Today is our last vehicle out of the old TROs.  Its been a fun journey to get to this vehicle and I’d like to think I saved a good one for last.  That’s why we find ourselves at the Ripper.

The Ripper is quite the VTOL.  It was designed for one purpose: deliver a squad of infantry  to a battle, and then get out.  Turns out, it was good at that and the Star League made good use of them.  After the Star League fell the design was saved by an eccentric CEO of Cal-Boeing and once he got the desgin, he set forth making them.  The AFFS, is a moment of unbridled stupidity, passed on the design, so he offered them to the Capellans, who eagerly accepted.  After having had them used against them, Team Davion, and all the other houses, quickly began to buy their own, except the Free Worlds League.  So today you can find them pratically anywhere.  There is even a factory of them on Belladonna, so if you are running the defense of New Avalon, you can have as many as you want.

The Ripper is, as suggested above, a very good VTOL.  It’s not a big VTOL, only ten tons, but that small size allows it do quite a bit.  For starters, it allows it to have  a blindingly fast speed of 12/18 with only a three ton fusion engine.  Now that is a third of the design by mass, but the speed is well worth it, and the cost, as we shall see, is not hurt too much either.

Next, the Ripper is protected by a ton and a half of ferro armor.  This used to be 27 points, but is now 26 in a 9/5/5/2 pattern.  Its not quite twenty percent by mmass, but it is a fairly good coat for a ten ton vehicle.  Still, the lost one point does hurt, preventing the frotn from taking two groups of five.

From here the ‘toys’ were added.  The main goodies, the guns, are a pair of front mounted medium lasers.  With a fusion engine on board these are a good choice.  They’ve got power and a decent range.  All this leaves one ton, which is the size of the cargo bay for the infantry squad.

The Ripper has also been ripe for modifications with its long, and very much varied, operational history.  One variant I am suprised not to see is a non-ferro variant.  Without ferro it becomes Tech Level 1 and thus perfectly logical for the Succession Wars.  All you’d need to do is drop two points of armor, which I would take from the rear.  Now, the real variants are quite plentiful.  The first two variants are obvious and simple upgrades.  Swapping the pair of mediums for a pair of ER Mediums or Small Pulse Lasers.  Both have their advantages.  You could even make your own non-canon one of one of each.  Another interesting variant takes the lasers out and plants in a pair of machine guns with a full ton of ammo.  That is an interesting choice, I’d only have done a half ton of ammo and then added more armor, but that’s just me, and it is admittedly a more troublesome upgrade.

Then we get to the two ‘big’ upgrades.  The first is the Combine variant.  The dropped in an XL engine and upped the armor in two ways.  First they added a half ton and then they turned it into Heavy Ferro.  This brought the armor up to thirty-nine points spread out 13/8/8/2.  A much heavier coat that is for sure.  More interestingly, the two mediums were pulled for a single LPPC.  I’m not a fan of that, I’d much rather have infantry support weapons, not something with a three hex minimum range.  The Lyrans took a similarly radical approach.  They also added the XL engine, but drastically changed the cargo bay.  They pulled a laser, added the extra tonnage and then even some armor, to get the cargo bay to four tons so it could carry a squad of Battle Armor.  The remaining laser was turned into a small pulse, and the armor into Heavy Ferro for a twenty point 7/4/3/2 pattern.  Its certainly a fast way of getting a squad of BA somewhere.

Cost wise the Ripper is a pretty good deal.  It is a very interesting vehicle because under BV 1 it was not quite so cheap at 518.  BV 2 dropped it to 340.  It is a huge savings.  Cost wise I’m at a bit of a crossroads.  The record sheet I have on my computer says the cost is 282,222 C-Bills while MegaMek says 162,222.  At exactly 120,000 C-bills it is a huge cost difference.  Nevertheless, the Ripper is very cheap in the base config.  RS:3050U did not grant us BVs or costs, so I cannot tell you how expensive the variants are.  The base config, though, is pretty darn good for its price.

So if you zip in, drop off, and zip out you can get a pretty good VTOL that can also annoy the hell out of many of your enemies.  It is a good VTOL and a good last original vehicle.  Don’t worry, we’re not done yet though, next week is an intersting new unit from JHS:3072 (assuming I get a Christmas present that I was a witness to the purchase of).

I guess 'good' is a relative term.  it's a Quick VTOL, and it's got plating, but the weapons-fit makes it a suicide machine if you try to employ 'em, and the infantry bay means two or more turns before you can deploy a platoon of infantry-which locks it into the individual 'mechwarrior SAR mission unless you use Maxtech squad rules. 

i.e. it's really only useful to have if you're playing the RPG, or you need a spotter for indirect fire.  Once you close to the range of those lasers, it's a one-two count and you're gone, your TN bonus goes effectively out the window since you have no range modification even against LIGHT INFANTRY, and unlike other scout units of similar price, it doesn't carry advanced electronics that create force-multipliers.

weapons-positioning don't give it much help against other VTOLs, either-unlike, say, the Mantis which is good for chasing down other choppers and papercutting them, the Ripper's weapons are poorly positioned, and can't be concentrated on a target provided you survive getting into range.

Did anybody else notice that the rotor blades are unevenly spaced?  As an Army Aviator, that's something that rather frightens me.

oops, mixed it up with one of those variants... it's still short-ranged and exceptionally costly for what it does, though.

Now uneven rotors seem like a bad idea to me.  However, I'm just a history (and education) major, I never even took fizzics in high school.  Can an uneven rotor helicopter even work?

No, it's just a poorly-drawn piece of art.

The AFFS, is a moment of unbridled stupidity, passed on the design, so he offered them to the Capellans, who eagerly accepted.  After having had them used against them, Team Davion, and all the other houses, quickly began to buy their own, except the Free Worlds League.

Sure, I'll grant you that.  But given what the Ripper was designed for, delivering a squad of infantry, the LPPC makes no sense.  That's 10% of the vehicle by weight.  If you're delivering infantry, especially the unarmored kind, you want them to have some sort of support, and an LPPC is terrible at that.