| The Venomous Sagittarius is an experimental strider designed for close combat in confined environments such as an urban landscape or a deep jungle. Infantry and Gears are normally the preferred combat units in these kinds of environment, but only a strider has both the mobility and the muscle power to carry the amount of ordinance and armor required by the Venom program. As its name indicates, the machine is based on the chassis of the Sagittarius, an artillery support strider presently undergoing field testing in the Humanist Alliance. The Sagittarius's main weakness, its fragile leg actuators and articulations, has been corrected with the addition of heavy composite armor plates. New articulations, made of a more resilient alloy, and better concealed power feedlines are also much less prone to damage from random shrapnel. These reinforcements have reduced the strider's running speed slightly, but the designers feel that the trade off is worth eliminating a dangerous weakness. The Venomous's main weapon is the triple set of short range missiles mounted atop and on the side of its hull. Each armored box contains an array of 18 launch clusters, each tube fitted with eight microrockets in a ring configuration. The fire control computers are linked to a single databus, allowing them to be fired en masse at a given target or zone. A modified chin turret houses an additional anti-personnel grenade launcher to take care of infantry squads straying too close -- the machinegun is now slung under the turret.
The Sagittarius has begun limited distribution to front line Alliance units under the watchful eye of the Republican military observers. Because the strider is a completely new design, not based on or even derived from an existing chassis, all systems and components were tested for several thousand hours in the computers before being crafted. As such, they are no "true" prototypes for the vehicle, the first twenty models built being the early production version. Still, the preparations paid off and the first completed Sagittarius walked off the Thebes assembly line last cycle without a hitch. The crew were immediately impressed by the sheer physical size of the vehicle, which towers nearly eight meters above the ground on two spindly backward-canted legs. Early live-fire tests are extremely priomising, with the missiles flying true on target every time. Though the vehicle cannot fire its missiles on the run, it has demonstrated good aptitudes for hit-and-scamper artillery bombardment by making extensive use of hard cover. Pilots were quick to program special macros allowing them to "squat" their machines at will, cutting its height to a more respectable 5.5 meters. Other than the random minor glitches of a new vehicle type, the testing program is going extremely well. Crews from the 28th Provisional Protector Group are having a field day, lobbing scores of blue-painted inert Spiculum missiles at polymer and fiberglass targets, both mobile and immobile, on the experimental artillery testing range on the outskirts of Thebes's territory. Despite the vehicle's design weaknesses (such as short ammunition supplies and fragile legs), the crews have been quite enthusiastic about it.
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