recent platforms like the ASF-23 Protector were developed with special interests in mind. This stagnation in design was, to a degree, understandable; with a thousand years of history behind them, air-breathing aircraft were something of a known quantity. For this reason, most Industrialist engineers found them relatively uninteresting and failed to be sufficiently enthusiastic for this latest Board initiative, much preferring something like VANGUARD PLUS. A few, however, like those responsible for the Azor debacle eight years prior, saw an opportunity to redeem themselves to some degree.

They never took on an official design team name of their own, but they gained and eventually answered to "the Penitents." Armed with TME Industries' aerospace data, they first considered the role of air-breathing jet fighters in the modern age. Historical analysis indicated two basic roles: air superiority and ground attack. The ancient air superiority mission in the age of the aerospace fighter was best left to the aerospace fighter that could fight in the perpetual vertical. The Penitents briefly considered resurrecting the Cold War point-defense interceptor, but as the Board was looking to make money they instead settled for emphasizing close air support with a nod towards multi-role capability. Their research into the Terran Hegemony archives on the pre-spaceflight Cold War did inspire them; the resulting aircraft, the Hellstorm, took cues from several third- and fourth-generation jet fighters and would not have looked too out of place on Earth during the Space Race.

Aerodynamically, the Hellstorm balanced transonic and subsonic maneuverability using a broad delta wing with leading edge extensions for high angle-of-attack flight. The Penitents balanced the airframe with canards just aft of the cockpit. After considering using modern thrust vectoring for yaw stability, they chose to use a conventional vertical stabilizer instead for simplicity. Indeed, the Hellstorm's touchstone was simplicity, attempting to avoid the complex and sometimes questionable aerodynamics of other aircraft. This resulted in a remarkably sleek jet, albeit one with archaic features such as wing fences.

What made the Hellstorm quite a bit different from ancient jet aircraft was its emphasis on maintainability and transport. As an example, the entire aircraft consisted of several modules--nose, fuselage, wings, and tail--and the splices in the skins between these modules could be easily removed. The modules themselves were connected with large bolts in bathtub fittings; anyone with a socket wrench could quickly take the plane apart into its major assemblies and put it back together again for maintenance, battle damage repair, or transport.

The Hellstorm's novelty came from its armament. On paper, twin five-racks of long-range missiles and twin two-racks of short-range missiles made it compare relatively well with the Protector, taking into account the Hellstorm's lesser maximum take-off weight of thirty-five tons. Using standard box launchers, however, would have increased the complexity and therefore reduced the robustness of its aerodynamics and related systems such as control surfaces and avionics. Therefore the Penitents decided to effectively give up on blistered box launchers and indeed missile tubes entirely by having the ammunition feed empty straight out the sides of the ventral fuselage. They integrated vital launcher components such as armers and datalinks into the last stage of the ammunition feed; the set-up also required a kind of conveyor belt and aerodynamic fairing slide-away doors, so there was no net weight savings. While the Hellstorm's method of launching salvos certainly looked odd, the Penitents later proved in live-fire flight testing of Hellstorm Article 001 that it had no impact on its combat capability.

The most curious items in the Hellstorm's arsenal were its four nose-mounted vehicle flamers. More akin to machine guns than fluid pumps, these "flame pill launchers" fired 40mm semi-self-propelled gyrojet shells filled with Inferno fuel rather than high explosives. In air-to-air combat, these flamers were of marginal utility at best. In ground attack, however, they made the Hellstorm absolutely lethal to infantry and vehicles alike, especially when combined with Inferno missiles in the short-range launchers' ammunition bin. Indeed, the Hellstorm carried two single-ton bins of long-range missiles for this exact reason; a Hellstorm's standard combat loadout consisted of Inferno SRMs and a mix of standard and incendiary LRMs.

These curiosities did come at a cost. While the flame pill launchers could fire any appropriately-filled 40mm gyrojet round, the ones that worked best were of course exclusive to TME Industries. If their primary cartridges failed to light, they had insufficient muzzle velocity to fight wind resistance and could fall back to strike the airplane. The missile launch system worked fine in level flight or in mild maneuvers but in the middle of a high-g turn expelled missiles could be buffeted by unexpected airflows and swing up into the wings or get jammed in the launch aperture, to say nothing of the effect of vertical or lateral gusts on the missiles before they had fired clear of the aircraft. Sadly, these only appeared after the flight test regimen and so the first production run of Hellstorms went unfixed.

During a lifetime combat test in August 3061, Hellstorm Article 001 suffered a short-range missile feed failure. The Inferno-warhead missile jammed into the gap between the feed mechanism and the door sill, twisted, and misfired, spewing incendiary fuel over the side of the aircraft and inside the ammunition feed mechanism, which dutifully returned it back to the bin. The resulting explosion blew the nose module clear from the rest of the disintegrating aircraft, a safety feature of sorts. Once the nose module automatically stabilized, the pilot calmly bailed out the old fashioned way by opening the canopy and leaping out. The Testing Department immediately convened an incident board and quickly traced down the cause to the missile feed mechanism. The board deemed this a critical design flaw affecting flight safety, and this quickly caught the attention of the Board of Directors, who immediately sent out a "stop flight" customer advisory via the Sales Department to all Hellstorm purchasers.

This stood to be a black eye for the company, so the Penitents received very clear orders: first, fix the problem as quickly as possible; second, prevent the problem from happening again. The Penitents responded with the quickest, dirtiest, and most field-expedient solution they could think of: tear out the missile doors and fit simple 'deflector' fairings in front of them to somewhat reduce the drag impact. The permanent solution consisted of leaving this fix in place and adding a ramp between the feed mechanism and the door sill, thus eliminating the gap the missile could get stuck in, and adding ammunition dump doors to the bottom of the fuselage. TME Industries couldn't force customers to upgrade their machine-gun armed Hellstorm-01s and flamer Hellstorm-00s to Hellstorm-01α or -00α "alpha" standards, but they could and did strongly recommend it.

In the end, munition-strike incidents were no more common to the Hellstorm than to other fighters carrying external stores, but the Hellstorm picked up a reputation for them to balance out its excellent flying characteristics. The upgraded Hellstorm-A of 3069 effectively eliminated the reputation by removing all the original weapons (including the unpopular flamers), flattening the bottom of the fuselage, and mounting two permanent external seven-tube multi-missile launchers in pods with boundary-layer separator pylons to minimize their impact on airflow over the ventral fuselage.

SPECIAL RULES:

Original-run Hellstorms are prone to missile jams. Treat their LRM-5s and SRM-2s similar to Ultra autocannon; they jam on a to-hit roll of 2. In case of a jam, randomly determine how many missiles were fired before the jam occurred (from 0 to 1 missiles for the SRMs, 0 to 4 for the LRMs) and resolve their effects normally; then roll 2D6 to see if the jammed missile explodes. On doubles, it does. A missile explosion causes structural integrity damage, destroys the launcher, and automatically causes one critical hit determined normally.