Re: WORLD WAR (1942-1964) Mod
Zingiber said, “If you can’t send landcruisers, send helicopters to help me take out some more of the Tosevites’ armor.”
Rethost made up his mind that if Zingiber made one more such idiotic request, he’d relieve him. He hissed angrily before he pressed the TRANSMIT button. “We have fewer helicopters than landcruisers to spare. The miserable Tosevites have learned something new.” They’re faster at that than we are. The thought worried him. He made himself continue: “They’ve brought their antiaircraft artillery as far forward as they can, towing it with light armor or sometimes even with soft-skinned vehicles. The helicopters are armored against rifle-caliber bullets. To armor them against these shells would make them too heavy to fly.”
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The more he thought about it, the more it worried him. The Lizards didn’t have numbers going for them; their strength had always lain in their guns: their tanks and self-propelled pieces; if they were easing off with those …
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“Indeed so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “To that end, we have recently converted a munitions factory we captured from the Français to producing artillery ammunition in our calibers. The Tosevites manufacture the casings and the explosive charges; our only contribution to the process is the electronics for terminal guidance.”
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More shells whistled overhead, these southbound from Bloomington. Mutt hoped they were registered on the Lizard guns, but they probably weren’t; the Lizards outranged American artillery.
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“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon.
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As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft cannon mounted in place of big guns protecting them. If she spotted one of those, she’d sheer off. A hit or two from their shells would turn the U-2 to kindling. She deliberately thought about it in terms of the aircraft rather than herself.
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The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jäger stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known—it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.
Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jäger knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.
(Lizard aircraft firing standoff ATGMs at Panzer column)
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“It’s even worse in those places than in the United States, because they don’t need to wreck their roads to make us go into the mud. As soon as it rains for more than two days straight, the roads themselves turn into mud. Why didn’t they pave them to begin with?”
The fleetlord knew Kirel could not possibly answer a question like that. Even if he could have answered it, responsibility still rested with Atvar. The Race’s landcruisers and troopcarriers, of course, were tracked. They managed after a fashion, even churning through sticky mud. Most supply vehicles, though, merely had wheels. Back before Atvar went into cold sleep, that had seemed sufficient, even extravagant. Against spear-carrying warriors riding on animals, it would have been.
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Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jäger’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”
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“Tell me about that thing, will you?”
Ristin turned one eye turret toward it. “That? That is a skelkwank sight, I think maybe from a bomb. Artillery shells use a smaller model. Skelkwank in your language is . . . is—” He paused and fluttered his lingers, a Lizardy way of showing frustration. “I think your language has not this word. Yep, that is what! think.”
(Laser guided weapons)
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Try as they would, the Race’s pilots and missile batteries and artillery had not managed to knock out the Big Uglies’ manufacturing capacity.
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Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.
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The Lizards’ advance positions, being lightly held, were soon overrun, though not before one of the aliens turned a Panzer IV to Jäger’s right to a funeral pyre with a rocket.
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It steers on the same principles as our machines, but it’s a lot easier to drive: the steering is power assisted and the gearbox shifts automatically.”
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Then he noticed the turret had no loader’s seat, just as there’d been no hull gunner’s position in the Lizard panzer’s forward compartment. Did the gunner or commander have to load shells, then? He couldn’t believe it. That would badly slow the panzer’s rate of fire, and he knew from bitter experience the Lizards could shoot quicker than their German counterparts.
Some of the gadgetry that filled the turret without crowding it had to be an automatic loader, then.
(Aha, they have Autoloaders)
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