Directorate Officer
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To create a battle walker in the Lucerne Labs product line-up
- Image Source: here
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: Lucerne Labs
- Affiliation: Directorate, Silver Jedi Concord, Lucerne Labs customers
- Market Status: Closed-Market
- Model: Kusak-class Battle Walker
- Modularity: Ammunition, secondary coaxial weapon mount, MAST Turret
- Production: Mass-Produced
- Material: Argentum-series Matrix Armor Plating, Beskar frame, ceraglass viewports, standard vehicle components
- Classification: Medium Walker
- Role: Assault Tank
- Size: Average
- Weight: Average
- Armaments: Very High
- 1 Turreted Double Firestorm Plasma Turbolaser (main turret guns)
- 1 Swiveling Vaapad-class Laser Cannon (right pintle mount on turret)
- 1 LLT-7 General Purpose Warhead Launcher (left side of turret)
- 1 Double Flamestorm Blaster Cannon Turret (dorsal turret)
- Defenses: Average
- Maneuverability Rating: High
- Speed Rating: Low
- Propulsion: Quadrupedal
- Minimum Crew: 2
- Optimal Crew: 5 (1 pilot, 2 gunners, 1 mechanic droid, and 1 commander)
- Passenger Capacity: None
- Cargo Capacity: Very Small
- Partially Automated: Kusaks contain a droid brain used to process sensor and targeting information, communicate with other Lucerne Labs military vehicles, and provide diagnostic information to the vehicle's crew.
- Environmentally Sealed: Kusaks have environmental sealing and full internal life-support for three days of continual operation, allowing the walkers to be deployed in hazardous environments such as vacuum or toxic atmospheres and to enable limited submersion in water.
- Heavy Firepower: The Kusak sports a pair of heavy plasma railguns, each powerful as many main battle tank's primary guns. These main guns augmented by secondary weapons make it a dangerous foe to most other ground vehicles on the battlefield.
- Maneuverable: The Kusak is a fairly responsive walker, designed to make tight turns in crowded terrain. Unusually for a walker, it's legs have also been designed to quickly expand upwards and quickly retract downwards, allowing its chassis to "pop up" and down quickly on the battlefield to make the most advantage of cover on the battlefield.
- Low Speed: The Kusak's drive train is designed to emphasize maneuverability, but in doing so, it has a relativley short stride length that limits its overall top speed, making it actually a little bit slow compared to many of its peers.
- Low Cargo Capacity: The Kusak has little in the way of actual cargo space, only sporting enough space to carry the crew's personal effects, some basic repair parts, and consumables for a couple weeks of field operations.
Looking like an oversized dwarf spider droid, the Kusak is a medium-sized walker designed by Lucerne Labs to be a tank and walker hunter. To that end, the Kusak's turret has not one but two powerful plasma railguns. A single shot from one is often enough to inflict significant damage to most armored vehicles, while two fire-linked shots from the railguns often obliterates tanks and large walkers like AT-ATs and significantly wounds even larger vehicles like siege cannons. Everything else compared to the guns on the Kusak is secondary - with additional weapons being primarily reactive and defensive in nature. Kusaks typically move slowly through dense terrain on the battlefield, taking advantage of their maneuverability and ability to pop-up from cover to provide them with protection before sniping their foes.
Technical Explanations:
Crew: Kusaks have a pretty typical crew for a battle walker, with a driver and gunner needed to operate the tank at a bare minimum to have any sort of combat value. But to obtain normal combat performance, the Kusak needs a full crew, including having a commander and a mechanic/communication's operator (typically a droid). The driver and mechanic are housed in the main chassis right underneath the turret, while the gunners and commander have their places in the Kusak's massive turret. All stations have small ceraglass viewports, normally covered by retractable plating, which provide the crew with very limited vision. Because the field of view from these is actually quite poor in order to better protect the crew, miniature photoreceptors located across the hull provide the visual feed for driving the vehicle and firing its weapons.
Engine Systems: The Kusak moves about on four articulated legs, which are both powered by a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell engine derived from the Lab's previous Myrmidon-class APC. The legs themselves are actually based on the locomotion systems of the old crab droid. This design allows the Kusak to scuttle around at a low height and take tight turns. Because it has much lower center of gravity compared to many other walkers, it also is more capable of climbing up slopes, allowing it to scale inclines slightly greater than 45 degrees. Perhaps more innovatively, the Kusak's legs can extend upward quickly, allowing the walker's turret to "pop up" from behind cover to take a few shots before rapidly retracting back to safety.
Defensive Systems: The Kusak's most basic defense its beskar frame, which is then covered in a layer of Argentum Matrix Armor plating that is designed to act as sloped armor from most attack angles. Thus the actual arrangement of plates combined with its frame is designed to resist kinetic weaponry, while the plating composition itself is designed to resist a wider variety of attack types. This protection is then supplemented by a starfighter grade Buckler deflector shield generator, which can be optimized to better protect it against certain opponents. The Kusak also sports a MAST turret mounted on its main turret. This is typically outfitted with a sensor jammer or directional particle shield, providing the Kusak with a more active means of defense.
Hull: The Kusak's hull is fairly unconventional for a walker, sharing more of its basic shape with a typical battle tank than a walker, largely because of its role as a tank analogue. Like the company's Howlrunner Tank and many older Baktoid Armor Workshop products, the Kusak has most of its more vulnerable components placed in the rear, including the power generator, in order to better protect them against incoming fire. Internally, the walker has a single, environmentally sealed working space that encompasses the entire turret and the driver and mechanic/communications operator stations just beneath and in front of the turret.
Weapons Systems: Kusak's primary weapon is a double Firestorm Plasma Turbolaser, which is actually a railgun that throws superheated bolts of searing plasma at targets. This is a fairly potent anti-vehicle weapon that is even dangerous to small starships such as gunships and even small corvettes. While each Firestorm can support two different types of plasma ammunition, the two most commonly encountered when used on the Kusak are pure thermal and explosive. The thermal's searing bolts are usually effective at burning through or superheating enemy armor, while the explosive bolts are ideal general purpose ammunition for bombardments. THe guns can be fire-linked to inflict massive, simultaneous damage, but they are also sometimes set for a slight delay in impact, especially if each cannon is using a different type of ammunition. A common combiantion would be an ion bolt followed by a thermal bolt to better pierce through enemy shielding. The Kusak's other weapons are primarily designed to protect it from other threats, with a top mounted Vaapad Laser Cannon controlled by the vehicle's droid brain to protect it from aerial and warhead threats, and a bottom mounted double blaster cannon designed to be used against enemy personnel, battle droids, and small vehicles that might get too close to be targeted by the walkers main guns. A warhead launcher on the left of the turret provides the walker with a variety of munitions that can be used against a variety of threats.
Carrying Capacity: Kusaks are essentially dedicated battle tanks, and consequently have little carrying capacity. There is no room inside the tank for passengers, albeit a few daring individuals can elect to ride on top of the walker. Cargo space is similarly small, with scattered internal compartments for a few of the crewmembers' personal effects such as personal weapons and rations along with some commonly needed spare parts for the vehicles.
Electronics: Kusaks have a basic droid brain not unlike those found in many tramp freighters. Like those brains, the Kusak's brain is primarily used for basic diagnostic and information processing. Taking a cue from the IX-6, the droid brains between Kusaks communicate and interact with each other to form a shared, collective understanding of the environment and tactical situation around them. They most notably pool information gathered by their sensors to collectively map out their surroundings and keep track of targets in a form of a Target Identification Network. Perhaps also somewhat unusually for a manned vehicle, the Kusaks's droid brain usually also controls the MAST and defensive guns, allowing collective groups of Kusaks to not only react individually to emerging threats, but to collectively produce an area of active defense around their squadron mates.
Last edited:
