Uergel Missile Artillery Does What It Does

The Uergel (better known as the "Urg," pronounced with a groan as if the speaker is suffering gastrointestinal distress) is a overspecialized design that retained a place in TME catalogs more as an example of what the company is capable of rather than filling a specific need. Branching off from the Testing Department's work with the Bracamante XXL testbed, the Uergel was a super-heavy combat vehicle approaching the mobile field base class. The initial specification, dated 3075, effectively told the engineers that as long as it was two hundred tons, could move, and made the vaguest sort of sense, it would be bought off.

The second of these two objectives turned out to be difficult. Without resorting to counterintuively designated large extra-extra-light engines, the as-yet-unnamed tank would be incapable of exceeding thirty-two kilometers per hour (and even then twenty kph would be mechanically safer). Knowing that ground pressure would be a concern, designers settled the chassis around six sets of double-wide tracks using overlapping road wheels. Like the Demolisher, four of these sets would be arranged on the sides as conventional fore and aft tracks; unlike the Demolisher, the last two sets were mounted along the centerline parallel to the outboard tracks. While this arrangement reduced the tank's ground pressure to below that of many light tanks, it turned very poorly and required a total of twelve track sets, sixty-four axle suspension arms, and ninety-six road wheels. Even on paper, with the most optimistic assumptions, maintaining the motive systems with its complex suspension and infinity of moving parts would be difficult at best.

Since the tank wouldn't be mobile, it would be best suited in an artillery or support role. Initially intended to carry four Thumper-class light tube artillery guns on side mounts (which earned the tank the Uergel name, due to the traditional association of artillery pieces with far too many tubes with musical organs), it was feared that these pieces would put too much force on the complicated suspension system and so they were replaced with Arrow IV-class missile systems with complex recoil-dampening exhaust venting systems. This choice also simplified the elevation mechanisms to a simple servo-actuated link that could translate a pin forward and aft inside a groove in the bottom of the artillery missile box launcher. Just in case anything got within tactical combat distance, a tall forward-mounted turret was equipped with twin twenty-racks of long range missiles, heightening the profile of an otherwise short (for its mass) tank.

With over ten percent of its mass dedicated to armor and ten more percent allocated to ammunition, the Uergel was both sturdy and long-lived in a fight. Tests conducted with Uergel Article 001 in March 3077 showed that when it was in range, it was a game-changer, and its cross-country mobility was actually slightly better than expected due to its low ground pressure and subsequent tendency to avoid bogging down. However, the cantilever points of the outboard track axles could break relatively easily, requiring time-consuming field repairs. The repair shop had to come to the distressed Uergel, since the tank was simply too heavy for armored recovery vehicles to tow, and it usually got stuck in the least accessible places. The central tread assemblies fared better as they used U-shaped suspension arms rather than L-shaped ones, and track damage could be repaired from within the tank due to access doors built into the underside of the relatively roomy catamaran hull. When Article 001's side axles and suspension arms were redesigned, the hull was refitted with access doors so, as far as was feasible, field repairs such as track adjustment could be done from within the tank.

By 3078, the Uergel was ready to be advertised as a combat-ready vehicle. The revelation of TME's XXL capability was considered to be a minimum risk, with the Jihad beginning to wind down and technology having spread willy-nilly throughout the chaos. At over four hundred million C-Bills, the Uergel was not exactly a low-cost investment, its mass made it impossible to transport in anger, its concentrated value made it a 'golden fish' impossible to risk in combat, and despite repeated engineering tests no one believed that it didn't destroy the pavement underneath it (at least, no more than any other tank). It did, however, find an extremely limited niche as a dropport defender. Its treads and mass couldn't hurt pavement built for DropShip crawlers, its launchers could be filled with surface-to-air Arrows (which had been aped from the Capellan Confederation since the late 3060s), and its armor could actually withstand minor to moderate bombardment. While conventional defense turrets were prime targets and rail-mounted sliding turrets could be derailed (or have their bunker doors disabled), Uergels could be parked inside DropShip hangars and then just driven out a few dozen meters to engage incoming fighters and DropShips. A lance of Uergels, with sixteen Arrow IV launchers between them, could secure a dropport quite handily against most attackers, and some operators considered this worth the two billion C-Bills in drive-away costs.

With the Uergel established as a defensive platform, its first modification planned to turn it into a heavy flak system. the Uergel-A replaced the Arrow IVs with Long Tom-class artillery guns, making it more similar to its original concept. Reducing the price by three million C-Bills did not make it much of a budget model and the original fears of artillery guns harming the track suspensions turned out to be well-founded as even the redesigned and reinforced production suspensions yielded and buckled when repeatedly stressed by tube artillery fire. The few -As built were refitted, at TME Industries' expense, to -0 specifications in a small customer relations coup.

One customer that apparently thought the Uergel wasn't expensive enough already wanted a second lance, but this one optimized for defending against anything that had grounded. Requests to the customer for a little more clarity on the mission revealed that this particular dropport was tired of the occasional ship lifting off without paying its port fees and so wanted some rapidly-deployable heavy firepower to deter such behavior. The Uergel-B "Metalstorm" removed all the artillery mountings, expanded the turret ring, and replaced the twin LRM-20 turret with a massive 'hammerhead' turret mounting seven medium-class 75mm rotary autocannon in a three-on-four stacked-and-staggered configuration. Sharing top-hull ejection ports similar to the Miztli and intentional turret stops to simplify the ammunition feed, the "Metalstorm" variant appealed to the unsubtle. A turbocharger sped it up marginally and three more tons of armor made it a passable, if extremely expensive, assault tank.

The customer was quite happy with their Uergel-B and the type saw some additional sales, mostly from operators with much more money than sense. By all accounts, watching an Uergel-B open up with all barrels at once was a sight to behold, albeit one severely detrimental to the hearing of anyone within a kilometer.