Plowshare Tank Destroyer

Country of Origin	Federal Republics of Yugoslavia
Produced at	Ministry of Experimental Science, Belgrade
Key Features	» EHV Tesla Arc Cannon  » EMP coils  » 12.7mm Machine guns (coaxial and pintle mounted)  » GAP field generator  » Rubber Tank tracks

T-63/TD Plowshare Tank Destroyer
Plowshares stopping an Alliance Tank Advance
Faction	Communist International
Unit Type	Tank
Designation	Tank Destroyer
Prerequisites
Production Building	Tank Factory
Secondary Ability	EMP burst (immobilizes large numbers of enemy vehicles at a time)
Cost	1800
Production Time	10 seconds
Heroic Upgrade	Multi-Chain Lightning (each burst arcs to multiple enemies simultaneously)
Dev. Status

Tactical Analysis

• Congratulations you have been discharged: The Plowshare is well known for its devastating electric currents able to obliterate man and machine alike, locking vehicles in place as the electric currents of its Tesla Arc Cannons overload their systems while reducing their structures to slag. Infantry are vaporized outright by bolts of electricity hotter than the surface of the sun, leaving nothing but dust and gas. The bolts can pass onto nearby enemy targets at reduced power for lethal effect against hordes. The Plowshare is also fully turreted and is both swift and durable.
• Rolling Blackout: The Plowshare can freeze an entire enemy vehicular advance at once by setting its coils to release a massive wide area burst of electromagnetic energy that will force affected structures, vehicles, robots, and battlesuits to have to engage in a hard reboot. The Plowshare itself is immune to EMP, but this ability does nothing to infantry and only lasts for so long.
• They've got the fiberglass? Damn.: The Plowshare is significantly less powerful against structures than it is against ground units due to them being made out of highly electricity resistant materials such as concrete. The Plowshare is also somewhat on the shorter range end of tank destroyers, and while its frontal armour is quite impressive and its side armour serviceable, its rear armour is virtually paper, and aircraft can stay out of its reach while swarms of infantry can overwhelm its rate of fire.
• Lighting for the whole family: A new model of reactor is being distributed to the best crews for battlefield testing. These can more efficiently generate power and current, allowing for the lightning generated to arc between up to four nearby targets at once and deal with large numbers of enemies at once, letting a single Plowshare shut down an entire enemy advance with ease.

Background

One thing that has been heavy on the minds of military thinkers in the Communist International for decades is the naked power of the armoured divisions of the Alliance of free states. Massive numbers of armoured fighting vehicles would be facing any RIVA force whether on the offense or defense. "Our task is stopping more than a billion tons of steel" as general Edyta Krygowska put it. While gun armed and missile armed tank destroyers had proven to be highly effective, all too often the enemy's tanks would overrun a tank destroyer unit through sheer numbers or toughness. Something able to stop even those tanks that survived the strike was needed.

Tesla technology had proven to be highly effective already in the second world war and Tesla half-tracks were reportedly greatly feared by Alliance tankers. Despite their lightness, even a single bolt would not only heavily damage a target tank but also disable many subsystems as the current fried them. However, they were poorly armoured and with them being tremendously visible upon firing, were hugely reliant on hit and run to be maximally effective against Alliance units. New designs were thus requested from design bureaus and collectives to produce a design that could threaten entire tank companies at a time while still adhering to the policy of mobile defense. The result was a series of improvements on the Tesla carriage concept to create a number of tank destroyers, culminating in the Plowshare.

Testing of the plowshare in the late cold war showed that one was able to significantly menace a large number of vehicles at once and even be a substantial threat to infantry formations. Thanks to its ability to force vehicles to stop with each hit, it was nearly impossible for a vehicle to be attacked by enemy vehicles when the ratio of numbers was roughly even and the Plowshares could each target their own vehicle or at least ensure every vehicle in the enemy column was locked down by arcing lightning. When a hundred replica remote controlled retriever tanks were destroyed by just ten drone piloted Plowshares at the Aberdeen tank proving grounds, the Stavka couldn't approve the design fast enough.

Such was fortunate, as just a year later Thornley launched his attack on the Communist International and the nightmare of millions armoured vehicles charging across the border was reality once again. The plowshares produced immediately proved their worth, being able to menace even the mighty Gotterdammerung tanks when they were able to lock the behemoths down, nevermind the lighter vehicles of the Blue armies. As per defense in depth doctrine, as each line was overrun the remaining forces would pull back to reinforce the line behind them; something the highly mobile plowshares were well suited for. The Alliance however, simply shrugged off the losses and pressed onwards and directed its mighty air force to deal with Plowshares as they popped up.

While the losses they inflicted upon the Alliance tank corps were savage, plowshare crews were marked for death by any means; whether by artillery, aircraft, infantry or simply trying to outfox the crews in vehicular combat. Nevertheless, the tank destroyer corps had a vicious reputation and morale remained high. The most elite crews were virtually celebrities whose movements could be tracked through the twisted hulks and piles of ash they left behind. Such a reputation meant that when the Co-Prosperity Sphere and Dominion launched their attacks however, they too would make targets out of them. Mecha and robotic infantry proved to be at least, highly vulnerable to the Plowshare's electric weaponry, but the Dominion's monstrous freaks of science would not be paused by such weapons and all too often, attempts to get into range of Epsilon columns resulted in the vehicles being seized by mind control.