Dawn Mace: Overview

The metaphorical sledgehammer of the Aeronautical Legion, the Dawn Mace gunship is used for wiping out just about any target that resides on the ground, whether that be entire armored detachments, heavily defended convoys, or entire bases. When deployed in conjunction with Dusk Sword escorts, a Dawn Mace squadron can rapidly eradicate enemy strongholds and maintain area dominance from the sky as allied ground forces move in to claim territory.

So help me God, if I have to hear “IYAAYAS” one more goddamn time I’m going to do everything in my power to mothball the entire Dawn Mace fleet.
Back in the Unified Empires air force we all knew without a shadow of a doubt, that Ammo were some of the most unfathomably retarded mouth breathers to ever disgrace the flightline, and I am simply amazed any of them had the mental capacity to so much as walk upright. Every week the base ended up with a curfew or some lockdown, and every week it’s because some orangutan from Ammo was up to their usual deplorable shit out in public. We had a record 31 DUIs in a single month, and imagine my fucking surprise, 80% of them were due to some glue eating fuckstick in Ammo.
We used to have earnest, hand on the heart debates about getting rid of Ammo and then just flying our jets into the targets directly. Those debates were always so very close to the edge of unanimous agreement, because turning our entire fleet into a bunch of expensive suicide bombers was far more preferable to the continued existence of Ammo.
A non-zero number of pilots in my squadron were more than willing to lawn dart into a building if it meant we’d ensure the total erasure of Ammo from the face of the planet.
Fuck Ammo.

I left the Unified Empires air force, I did everything right, I reached the apex of my career here, and yet Ammo still followed me to GDS and now act as the main supporters for our Dawn Mace gunships. The only victory I can claim is that I’ve struck Ammo as a job title, now they’re called Gunnery Aircrew and “IYAGAYAS” makes them at least marginally hesitate before getting it tattooed on their ass.
_{I can’t fucking breathe. – Nahli
Edit out this entire section and go see a chaplain you absolute child. – Hansuke}

Ignoring their support crew for now, Dawn Maces are one of the best ways for us to rack up an ammo bill and a kill count at a speed that’d make your eyes water.
They aren’t efficient, and they aren’t meant to be.
We created Dawn Maces to fulfill the role of a rapid, heavy assault aircraft that could provide fire support or quickly close in and take out enemy fortifications ahead of a ground force. We could technically use Entropy bombers for those same purposes but we needed something that can fit in that middle ground area, something we could station at a forward operating base that could handle everything that doesn’t warrant a precision bombing run.
Our pilots are the best, but nobody on the ground wants to hear “Danger close fire support incoming via 10 to 20 block busters”.

Therefore, we needed a gunship. Our initial outline of the design started off relatively tame:

· VTOL, rapid deployment, supersonic.

· Heavily armored.

· Main gun, withering level of firepower.

· Rockets, missiles for handling armored targets.

· Two crew, pilot and gunner.

I worked alongside some researchers and specialists from the Science Legion, got Dr. Baddarick involved whenever possible, and within two months we had a simplistic prototype that fit all the criteria above. The testing trials took place at our Gracepoint Mountain fortress, where it performed exactly as needed. In fire support scenarios, the singular Brass-Ravager class plasmatic chaingun could easily wipe out attacking forces and whatever cover they tried to hide behind. In assault scenarios, the prototype managed to disable 8 out of 24 vehicles in a convoy before needing to fly back and re-arm. With a standard squadron of three Dawn Maces, that meant it was a perfectly acceptable result.
Great trial all around, good result, time to send it off for final adjustments and then on to fabrication of the final design.
However, one of my engineers was infected by what I can only describe as an evil brain parasite that took over her frontal lobe and made her utter the sentence “What if we asked for more funding?”.

It's not like we needed it, in fact the cost projections showed that by the end we’d only be using 84% of our budget for the research phase. Adding another gun to the Dawn Mace would be nice for redundancy, even though more than one main gun would give diminishing returns.
At the time, I could think of a few “nice to have” improvements so sure, I went back to Iza and requested more funding. And then I did that about four more times.
I have no idea how it kept working.
_{Defense departments in other countries kept incurring contract violation fines, and if I’m going to throw legionnaires into a hovering AA target I’d prefer to not skimp out on anything. – Iza}

Eight months later, our design now had:

· VTOL, rapid deployment, Gray Conduits, hypersonic flight.

· Armor that’d be more at home on a main battle tank.

· Four plasmatic chainguns, which when fired all at once require the engines to be kicked up to prevent the gunship from being knocked off target. Guns which, as God is my witness, vaporized a 200-ton block of steel reinforced concrete in 10 seconds flat.

· Four plasmatic anti-armor cannons, which required even further engine adjustments.

· Two plasmatic shotgun cannons to handle spread out enemies.

· Enough rockets and missiles to wipe out three armored convoys, their reinforcements, and then two enemy fortifications for good measure.

· Passive and active countermeasure systems.

· Two crew, a pilot and gunner, who after numerous ammo storage additions are on the verge of using the gunship’s internal magazines as seats.

We ended up having to redesign the powerplant, the engines, and a host of other internals to compensate for the frankly absurd number of armaments we’d tacked onto it. The trials for this one at Gracepoint Mountain made it abundantly clear that we’d created a plasmatic bullet, shell, rocket and missile hose that just so happened to be capable of flight. When a Dawn Mace unloads on a target, I can guarantee that it will be wiped from existence to such a degree that nothing will ever grow on that patch of land again. We once made the news after a Dawn Mace strafed a rebel garrison during a conflict in Sinsedia. From what I’m told, all of the rebels there were listed as MIA instead of KIA, as nobody could find a single trace of them afterwards to confirm their deaths.

It's because of this that the Vanguard Legion have grown to absolutely love the Dawn Mace, as nothing brings joy to the heart of a frontline legionnaire than being pinned down and hearing the unmistakable roar of my legion going into debt by the second. To illustrate this, I once played the sound of the Dawn Mace’s chainguns firing in the Gracepoint Mountain mess hall.

The Vanguards, instinctively, all started making ape noises.

-FrW Azan Kinrados