Apocalypse Taxi: Overview

The largest aerial transport within GDS, used for transporting armored divisions, Wyrok squadrons, and heavy drone platforms over intercontinental distances. Each Apocalypse Taxi has three squadrons of Mechanical Legion engineers and mechanics to do repairs, rebuilds or upgrades to vehicles and drones in transit. Being such a high value target, it cannot be deployed without at least six squadrons of fighters, gunships, and bombers to provide screening and defense.

We can start off with the largest aircraft we’ve got, because I often find myself on the receiving end of questions such as “Holy shit, why?” and “Was the goal to make a sensor profile larger than a mountain?”

The reason is simple: combat vehicles, drones and mechs take up a substantial amount of space.
To move them we need a transport that can handle that space requirement, thus we ended up arriving at the Apocalypse Taxi.
I can already see my office getting dozens of messages about shoving it all into a singular aircraft, thus creating the most high value skeet shot target to ever exist, so put down your info slate and keep reading.

When we originally approached the issue we had a few ideas on how to handle moving large amounts of armor with the least amount of hassle possible. In an ideal world we’d have the armor already staged at any location prior to an engagement or operation, but every time you try to facilitate an ideal scenario you need to account for someone (or a committee of someones) fucking it up. In that case, we needed a way to make that situation a non-issue. One of the original ideas was that we’d create a series of large VTOL cargo lifters, with our armored units being partially disassembled and placed into crates made specifically for their transportation. As an example, to move three Hard Irons we’d have the Mechanical Legion remove the turret, tracks, drive system, and unload any ammo. The parts would be sectioned off and sorted into categorized sections of the transport crate, then loaded onto the cargo hauler in sets of three tanks per aircraft.
The receiving base would then open the crates upon arrival and reassemble the tanks, just like when you get new furniture. The process would be similar for artillery, Wyroks, troop transports, and others.

The problem we had was that this rendered anything we sent inoperable until they could be reassembled, which made sending reinforcements to a position incredibly cumbersome. Not only did it take additional resources to get them working again, but reassembly could run into issues if it ends up rushed to get it out on the frontline as soon as possible. We’d deliver three tanks, but after a rush job by the mechanics due to an incoming threat, two of them have glitchy countermeasures and one of them has an auto loader that seizes up every five shots.
This also assumes we’d be sending armor towards a position that even has mechanics to get them assembled in the first place, or the facilities to do so.

That idea was tossed due to having too many variables, and we considered the next option.
For this one we’d forgo the disassembly process, but doing so would limit how many vehicles we could transport at once. Using the same theoretical cargo lifter, we’d be knocked down to only 2 or 1 armored vehicles per aircraft. Everything would arrive in a combat ready state, but we’d need to send far more transports per trip.
Bear in mind this isn’t exact math nor did we have a cargo lifter type design to work off of, it’s all just hypothetical speculation about options and any downsides they come with.

If we wanted deployment flexibility, and a larger carrying capacity per transport, we’d have to scale up. Our root idea was an aircraft where the Armored Legion could drive on a squadron, we move them somewhere, they drive off in a combat ready state.
If you’ve seen an Apocalypse Taxi before, you’ll already know that this quickly got out of hand.

Armored Legion wanted more transport capacity.
Mechanical Legion wanted onboard workshops.
Armored Legion wanted more operational range.
Mechanical Legion wanted mech bays for Wyroks.
We wanted more countermeasures and armor.
Armored Legion wanted accommodations for more unit types.
Fabrication wanted to kill us.
Science Legion, after we kept sending back more demands for the power plants and engines, wanted to kill us.
Iza, after the first 30 cost projections, wanted to kill me.
Myself, after being expected to make this thing both airborne and graceful, wanted to kill everyone else.

During one design meeting, I was asked how I expected my pilots to land this thing on the frontlines and drop off the Armored Legion without getting hammered by both AA and artillery due to the size. Two of my officers had to physically drag me from the room and take my sidearm away. The engines and powerplants had to fight against every force in the universe just to get this goddamn thing off the ground and people were asking me how to make it do precision maneuvers.

There was a time when Iza visited Gracepoint Mountain to check on the progress, and she asked if it was in the research complex we were flying towards. I had to make it clear that the “research complex” she saw was the actual Apocalypse Taxi itself.
She asked how we’re supposed store it in some kind of armored hangar to keep it secure, I said we can’t.
She asked how we’re meant to land it in unfavorable terrain, I said we cut the engines and let the weight solve that problem.
She asked what the operational cost was for a single dispatch of an Apocalypse Taxi and accompanying escorts, and I adamantly refused to answer.

The only reason I walked away from that day with my head still attached was explaining how we could turn this into a form of passive income. Simply put, we add in the option of “Rapid, overwhelming armor deployment” to any new or existing contracts.
We offer to deploy armor to any location they need it, in under a few hours, for a 15% increase to their current contract fees. To our surprise, nearly every single government found it to be a total bargain and went along with the fee increase without hesitation. This not only covered the costs of deploying Apocalypse Taxis, but covered the costs of numerous other projects as well.

Here's why I hope to God they never, ever choose to try and use that benefit.
_{Azan this is a training document, you’re writing a novel, edit this down. – Hansuke
And remove all this incriminating nonsense. – Hansuke}

An Apocalypse Taxi would be one of the most powerful logistical systems in existence, if it wasn’t for the fact these monstrosities are a complete clusterfucked migraine to deploy.

I always request at least two weeks of notice prior to any need for an Apocalypse Taxi, because that's how long we're gonna need to get everything in place. Bear in mind the number of fortresses and bases that can accommodate an Apocalypse Taxi or Eminence Hauler can be counted on one hand, so not just any location will do.

First of all we need to get the air crew ready, and they need to run their checks over the course of two whole days. Next, we have to send for 35 engineers and mechanics from the Mechanical Legion, ones who are fully qualified to work both on the aircraft itself and any cargo.

Now I could have the mechanics onsite at the fortress within six hours, that's not the hard part. The hard part is finding and wrangling the dumbasses, because mech heads seem to treat an Apocalypse Taxi detail as “airborne coffin duty” despite it having armor thicker than most heavy class tanks. You could hit it with a few SAMs and it’d still require consecutive, concentrated hits in one area to get through the outer hull.

All that done, we have to then move the cargo (tanks, drones, etc...) to the fortress for loading if they aren't already stationed there. Half the time I wonder if it'd be faster just to put them through the postal service, I figure all we'd need is a ridiculous amount of stamps. Once all of that is taken care of, life gets a little easier. We can take off and move the cargo anywhere within five hours' time, and if we need to go elsewhere then loading back up is easy since we’ve already got everything sorted out.

But that isn’t all.
These things don’t come with guns due to both issues of weight, space, and the fact the powerplants are redlining as is just getting its fat ass off the ground. We can’t throw in an entire gunnery crew, a few tons of ammo, and the power requirements to run the class of weaponry we’d want stuck on the hull to keep it safe. It has Aeroprene thread ports to act as countermeasures for shells, rockets, missiles and drone swarms, but that isn’t adequate.
Therefore deployment of an Apocalypse Taxi also means providing fighter escorts, so we need to send Dusk Sword jets for screening and interception, then we need Dawn Mace gunships to deal with any ground based anti-air systems. And because that wasn’t fun enough, we also need Wisps to act as recon on top of other aerial drone platforms to act as inner engagement zone defenses.

The fact I only required two weeks of advanced notice should be fucking lauded.

That all taken care of, an Apocalypse Taxi is an absolute godsend when immediate, overwhelming reinforcements are required. Imagine being in a Vanguard squadron, pinned down and surrounded. Then from behind, the sky is completely blocked out and in comes a transport the size of two Unified Empire aircraft carriers lined up end to end.

A transport which then proceeds to unload ten Armored Legion tank squadrons, six Wyroks, and thirty-five cracked-out mechanics pissed off that I demanded they do their jobs.