Attack Dog: Overview

A mid-sized assault platform that acts as the main ground escort for Glacier. When hooked into the ARS Swarm intel network, Attack Dogs can coordinate among each other and quickly overwhelm enemy forces' blind spots due to their high level of speed.

Once the Sky Tyrant series was done, we needed a ground-based counterpart. Though during the initial design phase I noticed that despite the inclusion of Gray Conduits, Sky Tyrants were not the most expedient of drones. Their purpose was to be stable and accurate while shelling airborne threats, not run an obstacle course in the dark. It isn't like there's usually a lot of cover for enemy aircraft to duck behind up in the sky now is there?

I certainly wasn't creating an OS offshoot for the Sky Tyrant that'd handle ground warfare to such a degree, and I wasn't re-engineering the damn thing to be some kind of "mix and match" platform that could be adjusted on a case-by-case basis.

We needed mobility, speed and a substantial amount of firepower. Hence, we arrived at the creation of the Attack Dog series.

Our first order of business was determining what level of mobility was appropriate, and for that we had to sift through hundreds of combat logs and post-engagement reports. Generally, a large determining factor was the unit’s positioning or the ability to change position quickly (as is the case with all warfare but it’s still worthwhile to verify). Entrenched enemies or attackers with a favorable position tended to end up routed the moment their opponent found a way to get behind them.

I went with a reverse joint bipedal movement system, with a large emphasis placed on making the damn thing run as fast as possible. Our initial tests involved around eight to ten small scale prototypes, the forests of the Hammershell training ground, and about 40 GDS trainees. The instructions provided to the trainees were simple; they were to take mock weapons with infrared emitters and use them to attack a designated location. The location was guarded by the Attack Dog prototypes, who were likewise equipped with mock weapons. Both sides wore sensors that'd indicate if they'd been hit or not. Four hits and it was considered a kill.

The go button was hit, the experiment began, and the trainees were completely annihilated (in a simulated kind of way) within a handful of minutes. Once the threat had been recognized and communicated to the other Attack Dog prototypes, the trainees were overwhelmed after two drones held their attention as the other eight went around and got them from behind. Mind you, these prototypes were leaping over crevasses, pits and weaving between trees without being seen or heard.

Now we just had to scale that up to something absurdly large while maintaining the same speed and agility, all while fielding guns larger than most tanks. I brought out the equations I usually used, realized it wasn't going to apply in this situation, and proceeded to shelve the project for around three days while I went out into the mountains to hike and scream. For some godforsaken reason, the requirements of the project and the required armament for it to be effective simply didn't work with anything I've previously come up with.

Thankfully with my thoughts cleared I realized it wasn't as bad as I imagined it. In fact, it was downright easy. I took the plans, any associated requirements, and then made it all the problem of my legion’s mathematics department. They made the adjustments, did a significant amount of what I can only assume was the academic equivalent of churched up ass pulling, and it all checked out.

On paper we had a stable, bipedal drone platform that could shoot, run, and navigate like a chimp shot full of amphetamines.

In practice, we had ten small scale prototype frames that were leaking hydraulics and had been stuffed in a broom closet for the past month. Fabrication at Frostfall created our first full scale Attack Dog, we mounted some infrared mock weapons, and then wired it with a physics simulation system to mimic the expected recoil before taking it out for tests with these new stabilization adjustments.

The goddamn thing nearly did a backflip when the cannon fired, and the mathematics department was unsurprisingly unresponsive to my calls that day. After making the corrections myself, and nearly being sent to ASTR for it, our mock fire tests showed progress. And for some reason, once that had all be taken care of, the officers in charge of our mathematics department began answering my messages again.

Now in practice we had the perfect counterpart to the Sky Tyrant. After more successful mock tests and some live fire exercises, we ended up with the drone platform we were looking for. During the final verification exercises, the Attack Dog was shown to be capable of destroying 50 out of 50 armored targets, all spread out across the roughest terrain we could find. The final time clocked in at just shy of 5 minutes.

Once deployed to work in coordination with Glacier, the units would move in attack groups of 5 to 10 with each attack group supporting 3 Sky Tyrants. Anytime the ARS Swarm identifies an inbound threat that's crossed a certain engagement perimeter, you'd swear the Attack Dogs moved like a swarm of locusts to intercept and overwhelm. Because that's exactly what I programmed them to do. A bunch of rabid, feral locusts with chain guns, cannons and rocket launchers of a caliber that wouldn't be mountable on a tank.

- FrW Dr. Acris Baddarick