User:Quirel/Sandbox/Black Bear Rewrite

The M840 Black Bear main battle tank (Later renamed the Bear) is a series of superheavy tanks fielded by the United Nations Space Command during the UNSC-CMA Cold War. It was the first superheavy design to be adopted by the UNSC, and was plagued by a number of shortcomings. The design was ultimately not successful, and was quickly retired in favor of the M850 Grizzly MBT.

Role
As relationships soured with the CMA, UNSC brass predicted that a proper cold war was starting, which could evolve into a hot war between the UEG and the CMA, or possibly even rogue colonies. There were many disagreements as to how these conflicts would play out. Flag rank officers were of the opinion that Sol could drown the CMA with superior numbers and superior hardware. Various reformer factions contended that much of the UNSC’s own hardware was outdated, and the Navy’s transportation capacity was insufficient.

Wargames conducted in 2469 and 2470 proved that the Navy was indeed deficient. The UNSC Navy simply didn’t have the logistics to sustain a war in the Outer Colonies. Even if Mars alone possessed an order of magnitude more manufacturing capability than the outer colonies of any given quadrant, there was no ability to move that men and material in any reasonable amount of time. As a result, the UNSC Navy started a twenty-year-campaign to build that capacity, and the Marine Corps looked at strategies to enhance the quality of a small quantity of troops.

The Marine Corps floated a superheavy tank design program in the last quarter of 2470. The preliminary requirements were for an eighty-ton tank with a crew of three and a 140mm cannon or a gauss weapon of similar destructive power. The program was canceled before the requirements could be finalized, in favor of increasing the number of fixed-wing and VTOL gunships available to expeditionary forces.

The Gao Panera Riots
In 2482, riots broke out in Rinale, the capitol city of Gao. Initially provoked by a baker’s union furious over delays in shipments of flour, the riots spread across the city, and the government adopted a policy of compartmentalization. Some districts would be protected, others would be left to burn.

Police protection was withdrawn from the UEG embassy, leaving a single platoon of Marines to defend against several thousand armed rioters. Although Gao officials offered to restore the protection in exchange for concessions, the embassy staff had already hit the panic button, and the UNSC Belfast was on its way.

The 3rd Marine Armored Battalion landed on Gozmon Highway, ten miles outside of Gao. The two tank companies would perform a thunder run through the embassy district, punching a hole in the riots and providing a distraction as the mechanized infantry company relieved the embassy forces. Air support would be provided by two wings of gunships.

The thunder runs failed. The Gao rioters were organized by rival political factions and far better armed than intelligence indicated. The rioters had Tábano rocket launchers, a top-attack rocket simple enough to be produced in small workshops, but powerful enough to defeat Scorpion armor. The gunships were likewise menaced by rockets when they attempted to provide close air support.

The offensive stalled and the situation very nearly escalated when the Gao military panicked and called up their forces. Intelligence reports indicated that Gao might have as many as seventy-five tanks, but over 150 Siberian-built Carroways were spotted mobilizing. The Gao government and the rioters only backed down when the Belfast did a flyby of Rinale, maxing out its performance envelope to loop around the city and return to orbit. Warning shots from the point defense cannons were fired into burning buildings. With the streets clear, the 3rd Marine was able to reach the embassy and extract the personnel.

Four wrecked gunships and four destroyed Scorpions were returned to the UNSC within a week. The government of Gao wrote off a fifth Scorpion as unrecoverable due to the fact that a building had collapsed on it, but that final Scorpion was extracted and parked in a childrens’ playground within the year.

Rinale Findings
''“If you can manufacture a bearing, you can manufacture a rifle. If you can manufacture a starship reactor, you can manufacture a nuclear bomb.”''

An inquiry into the Panera Riots wrapped up the next year with three key findings: The Gao military likely had no more than two hundred Carroways, and a smaller number of other tank designs. The Carroway was a last-generation design and inferior in all respects to the Scorpion, but the Scorpions of the 3rd Marine Armored Battalion were still outnumbered nine to one by tanks alone. While Gao’s military was large, it was by no means the largest in the Outer Colonies, and many more colonial governments had the economic means to catch up. The Tábano rocket launcher was indeed manufactured locally, not smuggled in from off-world. The warhead and the rocket were 3D-printed, and the guidance system was cobbled together using parts from a consumer drone. While production expertise may have been supplied by local industry, and the launchers themselves were probably produced by a motorcycle company, the ties weren’t strong enough to prosecute in a court of law. These weapons could be built by any sufficiently organized insurgent movement, and they were lethal to gunships and Scorpion tanks alike. The sophistication of the Outer Colonies was quickly catching up to the Inner Colonies. The number of colonies with the industrial base to manufacture their own weapons was expanding, and the engineering hurdles were vanishing as open-source designs proliferated. The enemies that the Marines would face would not be as few or as poorly armed as many strategists had predicted.

Development
Within a few months of the Rinale Findings, the UNSC initiated another superheavy tank program. The M808 Scorpion would be uparmed and armored (Resulting in the B-model) as an immediate solution. In the long term, the Marines wanted a tank that could take on nine-to-one odds and win.

Although the project was open to anyone, the only serious contender was Chalybs Defense Solutions. In 2485, the corporation was awarded a contract with a virtually unlimited budget to develop the tank, tentatively called the Black Bear.

The requirements were for the tank to have a full meter of armor protection from the front firing arc, and five hundred millimeters of armor from top attack. The cannon was to be the 140mm design first proposed in 2470, with secondary armament capable of destroying light armored vehicles. Finally, the tank had to be able to cross or plow through the obstacles that had corralled the 3rd MAB. Preliminary designs put the Black Bear’s weight at ninety tons.

The engineers at Chalybs Defense Solutions quickly learned that the Scorpion’s four-bogie layout would not work for a superheavy tank without adjustment. A Scorpion can run on three bogies if the fourth one is destroyed. The Black Bear prototype simply could not steer if one of the tracks was disabled, and it was far, far too heavy to cross obstacles. Lifting the front bogies to mount a barrier frequently caused the tank to loose traction. Mobility is key to survival in a tank, and the engineers were looking at a tank that was far less mobile than the Scorpion.

Two solutions were implemented. The tank’s chassis and armor was re-designed to incorporate titanium foam and empty spaces. While this bulked the Brown Bear up and gave it its distinctive ‘chunky’ look, it allowed the tank to defeat shaped charges with less armor mass. The second solution was the steering treads mounted under the chassis, between the front bogies, which distributed the weight better and allowed the tank to move even if the front pair of treads were destroyed.

The tank’s trials began in 2489, and it was formally adopted in 2492 as the M840 Brown Bear. UNSC servicement quickly dubbed it the “Maxpedition”, after a line of off-road halftrack campers. The comparison is unfair. The Maxpedition corporation builds rugged, reliable vehicles that provide good value for the credit. The Brown Bear quickly earned a reputation as a maintenance nightmare.

This is not because the tank itself was unreliable, though plenty of engineering defects were found in the first decade of deployment. Rather, the tank was very difficult to work on. Conditions were cramped because much of the internal volume was given over to the spaced armor and structural cross-bracing that made the tank so resilient in the first place. A common joke is that there’s room for three mechanics in the turret, but only if two are pureed and poured in after the first.

The steering treads themselves are worthy of note, as even the engineering team admitted that there was no good way to service them. The fastest way to change out road wheels was to park the Black Bear over a pit and remove the tracks.

Ultimately, even though the design would be improved over the next two decades, the Black Bear was quickly replaced by the M850 Grizzly.

Specifications
While the spaced armor shaved ten tons off the Black Bear, the final weight of eighty-two tons meant that the tank was too heavy to be carried by a Pelican dropship. The M840 Black Bear had to be deployed by an Albatross or a Darter, placing a severe operational constraint on its use.

The armament was an improved high-velocity 140mm cannon capable of defeating any armor and practically any fortification in use during the Insurrection. Secondary armament was a pair of dual-linked .50 caliber machine guns, inspired by the Siberian copy of the T-351 Carroway. Although the stated ammunition capacity of the fifties was two thousand rounds, Black Bear crews would commonly carry several thousand more rounds in the tank’s spacious cargo compartment. And although few complaints were heard from the crews themselves, soldiers working alongside the Black Bears often complained that the tanks didn’t have an option between ‘rake it with the fifties’ and ‘Annihilate it and the ground it stands upon with the one-forty’. This deficiency would be addressed in the M840C model, when the fifty-caliber machine guns were replaced with 25mm autocannons.

Variants
With the Black Bear’s failures, Chalybs Defense Solutions quickly set about salvaging the project, culminating in a series of upgrade packages in the 2500s and 2510s. At the same time, Chalybs was working on the tank meant to learn from the Bear’s failures and correct them in a superheavy tank fit for the next century of warfighting. Part of the funding for the Grizzly project came from upgrade packages, where Chalybs would take old M840 models and refurbish them into the M840B.

The M840A and B models successfully mitigated some of the key issues facing the bear. Armor was reduced to give the vehicle more range in the field, and the B-model replaced the mechanical drive of the steering treads with a much more compact electrical system, shaving weight and increasing internal volume for the crew. Virtually all of the Black Bears were upgraded to the M840B model, and the M840C model was employed sporadically throughout the Insurrection.

Notably, when the B-model rolled out, the tenor of the “Maxpedition” comparisons changed. One meme riffed off of the famous Maxpedition advertisement, with a SRX-800 perched on the rim of a volcanic crater with the tagline “Getting home is half the fun.” The Black Bear was shown with the exact same tagline, except it was perched on the crater created by a vehicle-born IED.