WARSPRITE
“The history of our people has long been written by cynics, and who among the learned can blame them? How many revolutions have come to the shores of the nation? How many have rippled out from our factories, from our fields? For too long we have been stuck, stuck in the cycle of history itself!
No more! No more of the predictable pattern, not once more will we permit the lofty ideals of the partisans to sour into the comfortable compromise of the new little kings. Not once more will the revolution settle and rot, never again will the blood of our fallen make for fertile fields to grow rank corruption. No more!
Together, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the revolution, we will break the chains of history that have strangled our people. We will commit ourselves, body and mind, land and industry, to a new model of Perpetual Liberation!
We will not compromise with decadent empires. We will not settle at the edges of familiar borders. We will press on, not content with liberation in our time, we will grasp for liberation across all time! Perpetual Liberation!
- Transcript from ‘The First Address on Perpetual Liberation Thought’
Perpetual Liberation Committee Senior Chairman Lydia Voight
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The original prototype and production runs had been an unmitigated failure almost from inception. For decades every attempt to even broach the concept in feasibility studies or procurement programs had been laughed out of committee, the glaring deficiency of the weapons system evident to any observer with even a passing understanding of field conditions. That they finally built one was shocking, and that it failed miserably in every trial it was put through seemed so natural it’s unlikely any bets were even made on it. The ‘Maneuverable Assault Gun’ was a dead end project that would have been mothballed, scrapped out and forgotten if it hadn’t been winding down at exactly the right time to benefit from the neural-interface rig.
The most obvious issue with the MAGs as a weapons class was how ungainly the whole thing was. The first –and therefore most widespread– nickname it received was ‘stumblegun’ for how often the drivers would futz the controls and eat dirt while tracked guns or traditionally engineered walker-mechs did laps around the wreck. Trying to fire while conducting high-g ground maneuvers with most weapons types sent the entire thing careening wildly to one side, top speeds with the thruster systems were reduced to barely better than a trot and the majority of movement potential for a multi-vector bipedal frame was simply unachievable with a traditional control interface and anything less than a decade of high-intensity training. Existing classes of pilots simply could not adapt to the design and its actual combat performance was always reduced to, at best, parity with frames of significantly lower cost & complexity.
As with so many other industries and projects upon its debut, however, the omnidirectional neural-interface rig changed all of that. For the first time an operator could interface seamlessly with a suitably engineered machine, could wear it like a second skin and engage in a kind of movement that was nothing less than acrobatic. The process of sending physical feedback in both directions of the neural interface meant that they went from just suits of armor into what amounted to an extension of the operators themselves. The military implications were so broad and so tantalizingly possible to achieve that a handful of four-star careers were made entirely on the basis of paper feasibility studies alone and the ‘Maneuverable Assault Gun’ was quickly stripped down to less than the frame and rebuilt entirely around the pilot-machine direct neural interface in the omnidirectional feedback configuration.
The new models went into prototype testing almost immediately, fitted with experimental thruster boost-packs and momentum control systems, super-articulated joints, powerful bio-mechanical musculature and sensor-absorbing armor panel compositions. With a range of movement now closer to a particularly acrobatic human body came a new designation to shake away the ‘stumblegun’ reputation: the ‘Super-Maneuverable Assault Gun.’ S-MAGs were barely in the testing phase before they began mass producing the WARSPRITEs and they were pushed out into the field from the moment the first batch marched off the assembly lines over Aix-Angria and into the dropships and hangar bays of operational combat units heading to the fiercest conflict zones. The appearance of the S-MAGs were almost singularly credited with breaking the Kerpen Belt Blockade within a month of deployment.
- Excerpt from Project STURMGESTALT: A Technical History & General Review
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