Osberger-LES Rhino
Written by: Coupe
Fresh out of the North Carolina Security-Expo and straight into your nightmares, the Rhino is Osberger Law-Enforcement Systems' latest solution to that pesky problem of doors, walls and structures in general in between you and your objective. Pushing the scales at six and a half tons and six feet tall, this heavy drone is marketted as a 'Heavy-Assault Bulwark', designed to walk through sustained gunfire and use its built-in pneumatic ram to punch a hole through anything short of reinforced concrete, creating entry-points for metahuman squads to pour through or disable a vehicle by targetting its engine-block or simply knocking it over.When they demonstrated this thing at the expo, they brought in a Jackrabbit of all things as its first target. Poor little thing didn't stand a chance, and the dummies inside got fragging obliterated. Made for a good show, even if the prospective buyers were as worried as they were impressed.The body of the Rhino isn't anything groundbreaking - the ram is a hypertrophied Ares Siegebreaker pneumo-ram and the plating is actually hand-me-downs from an armored van Osberger made for a corpsec-contract - the real technical magic is in its propulsion: The Rhino trundles along on four sets of armored treads, each powered by its own Ares MX-12 hybrid-powertrain, but the whole thing is housed on the bottom of a set of vectored actuators, giving the Rhino a rudimentary walking-capability and allowing it to throw a good portion of its mass into ramming maneuvers from a stationary position. The Rhino's concept was an HTR unit's wet-dream, but it intitially didn't sell much outside of the NC area. The ram was near-unmatched in quickly mouseholing into buildings and putting the fear of corpsec into interlopers, but it needed a dedicated transport-vehicle all to itself to get to where it needed to be, and a squaddie with shaped-charges could do almost the same thing for a fraction of the cost. Most of its limited run got sold off to private collectors as something of a novelty-item, but Dragoon Tactical Investments surprised everyone by buying a set of three - one for use, one for backup and a third for spare-parts in a pinch, even tricking out its dedicated transportation-truck so that it could carry four HTR-operators along with its main cargo. Nobody's sure why company as practical and budget-oriented as Dragoons would splurge on this behemoth, but it wouldn't surprise me if their spoiled-rotten HTR Unit STATESMAN made a request for it. Whatever the case, it got a few more out-of-state buyers when trid-footage leaked of the Rhino steamrolling an improvised barricade and knocking a troll across the room in the closing minutes of a hostage-situation.
Pour one out for Heavy-Gear, who went down fighting against a drekking tank so the rest of us could make a break for it.Word to the wise, chummer: If you're unlucky enough to see this thing crawling out the back of a van, don't even bother fighting it unless you've got some mean anti-tank weaponry. This thing isn't fast, but it's unstoppable, so just run.
Special features: Once per combat-turn, the Rhino can attack objects infront of it with its built-in Pneumatic Ram. Treat the Ram as a Pneumatic Ram (Run and Gun, pg 104) with a Damage-rating of 20 and an AP of 8, using the Gunnery-skill or built-in Targetting Autosoft for the opposed test. The ram requires one Complex Action to brace itself and another Complex Action to initiate the attack.
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