THE WEAPONS
Both sides of the conflict would employ a number very fine weapons of war, ideally suited for the fighting that was to come. Both sides used the M-8 Avenger Assault Rifle as their standard issue infantry weapon. The Alliance forces would deploy Riesig assault walkers and Orca main battle tanks in large numbers, as well as Agincourt-class frigates with EXALT weaponry in orbit. The Corporate Congress had Verush Heavy Tanks in its arsenal, and like the Alliance, issued all of its soldiers with kinetic barrier systems. At first glance, the combatants appear very much alike in their equipment's capabilities, pound for pound. However, both sides would also employ weapons never before tested against one another, a fact that drew the attention of the other galactic powers, which would keep a very close watch on the performance of the weapons in question.
Alliance: Mark IV Orbital Assault Titan
The assault titan had been in use with human military forces for fifty years by the time of the invasion of Anhur. First used in major combat operations during the Cold War, the last world conflict on Earth, titans are large flying fortresses, well-equipped with defensive and offensive armaments. Most are also capable of carrying a small squadron of gunships or combat transports. When the discovery of the mass effect brought about an early end to war on Earth, updating the design to take advantage of the new technology was a top priority for human planners. By the time of the First Contact War, titans had augmented their role with the capability of being dropped from low orbit during invasions. Their weapons were upgraded with mass-accelerators, EXALT weaponry and their defences were given a huge boost with the addition of kinetic barriers to their already formidable active defence systems.
The titans performed admirably on Shanxi, as well as on the few minor turian colonies the Alliance invaded during the last days of the First Contact War. The turians had no ground-based weapons that could deal with them. Their kinetic barriers were almost as strong as a cruiser's own, requiring infeasible amounts of artillery fire to bring down. The only weapon they were immediately vulnerable to was disruptor torpedoes and missiles, which themselves could be shot down by the active defences of the target titan most of the time. Human forces had long preferred temporarily disrupting the shielding of titans and boarding them to destroy or disable their reactor cores. All soldiers in human armies were trained to do this, often using boarding pods launched from armoured personnel carriers to infiltrate the target titans.
By 2176, a new model with a modular design had entered service. The Mark IV Orbital Assault Titan was the first of its kind that could re-enter low orbit without the aid of a lift-shuttle. It was larger than previous models by half, and sported almost twice as many weapons. There were two variants, the Mark IVa and the IVb. Both had most of their features in common: A command information centre, a well armoured hull, a small gunship hanger, a shielded reactor core, point and active defence systems, a GARDIAN battery and gatling mass-accelerators for AA duties, EXALT missile launchers along the back for anti-ship and anti-titan work, and arrays of 155mm and 40mm gatling mass-accelerator cannons along the belly for ground attack.
The IVa was the most common variant, designed for transporting infantry companies and a mix of both gunships and combat transports. Along its sides, it had assault pod launchers to shower enemy positions with infantry, that could then attack from the flanks and rear under the cover of the titan's guns. The IVb replaced its command and control and habitation modules for more cargo space. This model was used for deploying large numbers of Riesig assault walkers and gunships. Hundreds of both types would be deployed to Anhur, dropped from the planetary assault cruisers of the Alliance Navy and bearing within them the orbital assault divisions of the Alliance Army. They would perform excellently, and the Corporate Congress' forces were often at a loss when they faced the machines in numbers. GARDIAN batteries proved most effective, but these were soon earmarked as priority targets for Alliance air and artillery strikes, leaving the battlefield a hunting ground for these behemoths of the sky.
Alliance: M-57 Groundhog II Armoured Personnel Carrier
The M-57 armoured personnel carrier was introduced in 2157, after a lengthy design competition between several Earth arms manufacturers for the Alliance Army's standardisation programme. Prior to its introduction, human military forces used a large variety of armoured transports and armoured cars. This presented a programme for maintenance and resupply when national military units were consolidated under Alliance command. At first, this was tolerated, but a corruption scandal in 2154 created a political push for cost efficiency in the military.
Designed by Assegai Armour, the M-57 was an updated version of the AMV-2 Groundhog that saw service with European and African armies in the Cold War. It shared nearly half of its parts with the older machine including its chassis. This made it extraordinarily cheap to produce, and with the majority of Alliance Army troops already using the predecessor model, the infrastructure to train troops to use it was already in place. However, it was a far more capable machine than its ancestor, both in its defences and in its offensive purpose.
The vehicle itself consists of a heavily armoured hull with sloped composite plating and six plated wheels. The engine of the old Groundhog was replaced with a more powerful yet more compact version, allowing the inclusion of a mass effect core to reduce or increase the weight of the vehicle somewhat, allowing far greater mobility overall. The two-man crew consisted of a driver and commander, and the transport capacity was a four-man squad in the rear compartment. This was less than traditional designs, but each member of the attached squad was seated in an assault pod that could launch hundreds of feet into the air and travel almost a full mile if necessary to land behind or in the midst of the enemy, or if required, onto an enemy titan. Its armaments originally consisted of four 7.62mm light machineguns controlled by the passengers, a grenade launcher along with another 7.62mm machinegun aimed by the driver, and a 12.7mm "fifty cal" heavy machinegun with a heavy mortar controlled by the commander. Before the First Contact War, these weapons were all caseless chemical-projectile types, but would be updated afterwards. Its defence was originally an active defence system only, but this would later be joined by kinetic barriers.
The Groundhog II performed excellently on Shanxi and elsewhere during the First Contact War, but the conflict exposed certain flaws in the design as well. Aside from some weaknesses in the defence systems that allowed turian anti-tank missiles to successfully knock out vehicles, it was found that the design did not have adequate armament. After the armistice, all the weapons were replaced with mass-accelerators, allowing a greater rate of fire and less ammunition consumption. Furthermore, a variant was created that added a short-barrel 155mm mass-accelerator cannon in a remote-control turret, the same type that was eventually added to the Riesig Assault Walkers in later models.
The vehicle saw no action on Mindoir, as almost all examples of the model were destroyed by batarian orbital and artillery bombardments on Alliance bases in the opening hours of the raid. The rest of the First Verge War saw deployments across the Skyllian Verge, where the Groundhog was used extensively and found to be highly effective. Elysium was no different, and the APCs ferried huge numbers of Alliance troops on their way to the fight, as well as ferrying civilians away from it. Despite these experiences, the vehicle was best used on the offensive, where it turned from a useful tool into a decisive, battle-winning weapon. Anhur was perhaps the best demonstration of this, as its assault pods and multiple anti-personnel weapons were given free reign.
Alliance: A-61 Mantis Gunship
In the 2160s, the threat of war with the Batarian Hegemony was growing and the Alliance military successfully lobbied the notoriously fiscal-minded Parliament under Consul Anka Gasperi for new equipment. The reason for this success was the aging tools of both the Army and the Navy. The cost of maintaining equipment was becoming egregious, even with humanity's love affair for modular design. There were also serious questions raised over whether or not pre-First Contact equipment was any deterrence at all to the other powers of the galaxy. While many of humanity's weapons had been highly effective against turian forces, not least EMP weapons on the ground and EXALT weapons in space, others had performed extremely poorly. Nowhere else was this most apparent than in the area of gunships.
Until 2170, the Alliance used the Cold-War era BAE Systems UD-4 Talon, a highly capable weapons platform with excellent performance that had a single drawback; it did not utilise mass effect technology. Almost all of the gunships of this type deployed against the turians were shot down, either by enemy gunships or by ground fire. Its record against pirates and slavers was only marginally better, and the pilots of the craft had to rely on beyond-the-horizon missile weapons or high-speed strafing runs to remain alive. In the first military appropriations bill during Gasperi's first term, a replacement project for the Talon was given generous funding. The project was to be cooperatively planned by all bidding contractors under the direction of the Alliance Army Airforce Command. It was this that would produce the A-61 Mantis.
The Mantis has a 1 + 1 crew arrangement of gunner and pilot sitting one behind the other, surrounded by an armoured hull and reinforced 'crysteel' glass. Its engines are fully articulate, allowing for vectored thrust in almost any direction, making the craft extremely manoeuvrable. Its mass effect core allows it to act as a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane if required, though its performance in vacuum is limited as it does not have an FTL drive like a true fighter does. In-atmosphere however, it is unmatched in its roles. The standard equipment of all variants includes kinetic barriers, an active defence system, ECM and ECCM, and a nose-mounted weapon, most commonly dual M350 machineguns.
The Mantis can be outfitted to almost any role, modular-construction and design playing its usual part in human military thinking. In Alliance service, there are five models. The most common is the ground-attack variant, the Mantis-A, mounting precision-kill rockets in pods under the winglets and laser-guided bombs in an underside bomb-bay. The Mantis-B is outfitted for air supremacy, replacing its nose mounted machineguns for a longbarrel 40mm gatling mass-accelerator, carrying air-to-air and anti-orbital missiles and stripping out the rear compartment entirely to reduce weight. The Mantis-C's role is troop transport, retaining the weapons of the Mantis-A except for the bomb-bay, which is replaced by a passenger hold that can carry up to eight troops in an elongated hull section under the 'hump' of the craft. The Mantis-D carries a single assault walker in a clamp behind the cockpit, again stripping out the rear-compartment to accommodate it. The Mantis-E is a tank hunter variant, mounting two long barrel 155mm cannons under the winglets, a 40mm gatling cannon in the nose, and two EXALT missiles on the underside of the hull for cracking heavily shielded targets.
The gunship is a popular export, and it saw service with almost all armies and mercenary groups in the galaxy, with the exception of the krogan, whom cannot fit in the cockpit. All five types would see heavy service on Anhur. The Corporate Congress had no small number of the Mantis A itself serving in the ground-attack role, but the Alliance would field orders of magnitude more of the weapon in all its types, most famously under the command of Lieutenant Haider.
Alliance: Omni-blade & Omni-bayonet
Perhaps the most telling indicator of the brutality of the combat on Anhur was the role played by hand-to-hand fighting in the course of the campaign. By 2176, the personal kinetic barrier had become cheap and reliably effective at stopping a variety of small arms, leading to the defence becoming extremely commonplace. The faster firing weapons of the Geth War era and beyond had not been developed to counteract this trend, and disruptor mods for standard assault weapons remained extremely uncommon. What this meant in effect was that it was possible for either massed attacks or infantry advancing through cover to close with the enemy to the very smallest of distances. The batarians themselves had long predicted such a situation, using it both to justify the casualties of their wave tactics and to its true potential for winning battles. Most batarian soldiers were issued with swords or maces by 2176, as they were expected to use them. The Alliance's solution to the problem was only slightly more elegant.
After the hand-to-hand combat during the action in the New Omaha Pocket on Mindoir, the Army ordered the mass issue of close combat weapon programmes to all soldiers carrying omnitools, which effectively meant every combat-rated soldier that wasn't a biotic and every tech now had an extremely deadly blade at their disposal. In 2175, these were augmented with a new invention, the omni-bayonet, which attached easily to any weapon from the huge Rorsch Anti-Materiel Rifle to the concealable pistols carried by rear-echelon personnel. Both types manufactured a red-hot blade from an omnigel container and operated with a mass effect field, which could be tuned to simply hold it in place or to move it in a variety of deadly slashing or stabbing patterns.
The physical and psychological effect of these weapons was devastating in equal measure. The wounds inflicted by the weapon were almost always fatal, as blood loss tended to be excessive and bones often failed to deflect or stop the blades. The mental effects of an entire infantry regiment armed with these weapons charging down a position with walker or gunship support needs no great explanation. The soldiers serving the Na'hesit were considered extremely brave indeed to remain calm in the face of such a ferocious weapon, a testament to their professionalism and discipline.
Na'hesit: Jiris Fighting Vehicle
In 2157, the turians landed on the Alliance colony of Shanxi, a couple of weeks after the Battle at Relay 314, and were confronted by an expanded Alliance garrison under General Williams. The colony formally surrendered two weeks later, a matter of continuing controversy in Alliance circles, but not before inflicting heavy losses on the turians' equipment, particularly their vehicles. Alliance 'EMP' weaponry, more correctly described as electronic disruptor nanite dispersion weapons, disabled many of the turian anti-grav tanks and tank destroyers. The Turian Armoured Infantry Transport, or AIT, was particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, when the liberation came, it was found the more primitive tanks of the Alliance were able to match the turians far less well protected tanks in combat, despite their weaker kinetic barriers. The war exposed serious problems with the existing arsenal of turian vehicles, which had been finally been tested against a far more technologically sophisticated enemy than the krogan had ever been.
After serious debate at the very highest levels of the Turian Hierarchy's military, and with consultation with the very best of that state's engineers, the Jiris Fighting Vehicle was born. An anti-grav infantry fighting vehicle, the design incorporated all the great advantages of previous designs of all types. The Jiris would have the mobility of an anti-grav vehicle, the heavy armour of a tank, the long-range missile system of a tank destroyer, and the infantry transport capacity of an armoured personnel carrier. The design was a huge success in wargames and in operations against Terminus pirates. Too lucrative an opportunity to pass up, the Hierarchy authorised its export to trusted allies and key independent border colonies. Anhur was among the latter, and the Jiris became the bedrock of the Anhur Protection Forces' armoured and mobile forces.
The vehicle itself has kinetic barriers and composite armour for defences, vectored thrusters and an excellent mass effect core for propulsion, space for up to six soldiers in addition to its three crew, up to five machineguns for close-in anti-personnel work, and a missile system capable of hitting targets at twenty kilometres for its main armament. All of its equipment is tied into a complex VI-operated network, to allow maximum coordination of squadrons and for third-party targeting of its missiles. The speed of the vehicle is unimpressive for an anti-grav vehicle and its maximum altitude in 1G is low, meaning that it was operated much like the Orca or the Verush was.
Both the Protection Forces and the Coalition of the Free operated the Jiris during the Rebellion in the leadup to the invasion by the Alliance, gaining valuable experience in the process. The rebels generally had less examples to use, but were able to operate defensively and use the range of the vehicle's main weapon to maximum advantage. Against the Alliance, attempts to copy this strategy by the Protection Forces had some success, though these were primarily at the beginning of the invasion. If it wasn't for Alliance air superiority, the Jiris would have caused significantly more casualties and equipment losses than it did, and it would cause no small amount of either in the course of the action to come.
Na'hesit: Neurally-Controlled Drone Fighter
The Neural Control Interface is a system that allows a single pilot to operate multiple drone fighters at once in formation. It was developed by the asari during the Krogan Rebellions. Prior to its introduction, asari drone pilots could only pilot a single aircraft effectively in high intensity actions, and VI-assisted formations lacked the intuition and unpredictability of a real pilot. As a species, the asari do not reproduce fast enough to waste valuable persons in the high risk environment of a space battle, particularly in the most dangerous role of piloting a fighter directly. The krogan greatly outnumbered asari pilots in any engagement, and the asari found themselves at a severe disadvantage, particularly before the discovery of the turian empire. Thus, a technology that allowed a single pilot to coordinate a whole wing of fighters via her mind was extremely valuable, and was key to the victories that allowed the species to hold off the krogan long enough for them to be defeated and sterilised by the salarians.
The technology was and is not popular outside of asari-held worlds, for a variety of reasons. Despite each pilot's wing of fighters being keyed into their particular set of brainwaves, there were large but unsubstantiated claims that the FTL Commlink between controller and fighter could be hacked or disrupted. There was also a great deal of hesitation among non-asari to undergo the neural mapping and interfacing required. These superstitions did not bother the Na'hesit or the Anhur Protection Forces in the slightest. From the very foundation of the colony, its rulers expected its forces to be outnumbered eventually, either by a concerted effort by a Terminus coalition to overthrow it or by a push by the Citadel Council to integrate it more fully into their jurisdiction. The neurally controlled fighter was far too valuable a technology to pass up. It was found that batarians in particular were excellent at utilising the weapons, thought to be the result of their ability to track multiple objects with their four eyes.
The technology itself can be added to almost any spacefighter in existence, and the Protection Forces primarily used turian models of varying age and capability. The fighters were stationed on airfields, in specialised bunkers and on-board the escort carriers that had been constructed from merchant vessels. They would still be heavily outnumbered in the fight to come, but would play their part in making Anhur a costly battle for humanity. Alliance pilots would come to greatly respect their counterparts' skills, despite the lack of risk that the drone operators actually faced in battle.
Na'hesit: Kishock Harpoon Gun
The Kishock Harpoon Gun was a large anti-personnel sniper rifle, designed to fire large harpoon-shaped projectiles. These are capable of causing massive damage to the target's body, with the intention of bleeding him or her out before medical measures could be taken to save their life. Developed by the Batarian Hegemony after Mindoir on the recommendation of the infamous General Gadnalak, it was created to respond to two particular trends in military technology and tactics. With ever-more-effective combat medical equipment and biotech like medigel, more immediately lethal weapons were considered a priority by the General, and as a result, by the Hegemony as a whole. Kinetic barriers and their ubiquitous presence on the battlefields of 2176 and later meant that delivering lethal blows also meant contending with these defences. It was therefore decided that the best way to mate the solutions of these two problems was to create a powerful, 'bolt-action' sniper rifle.
The weapon was massively feared by Alliance troops for its range and lethality, just as intended. During the mercenary proxy conflicts fought during the inter-war period, both Alliance forces and their mercenaries encountered the weapon regularly. It was primarily employed on the defence, as due to its bulk. Very few had been issued to the troops that attacked Elysium, for instance, where it served primarily in the hands of the External Forces' units. Its reputation assured a devastating response should the shooter not remove themselves from the firing position after taking the shot. Alliance Army squads often sent their entire drone complements against snipers or called in artillery strikes to completely level complex terrain that allowed shooters to hide.
The weapon was also one of the few highly successful batarian exports. It was specifically exempted from Citadel protectionist tariffs so that asari commando units and private turian companies could purchase it. Its popularity was almost inevitable in the Terminus Systems, where its reputation for ending an opponent in a pool of their own blood gave it incredible gangster chic. The Na'hesit bought the weapon in large numbers primarily on the basis of its reputation in the Terminus, and the Protection Forces had faced it as often as they had used it by the time the invasion rolled in. It was not popular among the rank and file on Anhur however, due to its bulk and its inability to fire more than one shot before it needed a fresh heatsink.