Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Crocodile Hovertank

The Crocodile Hovertank is the light hovertank. This unit is planned to be voiced by Anjali Kunapaneni

History
"If you stop moving, I'll kill you before the Encantadians do!"

-Crocodile Hovertank gunner to his driver

Peace is a prize worth fighting for. In peace, parents die before children, factories make consumer goods, and nations have goodwill to others. No one really wants war; even the Brotherhood wish nothing more than peace (under Brotherhood control, of course.) But there are disadvantages to peace. One of the biggest examples to plague the Alliance in the early months of were projects that should have been stopped but were instead encouraged.

Main battle tanks have few disadvantages when used right. One of these problems, however, is water. Whether a Mastiff, Grizzly, Cavalier, Bulldog, Challenger 2, Legion or Liberties, tank divisions are stopped by oceans, rivers, or even simple farming canals. Though this was never too constraining on a strategic level, certain officers felt it was important enough to commission a tank to supplement Alliance forces in boggy land or for ocean landings, and especially for actions in watery Southern Continent.

Neptune Hovercraft was given the commission to build a tank that could hover over the ground and was at least a bit useful in battle. The resulting SwM-4e9 Crocodile Hovertank impressed Alliance High Command enough to equip certain units in the Alliance military with it. The Crocodile looked to have a bright future.

As is often the case for outlandish Alliance designs, however, the Crocodile was less than impressive once it hit battle. The light weight required for it to hover precluded the use of a standard main gun; it had to make do with two 40mm autocannons, which worked pitifully against thick Voshkod armour.

The same requirement for light weight meant that the Crocodile also lacked armour of even the thinnest sort. Though watertight, a machine gun could damage the engine irreparably, and the Balthazar-aligned tanks had much more firepower than that. Once one engine was down, the whole hovertank immediately hit the deck, which was fatal when over water and only slightly less so when on the ground with nearby Destroyer-affilated units.

But the biggest reason was simply that the Crocodile had no place in the Alliance forces. The Voyager's addition of missile pods and did the job easier, and the Athel Loren's Coeddil Tank made hunting Destroyers armour on the ground pointless. After a disastrous attempt to assault Voshkod naval forces from Cantha, the Crocodile was completely withdrawn from the Alliance service, the place it was originally designed for!

Most of the Crocodiles were shipped to the Dragon Clan, one of the Community of Cantha's members, where they were assumed to ride out the rest of the war as a show of force to the less well-armed warlords of the region. However, the Dragon Clan forces desperately needed any sort of armoured support, and the Crocodiles were pressed into service on the front. As it turned out, the Crocodile was not completely useless after all - Dragon drivers realized that the Crocodile's engines would allow them to circle around tanks faster than their turrets could turn - but only if they were daring to drive that fast. They quickly proved their worth in Encantadia, able to flank and outmanoeuvre the horribly outdated Encatadian tanks (at least against Adamya's AMX-13 and ARL-44s and Lireo's M13/40s and Progettos).

Crocodile Hovertanks have replaced the Dragon Clan's more traditional Semple in some theatres, most notably in Encantadia. With a newer variant having replaced its underwhelming autocannons with a pair of 50mm Metalstorm autocannons that can be aimed skyward, which not only rips apart infantry but also send most aircraft crashing back down, and a rack of anti-tank rockets that fire in salvos of six, lending some extra anti-tank firepower to the Crocodile.