| The Fire Dragon close support vehicle was originally a Humanist Alliance design that was adopted by the armies of the South after the formation fo the Allied Southern Territories. The Fire Dragon was conceived as a mobile support vehicle, capable of handling both civil and military missions in very different environments. The early versions of the strider used large rubber wheels for movement in urban landscapes, but the military ones have since replaced them with sturdy treads designed to carry the vehicle over the roughest ground. Although it does not have the armor protection of a battle tank, its armoplast hide, supplemented by belts of bonded ceramite armor, can deflect many small to medium battlefield weapons.
The armament of the Fire Dragon is light but serviceable. All of its weapons were desgiend expressively for the vehicle, though many components were adopted from existing items in order to keep production costs to a reasonable level. A large boxy turret on the Dragon's broad, flat back holds forty-eight launch tubes for the Dragonsclaw 90mm anti-armor rocket, a simple yet reliable missile weapon. The tubes are protected from accidental detonation by a large blow-away armor panel. The rocket launcher is backed up by a pair of Dragonsfang 20mm chain guns placed on either side of the hull each chain gun covering the entire lateral arc. Each is fed through a separate magazine mounted in the main hull. The final weapon in the Fire Dragon's arsenal is the one that gave the vehicle its name: a wicked Dragonsbreath flamer is placed in a turreted chin mount at the front of the strider. The flamer can be used for many tasks, such as clearing a path through deep vegetation or keeping hostile infantry at bay. The Fire Dragon can also hold its own defensively. An anti-missile system, located in a small turret mounted under the main rocket launcher, helps to reduce the odds of a missile trying to test the armor. The system can swing freely under the luancher housing, and that location affords considerable protection to the delicate actuators of the AM system, shielding them with the bulk of the rocket launcher. All of the Dragon's weapons are well-served by an extremely sophisticated fire control computer which gives the machine a deadly accuracy in combat. |