Echo-Class Rumbler

The past few weeks have seen things go from being on an even keel to pretty much falling apart for me. And oddly I mean that in a good way, as it's times of instability that lead to real advancement. But in the meantime I wasn't able to work on my comic in any meaningful way so instead I've been trying to "prime the pump" with some conceptual designs. This one is of a series I'm doing of the "Rumblers," superheavy, semi-intelligent robotic tanks who fight the battles people don't want to in the world of 6-Commando, my comic book-in-progress. This one is the same design as one of my main characters, a Rumbler named Mike One Echo. The ink-and-shade look is one I like to use for concept work, though I usually do it with steel pen and prismacolor marker on tracing paper. Still the effect is pretty good and gets the scale and perspective pretty all right.

And let me say for the record that, when all else fails, I always seem to be able to manage to draw a tank.

About the Echo Class Rumbler, though. The Echo Class is a third generation Autonomous Armored Vehicle, itended to make up for a major manpower shortage in the United Nations Alliance. In the mid and late 1970's, a series of socialist uprisings and subversions in Western Europe, known collectively as the Scarlet Revolution, brought down most of the UN-friendly governments in places like Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Great Britain. As a result, the United Nations lost a great deal of manpower and industrial capacity, and had to drastically re-evaluate its combat doctrine.

The result was the introduction of smaller, more highly specialized, mobile and carefully-trained units of about Battalion size, each called a "Multinational Command," or a "Commando," using a large, autonomous armored support vehicle as the primary spearhead for combat purposes. This made the UN forces viable again, allowing combat operations to be resumed more effectively in places like Africa, Indochina and the Indian Subcontinent.

The first AAV's were only rarely used in actual combat, and were basically testbeds for the computer control systems. The second generation, which was the Bravo class and its various modifications, was the first truly effective series of AAV's, but was obsolete by the late 1980's. The Echo class, and its partner the Foxtrot class, were built starting around 1988, and have superseded the Bravo. The Echo is the "blunt force" weapon of the UNA, with a heavy cannon in a fast-traversing turret, and a large guided missile launcher system that can fire a variety of different interchangeable warheads (including atomic ones, if necessary). They also have highly advanced protein-wetware intelligence circuits that give them a high degree of decision-making ability, for increased battlefield flexibility. In fact, they are designed to seek out targets according to a selection of war plans, entirely autonomously, in the event of loss of proper command and control, supposedly acting as a retaliatory safeguard for UNA ground troops, in case of an international strategic conflict.