The Rebel Faction

Vengeance IFV

Name/Type: Vengeance IFV
Designer/Manufacturer: The New Order
Combat Role: Infantry Fighting Vehicle
Crew: 3 (Driver, Commander, Gunner)
Length: 9 meters
Weight: 40 tons
Propulsion: Treads
Max Speed: 90 kph
Hull Armor: 50 RU
Capacity: 15 Troops
Countermeasures: Shtora, Mirage Sensor Deceiver
Armament: 1 40mm Rail Auto Cannon, 2 Concussion Missile Launchers, 2 Laser Gattlings
Cost: 40,000 credits

As the SS rapidly expanded and developed it’s tank forces at a breakneck page, generals and marshals across the Empire watched with great interest. For years, marvelous light vehicles such as the AT-ST, Century Tank and the Chariot Command speeder have served their Imperial designers well, but their heyday is long past. Now, as armies across the galaxy expand develop their own armored vehicles, Imperial army commanders have found it becoming increasingly difficult to cope.

As they had hoped, from the project came several different vehicles that hadn’t quite made the SS’s final cut for a wide array of reasons. The general army resumed development of the canceled vehicles, and within months the resulting vehicles, often radically changed from their original forms, were on a par with their SS brethren.

When it comes to infantry support, few vehicles can compete with the Vengeance IFV. While it’s mobility is more limited than similar vehicles that use repulsor lifts, the Vengeance’s heavier armament and armor more than make up for this. In combat, it can take on anything from other IFVs and APCs to medium armored vehicles such as the AT-ST, and in numbers can concentrate their firepower to fell heavier vehicles such as the infamous AT-AT walker.

Armament The vengeance’s primary weapon is a 40mm Rail Gun. Capable of firing a wide variety of ammunition, it is a versatile weapon that allows Vengeance IFVs to perform many tasks in many different situations. The Rail Gun itself fires fast and hits hard—shells are launched from it at a speed just over 2 kilometers per second, at a rate of 800 RPM. High explosive ammunition is the most important type, useful for destroying bunkers and bombarding enemies. For anti-vehicle duties, each carries a stock of Depleted Uranium slugs. At the velocities and rate they are fired, these can burrow through all but the thickest armor in just a few moments. In addition, the Vengeance also carries incendiary and Flechette, and Ionic shells. The first, while not as powerful as those carried by Vengeance tanks or Administrator SPAs, still can incinerate an area in a 5m diameter around the impact site. For rapid anti-infantry work, no ammunition is better than the Flechette. By firing hundreds of tiny balls, essentially like a giant shotgun, the Flechette ammunition can rip a squad of infantry apart, or clear the floor of a building in seconds by firing through an opening. Ionic shells, while less powerful than an Administrators, disable all technology within five meters of where they impact.

Backing up the main gun is a pair of Concussion Missile Launchers, each with a magazine of six missiles. These are useful for shooting down aircraft and other fast moving vehicles such as speeder bikes, and a sustained barrage by several Vengeance IFVs can take down even the heaviest of ground units.

Lastly there is a pair of laser Gattlings mounted on the turret roof controlled by either the vehicle commander or the driver. Though capable of some limited anti-air and anti-vehicle duties (though in the latter case, they are effective only against lightly armored vehicles, such as most APCs), their primary purpose is anti-infantry. With their fast firing rate, they can mow infantry down like grass.

Shields/Defenses For protection, the Vengeance has a few more tricks to it than just the armor itself. Active defense systems are used to minimize the risk of the tank being hit in the first place. The first of these is called the Shtora. Mounted on the back of the IFV’s turret, the Shtora is a defense system designed to neutralize missile’s threat by jamming their seekers with microwave and infrared lasers, causing them to lose their target lock. This system has proven itself 60% effective at ranges under 5 kilometers, and just under 80% effective at ranges over this mark. Naturally, however, as the number of potential missile threats increases, the efficiency of the system decreases. Against single or dual threats, however, the Shtora has proven itself to be very effective.

The second active protection system deployed on the Vengeance is the Mirage sensor deceiver. This device is basically a scaled down version of the XP-110 Illusion sensor deceiver employed by the Imperial navy, and works on the same principals. Incoming sensor beams are magnified and sent back to enemy receivers. The effect is such that when viewed via enemy sensors, the tank appears to be not one, but a dozen Vengeances, all of them interlaced with one another. By making it far more difficult than normal to successfully target, the Mirage sensor deceiver reduces coordinated fire against the tank dramatically.

To neutralize the threat of hand-held rocket launchers and anti-vehicle missiles—the primary threat at the close ranges the Vengeance will be fighting at--the Vengeance is equipped with slat armor. When a shaped charge missile or shell is approaching the vehicle, it strikes between the gaps in the rails The Impact causes the hollow space within the warhead to become deformed, causing the shaped charge’s jet to also be badly deformed and less concentrated than normal, decreasing penetrating power by a huge degree and protecting it from all but the most powerful shaped charge warheads.

The armor composition is the same as the Administrator SPA’s. The Armor is composed of an outer layer of Hyperbaride backed by a Titanium Matrix containing Titanium Boride ceramic disks and reinforced with Carbon-60 nanotubes. Behind this is a titanium backing plate with microscopic holes in it allowing it to serve as a Faraday cage, protecting the vehicle from Ion cannon fire, and a Kevlar spall liner. This armor can protect against general small arms fire, including that from automatic repeating blasters such as the E-web, and to a lesser degree, medium and heavy laser fire from vehicles and star fighters—it can take only a few hits, but with the Mirage Sensor Deceiver on board, it was hoped a few hits would be a few more than it would receive.

Sensors Since the Vengeance IFV is meant to be deployed on the front lines, finding and seeing your enemy before he sees you is a matter of life or death. To make sure that the Vengeance sees them first, it carries the same powerful sensor package as is on the Avenger MBT. Ground radar, FLIRs, sonar, magnetic sensors, laser rangefinders and DERs are all used to give vehicle crews highly detailed information about the battlefield around them and maximize their chances of survivability.

Communications On any battlefield, the key to victory is communications. The commander who has better control of his forces the quickest and the most precisely has a critical advantage that is hard to match for an opponent who does not, therefore on the Vengeance IFV a major effort to maximize the speed and communication between both commanders and the units themselves was made, with the results being superior to any other vehicle yet developed.

For communication with the “high and mightys,” the generals or admirals directing the operation, both the leader and assistant leader of every unit from squadrons on up have special transceivers designed for encrypted long range communications with both ground units and orbiting vessels, allowing orders to be sent right where they are needed in a secure form and be read and obeyed right away. For standard video and audio communication between vehicles, each tank has standard communications gear and an SS-developed Stealth comm as used on the TIE Phantom II. Even if intercepted (unlikely, thanks to the tight beam unless they’re at close range with the enemy) the transmissions are highly encrypted and all but impossible to break.

To speed and ease communication between tanks, a datalink between all deployed vehicles is maintained, allowing commanders to pull up information about every other deployed tank, including it’s position, assignment, and sensor data, giving commanders (both tank and unit level) when considering how to deploy forces. In addition, terrain and data on enemies from orbiting vessels can also be brought up. In addition to easing organization, this system also allows commanders to focus radio conversation on important things.
Due to their sensitive nature, the datalink communications are more highly encrypted than even the standard stealth comm transmissions. Based on the sums of two hundred digit prime numbers, Imperial Intelligence claims that even the fastest computer in the galaxy could not crack it before the big crunch and the end of the universe. To prevent the code from falling into enemy hands, it is impossible to access it in the tank’s computer system. It is permanently blocked off and any attempt to remove the blocks, no matter how subtle, will result in the immediate permanent deletion of the code data with no chance of recovery.

Deployment and Tactics While quality is in many cases certainly better than quantity, designers believed quantity has a quality of it’s own. The base Vengeance unit, a squadron, is twelve IFVs. Three squadrons make a platoon, and three platoons make a company. Three companies make a battalion, and three battalions make a division for a total of 972 IFVs.

The first Avengers deployed will be as part of forming panzergrenadier divisions in the Borderland protectorate. With a full division of Vengeances, supported by Administrator artillery pieces (108) and Avenger MBTs (566), plus twelve thousand infantry, these divisions will be a force to be reckoned with on whatever world they may show up. A division can be loaded onto a single [URL=http://www.therebelfaction.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6451 ]Venator Troopship[/URL], allowing it to have superb mobility both on a planet and in space.