"Wrangler" Combat Winch

The "Wrangler" Combat Winch is a crew-served designed to give infantry and auto-armor pilots the upper hand against enemy auto armor and light vehicles (i.e. motorcycles). A weaponization of towing equipment, the Wrangler is a popular weapon among Coalition Defense Forces units hailing from the Free Faces League as it allows their auto-armor pilots to use principles of Mesa-style wrestling against their mobility-minded peers in the Grand Army of Voxelia.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

The Wrangler fires a set of four to six barbed grapnels out of a series of parallel tubes. Each of these grapnels is tied to one another in a cross or asterisk pattern with a ten foot lengths of cable; a sturdy eyelet where the two to three cables intersect allows for the attachment of a hundred foot tow cable, the other end of which is secured to a dedicated winch spool back at the base of the weapon.
The operators aim for an opponent in a suit of auto armor or vehicle - ideally weighing less than one ton - such that the grapnels pass by the vehicle on either side, causing them to wrap around the target before becoming entangled with one another. This binds the opponent and, should they remain mobile, allows the Wrangler's crew to control how far they move away and gradually reel them in for capture if so desired. This tactic is particularly effective against Voxelian units because the warfigthing doctrine of the Grand Army involves a lot of hit-and-fade operations. Taking the ability of a Voxelian unit to move denies them their best defense and forces them to fight the CDF on their own terms - and the CDF doctrine is one of defense-in-depth.

Item type

Weapon, Ranged

Rarity

The Wrangler is somewhat common in stationary fortifications where permanent anchors allow the crew to hold their ground against ensnared enemies, but they can also be found among League PBA-5 "Pioneer" Main Battle Auto-Armor and BF-6 "Fortress" Mobile Stronghold Auto-Armor crews expecting to face off against sidecar motorcycle skirmishers and KF "Knave" Fast Attack Auto-Armor crews. As a weapon specialized against a particular opponent, the Wrangler is seldom seen in other contexts except among particularly innovative Hazardous-Condition Salvage Reclamation crews, who occasionally use the device to pluck salvage up from the safety of their salvage airships.