Sign In
Create Account
Background:
Once freelancers turned against their once-contractor merchantmen, using the Muller chassis to inflict heavy casualties upon the supply lines and cutting off many convoy routes across what is left of Illal, it wasn't long before Prosk and Sentium quickly scrambled to halt the incursions, using beefier escorts to halt the Raider's original reign of terror by making it extremely risky to attack supply vehicles in any attempt to loot them. However, there were many people that were far more desperate for the goods than either company realized, and the graveyards full of the Raider chassis simply piled up after the raids were prime pickings for scavengers in order to find parts for their own cobbled-together axes.
Some of those desperate folk happened to be what little remained of Crion after Prosk's very ill-timed raid upon the small lab which contained the Hawken virus, attempting to eke out a living but with no way to even retrieve technology in an attempt to stop the spread of the Giga Structure across Illal. What mechs they originally had were very poorly suited to becoming axes, most used in hazardous environments with very little in the way of protection and made strictly for labor. However, there were fields of fallen axes which more than likely had parts ripe for the picking, oftentimes left to rot because it was far easier to replace them than it was to retrieve their husks among the dangerous fields of no man's land between Prosk and Sentium fronts. For the Crion engineers, it was a perfect breeding ground for a new mech to help them break their grave situation.
Parts were scavenged from the scraps of Mullers and escorts which lay in the danger zones, watches kept late into the night so that they were delivered wholly into what remained of the Crion labs. Some brave souls were lost, taken out by marauders which yet roamed the badlands looking for easy score. All of this would pay off, however, as within several months a brand new axe was created.
Using the basis of the Muller chassis, a good chunk of the armor was ripped up and the engine replaced with a far more powerful unit, the boosters improved and the leg strength increased to handle the shock of rapid ground movement almost unheard of, even for A-class axes. The targeting system was heavily improved, vision increased greatly via more external cameras for an all-around view, and smoke canister dischargers were repurposed for chaff grenades, enabling it to move relatively unmolested through rough terrain. With a very flat torso and long, thin legs compared to most other B-classes, this made the new axe a hard target to track visually, the upgraded boosters providing unparalleled mobility on the ground. Air-wise, however, the axe suffered thanks to the placement of the boosters designed for the best groundspeed possible, and thus altitude jumps and efficiency in the air were only secondary to the engineering team.
The first weapons of the prototype were a mini-Vulcan stolen from a G2 assault husk and a heavily modified Corsair-KLA launcher, and thusly it was launched into the night on a field test to see what fruit their efforts yielded. They were not disappointed.
Rumors quickly began to rise of a strange axe which moved swiftly like a shadow, cutting into escorts of small convoys with lethal efficiency at close range before helping its mysterious benefactors to loot the vessel, rocketing off into the darkness at a speed one could only imagine a demon would have. The cutthroat tactics used led it to be nicknamed "Grifter," because in the Crion engineers' eyes, they were retrieving good bounty for simple sleight of hand.
One note: One model seems to have been taken by a transgressor, a woman around 20 years and has disappeared into the wastes, along with a heavy complement of electronic countermeasures and electronic intelligence-gathering technology. Reports have been made of an axe similar to the Grifter, but littered with heavy ECM stealing mass amounts of data or gathering intel before bolting as soon as the first guardsman acknowledges it on radar. Pictos of it have revealed a stylized cricket on the side, so for now it is codenamed "Noisy Cricket."
Design Goals:
-High burst damage
-Precision strikes
-Shock and Awe in combination with ambush tactics
-Prioritize escape when necessary.
Basic Information:
Class: A or B, not enough information has been derived to fully classify it in any one category
Armor: Subpar for a B-class, average to high for an A-class
Fuel Tank: Average
Boost Speed: High
Fuel Regeneration: Average
Ground Speed: High
Air Speed: Low
Radar: Average
Overheating: Faster than average
Dodging: Fast, with a relatively low rest period
Ability:
Boost Drive- when activated, Grifter has much reduced cooldown and much higher fuel regeneration for a short amount of time. Airspeed becomes slightly faster.
Primary:
(currently just one)
TX-i Mini-Vulcan: A highly modified Vulcan which spins up more quickly with a higher rate of fire, but consequently much lower range. It enables the Grifter to fire a storm of munitions within a very short span of time, but this function comes at the cost of a very high heat generation for a single weapon.
Secondary:
Corsair-KLA MkII "Omen": Another extensively redesigned weapon taken from a Muller frame, the entire mechanism has been reworked to provide rapid-firing grenade slinging capability at the cost of a reduced munitions size and range, with relatively modest heat generation and cooldown. Toggling the fire mode opens up the tripart 'petals' around the barrel, loading them up with grenades before slinging them in one large, concentrated volley.
Weapons are currently set up for quick bursts, non-sustained combat and ambush tactics. Current ideas for additional primaries are: Modified version of the PN-223 with a higher-caliber yield, lower fire rate with possible burst function, and a large-bore flechette gun.
Back to top
