Reaver is already making his own troop/prime mover. I may buy a centaur and have my bronzey ways with it.

Also, I didn't mean to imply it can shoot while moving. My understanding of shoot-and-scoot has been that the vehicle pulls into position, loads, fires, then drives the hell away before counter battery can get it.

So ... there will be 2 versions of the Centaur ? A Type R & Type O ?  

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

I have never, ever read a better description of GW's design philosophy.  Well done, sir!  You get 10,000 bonus points!

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The guns look like they're from a WW1 Naval gun battery or ship turret.  

I think the premise of this hunk of steel and iron would be the WW2 Archer SP gun design. It had it's gun mounted backwards so it could back into the position fire then quickly leave when it had to.

L4 beat me to it. Quite sensible for arty and AT guns to mount in a rear firing position - makes it easier to scoot after firing! The twin barrle though looks a little silly to my eyes. Can't see much improvement in rate of fire for a manually loaded system and it would make more sense to have rockets or two guns to do the same heavy bombardment job.

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Yeah, it's ugly, impractical, odd and unlikely looking but admit it people, if it was available in Epic we would all have some.  

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My head is full of War...

[img]http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk120/Warhead40k/Tyranid%20Swarm/DSC02262.jpg[/img]

I don't like it either, but then I'm not an IG fan anyway.

But the cannons facing backwards does make a bit of sense. It's probably far more preferable to just drive forward when the enemy is closing in on your position rather than trying to reverse or turn around. So basically its designed in a way that it's expected to want to fall back quickly.

Death Korps is cleary the most twin-linked army out there

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Thanks ! Do I win the Toaster as a door prize !  But truthfully, sometimes G/W Fluff is just too "fluffy" for me !  

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Yes, those were my observations also ... The Archer was used by the Egyptian Army into the '50s also IIRC ... The "Shoot & Scoot" concept was cetainly an advantage, but like other rear mounted weapons, the main gun was mounted rearward on existing chassis more out of mechanical designs and in some cases desperation. If the Brits could mount the excellent 17 lber in a Valentine 360 degree rotating turret, they would have ... But the tech at the time didn't exist and they had all theses Valentine hulls and wanted to mount the 17 lber AT on a hull to make it more mobile ... Like they did with the Sherman Firefly ...  So maybe the "fluff" on the Minotaur is similar ?

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Legion 4 "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War !" ... "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

If the Brits could mount the excellent 17 lber in a Valentine 360 degree rotating turret, they would have ...

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My head is full of War...

[img]http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk120/Warhead40k/Tyranid%20Swarm/DSC02262.jpg[/img]

From a functional rather than aesthetic perspective, rear-facing cannons work just as well as forward-facing ones.  But there are a few drawbacks to this design:

1.  No direct-fire support for infantry.  We used to train using the M109A6 Paladins from our field artillery component to create breaches in MOUT situations.  The best way to enter a building at the ground level is to have a Paladin blow a hole in one wall, since you know for sure that room is clear.  This configuration would be severely limited in that environment, no matter how good the gunbunny behind the wheel is.

2.  Resupply needs limit the shoot-and-scoot capability.  A self-propelled gun carries limited ammo onboard, and depends on a mule to resupply it, usually another tracked vehicle that can back up and use a conveyor belt assembly or derick to push rounds over to the gun.  If a mule were to do so for this thing, it would have to be from the side.

3.  Firing and loading.  The Minotaur's twin guns would have to fire simultaneously, or else in a sequential fashion with reasonable time in between.  Reason being, firing one gun would cause the vehicle to jump enough to throw off the register of the second gun, so its round wouldn't land where it was needed unless they took the time to reposition the vehicle and ensure that they are properly registered.  Plus, looking at the pics on FW, one crew loading a gun would have limited space in which to cycle the other breach, while both crews working simultaneously would be getting in each other's way.  There would be the very real possibility of someone losing a leg to the recoiling breach of one gun tube firing while trying to load the other, so sequential fire would be difficult.  So either way of operating, using two crews, is problematic.  A third possibility would be to have a single crew working both guns -- load both and then fire both simultaneously.  This would be exhausting for the cannon-cockers and would return a lower rate of fire than a crew working a single gun, since there would longer lag time between firings.  

Better solution:  Autoloading single gun tube.  But that's just my opinion.

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Set phasers on "fun"!

You have delivered an evaluation of extraordinary magnitude. We build our STC armor in the tradition of our ancestors.

You have our gratitude!

(Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kentucky_Fried_Movie)

Russians built this gem:



but it utilise double autoloaders

Maybe FW wil make closed wersion w"with imaginative autoloader ? :>

Yeah, I've seen that one before -- dual 152mm guns fed by autoloaders.  The cupola is completely unmanned and it carries a pretty decent number of shells (40 or 50).  It also uses the latest Russian fire control computers and whatnot.  I think it's supposed to be specialized for counter-battery fire.

Of course, all of the above set it apart from the new Minotaur.  No autoloaders, no computerized FCS, etc.  

And the holed metalwork on that Minotaur looks positively Victorian!  Wait -- could this herald the return of the Praetorian XXV???

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