Sea Fox (Vinberland) Scout Armor

Sea Fox Amphibious Armor (Vinberland)

Base Tech Level: Advanced Mixed (Base IS)
Advanced 3116+
Tech Rating: F/X-X-F-F

BV: 98
Cost: 1,728,000 C-bills
Source: MME Vinberland

Movement: 3/3/0/2

Internal: 4
Armor: 20 BA Standard (Basic)

Internal Armor
Trooper 1 1 5
Trooper 2 1 5
Trooper 3 1 5
Trooper 4 1 5


Weapons Loc Heat
Laser Rifle (Mauser 960) (APM) Squad 0
Laser Rifle (ER [Sunbeam Starfire]) (APM) Squad 0

Equipment Loc
BA Manipulators [Armored Gloves] (Right arm) Squad
BA Manipulators [Armored Gloves] (Left arm) Squad
Camo System (Body) Squad
Anti Personnel Weapon Mount (Body) Squad
Cutting Torch (Right arm) Squad
Heat Sensor (Body) Squad
Mission Equipment Storage (15 kg) (Left arm) Squad
Searchlight [BA] (Left arm) Squad


Battle armour designs intended amphibious raids against targets ashore is a neglected area of battle armour development, with only the Federated Sun's Sea Fox design ever entering production. While the clan's Undine suit possesses superior underwater capabilities to the Sea Fox, the sluggish movements of the Undine when on land leaves it unable to properly exploit whatever surprise may be achieved from an amphibious deployment. While the standard Sea Fox is an excellent design for direct action raids, it lacks the concealment and surveillance systems of dedicated scout armours. To fill this scout role for their amphibious forces the New Vinberland Defense Force has developed their own version of the Sea Fox.

Over a quarter of the Sea Fox (Vinberland)'s total mass would be required for installation of the reactive display panels and visual processors needed for an active camouflage system and several capabilities of the baseline suit needed to be reduced to free up the required mass. Much of the weight saving was achieved by removing one third of the original version's underwater thrusters and the entire mechanical jump system, considered acceptable since the NVDF special operations doctrine favours the use of fast boats or VTOLs to deliver Sea Foxes almost to the shoreline. To further reduce the weight of the original the overhead weapons mount was significantly lightened and the recoil compensation system completely removed, as a result the suit could no longer support the weight or recoil of the light machine gun used on the standard suit. In its place an infantry marksman's laser rifle was installed. The replacement weapon was found to be satisfactory to NVDF special forces, with their soldiers developing techniques to extend the laser rifle just above the surface of the water to eliminate shoreline sentries while the bulk of their camouflaged suits remained practically invisible beneath the water's surface. The short range missile launcher was also removed and in its place an external stowage module was installed for the various miscellaneous pieces of gear that may be required for a particular operation. One area of complaint from users is the sensor suite, while the addition of a thermal imager does improve on the basic design the suit lacks the multispectrum sensor systems that are installed on some other scout suits.

The sum result of the modifications is a suit that trades away the direct action capabilities of the standard Sea Fox to instead uniquely fill a niche as an infiltration, reconnaissance and harassment suit. In one notable exercise a squad of soldiers in Sea Fox (Vinberland) armour used the cover of a rain storm to infiltrate to within one hundred meters of opposing infantry platoon. After survailing the infantry platoon for thirty minutes without detection the Sea Foxes then scored simulated kills on all members of the opposing platoon over the course of a minute, without any member of the opposing platoon successfully identifying the concealed positions of the Sea Fox suits.

Designer's Notes:

There isn't a canon design that has both UMUs and visual camouflage, so if I wanted something in this niche it needed a custom design. The Sea Fox is the only canon spec-ops suit with UMUs, so it was the obvious basis for the design [link to Sarna for the original design]. Since the original is Inner Sphere tech base I decided to keep my version the same, like the original the only clantech is the UMUs (for some unknown reason small water jet thrusters are lostech in the Inner Sphere). It won't be great in direct combat, since the rules don't allow both anti-personal weapons to be fired in the same turn which forces it to choose between using the long range but low damage Sunbeam or the shorter ranged higher damage Mauser 960. Sure a single clantech Mauser IIC would do both roles better than either, but that option just felt boring and lacking in character. Similarly the cutting torch that is carried over from the original, the mission equipment and the searchlight don't have much in-game use, but they make a lot of in universe sense for a suit designed for this role. I definitely would have liked some form of better sensor system, but it would have required removing all of the fluff systems that give the design its flavour.