Malevolent AH-51E

Mass: 50 tons
Movement Type: Hover
Power Plant: GH PowerMaxx 180 FuelCell Plus 165 Fuel Cell
Cruising Speed: 86.4 kph
Maximum Speed: 129.6 kph
Armor: StarSlab Standard
Armament:
     1 ISArrowIV
Manufacturer: TriStar Intersellar
     Primary Factory: Sherwood
Communication System: TriStar Multilink II
Targeting & Tracking System: TriStar TrackMaster III W/ ArtiSpot
Introduction Year: 3049
Tech Rating/Availability: IS Level 3
Cost: 1.31 million C-bills

Overview
The Arrow IV batteries are the March's guided fist, and the reason the Eye of Ra chain has teeth as well as eyes. For two centuries the fire-support ecosystem was a tube affair — a spotter corrected, a Horus or a Ra dropped a shell somewhere close, and "close" was the best anyone could promise. The Helm Core changed the arithmetic: among the recovered technologies the March embraced was Arrow IV, the Star League's homing artillery missile, and Common Heart did with it exactly what the program does with everything worth keeping — it declined to build a bespoke launcher and bolted the system into the hulls it already made by the hundred. The 'Mal' family, the fuel-cell fifty-tonners that share a turret across wheels, tracks, and air cushion, gave the batteries their bodies: the wheeled Malice AW-51C and the hover Malevolent AH-51E, each an existing chassis with its gun deck rebuilt around an Arrow IV tube and its magazines. Now the spotter's designation does not merely correct a shell's fall — it steers the missile onto the target, and the difference between the old chain and the new is the difference between shelling a grid square and hitting the specific OmniMech standing in it. The Skink paints, the Glasshopper spots, the Sanddiver hides and marks; the batteries are what answers.

Capabilities
The AH-51E is the mobile half, and the answer to counterbattery fire. Where the AW-51C plants itself and shoots precision, the Malevolent hover chassis carries its Arrow IV tube at a hover cruise past 85 kph — a shoot-and-scoot battery that lobs its missiles, slides off its firing point, and is a kilometer away across the pans before the enemy's return fire arrives at the place it used to be. Its magazine runs standard Arrow IV rounds rather than the AW-51C's homing stock, trading the wheeled tank's TAG-guided precision for area fire delivered from a platform that refuses to hold still long enough to be silenced. The pairing is deliberate and it is pure Common Heart: one battery that hits the exact target the spotters designate and one that saturates the ground they can't, both firing the same recovered missile from the same family hull, both fed from the same hydrogen bowser as every other 'Mal' on the field. The hover tank is the one the counterbattery radar hates, because by the time the solution resolves, the Malevolent has already relocated the argument.

Deployment
The batteries deploy where the spotters do, which by 3050 was everywhere the March expected to meet the Clans. Each Clan-facing regiment — the 21st Morven Grenadiers, the 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry — fields its Arrow IV battery as the delivery end of a precision fire chain whose forward elements are the cheap and numerous: the Skink that paints, the Glasshopper that spots from its mast, and the rare, jealously-tasked Sanddiver DIN-G03 that marks from stealth. AW-51Cs sit deep and still, waiting for a designation; AH-51Es prowl the flanks, firing and repositioning, drawing the counterbattery fire the wheeled tanks cannot survive. A March artillerist's account of the arrangement is characteristically flat: "The Skink finds it, the Sanddiver confirms it, the C puts the missile through it, and the E is there in case it brought friends." The whole chain costs less, in forward assets, than the ammunition it delivers — which the Ledger Barrage's authors regard as the entire point.

History
Arrow IV came to the March the way all the recovered technologies did: heartily, and on the existing hulls. The Star League's homing missile was among the first systems the Helm Core gave back that Common Heart wanted without reservation, because a merchant house that had built its whole fire doctrine around spotting — the Eye of Ra chain, the Skink's TAG, the Glasshopper's ArtiSpot suite — had spent two centuries with excellent eyes and merely adequate fists. Arrow IV closed the gap overnight, and the program's discipline showed in how little fuss it made doing so: no new artillery chassis, no new logistics tail, just two more entries in the 'Mal' family's variant book and a magazine of recovered missiles behind the same StarSlab plate. The AH-51E came first, in 3049, the hover tank being the easier conversion; the AW-51C followed in 3050 with the homing rounds that made the TAG network suddenly lethal rather than merely helpful. By the time the Sanddiver DIN-G03 arrived in 3053 to paint from stealth, the batteries it would feed had been in the field for years — which is why the March, when it hears its guided artillery described as a Clan-era innovation, tends to point out that the innovation was the aiming, and the March had always been able to aim.

Type: Malevolent
Technology Base: IS Level 3
Tonnage: 50

Equipment		Mass
Internal Structure		5
Engine	165 Fuel Cell	-
Cruising MP:	8
Flanking MP:	12
Heat Sinks:	0	-
Control Equipment:		2.5
Turret:		-
Armor Factor:	143	-

AH-50A - 1.78 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-50A.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Ammo SRM-6	Body	1	1
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
Large Laser	Turret	2	5
SRM 6	Turret	2	3
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5

AH-50B - 1.96 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-50B.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Ammo AC/20	Body	1	1
Ammo AC/20	Body	1	1
Autocannon/20	Turret	10	14
Small Laser	Turret	1	0.5

AH-50C - 1.97 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-50C.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
Ammo LRM-15	Body	1	1
Ammo LRM-15	Body	1	1
Ammo SRM-6	Body	1	1
Machine Gun	Front	1	0.5
LRM 15	Turret	3	7
Medium Laser	Turret	1	1
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5
Infantry Bay (2.0 tons)	Body	-	2.0

AH-50C - 1.93 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-50D.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Ammo AC/20	Body	1	1
Ammo AC/20	Body	1	1
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
Autocannon/20	Turret	10	14
Machine Gun	Turret	1	0.5

AH-51A - 2.08 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-51A.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
CASE	Body	1	0.5
Ammo SRM-6	Body	1	1
LB 10-X AC Ammo	Body	6	11
LB 10-X Cluster Ammo	Body	-	-
SRM 6	Turret	2	3
LBXAC10	Turret	7	12
TAG	Turret	1	1

AH-51E - 1.31 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AH-51E.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Arrow IV Ammo	Body	1	1
Arrow IV Ammo	Body	1	1
Arrow IV Ammo	Body	1	1
Arrow IV	Turret	15	15

AT-52A - 1.56 million C-bills - 0 Single Heat Sinks - ↓ Malevolent AT-52A.blk

Weapons and Ammo	Location	Critical	Tonnage
Gauss Ammo	Body	1	1
Gauss Ammo	Body	1	1
Gauss Ammo	Body	1	1
Machine Gun Ammo - Half	Body	1	0.5
CASE	Body	1	0.5
Machine Gun	Front	1	0.5
Hitch	Rear	0	0
Gauss Rifle	Turret	7	15