Let's Create a proper MBT for Halo.

[Stark]

Is 54k for the ute armed? That's a pretty cheap mg - go nuts and install headlight rws

[adam_grif]

Is 54k for the ute armed? That's a pretty cheap mg - go nuts and install headlight rws

54k is listed as the cost of the "M12 Warthog", and 86,000 is listed as "Hog- standard edition" - the price they charge civilians for the civilian model. The Assault Rifle is listed as costing 1,686 credits, so make of that what you will.

[Shroom Man 777]

An S-tank would probably fit the Scorpion's profile, with pretty much the same level of weaponry but without the shitty track arrangements.

[JointStrikeFighter]

I am about to take a giant shit all over this thread:

[adam_grif]

.50 cal Coax isn't big and macho enough for shielded infantry, but is huge overkill for unshielded types. 120mm gun is overkill. Put a Bradley in there instead. 25mm main gun for instakill on Hunters and shielded infantry, 7.62 secondary for the rest. TOW missiles for killing ground vehicles that the 25 can't.

[Chris OFarrell]

I am about to take a giant shit all over this thread:

...I have no idea exactly how you just took a giant shit over the thread...

But if you're claiming the tank can't fit inside the Infintry bay...well no fucking shit; you DO realize that the Scorpion (and Wathog for that matter) are carreid externally, don't you?

[JointStrikeFighter]

Are you fucking stupid? I am saying a fucking M1 Abrams CAN [just] fit inside the infantry bay [though in a non practical] and is in fact SMALLER than a scorpion despite being colossally superior.

[Ryan Thunder]

Well, as long as we're going there, I don't think the front profile fits. You seem to have failed to notice that the seats are in the way.

Imbecile.

[Purple]

Be that as it may, it seems that if only minimum modifications would be required for said infantry bay so that it can fit a tank.

Now, I am not a big halo fan, but I have read this thread so bear with what I am about to say.
From what I understand, the main sort of targets this vehicle will be fighting are:
1. Human infantry
2. Light vehicles
3. Heavy infantry (but not spartan level)

Are there even any vehicles in halo that would qualify as a tank? Apparently not, or this thread would not exist. Hence I think a heavy cannon is not really necessary.

Also, is there a reason to believe that who ever is deploying these will forgo any and all tactics and send them in singly to be destroyed? Again, probably not. But I might be wrong.


This said, I see no reason to make one vehicle a jack of all trades. If anything, I would take the base of a modern MBT, say the T-90 because I like it. Than I would create different turrets and modules to fit the role. And these new vehicles would than be deployed as an integral unit.

For urban combat and fighting heavy infantry, have a model armed with a set of four rapid fire 23mm autocanons like the Shilka. The turret should be similar to the Shilka but beter armored. Since there is no need for heavy radar equipment it would probably be light and small enough (short barrels unlike the M1) to fit into said dropship. For fighting ground targets, have it mound a set of missile pods like the Tunguska.

With it's proper armor (MBT grade, not light AA grade), high rate of fire and relatively powerful munitions it should decimate any sort of infantry bellow spartan level and any light vehicles (like say the Scorpion). For anything heavier, use the guided missiles fired from the side pods.
Also, the AA like turret and gun elevation should make it devastating in urban combat as it will be able to hit people on roof tops and high windows with ease.

Have 4 of these in each company of 5.

For taking out any heavy targets, make a T-90 clone but with a laser canon. Even if that thing is expensive as hell, you can sure afford better to put it on a tank than an infantry unit. Since the chances are that the tank will make up for the cost by blowing stuff up faster than said infantry. Have this be the company command tank, perhaps give it some shielding. Use it to take out anything the rest of the company can't take.

For secondary weapons, give it a coaxial and 14.5mm heavy machine gun. Also, add a configurable Remote Weapon Station to the top of the turret. have the standard load out be a pair of 14.5mm machine guns and what ever grenade launcher the guys in halo use. But have it be capable of mounting AA or AT missiles as well.

For both vehicles, have a set of active countermeasures, ERA and standard armor. Shields if you can afford it.
A combined force like this should sweep through anything that halo has to offer. Or at least in theory. What do you people think?

[Chris OFarrell]

Are you fucking stupid? I am saying a fucking M1 Abrams CAN [just] fit inside the infantry bay [though in a non practical] and is in fact SMALLER than a scorpion despite being colossally superior.

You actaully said NOTHING and just posted a picture of a tank. But at any rate, that DOESN'T actually fit inside the bay because the bay is a wedge shape, not a square, unless you're talking about radically redesigning the bay into a tank hold. Which isn't a stupid thing to do, but you aint going to be fitting an Abrams inside. You can get a reasnoable scaling of the bay from Hood standing inside it in Halo 3, or when the Chief exits the cockpit during the descent to the Arc. And frankly, it just doesn't look big enough to fit an Abrams in as is.

Of course, strip all the infintry crap out and expand the bay a little bit and it would work. But frankly, it makes some sense to be able to carry both the infintry AND the vehicle.

[Zaune]

Semi off-topic, but after writing my contribution I had a look at the Wiki page for the Alvis Scorpion light tank. Is it just me or is there a passing resemblance from some angles?

[Stark]

Needs more giant posts to repeat what people have already said!

Chris I'm not sure how smart it really is to be hanging a tank from the back of your VTOL - for either the VTOL or the tank. An Abrams might not like the five meter deployment drop, and maybe that's a big design influence on the Scorpion. Passes drop tests!

[Sarevok]

The Pelican actually carries a fucking tank attached to a rope ? Lol. I thought it was a gameplay gimmick by lazy programmers. Why write shitload of code for a tank driving off a sliding ramp on a dropship ? When you can just attach mesh A to mesh B ?

[Stark]

Admittedly that's just how it is in games, and I've never read any of the books because I'm not crazy. So yeah, I'm pretty sure they just hang it off the back. God knows how unsafe it is for the VTOL pilot.

[Imperial528]

I always assumed it was held up by some sort of electromagnet, since if you look at the underside of that piece of the pelican there seems to be some sort of purposeful mechanism there, rather than just a nice texture, and they never show any cargo actually attached via any sort of clamp or ropes.

[Sea Skimmer]

If Halo actually had anything like the gauss gun technology it supposedly does to then you could just arm a tank with a 50mm guass chaingun while carrying five hundred rounds of ammunition. They should easily be able to achieve a velocity sufficient to meet any battlefield armor piercing requirement (all the more so since it’d fire at 200-400rpm). Fire solid shot at armor and AHEAD at infantry and air targets. At even 5,000m/s, far short of the 15,000m/s claimed for the Halo hand held guass gun, a thousand 3.3 gram subprojectiles would each be able to strike with the force of a weak 20mm cannon shell. They’d be more powerful then any heavy machine gun round… so one shot of 50mm AHEAD fired at infantry would be more potent then a .50cal machine gun firing for about two minutes. And you'd have this from a 50mm chaingun so you can fire maybe 200 rounds a minute yourself... This would be firepower on par with a whole machine gun battalion armed with .50cal Brownings until you ran out of ammo.

An armament like this should be possible, and since it’s a relatively small caliber you can have enough elevation to shoot at air targets too. No need for numerous different tanks. It’d put all that extra effort into building as many Crusader style self propelled howitzers as possible. Ideally with eight inch howitzers since in all rationality that'd fit fine on a Crusader sized hull and be able to fire high yield nuclear warheads. Never mind the AP capability you'd get out of it, and the effective AA ceiling could be pretty damn high too at 5,000m/s. Enough that the howitzers could easily serve as ABM weapons and engage stratospheric aircraft and warships.

[Vehrec]

Conversely Gauss weapons are not exclusively in the hands of the military authorities. What kind of armor scheme do you need to resist such weapons? Was the Spartan's armor originally developed to plate tanks?

And here's an even more evil thought to extend the original proposal. The scorpion sucks-but at least it's a tank. What the hell would the Covenant come up with to counter your proposed vehicle? They have no appreciable armored tradition, so do they copy blindly, or go a different route?

[Stark]

Making a two-seater hoverbike with forward fuel rod/rocket launcher and a twin-linked plasma repeater turret would be better against everything but scorpions, and is a clear Covenant applicaiton of the technical.

[Sarevok]

Putting Jackel shields on the Ghost would make it the most sought after vehicle in Halo.

[Ford Prefect]

Interestingly, at one point in development Jackal shields were more prevalent. Admittedly only in an infantry context, but at one point both Elites and Brutes have been seen with Jackal-style shields, only bigger, obviously. The Elite version was actually triple layered.

[Sarevok]

Interestingly, at one point in development Jackal shields were more prevalent. Admittedly only in an infantry context, but at one point both Elites and Brutes have been seen with Jackal-style shields, only bigger, obviously. The Elite version was actually triple layered.

But the original version of the Elites only had jackel shields and no weaker full body energy shields to stop flanking or side shots. Ideally Elites should dual wield a Jackal shield, plasma rifle / needler and carry their regular shielding as well. They are certainly strong enough to do so.

[Void]

Amusingly the Scorpion has stumbled on some clever design features.

Particularly the frontal cross section of the vulnerable area (that is the part with people in it) is fairly small. This is good because it allows for armor thickness to be maximized. Also good the external gun pod which greatly reduces the volume of the turret (again saving mass and allowing armor thickness to be maximized), and from the looks of it completely segregates the ammunition storage from the crew compartment (very, very good for post-penetration survivability).

The funky track arrangement could also offer some protection from simple pressure mines, since they are so far from the main body even completely destroying them might not compromise the crew compartment. They would also provide a fair bit of protection from anti-tank weapons should they strike them on the way to the crew compartment (though again you would lose the track).

Of course the whole open compartments thing is completely idiocy. Going by the pictures on Halopedia the very first scorpion seems to have been the best:
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 ... d/Tank.jpg

The lone crew compartment set deep inside the tank (maximizes protection) is particularly admirable.

I am not a Halo fan but I am not sure the Scorpion deserves such scorn. By the standards of fictional tanks (which isn't high) it is fairly competent, though I suspect this is mostly coincidental. It has some basic design flaws (so tall...) as well as the much more common (in fiction) failure to keep up with modern armor/anti-armor "paradigms" if you will (no discernable signature reduction, apparent lack of sophisticated multispectral sensors, no smart munitions for the main gun, no hard of soft kill active protection systems, no provisions for protection from top attack weapons. Though even most modern designs lack many of these things).

[Imperial528]

The scorpion tank's design is actually different in multiplayer than campaign, it has a cage cockpit instead of a metal plate one, although in the Custom Edition it'd be easy to use the better campaign model. They used the cage cockpit in multiplayer apparently because they couldn't make any part of vehicles destructible in multiplayer, although they easily could've made it so that there is partial penetration on the cockpit cover (like with the original banshee).

I don't mind the height of the turret all that much as a design issue, since the profile of the turret is rather thin, it would also give an advantage for crew safety, since one could hide the main hull of the tank behind larger cover and still be able to engage than a tank with a low-set turret. Although, the tank itself seems more like a cross between an armored tank-destroyer and a light tank rather than a true MBT to me.

[weemadando]

OK, so the qualifications are:

Airdroppable.
Can carry a small infantry group.
Has crew protection.
Good hitting power.

I say just get a BMD-3 or 4 and up-gun it with some in-universe tech and put some Jackal shield ablative armour on it. Hell with the automation advances you can probably even reduce it to a single crew-member as well if you wanted.

Congratulations. You have something that weights about 13t, can carry a 4 man infantry team, is airdroppable, amphibious and is less tall (even discounting the turret) about 1/3 as wide and capable of hitting 70km/h. Plus with the upgunning to a decent standard and the use of even the most basic shield tech (or even just armour compound advancement) it's going to be pretty survivable to boot.

[Drone]

OK, so the qualifications are:

Airdroppable.
Can carry a small infantry group.
Has crew protection.
Good hitting power.

I say just get a BMD-3 or 4 and up-gun it with some in-universe tech and put some Jackal shield ablative armour on it. Hell with the automation advances you can probably even reduce it to a single crew-member as well if you wanted.

Congratulations. You have something that weights about 13t, can carry a 4 man infantry team, is airdroppable, amphibious and is less tall (even discounting the turret) about 1/3 as wide and capable of hitting 70km/h. Plus with the upgunning to a decent standard and the use of even the most basic shield tech (or even just armour compound advancement) it's going to be pretty survivable to boot.

You're assuming that putting a new gun on that turret or chassis works. Not a safe assumption. Look at the attempts to make tank-killer LAV-25's where 4-6 shots from a 120mm would crack the hull, or about 200 from a 105 would do the same. Sometimes hulls just can't stand up to the stress of recoil if it's that light.