Rimongever Touches Down

While The War Profiteers's Ker was a successful initial foray into Clan assault 'Mech design, it suffered from being just a little thinner skinned than the Atlas it was obviously cribbed off of and, despite being more mobile, suffered the iconic's 'Mech flaw of being heavily ammunition dependent and existing mostly to waddle into short range where it could then thresh any opposition into shards of smoking metal. Its extended-range large laser, like the Gauss rifle on newer Atlas variants, actually worked against this flaw's sole benefit: in a walking brick with a short-range arsenal, if all a Mechwarrior can do from range is annoy the enemy then she's forced to close. If a Mechwarrior can actually do appreciable damage at range, say with a one-two between armor-blasting lasers or Gauss rifles and hole-seeking spreads of missiles, then she has a psychological driver to stay back and plink, even if her machine is optimized for making things dead at close range.

This desire for optimization led TME Industries management to put the Mission Orienters design team on the case. Known for their laser-like focus on achieving goals from higher up, Management was content to tell the MOs that their mission, should they choose to accept it, was to develop as combat-effective a Clan chassis as they could in the assault weight class, with a distinct mission profile and avoiding competition with the established Ker. The last point was driven by wanting to keep the profits from the War Profiteers' successful Ker rolling in and so letting the Ker be the mighty Clantech flagship product suited them just fine for the time being.

Starting with a clean sheet, the first thing that the Mission Orienters noted was that, as far as the generalized metrics and nondimensional parameters were concerned, what the Clans were exceedingly good at were extremely long-ranged weapons with a powerful punch: extended-range particle cannon and large lasers, Gauss rifles, and so on. Clan weapons consistently outranged and outdamaged their Inner Sphere counterparts for less mass and less heat, and some of the most effective Clan designs (piloted most un-Clanly, since honorable warriors tend to eschew sniping) took advantage of these. Some, like the Puma's primary variant, could easily hit well above their weight by being a light 'Mech mounting twin hard-hitting particle cannon. Others went too far, like the primary variant of the Masakari, which was mostly good for committing suicide as the excess heat from quad party cannons would give the missile ammunition plenty of opportunity to cook off and cripple the 'Mech.

To them, the conclusion was obvious: keep heat down, so use Gauss rifles. Take advantage of being less dependent on heat sinks by loading sixty-four Gauss slugs into the design, well in excess of any similar opposition. Reduce ammunition dependence further by adding even longer-ranged extended-range large lasers. To cover the Gauss rifles' minimum range restrictions without getting too close, add medium pulse lasers. Put all the weapons into the arms to maximize coverage arcs. Mount sixteen double heat sinks to manage the heat load. Finally, to avoid competing with the War Profiteers, keep it down to ninety-five tons with a class-average speed made less limiting through the use of jump jets. Finally, the Mission Orienters dubbed their new design the Rimongever.

After putting the entire thing together with flexible double-ball joints protected by spaced armor plates, a 285 extra-light engine to keep it walking at a smooth 32 kph, and mounting a maximum amount of ferro-fibrous armor to protect it, the Mission Orienters' discovered that rather than aping the Ker they had ended up aping the Nightstar. The Ker:Atlas::Rimongever:Nightstar analogy worked on several different levels; the more advanced Clantech TME Industries products could jump where their products could not, massed the same, and filled similar niches.

In April 3070, a partially completed Rimongever Article 001 carefully stepped off the assembly line to test both its double-ball joints (based on the double-jointing used on the Outlaw) and its chicken legs, which were the first not based on the Fusilier's joint scheme in 18 years. Since the Fusilier's nimbleness was dependent upon its swaying hips, which made torso stabilization more difficult, the Mission Orienters hoped that by giving the knee and hip joints better freedom of movement they could both balance the hips and consolidate the foot actuators from an upper ankle pin and lower ball to a single low-slung ankle ball affixed to a shock-absorbing plate that the toes were attached to. Given TME Industries' rather poor luck in developing new reverse-joint leg systems, the Mission Orienters had factored in additional safety margins (TEAM MELTA simply called them 'fudge factors') while designing the pins that attached the twin ball-joints to each other, since they would see more severe shear and bending loads than the Fusilier-style double-shear lug and trunnion system.

Predictably, betting pools arose as to when the new system would fail rather than whether it would work or not. According to the bookies in Finance, the expectation of the engineering betting market averaged around two days.

In initial field tests with dummy weights replacing most non-motive systems, the Rimongever proved--indefinitely--to be sturdy and dependable but relatively unresponsive. While this negated the hoped-for advantages in mobility, the new design methodology did prove to have improved flexibility and a few people who bet on 'never' made a lot of money, as good as it did them in the closed and vaguely commanded economy of Tinker's World. The Mission Orienters decided that a sluggish but dependable motive system was sufficient for a sniping platform and went ahead with combat systems integration, but on a cautious schedule. This proved fortuitous when the double-ball elbow joint proved difficult to feed Gauss ammunition from the torso bins through to the forearm rifles, so the elbow joints were optimized to maintain a slow but steady feed from the primary bins in the torsos to the ready-magazines in the arms. While it took ten seconds for a Gauss slug to carefully make its way from bin to magazine, it also took ten seconds for the Gauss rifle to charge and fire, so this was not considered an issue. To clear jams, the transfer mechanisms were designed so they could go to safe-battery positions if the upper and lower arms were aligned; due to the arms' flexibility, this rarely added more than a second or two to the feed time and was also therefore considered a minor issue at best.

The slow, methodical testing schedule meant that it was not until June 3072 that the Rimongever went into full production, almost at the nadir of the Jihad. The extended testing and correction cycle led the production Rimongever to be a much more responsive vehicle than Article 001 due to optimizations in its structure and linkage pins, but the extreme volumetric optimization required to fit everything in and make it work just right meant that the Rimongever strongly resisted modification, either in the field or by corner-painted TME engineers.