Modified assault transport for ground support. Heavy lasers and 4 light turbolaser mounts. Platoon-company carriage depending on length of mission. The idea is basically a mobile “chunk of fortress” – guns heavy enough to take most plausible ground vehicles, enough troops to deploy to take small points, and shields and mobility to be safe from hand-held weapons and plausibly survive against air vehicles short of starfighters.
I’m in total necro-post comment mode right now. Love your content!
This, to me, looks a lot like an Imperial AC130.
It’s decent-sized, with downward firing heavy weapons. It could sit back, hovering out of range of most ground fire at >4,000m altitude and hit targets with its heavy lasers and turbolasers (which should have at least a 15-20km effective range, right?). Like the AC130, it might be nice to have a wider variety of effects. Perhaps ion cannons, munition launchers, or mass drivers. It could probably use fighter-grade munition launchers, given the relatively short range of its targets, allowing it to carry more munitions. An ion cannon could be used to take down shields or non-destructively knock out enemy systems. Mass drivers could fire a variety of inexpensive munitions. Maybe instead of one ship having all of these types, there could be variants.
So rather than carrying infantry, it could focus on a larger reactor, repulsorlifts, capacitors, shields, downward-looking sensors, armor on the underside, and a wider variety of weapons. I saw you added a point defense cannon to the top in WIP#2, maybe needs one on the underside too since many threats will come from below?
Is it large enough to carry SPHA-sized weapons? Maybe on a vertically-trainable spinal mount? Or is it too small? If the LTLs are the same ones as on your Scythe, then this might be in the 35-40m length range?
Obviously you could use a starship for this instead, but they may not be optimized for hovering in atmosphere inside an enemy’s weapons envelope, and the Empire might not like to risk larger, more expensive warships in this relatively dangerous role.
Imperial LAAT? I like it! Perhaphs a variant as a gunboat? Or close range fighter defense for, say, an Imperator?
Awesome design, maybe increase the shield strength and stonger hull, plus peehaps increase the size to hold at least. 100 troops
Awesome design, maybe increase the shield strength and stonger hull, plus peehaps increase the size to hold at least. 100 troops
I’m guessing this thing will use repulsorlifts for mobility?
Yep – relatively good performance in atmosphere and low orbit, but drops off a lot in space (and no hyper), so ideally it gets carried on a dropship.
Oh, so it can actually fly, like a LAAT. I guess I was assuming it was just an armored landspeeder.
Cool Idea. Not sure about that fin on it’s back just yet. But I’m sure you’ll do something awesome with it!