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-country 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 mecha tank so the rest of us could make a break for it.
Worth noting as well, Osberger had a legal spat with GMC over both companies having a model named the 'Rhino'. Osberger won the case, surprisingly, on account of GMC making the blunder of suing in the CAS where Osberger's Rhino being a drone meant it was sufficiently distinct from GMC's automobile product that it didn't qualify as trademark-infringement. Mind you, GMC managed some legal shaboingery in the court that meant Rhinos can't be sold in the UCAS, but there ain't nothing stopping you from buying one elsewhere and having it shipped over.
Huh, didn't peg you as someone who cared about courtoom drek
Horizon did a courtroom drama series on the case a while back. Apparently it's pretty true to life, except for the court shootouts and the clowns.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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