MysticWind
Warlord
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2008
- Messages
- 162
Vehicle Chassis: Hod
Monitor-Protector Trung Thi Hoang said:The standard frontline shagokhod is three to fifteen meters of space-age alloys wrapped around priceless parts atop two servo-encrusted pillars called legs. It is ungainly, prone to mechanical fault, and the largest, slowest target on a battlefield. But to a native, it is a demon that crushes your village, erasing the physical memory of all you have ever loved. And to a pilot, there is no greater thrill than in driving one, to tower over tanks, to swat down rockets, to make every step a weapon. It is the apotheosis of war. How like man to craft a god of death in his own image. - Letters from Kon Tum
The earliest shagokhod (Шагоход, Russian for “walker”) prototypes were built by Soviet pioneers as early as the 1960s, but the required technologies in power and propulsion did not arrive until the first quarter of the 21st century. Ranging anywhere from double a man’s height to fifty feet tall, these bipedal machines were touted for their ability to provide elevated mutual support without flight; increased sensory range due to clearer wireless reception and heightened line of sight; enhanced maneuverability including the ability to dodge, duck, and swivel; traversal over difficult terrain from muddy swamps to rubble-choked streets; and most of all, the sheer morale shock of facing a titan.
Golden Chinese Huàshān Brigade pilots posing in front of their ZSD-1 Metal Heaven shagokhods before the Southern Pacification Campaign of the Fourth Indochina War
Wondrous promises belied severe shortcomings. Prodigious size, slug-like speed, explosive reactor breaches, they were as much a hazard to their pilots’ comrades as they were to their pilots. But everyone from rear echelon brass to flag-waving civilians were enthralled by their imposing gaits, the romantic return of elite infantry in the form of giants. So they were kept on despite significant cost and liability. In time, mature militaries adapted to shagokhods with new combined arms doctrines utilizing them as one-man close support vehicles for ground forces. Canny commanders devised prudent counter-stratagems against artillery and to raid armor and attack helicopters. They soon saw action on all eight continents.
What’s in a name?
The name for the vehicle varied. British Imperial troops cheekily called them “Shaggies” - though over time, this became the label for the pilots, while the machines themselves were known to the Empire as “Shaggers.” In Japan, word corruption reduced it to “Shogo” among pilots, who themselves were then called “Shoguns.” This reflected a cross-cultural bravado: pilots, or ‘jockeys,’ were “Cossack” in the Soviet Union, “Chasseur” in the French Union, “Yantakāra” in India, “Tufohen” in Ghana, “Gaucho” in the Southern Cone countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Rio Grande do Sul), “Huaso” in Chile, and dozens more invocations of olden glories across the Earthsphere.
“Elevated Armored Ambulatory Vehicle” was shortened to Walker, then bitterly twisted to “Wrecker” by long-suffering Midwesterners who found their communities trodden underfoot by W-17 Rushmore sweeper squads in and after the Second American Civil War. Loyalist servicemen liked the sound and appropriated it for their beloved war machines. In the same vein, “Amb-Bam” was used by United States Up-Armored Cavalry occupation jockeys strolling through the gardens of Reconstruction. On the opposite side of the Pacific Rim, in 2054 Sony tried vainly to convince the JSSDF to rebrand its shagokhod pilots as “Walkmen” for the 75th anniversary of its iconic audio device, re-released as a modern datatape multi-player.
Commonly favored for its pithiness, “hod” was adopted by NATO as a standard abbreviation, and it stuck. “Mech,” from “mechanical,” is a TwenCen archaism, dropped after its conflation with mechanized infantry.
Hods benefited both sides of imperialism. Left - Iraqi Political Police search for dissidents in Basra, assisted by Soviet advisors in Brezhnev shagokhods. Right - Mgabata ng Disyerto fighters assemble in the Rub' al Khali, preparing to fight the petrol-emirs of the Triplet Cities
As the tactical implications of the shagokhod became better studied, the powers-that-be began increasingly adopting them for use cases other than actual cross-state warfare. Imperial establishments sent them on police actions and stabilization operations. Their looming figures and blinkless stares made up the silent face of a thousand occupying forces in colonial territories. Even law enforcement sent cop hods wielding waterjet cannons and tear gas launchers on psychological operations during times of large-scale civil disorder. In the lead-up to the launch of the Unity, the U.N. Security Forces themselves resorted to their own contingents of baby blue-painted shagokhods purchased from Soviet, American, or Japanese surplus to protect their fragile Space Elevator zones.
As technical schematics and surplus parts flooded the black market, non-state actors and the occupied began fielding hods of their own. Requiring far fewer personnel than a tank team, able to step over security blockades and minefields with ease, the hod was as stirring an icon for revolutionaries as it was for the regimes they fought. Though they required armies of technicians to maintain, hods were invaluable for hit and run raids, off-road flanking maneuvers, and capturing the imagination of entire peoples.
Planetfall, and after
Scarcely larger than Chevrolet-Monarch Powered Combat Suits, the Unity walker blurred the line between shagokhod and exo-frame
Despite lobbying from American defense contractors and Japanese industrial combines, few shagokhods were brought on the Unity mission. As weapons of war, their exclusion seemed as self-explanatory as the lack of tanks or fighter planes- not only were they resource-intensive, they signified a continuation of the same sad sins that drove humanity from the homeworld. Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida dissented but was shot down by mission planners, his calls for heavier firepower against alien threats unknown ignored. However, Chief Security Officer Rachael Winzenried did secure a miniscule cache of VB-451 Bronson armored sentinels, rebranded as the Unity walker.
Armed with a primary Tau Ceti V photonic cannon and anti-personnel nonlethal rounds, Unity walkers were supposedly able to go toe-to-toe with a rover, even a chopper. In practice, they were mostly unavailable or subverted during Planetfall. Traitor saboteurs disabled the walkers they could not access, and the ones they could pilot were used against the high-sensitivity areas they were intended to protect. Even then, they met opposition. U.N. Marines deployed CMC suits and Rambler-Crane B-9 Robby roller robots to blunt their might. During the Skirmish at the Lightmast, solartechs led by Powertech Lucero Eztli Salvador vanquished a Holnist-siezed walker by reflecting its laser back into itself with a replacement solar sail panel, then swarming it with pipes, crowbars, and wrenches. (This event would codify the “rediscovered” melee tradition of the Sons of Centauri-Ra.) Locked Unity walkers, preserved from the fray, were sent along with other mission vehicles in supply pods dispersed across Chiron, later found by factions and reigniting entire technological disciplines.
A New State NS-13 Murat shagokhod and a Tirailleur assault an enemy polar base. Note the use of Particle Impactor weaponry
While amateur public domain, open-sourced, or otherwise leaked blueprints were brought to Chiron in the Unity's massive data archives, no prototypes for extraterrestrial shagokhods were built until colonial society had progressed considerably, towards the "Pre-Sentience Age". Not until the advent of Portable Fission Reactors and Advanced Industrial Base were such war machines feasible for Planetary warfare. But when they were, they were a sight to behold.
Chironian shagokhods were a familiar beast of battle, with only slight modifications owing to the different planetary environment. Like everything else, they were rebalanced for greater gravity, leading to even larger unit weight and materials consumed. Most ran on reactors fueled by abundant thorium deposits, though biogas generators using methane were rigged up for deathtraps on the cheap.
In terms of official doctrine, these hods did not diverge far from their ancestors, intended to supplement infantry, speeders, bikes, copters, and heavier vehicles in a combined arms strategy. Though with the relatively underdeveloped state of factional militaries, they were frequently able to launch their own raids, even soloing entire bases by themselves. While overall slower than wheeled vehicles, hods could pass through rough terrain, even xenofungus fields, with minimal trouble. Their elevated height gave them further optical range and greatly reduced the benefits of their targets’ defensive cover, though it also grievously exposed them to artillery fire. Speeder-mounted artillery proved especially deadly against many an overconfident jockey who forgot that height made for easier aiming from swift OpFor as well.
In an oxygenated bunker, Restoration hod jockeys prep for anti-mindworm mission as psych chaplains minister
The first hods indigenous to Planet aided base garrisons against dangerous wildlife. Unity walkers salvaged from Supply Pods were rigged with flame guns and sent to drive off mindworm boils. Rumors that the extra armor and battlefield separation via instrumentation proxy would guard against xenosanity proved horrifically false. But the flamer hod did store greater amounts of fuel to burn out invasive aliens, as well as precious minutes of shielding against crawling death.
In the field, hods provided valuable reconnaissance and fire support to scout infantry. Their ability to traverse dense foliage, including xenofungus patches, sped up expeditions despite their slower-than-rover speeds. Liquidators used hods in defoliant work, clearing away hostile flora with greater protection than formers afforded. In a pinch, an unsalvageable hod could be overloaded and detonated, burning away acres of fungus. Because of this practice, and the general destructive nature of microcompact reactors going critical, Lady Deirdre Skye added hods to the list of Gaian proscribed technologies. Until the discovery of Green Locomotion, all hods except low-powered models remained banned among the Stepdaughters of Gaia for over a mission century.
Factional perspectives
Many claimed to be the first to reintroduce shagokhods, mirroring the invention of the telephone. As with proverbial victory, the hod had a thousand fathers. But there were many fences, and dogs, along the way. None of the mercantile factions and corporations were first to market. The Dynamic Enterprise, going through one of its manias of intracompany competition after the CEO gave a particularly stirring holiday party address on “internal entrepreneurship,” lost control of its shagokhod project after Morgan Robotics, Morgan Transport, and Morgan Microwave Oven Programming devolved into a probe war after divisional relations broke down.
No fewer than half a dozen companies of the Chiron Cartel had prototype hods in the works, but were stymied by litigation based on claimed prior art from NoxCo, Morgan Industries, and New Unity Industries. (The last from scrapped designs dating back to the Dai Seung Heavy Industries days.) This was further overcomplicated by over-earnest Marketeers promoting the Free Market Zone as a less regulation-heavy (yet somehow more property-protecting) framework for companies to file patents under, drawing injunctions from an irate Cartel government.
Governor Oscar van de Graaf was content to use the ancient Mitsubishi mobility platforms that he had brought for the original mission, jealously guarded and maintained by the Pilgrims since before Planetfall. These antiques were still piloted by the thrill-seeking ARC president now and then, and he tolerated no attempts to steal or copy them. During the race to reinvent the hod, the New Two Thousand enforced this intellectual property not with patent trolls, but with Regulator strike teams.
Spartan hods included Japanese humanoid designs and conventional variants- a Darkwing rear-facing knee joint heavy weapons hod on the left, and a Kong tetrapodal tools-capable support hod on the right
Colonel Corazon Santiago broke the Spartan Federation’s traditional Purism with a research pact with the University of Planet, offering researchers access to her expansive weapons development labs to resurrect the shagokhod. As much a political move to prevent internal mutiny as to prevent an external hod gap, she sweetened the pot by throwing in a crawler’s worth of Holnist unreliables for the provost’s human experiments. As Zakharov was seeking better relations with the Planetary Council, he decided to assign the captives as test subjects for social science research, to be overseen by the avatar of soft studies, Dean Adam Gieseler at Planetary Archives. (Gieseler, already uncomfortable with the faction’s grasp of ethics, did not take well to the assignment.) This yielded some promising prototypes, which both factions went on to develop separately. Unfortunately for Santiago, the price she paid with exiles only inflamed discontent from other Holnists and seditionaries, ultimately leading to the civil vendetta known as Garcia’s Revolt. But at least the Spartan loyalists had hods to fight with.
Oracle scouts in replica Unity-era suits follow a DEC-8 Talos into the wild. Each explorer receives full-spectrum data from the hod courtesy of Total Battlelinks
Mediator Johann Anhaldt said:My critics claim my love for this program is proof that I may yet harbor a shred of species narcissism. They misunderstand- the beauty in building a machine modeled after man is so we may make use of all our vast knowledge of biomechanics, anthrophysics, and physiology to iterate upon known systems. Just as with intelligence, no need to invent out of whole cloth what evolution has already bootstrapped for us. - MorganLink 3DVision documentary show Hod Shots
No faction was more enthusiastic about the rebuild of shagokhods than the Digital Oracle. Already committed to robotic technologies and cybernetics, Mediator Johann Anhaldt committed his scientists on a program to create a true child of the atom. Built under the direction of the greatest minds of the Oracle, it would boast gifts from its three magi: Energy Director Daoming Sochua devised its cutting-edge reactor and power systems, with a clean output beyond any preexisting vehicle known to date. Director of Industrial Mechanization Sylvia Gauss, the former Chief Roboticist of the Unity, designed the machine from its circuitry to its servos to the polish of its outer paneling. And finally, even the elusive Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, leader of the community known as the Cybernetic Consciousness which had settled within the Oracle, had contributed by implementing a never-before-seen network protocol that could transmit and process immense amounts of data from hod-to-hod.
The DEC-8 Talos could traverse Planet’s landscape at a maximum speed of eighty kilometers per hour. It was equipped with a 20mm caliber railgun and a wide array of anti-shagokhod weaponry, including an EMP module that it was shielded against. The mysterious algorithm from the Algorithm, dubbed the Total Battlelinks, made communications seamless, allowing pilots to exchange live information with infantry, speeders, even aircraft and home base.
The only thing it was missing was pilots. As the faction was not renowned for vehicular derring-do, let alone military expertise, Anhaldt attempted to find staff elsewhere. A contract with the Emporium via the Imperial Military Focus legacy brand fell through, as Brigadier James Heid suddenly decreed that the Warmongers would not be using hods for combat purposes, even under pay. Thus, Anhaldt turned to the Prime Function once more. Aki Zeta-5 provided him AI assistance software that aimed to turn every novice into a true hod jockey. Adaptive programming installed in each Talos unit parsed the data, learned from it, and could invent new strategies to advise its pilot. It could even do the same from the data received by other telemetry points, that is anyone in communication with it. Each hod became a powerful mobile data processor.
When unveiled to wider colonial society, Anhaldt’s creation gave shagokhods a new alias: “shoggoth.” Named for the monstrous creature of ancient stories, the slang captured the hysterias that the Talos manifested within the Planetary population. Fears of Aki’s Cyborgs were already widespread; that they were now empowering giant warbots of unknown capabilities gripped the datalinks. Their ability to assimilate and propagate information terrified data-doomers. Were these simply hods or pods that turned their drivers into unthinking automatons? The threat of imminent cyber-takeover panicked the factions, and even demands for a full audit of its software were made before the Planetary Council. Urban legends further alleged that the machines were coated with a mysterious nanopaste that could cause them to self-repair and even self-replicate, which Sylvia Gauss meticulously debunked with a wistful sigh. Adam Gieseler would later write that the Talos Panic had all of the hallmarks of a modern techno-myth. Yet after all of the hub-bub had died down, military leaders clamored to buy- or steal- the new hod. And even if later actual battles would prove otherwise, for a time, the bookish actuaries of the Digital Oracle had made the ultimate deterrent.
Notes
Intro quote inspired by the Acquisitions Entry for Mechs from Brigador.
Shagokhod is both a variant name of the vehicle from Metal Gear Solid 3, and appears to be a generic term for walking machine in Russian. Use of its abbreviated term follows SMAC’s convention for (terra)former, (hydro)foil, (heli)copter, etc.
ход, or “hod,” simply means “to walk” in Russian. A war weapon named for a nondescript diminutive perhaps mirrors the etymology of tank and some of its non-English equivalents. Coincidentally, a hod is also a large container (for construction materials, even sometimes for water), and means “splendour, majesty, vigour” in Hebrew.
Mount Hua, one of the five sacred mountains of China, was regarded as the dominion of Xiyue Dadi, named “King of the Metal Heavens” by Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang.
“Mgabata ng Disyerto” is Tagalog for “Children of the Desert.”
The idea of thorium fission being a major power source on Planet comes from nweismuller’s Let's Settle a New World in... Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Let’s Play.
Drago is a reference to Ivan Drago, the “Siberian Bull.”
Image Credits
Opening image is the Touro as depicted in retro tribute Brigador ATARI Icon by papirnehezek
Soldiers in formation in hangar from MissionForce: CyberStorm, the specific Herc is the Remora
Blueprint from Battlefield 2142
Occupation forces assisted by Leo mobile suits, Maganac Corps desert group photo from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
The Unity Hod is the System Shock 2 Security Robot
Combat walker and soldier in snow from Battlefield 2142
Trench troops readying powered suits from The Animatrix - The Second Renaissance Part II
Two mechs are the Duck and the Ape variants of Marauders from Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles
Large walker with soldiers in background is the Powered Suit from GODZILLA: Planet of the Monsters
Further Reading
Mecha and the Male Fantasy, The Bellman
Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I., New York Times