Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Mesofortress Gunship

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The Mesofortress Gunship is one of the heavy aircraft for the Alliance. This piece of a heavy aircraft set to be voiced by

Tactical analysis

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History
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When the bottom partially fell out of the Harbinger Gunship project, there was a mad scramble by the Allies and AseliaTech to make something out of the multimillion-dollar disappointment. Teams of analysts and experts carefully deconstructed every portion of the debacle, figuring out its failures and successes. The eventual damning conclusion was that all the technology and engineering in the Harbinger were sound, but the end result was that too many complex features together in one package had made it too expensive for the regular army.

The massive airframe couldn't hope to hold the massive generator, battery banks, and accelerators necessary for its Proton Collider weapons to work properly while remaining well cooled, maneuvering acceptably, and handling recoil for long hours. There were so many parts vital to its operation, each staggeringly intricate and cutting edge, that simple part failure due to a manufacturing defect would statistically ground the aircraft, nevermind actual wear and tear. AseliaTech's wonder weapon had been limited by the sheer complexity of their design and extreme overkill not fitting for most Alliance battles.

Having received the results of the study, the Alliance told AseliaTech that if they wanted to get back into their good graces they had best focus on simplification. AseliaTech began gutting its stock of complex machinery, using them in simplified forms, at least for the mass-produced models. For example, the Grand Collider turret was the result of simply mounting one of the Harbinger's weapons directly to a reinforced turret mount.

Another project that was resurrected was the XB-3 Mesofortress Gunship, the Harbinger's original shape; a clean-lined delta-wing with an extremely short wing span (shorter than a Conglomerate X-31's), completed with a pair of custom-tuned Rolls-Royce Phantom afterburning turbofans. The aircraft had been designed over the course of five years, reaching the prototype stage, before being discarded in favor of the Galaxy airframe due to the ever-increasing complexity and weight of the Harbinger's weapons systems.

The weapon systems were another simple innovation; one-shot "test" colliders from the early days of proton weapon testing were strapped to spectrum-guided missiles with a proximity detector. These proton cores, essentially one magnetic ring from a particle accelerator, were built cheaply as an alternative to full-sized colliders in order to test various settings. As they are not intended to survive more than one use, they could be built out of cheaper, less durable materials. By fitting them to missiles, they can be dropped close to a target before setting them off, throwing a number of hydrogen atoms at the target at relativistic speeds. Power, normally supplied by large plants or powerful generators, is provided by a self-contained collider cell. All parts are designed for the Harbinger but used in a simpler manner and utterly disposable.

Finally, to protect the new strike aircraft from attack, two of the three modular bays were given over to QF-14 Lamprey Parasite Fighters. Initially designed by AseliaTech as a cheap successor to the Shooting Star and Me 163 Komets of Great Voshkod-Aquilan War, the Lamprey had seen action throughout the Elysea's Conflict attached to Talsyn squadrons or launched from bases as last-ditch defenses. The simple little machines are little more than a two-way radio, a cockpit, a jet engine, and a pair of rocket pods slung under stubby wings, but they are capable of hiding in the heat and radar shadow of their charge before veering onto their target and unleashing a barrage of heat-seeking rockets filled with superheated ball bearings, a weapon specifically designed to confound target tracking systems while tearing into an aircraft. This ensures the Mesofortress will always be protected from fighter attack without the need for a separate fighter escort, one of the Harbinger's primary disadvantages.

After just three months of assembling disassembled prototypes and test equipment, AseliaTech had a design that was easier to mass-produce and quite deadly. Though lacking the sheer destructive output of the Harbinger's massive guns, the Mesofortress was purpose-made to tear apart tank divisions with casual ease. Like a phoenix out of the flames, the graceful profile of the Mesofortress rose from the remains of the Harbinger program. Though still in prototyping stages, Allied command considers the Mesofortress an equal successor to their promised wonder weapon; not nearly as powerful, but reliable and deadly in its own right, though the Aselian Federation takes pride in their Harbingers to change.