BLACK PANTS LEGION ON THE FUCKING SUPER URBANMECH
( youtube video plays )
( deep gravelly voice begins)
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(sigh)
The fucking Super Urbanmech.
I know, I deliberately chose not to talk about it when we did the Urbanmech episode, and oh boy did
you all send me so many angry comments about that.
First off all, screw you.
And second, I really didn't want to get into this fucking thing.
The fucking Super Urbanmech. In many ways, the fucking Super Urbanmech is a mech that shouldn't
work. It is the worst of the Star League's excess and brain bugs brought into the modern age. It's like
someone looked at the Urbanmech, decided 'that's not good enough' and instead of setting for 'good
enough' went so far off into batshit insane territory that it is a miracle that they actually ended up with
a mech instead of sugar-and-cocaine-pixie sticks. Which they probably were eating and getting high
on anyway.
To understand the fucking Super Urbanmech, we need to first talk about the Eridani Light Horse.
When Kerensky left the Inner Sphere, taking practically the entire the SLDF in all their troops and all
their mechs and all their warships, some units decided to remain. Some joined up with the other
Houses, attracted by promises of high pay and elite treatment. Others became mercenaries, selling
their services to the highest bidder. Some, like the Eridani Light Horse, started with noble intentions
to preserve the ideals of the Star League until the time the SLDF might see fit to return.
This, as should be obvious, was a terrible idea. Literal children would be less delusional and idealistic.
...
( - Snip Eridani Light Horse History Lesson here - )
...
So now… it's thirty-twenty four.
Something fucking happened in thirty-twenty-four, and that's when the Super Urbanmechs came out
and the Eridani Light Horse came into their fucking renaissance like some fucking Disney Princess riding
on a white horse. For some fucking reason, the Eridani Light Horse stopped being this elite but still
cash-limited unit that was practically primed for Company Store policy into something that one had
to wonder WHY they still chose to maintain the illusion they were under the EMPLOY of House Davion.
The Eridani Light Horse built new regiments overnight. Of Super Urbanmechs.
They got new DropShips. Which the Super Urbanmechs flew in on.
They got new JumpShips. Which brought the DropShips that carried those Super Urbanmechs.
And then, it turns out they had actual fucking WarShips disguised as civilian JumpShips, because
sometimes you need more than just some fucking Super Urbanmechs to be taken seriously.
Whether the Eridani Light Horse really were the vanguards to the remnants of the Terran Hegemony
out there, or that they were reactivated elements of SLDF, this was never decisively revealed. When
the Clans came around and the Wolf's Dragoons admitted that they were all actually children of
Kerensky, that the SLDF had turned from this great and competent military force into a bunch of
cosplaying motherless furries, this traumatized so much of the Inner Sphere that still just had the
childish hope that if the SLDF came back the good old days could be there again. Make the Inner
Sphere great again.
It was emotionally devastating.
Except to the Eridani Light Horse.
As if they fucking knew all along.
Why they chose to use the fucking Super Urbanmech to crash-train the Inner Sphere to deal
with Clan-like combat no one knows. Some theorize that their hidden Hegemony backers were only
willing to give them technology that could not be used against them. Some believe that it should be
taken for what it is. An insult.
It remains one of the most enduring fucking mysteries of modern history.
...
It is weird as hell that such a watershed moment in history derives all the way to the appearance of
these fucking things. They put all their hopes on the fucking Super Urbanmech. Lacking the mobility
of a fast light mech or the armor protection of a trooper medium mech, fucking Super Urbanmech pilots
can expect their smallest mistakes in combat to be punished. They would die. A lot.
And they did. Die. A lot.
But just as it turned out to have essentially limitless stocks of these fucking Super Urbanmechs, so
were there limitless numbers of young people who wanted to become MechWarriors. Because if
there was one thing the SLDF knew how to do… it was good PR.
The Eridani Light Horse had that good PR. They had centuries of being the poster boy for being the
top and most professional mercenary unit until Wolf's Dragoons arrived in the Inner Sphere.
The Eridani Light Horse began recruiting while blatantly flying the flag of the Star League. They
recruited from the Davion outback, those poor ignored and uneducated worlds of the Federated
Suns. Hell, those people probably would have joined up just for good food and clean water.
But the Eridani Light Horse didn't just talk about war. In thirty-twenty-five they brought out the
DEMETER CORE, a complete easy-to-read, easy-to-understand database about the Star League's
terraforming capabilities, their machinery, how to build them, how to repair them, and gave them
to everybody.
Fucking everybody.
They gave it to Comstar first because Comstar PR is about helping the Inner Sphere and preserving
or well, worshipping technology, as a guarantee that the DEMETER CORE has a clean copy. This also
meant that if Comstar messed with the information, it could be checked against the copies given
to everybody else.
The Eridani Light Horse gave the core to House Davion, their ertswhile employers. They gave the
core to House Steiner, personally to Archon Katrina Steiner herself, banking on their one hundred
and fifty years of service before they abandoned the Lyran Commonwealth for Davion employment
after finally having enough of the rank incompetence of their social generals. They gave it to House
Marik. They even walked brazenly into Sian and presented Maximilian Liao with the core, regardless
that House Davion and House Liao were at war, because as they pointed out – the Eridani Light Horse
was one force that had yet at all to fuck with House Liao. The fact that they had been fighting other,
more dangerous, states went unstated.
They went to the Periphery, and gave the core for free to the Outworlds Alliance. They went to the
Magistracy of Canopus. Even knowing that claiming to be part of the SLDF would likely get them
killed, the Light Horse delivered the core to the Taurian Concordat.
They gave it to everybody. Except House Kurita.
House Kurita could go suck a bag of dicks. If they want it, they should go steal it from the others, like
they were going to do anyway.
Heh. Heh. Heh. That's one thing you can respect about the ELH. They really hate the shit out of the
Draconis Combine.
After a long long time, priceless lifesaving technology was no longer lostech. Worlds had starved and
been made uninhabitable since the fall of the Star League. Wars were fought over spare parts. Entire
populations barely able to sustain themselves or improve their living conditions due to the harsh
conditions imposed by their worlds, forever trapped in the cage of poverty.
Now nobody had a monopoly on that knowledge.
Needless to say, Comstar was losing their shit.
But that is for another time.
...
So when the Eridani Light Horse called for people to ride their fucking deathtraps, they were answered.
In the thousands. In the tens of thousands.
And ride they did and die they did, and waves after waves of fucking Super Urbanmechs could beat
fucking anything. They tried this against everything, including the fucking Clans, and it annoyed them
as much as I do to prove that with enough fucking Super Urbanmechs you could in theory accomplish
fucking anything.
That is the legacy of the fucking Super Urbanmech. Like the Star League before it, to send tens of thousands
of young boys and girls with big dreams out to die in the meatgrinder of war in search of false glory.
But they send House Kurita and the Clans into mad frothing rage, so that's gotta count for something.
...
What makes the fucking Super Urbanmech so effective? Not good. Not bad. But effective.
Because as much as I hate to admit it, in the right hands, they are.
If you look at it from the outside, they don't have much to distinguish themselves from your regular
Urbanmech. Big gun on the right, peashooter on the left. That dumpy dome on a tube and big flat fleet.
The changes are internal.
Your regular Urbanmech is a painfully slow machine able to amble along at top speed of thirty-two
kilometers per hour on a rated sixty fusion engine that weighs a paltry one and half tons. The
designers of the fucking Super Urbanmech ripped that out and replaced it with a one-fifty rated fusion
engine that weighs three tons. Now the mech famous everywhere for being slow as shit can run at crisp
eight-six kilometers per hour.
Absolutely fucking no one was prepared for this. No one even considered it would be possible.
Who would waste an Extra Light Engine on a fucking Urbanmech?
But whoever was supplying the Eridani Light Horse with these fucking things did, and with those
freed tons they were able to give an ER PPC. No, not your regular PPC, an Extended Range PPC. Like
mint fucking Star League grade PPC. These things could outrange fucking LRMs, at cost of just
terrible heat production. They also lacked the minimum range problems that restrict regular PPCs,
so now they're as good as much in your face as shooting at you from the fucking horizon.
But that means they just gave the fucking Super Urbanmech Double Heat Sinks because why not.
And because these double strength heat sinks could sink the heat of an ER PPC, they stuck a
Medium Pulse Laser on the other arm in case it wants to backstab somebody. With its two Jump
Jets allowing it to jump sixty meters, it can do just that.
Its armor is six tons of advanced Star League Royal-grade Ferro Fibrous armor. Enough to fully
protect its frame, but in the end it is still a light mech with all that fragility that implies.
Finally, it packs a Guardian ECM suite to make it more difficult for the enemy to find it, shoot at it,
or use sophisticated electronics in its presence. It has a TAG – target acquisition gear – to mark
enemies for special munitions.
It is an overteched expensive boondoggle of a mech that has no business doing as well as it
should, but if – and I remind you – if and only used by competent hands, they would be able to
stand up to mechs twice their size with proper team tactics.
And like it or not, that's what they did. The fucking Super Urbanmech had sheer speed and surprise
on their side, and in the hands of the Eridani Light Horse they ripped through the Draconis Combine
Mustered Soldiery. Even the Wolf's Dragoons found them hard to counter.
The Eridani Light Horse only got so far because they were some of the most practiced combined
arms forces in the Inner Sphere. They knew how to leverage speed, firepower, and battlefield
psychology. They were among the elites of elites. It would be unfair for others to think they could
do the same just because they happened to pilot the same type of stupid walking trashcans.
...
The Super Urbie.
This variant was built by House Davion. It completely lacks and all advanced technology and is
a perfectly reasonable example of 'good enough'. It's still able to go as fast. It only carries a single
PPC and a single Medium Laser, but those weapons also produce a much lesser heat load that single
heatsinks could barely keep up with.
While not as bonkers, and did require some careful piloting, the use of a PPC instead of an AC/10
significantly eased logistics concerns while doing roughly the same damage. Double Heat Sink
upgrades later made them almost effortless to use.
Some say that this was drafted on the suggestion of Hanse Davion himself.
...
Now, the existence of fucking Super Urbanmechs was troubling for House Liao. Because they actually
owned one of the two remaining Urbanmech factories in the entire Inner Sphere. And Urbanmechs were
starting to appear as valuable salvage because people could take them, bring them into Davion space,
and upgrade them into a Super Urbie.
House Liao's industry could not match Davion, and so their retool of their production line to make
their Urbanmechs more relevant on pain of excution was the Improved Urbanmech Liao. Not as fast,
only able to move up to fifty-four kilometers an hour – nor as powerful, only carrying a Large
Laser – it ended up also being very effective, perhaps even more effective than its Davion counterpart.
It was cheap. Incredibly so. It turned out you could buy one for little more a Locust.
The Large Laser had the same range bracket as the AC/10 of an Urbanmech, and the brace of
three Medium Lasers on the left arm could not be fired at the same time or suffer overheating. But
this meant that the Improved Urbanmech was not as dependent on one big punch and helpless
once its arm is shot off. It surprisingly became even more useful in its defined role – urban combat.
...
So is that the secret of the fucking Super Urbanmech? Go fast. Carry a big gun.
That's nothing special. You could do the same with a Medium Mech. The Griffin 1N, for example, it does
all the same things and no one's calling it some wonder mech.
But the thing is, the Eridani Light Horse?
They cheat. They cheat a lot.
They act like a real military force should, which means piling as many advantages on your side as
possible before engaging in actual combat. It just so happens that they happen to be on the chassis
of a fucking Super Urbanmech.
You know that the Urbanmech can carry an Arrow IV launcher at great sacrifice. So can the fucking Super
Urbanmech and it also needs to make significant compromises. For one thing, it is slower, able to
go only up to fifty-four kilometers per hour – assault mech speeds. It needs to use an Endo Steel
skeleton. It only has three instead of six tons of armor.
But in exchange it is something that can throw ten rounds of full-sized artillery missiles from outside
of the combat radius. It can pack the full arsenal of Arrow munitions, from homing missiles, cluster
warheads, even air-defense Arrow artillery.
This was actually how the Eridani Light Horse beat Natasha Kerensky. They tagged her and then beat
the shit out of her with guided artillery. Turns out it doesn't matter how good of a pilot you are, when
they could just blast everything in the ground you're occupying. It may even be a testament to just
how absurdly good or lucky Natasha Kerensky is, that she survived that unfair bullshit.
Artillery is the king of the battlefield, but always it has been limited by the bulk and the slow pace and
inability to cross inconvenient terrain by the artillery pieces. The Super Urbanmech AIV for the first
time is able to accompany a battle formation at more than reasonable speeds and hot-drop
anywhere. Air power can be challenged by anti-air arrow munitions.
While conventional tube artillery still have so much greater range and is much safer far behind the
battle lines, and typically with more shots, missile artillery can arrive sooner for fire support and can
use specialty munitions such as laying down minefields or homing missiles. With homing missiles in
play any unit that has a tag can contribute to killing an Assault Mech no matter how small they are.
This is so fucking effective that it enrages me that the Hegemony tried to put a cannon on a
mech – the Heliopolis – instead of missile artillery with comparatively much lower recoil and that it
had to be on a fucking thirty-ton Super Urbanmech instead of something more reasonable – like
a medium mech.
Why this chassis in particular?
...
So now that we know that the Light Horse could drop artillery on your command center anytime
they fucking wanted, what more bullshit could a Super Urbanmech do to you?
How about fucking with your communications, monitoring the entire battlespace from kilometers
away, directing fire support strikes from artillery and air, and coordinating a battalion-level force?
There's this Super Urbanmech designed specifically for battlefield command, control and
communications. Someone out there knew precisely that information wins battles and the one that
knows first also moves best. Instead of a PPC it carries a pair of Medium Pulse Lasers. It is slightly
faster than your regular fucking Super Urbanmech. Everything else goes into communications, sensor
dispensers, and information management electronics. This thing could pass information from
one Super Urbanmech information node to another in one uninterrupted chain to let commanders
coordinate a force many tens or even hundreds of kilometers around instead of the usual pockets of
conflict that the Inner Sphere was used to.
This little thing had comm gear good enough to hack satellites and communicate with orbiting
dropships. This was a literal game-changer, and no one realizes just how much of the Eridani Light
Horse's victories may have been due to this information recycler sitting in the back as much as their
PPC-throwing battlemechs up front.
...
That's what happened. The fucking Super Urbanmech was fast. And due to its simple uncomplicated
shape could be endlessly modified with only minor inconvenience.
Fucking Super Urbanmechs became a plague on the Inner Sphere. Not only were they being produced
in functionally limitless number, with Davion buying up as many of them as could be produced, people
were steadily being motivated to be... inventive. You had variants popping up all over the place.
And the more the Eridani Light Horse were being taped going from victory after victory, the more
people believed that these fucking things were on a winning formula.
Swarm tactics and the continued insult made the Draconis Combine try with a Super Panther and
a Super Jenner, but as much as they try they couldn't just match that 'secret sauce' that made them
punch above their weight.
To be fair, as long as you bought the Mass Production Davion version, they were cheap. They were,
for their size and cost, quite effective. You get the firepower and speed of a medium with almost the
same levels of armor at half the price.
But they were still the worst sins of the Star League and their procurement process brought back
into the Inner Sphere's consciousness and made popular again.
They encourage for an unattainable ideal, always a little more improvement, always a little more
optimization, instead of settling for 'good enough'. They praise taking risks and complex multi-
formation maneuvers, instead of simple hard-to-fuck-up plans that anyone can carry out. They
come out with new variants and chassis – the Super Urbanmech II at 40 tons, then the Knight
Urbanmech at 60 tons, then the Lord Urbanmech at 80 tons, as if they were a toy run or something.
There are always options and always something new to try. If you don't win then you clearly didn't pay
enough in cbills or in lives or experiment time or want it hard enough to happen.
Frustratingly no one can just say 'this is a bad mech'. But it can be used badly. We talked about the
Warhammer and why it stands the test of time, being continually produced because it is a perfect
example of 'good enough' that works precisely the way it is meant to, without fuss and without
unnecessary spending. The fucking Super Urbanmech is produced in great numbers simply because it
is. Its costs are low due to high volume, so more people find them easy to acquire. Because they're easy
to acquire, they have great access to spare parts and equipment. This means they are easily modified
and maintained. That means they get more demand from second line militia and every two-bit mercenary
that wants something – anything – better than a Locust.
They have civilian versions.
They have brawlers.
Seriously, someone put arms on an Urbanmech and that just looks so wrong.
They have missile boats.
They have actual boats. Urbanmech Marine versions.
Everything you could possibly chuck into a 30-ton frame, you could do it.
The only price you have to really pay is that your pilots are still, at the end of it, riding a 30-ton frame
that they are being led to believe can throw down with heavy mechs as long as its pilot is badass enough
with the cojones to try.
Most of the time, if you just throw the enemy's weight in fucking Super Urbanmechs at them this
actually fucking works. Even against the Clans this works, even if you might need to throw triple their
tonnage at them.
But one on one?
Those poor boys and girls just fucking die, for the equivalent of a fucking commercial.
(music and outro fades)
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DISCOUNT DAN's Super Urbanmech SUPER SALE
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(egregiously cheery salesman voice begins)
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Hey there, it's me again, DISCOUNT DAN!
I heard you want Urbanmechs. Super Urbanmech.
I got 'em. I got 'em for DAYS. I got them FOR YEARS.
You want a Super Urbanmech that can run eighty six kph and surprise the hell out of people? TAKE TWO.
You want a lance? I can give you BATALLION. Come over to DISCOUNT DAN'S, I can give you a good deal
on a REGIMENT.
Super Urbies with PPCs. With Large Lasers. Missiles. Flamers. Arrows. Crossbows. Tomahawks. Shivs. Urbies
that can run. Jump. Kick. Swim. Dance. Make sweet love to your mother. I got 'em.
You can do anything you want with them. You know how roomy an Urbanmech's cockpit is, don't cha?
You want a walking hotel, you got it. Imma pimp your ride. You know how the ladies love a MechWarrior.
Can you have sex in it? Yes of course you can. Can you have sex with multiple people in one? Hell yeah
you can. How about animals? As long as your money is good, I don't judge, you filthy degenerate.
DISCOUNT DAN, can I swap my Locust for a Super Urbanmech?
SURE YOU CAN! I'll take it. I'll take ANY MECH you can give me. SWAP ALL DAY EVERY DAY. I got so many
Urbanmech it's an army of them. An Urban population of them. Sometimes at night I can hear them move,
crowding to pray to their embryonic UrbGod.
BUY BUY BUY SOME URBANMECHS! YOU CAN'T MISS THESE PRICES! THEY'RE UNREAL!
COME OVER TO DISCOUNT DAN'S SUPER URBANMECH EMPORIUM!
⁽ᶠᵒʳᵐᵉʳˡʸ ᵁⁿᶜˡᵉ ᴮᵘᶜᵏʸ'ˢ ᵁʳᵇᵃⁿᵐᵉᶜʰ ᴱᵐᵖᵒʳᶦᵘᵐ, ᵃˡˡ ᵖʳᶦᵒʳ ᶜᵒⁿᵗʳᵃᶜᵗˢ ᵃⁿᵈ ˡᵃʷˢᵘᶦᵗˢ ᵃⁿᵈ ʷᵃʳʳᵃⁿᵗᶦᵉˢ ᵛᵒᶦᵈ. ᴮᵃᵗᵗᵉʳᶦᵉˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ᶦⁿᶜˡᵘᵈᵉᵈ.⁾
Where the word is, THE DEAL IS *SUPER*!