Uhlan Assault 'Mech Stomps Along

Conceived of as an assault Flashman or a heavier BattleMaster, the Uhlan was a predictable attempt by TME Industries to drop an extralight engine into a hundred-ton chassis as an attempt to make it go faster, similar to a Grand Titan. With heavier armor than the Marik 'Mech and a longer engagement range, the Uhlan exchanges firepower for accuracy by mounting a targeting computer.

The initial Uhlan mockup used bird legs and was effectively a Spheroid copy of a Dire Wolf. Given TME Industries' hit-or-miss (and mostly miss) history with chicken walkers, engineers decided to switch to more conventional human legs during a preliminary design review. The hunched over torso remained the same, mostly to keep the center of gravity low and reduce the Uhlan's target profile. Since TME to that point still owned too little Clan technology to effectively develop Omni-chassis without expensive licensing agreements, management scrapped the plan to make the Uhlan an OmniMech at the same PDR. However, multiple hardpoints and access points remained in the design for 'manufacturability' and 'damage tolerance,' at least officially. Unofficially, the engineers were too lazy to remove them when there wasn't a weight issue and it made the Uhlan more easily modifiable.

The basic Uhlan mounted a laser-heavy arsenal of twin extended-range large lasers, six extended-range medium lasers, and a ten-rack of long-range missiles. While lacking an effective knock-down weapon, the focused fire of the lasers--coordinated through the targeting computer--could still quickly pare down adversaries, albeit not in single hits. The prototype, Uhlan Article 001, suffered heat interference issues between the laser cooling systems and the targeting computer, especially when the six ER medium lasers were fired simultaneously. The addition of more heat sinks--to a total of twenty double freezers--failed to rectify the problem; only after extended testing did engineers discover that the coolant flowing around the torso medium lasers induced a magnetic field via static electrical exchange with the piping and it was this EM field that caused the interference. With several critical design reviews already passed, a few lines of code were added to the fire control system actively preventing all six medium lasers from firing at the same time. When test pilots complained about having the option taken away from them--especially at ranges where the targeting computer's help wasn't needed--these lines were removed and replaced with a simple recommendation in the user's manual not to group-fire the six medium lasers and to use the arm mediums and larges instead.

While effective at its mission, the original production Uhlan was most certainly not optimized for its loadout. With too much heat dissipation and not enough armament, several field refits tried to fix the balance to varying effect. Most conflicted with the targeting computer's capabilities but one eventually made it back to TME Industries to become a production model; the Uhlan-A replaced the odd-man-out LRM-10 with twin Streak SRM-4 racks to take advantage of holes made during closing with the lasers. Another, the Uhlan-B, used some of the access panels on the arms to free up room to swap the ER large lasers with extended range particle cannon at the expense of the troublesome torso lasers and some heat sinks. Since these modifications were not mutually exclusive, the Uhlan-C combined both into the same chassis.

When TME Industries did get its hands on OmniTechnology, the Uhlan was an obvious choice for retrofit, having been designed from the get-go to be an OmniMech. Unfortunately, teething problems prevented the Uhlan-DO from immediate production, delaying its debut until 3063. This sold and served admirably until it was upgraded in 3075 with the Uhlan-DO1, which did nothing but reduce the chassis armor and add compatibility with modular armor based on experience with the Robur-AO.

It was not until the Uhlan-DO1 that the OmniMech really hit its stride, as it could be optimized as an extreme-range sniping platform where its extra-light engine was more of a boon due to its speed than a liability due to its fragility. Luckily, throughout its history, the Uhlan has always been slightly more durable than the Grand Titan so TME marketers were always able to deflect accusations of glass jaws.