DOC-06 · TECHNICAL READOUT
Centurion CN12-T
Mass: 50 tons
Chassis Configuration: Biped
Power Plant: 200 Fusion
Cruising Speed: 43.2 kph
Maximum Speed: 64.8 kph
Armor: Standard
Armament:
1 PPC
1 LRM 15
Manufacturer:
Primary Factory:
Communication System:
Targeting & Tracking System:
Introduction Year: 3015
Tech Rating/Availability: Inner Sphere
Cost: 3.47 million C-bills
Overview
The refit kits are where Common Heart learned to talk before it learned to walk. Long before the StarHeart 240 was a doctrine — back when Memphis Motive Works was still a freight company with a machine shop and a grudge, not an arms manufacturer with a catalog — its technicians noticed the thing every merchant eventually notices: that the 'Mechs the Great Houses sold onto the used market were superb machines shackled to terrible supply chains. A Centurion or an Enforcer would soldier on for a century, but every one of them ran on a proprietary autocannon that ate a caliber of ammunition the March could neither manufacture nor reliably buy, and a raiding company a hundred light-years from a friendly depot does not get to reload. So the shop did what freight people do with a bad dependency: it engineered the dependency out. The Memphis Refit — the "-T kit," for TriStar — is a standardized package of parts and a weekend of yard work that pulls a common chassis's ammunition-hungry main gun and drops in an energy weapon the March's own fusion plants can feed forever. The kits were sold, openly and profitably, to anyone in the Periphery tired of running dry; they were also, quietly, the proof of concept for everything the Common Heart program would later formalize. One heart, one parts bin, no ammunition train you cannot carry — the doctrine was written in these four machines' engine decks a decade before anyone wrote it down.
Capabilities
The Centurion CN12-T is the kit at its purest. The stock Centurion pairs a Defiance-pattern AC/10 with a LRM-10 — a burst gun and a light rack, both fed from magazines — and the -T kit rewrites both halves of the sentence in the March's own grammar. Out comes the autocannon, the whole ammunition-fed liability of it, and a PPC goes into the right arm in its place: the March gives up the burst weight and accepts the particle cannon's heat in exchange for a main gun that never runs out, never needs a caliber the depot can't stock, and draws its charge from the same fusion plant that moves the 'Mech. The light LRM-10 is upgunned to a Holly LRM-15 — the March's standard rack, so the one remaining ammunition train is a supply chain TriStar already runs at scale — and the tonnage freed by deleting the autocannon's bins goes partly into a thicker armor envelope than the stock hull ever wore. Fifteen heat sinks keep the particle cannon honest. It is a Centurion rebuilt to the March's whole argument: one energy main gun, one standardized rack, more skin, and never again found dead of an empty magazine.
Deployment
The refit kits fill the ranks the MMW catalog was too small to fill alone. For all the March's pride in home-built machines, a periphery brigade cannot 'Mech an entire order of battle out of one company's design bureau, and the refits are how TriStar makes up the difference honestly: common chassis, sourced on the open market or taken in salvage, run through the Memphis yards, and returned to the line speaking fluent Common Heart. They equip the second-line and garrison lances, stiffen the militia commands, and travel well — a refit's whole selling point is that it can deploy to the end of a supply line and keep shooting — so they turn up disproportionately in the expeditionary and raiding formations, alongside the Bast battalions, wherever the March intends to operate far from a depot. The kits themselves remain a product: MMW will sell a periphery neighbor the parts and the drawings to convert its own hulls, and frequently does, on the sound merchant logic that a customer who runs Memphis-standard weapons is a customer who buys Memphis-standard spares forever after.
History
The refits predate the program that made them famous, and Common Heart has always been careful to give them the credit. The kits began in the salvage decades as pure necessity — a freight company with more captured and purchased 'Mechs than it could keep fed, and a shop floor stubborn enough to re-engineer the problem instead of accepting it — and they worked so well, so cheaply, and so repeatably that they became a business before they became a doctrine. Every lesson the Common Heart program would later carve in stone was learned first on these decks: that an energy main gun frees a raiding force from a supply line it cannot defend, that standardizing on weapons the company itself manufactures turns the arsenal into a revenue stream, that a machine you can service in a barn is worth more to the March than a machine that is merely superior on paper. When Melissa Starr's memorandum turned the habit into a program and the StarHeart 240 gave it a single heart, the refit kits did not go away — they simply became the entry level of a philosophy they had authored, the proof still parked in every March motor pool that the whole idea worked long before it had a name.
Type: Centurion
Technology Base: Inner Sphere
Tonnage: 50
| Weapons and Ammo | Location | Critical | Tonnage |
|---|---|---|---|
| PPC | Right Arm | 3 | 7 |
| LRM 15 | Left Torso | 3 | 7 |
| Ammo LRM-15 x2 | LT | 2 | 2 |