Bolo

A series of books about unite of the Dinochrome brigade. Bolos are massive tanks employed by the Concordiate of Man in its wars with aggressive alien species and the various books focus on different marks of Bolo.

Except for the earliest Bolos developed by the US army, all Bolos are armed with one or more hellbore plasma cannon as its main armament. Turret mounted and capable of orbital interdiction of any hostile vessel up to and including Cruiser level. This allows a Bolo to secure a continent against any possible enemy attack. Backing up the main armament are banks of infinite repeaters, normally mounted above the front glacis plate to provide firepower allong the front arc. The banks consisted of chain guns, followed by ion guns then finally small bore hellbores in the latest mark Bolos and all are capable of sucesfully engaging anything massing less than a Bolo and are the Bolos primary anti air assets. Primary anti infantry firepower is provided by a number of either auto-mortars or auto-howitzers normally mounted sequentially with the infinate repeater batteries and both are capable of indirect fire. The final main weapons system are the missile cells capble of continental firing ranges and can carry a number of different payloads.

Most Bolos are equiped with battlescreens, forcefields capable of interdicting enemy fire, and are a Bolos primary defence. Secondary defence is the armour, the composition of which depends on the Bolo mark but it equivelent to that used in period war ships.

As the Bolo concept was developed in sucessive marks, they became more and more automated untill, by the type XX, they were capable of functioning fully independany of any human control. fears about rogue Bolos forced draconian constraints on these AIs though, keeping them in the AI equivelent of lobotomy untill battle reflex more was activated by the Bolos commander, It wasn't untill the Mark XXV that Bolo AIs became fully sentient and were allowed to remain that way. despite this, a human commander was retained for all Bolos, not only to keep humans in the loop, but because battlefield analysis revealed a small but significant performance increase when a Bolo AI operated in tandem with an experienced human commander.

The Mark XXXIIs and XXXIIIs were equipped with direct human-Bolo neural interfacing which made them the most effective Marks ever produced.

During the many wars they participated in, the deciding factor in many Bolo operations was the Bolo AI, allowing it to react faster and more acurately than the enemy.

The mark XXV Bolo massed 15,000 tons

The Mark XXXIIIs massed 32,000 tons and mounted a main armament of three independently-turreted 200cm Hellbores with a secondary armament of sixteen 30cm Hellbore infinite repeaters in two lateral batteries.


Changed from:This is the stunning tale of humanity and their giant mechanized tanks against alien enemies and fellow humans from spans of thounsands of years. Their weaponry evolves from cannons on the Mk I's to Hellbores and Hellrails on the XXXIII's and XXXIV's. Their main enemies include but are not limited to the Deng, the Djann, the Melconians, the Malach, the Aetryx and the !*!*! (AKA 'Clackers').

Record 460 - universe - Last update 28 Mar 2007, 23:05:29

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