Mecha Origins: The Red Ant

The Red Ant is one of the oldest human designed mecha you'll find still in active service within fleets.  It was believed to have been pioneered at the start of the Post Earth age and the blueprints were credited to a Hegemony Engineer back in 3087.  A relatively compact unit, Red Ant mecha weigh merely 10 tons making them the lightest of the light weight class division mecha.  They specialize in laser weaponry and possess an integrated on board preinstalled engine which cannot be replaced (it's a light and efficient one that grants a speed boost of +10, which isn't horrible but is a limiting factor). 

At later upgrade levels they begin to have built-in native shielding.  Expansion slots for equipment remain pretty spartan on this little guy.  You can at level 28 unlock a chassis slot which chances are you will use for Reinforced joints, although you could if you really wanted to use it for light torso plating or one of these two light weight premium chassis options: Improvised Jump Jet or the Hip Actuator.  Point is that dodge slot is going to be practical and overwhelmingly used to add some much needed dodge ability to your Red Ant.  You'll have some cockpit and shielding placements become available to you at later upgrade levels and by the time you upgrade a Red Ant to level 90 it will have the nearly insane boost of 95% increased laser damage

Right out of the box your Red Ant comes armed with just one Viper Laser, the weakest of all laser weapons (so weak in fact that it isn't even a crystal weapon, costing just 10 Ferrite and 8 Bioptics).  Don't fret though, the sheer amount of other lasers which will become subsequently available to you for purchase is staggering.

The ultimate grunt, this useful pawn is most often found being used as a front line infantry mech and at the super low cost of 125 Ferrite and 125 Bioptics, no wonder.









Submitted by Mycobacter#712744