Poseidon-class Heavy Walker
Name/Type: Poseidon-class Heavy Walker
Designer/Manufacturer: Contegorian Confederation
Combat Role: Armored Transport / Excavation Platform
Crew: 4 + 2 astromech droids
Height: 6 meters (crouched) / 15 meters (legs fully extended)
Length: 20 meters
Propulsion: Legs
Speed: 105 Kph
Shield Rating: 200 SBD
Hull Rating: 310 RU
Weapons: 1 turreted Composite Homing Laser, 2 claws, 2 claw-mounted Plasma Jets, 8 leg-mounted light repeating blasters
Cargo Capacity: 40 Passengers
Special: Modular Shielding, Omniscan sensors, Excavator
At first glance, the Poseidon-class Heavy Walker does not appear very impressive. It's large, awkward-looking, and armed more with mining equipment rather than conventional weaponry. It does, however, have a few advantages over its more widespread counterpart, the AT-AT. The Poseidon was originally a mining excavation platform designed for use on Jabiim, where the world's unstable electrical fields and torrential rains demanded an unusually stable platform capable of being submerged in water. This heritage has been expanded upon by Confederate engineers to allow it crawl along the seabeds of oceans, its thick hull supplemented by retuned deflector shields (like several Mon Calamari freighter designs). Secondly, the mining equipment has mostly been left untouched, allowing the Poseidon to slowly burrow its way through ground via a combination of a retuned mining laser, plasma jets, and claws. While all of this allows the Poseidon to go places where many of its counterparts cannot, several Confederation commanders are unimpressed with its combat performance because while the mining equipment can be used as weapons, they tend to be short-ranged, which is a liability in a vehicle that's slower than most dedicated combat vehicles.
Technical Explanations:
Cost: Average
Cost: The Poseidon-class does not use any new technologies, and its base platform has existed for a while. Additionally, the Poseidon is not particularly high weaknesses or strengths, making it a fairly balanced vehicle. This would lead development costs down, except the Poseidon is a large vehicle, requiring a lot of material to make, especially for its thick armor shell.
Armor/Chassis: Moderately High
Armor/Chassis: The basic frame of the walker itself follows the tried and true approach of most small Confederate vehicles: a ferrocarbon frame wrapped in layers of Quadanium Carbide, a refractory hard ceramic. It is more lightweight than traditional metal armor, which helps with the fuel economy and speed, but the armor isn't as effective against projectile weapons as typical metallic armors. Like the Ares tank, the Poseidon use non-energetic reactive armor. Two thin quadanium carbide plates sandwich an inert liner, usually synthetic rubber. When struck by a shaped charge's metal jet, some of the impact energy is dissipated into the inert liner layer, and the resulting high pressure causes a localized bending or bulging of the plates in the area of the impact. As the plates bulge, the point of jet impact shifts with the plate bulging, increasing the effective thickness of the armour. Because this armor does not prematurely detonate the weapon, it is safer for nearby infantry. Because of this innovation, the Poseidon is capable of withstanding some, but not all, direct hits from missiles, shells, and similar weapons even without its shields up. In order to protect the walker's crew even more, the command cabin of the Poseidon is actually near the middle of the vehicle itself, where the crew control and pilot the craft based on a number of sensor systems discussed latter on this document. Like other Confederate vehicles, the Poseidon is a fully sealed environment with its own air supply, which allows the vehicle to operate in vacuum environments, toxic atmospheres, or even underwater.
Shields: Moderately Low
Shields: In order to cut down on costs and ease maintenance, the Poseidon reuses the same shield generators and systems as found on the S16 Prowler, only twice as many of them as the starfighter. While not unsubstantial for an armored transport, this does give the walker about the same sheilding as battle tanks half its size.
Propulsion: Moderately High
Propulsion: The chassis of the Poseidon is unlike many walkers in that is has eight legs, which were necessary for the original unstable mining environments that it was expected to work in. Unlike traditional walker designs, the legs of the Poseidon are triple jointed, which gives the vehicle more vertical flexibility than its counterparts. Since the work on the drive train is lowest in its crouched setting, the walker typically moves fairly low to the ground where its heavily armored lower legs can provide extra protection to the rest of the drive train. The Poseidon is actually faster than many contemporary walkers, including the AT-AT, in part because of drive improvements originating from the MT-AT (which uses the same eight-legged propulsion), though the Poseidon is not as fast as that walker.
Weapons: Average
Weapons: The Poseidon is designed primarily to get infantry and battle droids into vital areas of the battle field, and consequently it's armament isn't designed so much to destroy enemy threats as to ensure they get to their designation unharmed. The primary weapon on the Poseidon is a turreted Composite Homing Laser, which is a very similar to the weapons used on the Republic's LAAT/s during the Clone Wars. In times of peace, the laser is used to carve out tunnels or pieces of valuable ore. In times of war, the laser can help burn down heavy shielding, wreck vehicles, and incinerate groups of troops. The two claws, typically used to help scoop up earth and remove obstacles while mining, can also be used as impromptu weapons much in a manner of those of the X-1 Viper. On each claw is a plasma jet, typically used burned organic matter to help burrow, can also be used to ignite and burn through nearby objects if given enough time. Lastly, there is a light repeating blaster mounted on the top of each leg (as it sits crouched), to deter away enemy infantry and to provide cover fire while it disembarks its passengers. The blasters are also typically used a point defense against enemy projectiles. The astromech droids typically operate the light repeating blasters, but it is possible for the gunner to take control of the blasters for more fine work.
Modular Secondary Shields: As Confederates place a high value on adaptability and maintaining their forces, KDI incorporated a similar modular shield system as the Dhothil starfighter into their ground vehicle designs. This second set of shields is situated behind the crew compartment with its own dedicated power supply. Like the Dhothils, the secondary shields are meant to supplement, not replace, the man shields by providing a focused defense against certain types of attacks. The walker's secondary shields can be focused, dispersed, and otherwise manipulated by the commander or one of the astromech droids as needed.
Photon Scattering Field: This module produces photons and hi-jacks naturally occurring particles of this nature to form and hold them in a field surrounding the vehicle, just overlaying the walker’s standard shielding. When this shield is hit by ion and EMP weaponry hit the field, the photon particles interfere and collide with the energized particles, ions, and other radiation, thereby reducing or annulling the effects of those weapons on the vehicle itself. This module is heavily used when facing Reavers because of the Confederation's prospensity for using area-wide electromagnetic attacks.
Anticoncussion Field Generator: Widely used on Confederate naval vessels, the Anticoncussion field on the Poseidon is not as powerful, nor does it cost nearly the proportional of energy as used on the Confederate vessels either. The generator creates an umbrella-shaped magnetic field around the walker that absorbs and disperses kinetic energy from oncoming projectiles, much like ray shields work against laser cannons. Like ray shields, the magnetic field eventually will fall under sustained enemy fire.
Heat Dissipation Field: This module creates a complex maze of particles that interlock with the walker’s shields, but also jut in and out of them. When a thermal attack collides with the walker’s shields, this maze of particles acts like a superconductive radiator which uniformly disperses the heat or cold evenly all across the surface area of the walker’s shields; thereby reducing the effects of such weapons. It is commonly used to protect against laser cannons and other like weaponry, or to provide the craft with additional protection for unusually hot environments, such as volcanic worlds or against enemies known for using thermal attacks, such as flamethrowers and some plasma weapons.
Carrying Capacity: Moderately Low
Carrying Capacity: The Poseidon has two separate cabins to carry cargo or passengers in, both running the long way on the right and left sides of the vehicle. Each cabin is sealed off from the rest of the vehicle's interior by blast doors and sports built in folding seats on the length of the room. Passengers and cargo can embark and disembark from each cabin via either a loading ramp that lowers to the ground, or a hatch that pops up to the topside of the vehicle. In times of war, it typically carries 40 troopers or C1 battle droids, but it is also capable of carrying other smaller vehicles such as speeder bikes, CAVs, or even a small number of Piranha drones if need be. In times of peace, the holds are generally occupied by various mining droids, some of whom process and sort the ore in the hold of the vehicle itself. Some Confederate water worlds also use the Poseidon as secure government transports because of their capability to operate underwater. While the Poseidon carries as many troopers as its Imperial rival, the AT-AT, it also significantly larger in terms of volume because of its width. There are also many more efficient ways to simply move troops in the rear lines, which typically limits the Poseidon to either carrying troops through terrain impassible to other vehicles or into the midst of heavy combat zones.
Sensor systems: Because of the decision to maximize crew protection by placing their cabin in the middle of the vehicle, the crew has no physical viewport to work off of to drive their vehicle. Instead, a half-dozen retractable scopes and cameras from all around the craft feed visual data to crew's consoles. It retains a MicroThrust Holo Ore Scanner FR9 from its predecessor, which not only allows it to discover and help quarry mine obstacles, but is also linked with a Fabritech 7000 Geoscanner to navigate other underground obstacles such as pipes, subterranean rivers, mines, etc. For water travelling, the Poseidon is equipped with regular sonar to both navigate and detect various threats.
Peacetime Role: Excavation Vehicle
In times of peace, the Poseidon is typically used like its ancestor, as an excavation vehicle employed in mining or construction roles. Most often, Poseidons help dig large mining shafts off of which countless miners and mining droids then work off of. In more urbanized areas, Poseidons are used to dig to set up foundations for buildings or to even lay down pipes. In smaller urban areas, the walker is even used for demolition duty, where its laser can easily cut through metal beams and its claws can help batter down duracrete.