Chapter 19: Guest Chapter

(The guy I left chapter 17 with is a good pal of mind, I trust him a lot. Chapter 17 will be staying in a lockbox he has until something I'm working on is done. Until then, here's a chapter he wrote for the book that I thought was worth publishing. I just added a few notes of my own. Enjoy and pray for us all.)

First off props to the original author for coming up with this. Much as we like to give crunchies shit, we need one another to stay alive. Brings me neatly to my first point.

1. Tanks Are Demigods At Best: Yes driving around a Russ is fun (Yeah that's a mindset that leads to half the new recruits doing fucking donuts with them) and a hell of a lot more survivable than slogging around with a lasgun. No you are not invincible when going around doing tanky shit. So charging off half cocked while your commander waves his sword around atop the turret with no plan other than ramming them is a good way to get your engine deck swarmed by cultists. Nothing is quite so demoralising as seeing one of our big mean warmachines run over a grand total of one wall before having it's engine blown out. Fortunately I was the gunner in a Russ that had a competent commander so the rest of the tank troop held the line there. By going into the prepared positions and actually using our guns.

2. Tanks Are Not Close Quarter Weapons: When you drive out into a field and declare none shall pass until your dying breath, do not be surprised when the local Ork Stormboys take you up on that. Seriously we carry around huge cumbersome guns. GUNS. They go boom and make bad stuff far away explode, they are not pointy things that go into bad stuff's various vital organs. A Space Marine Land Raider has issues hitting infantry that are up in it's grill, just put the pedal to the metal and get to allies that can shoot off any unwanted hull decorations for you. This was not even a noble that tried to pull this stunt just some young moron that tried to impress an all female regiment. (Why am I not fucking surprised?) Trust me it is a lot easier to pick up chicks in a tank that isn't a smoking wreck.

3. Keep Your Friends Close, But Not That Close: General warning to infantry as well as tankers, the nickname 'crunchy' is not a misnomer. Treads will kill almost anything if given the chance and inside the tank it is impossible to see what or who is right next to them. Surprise surprise, pulling off unexpected 'sick drifts' for no reason is an easy way to get lost in a dark alley while tripping onto a standard issue combat knife six or seven times. (Haven't done it yet, but I've been tempted)

4. Study Your Maps: When your proposed shortcut takes a 45 ton tank over a rickety wooden bridge (I'd ask if you were joking, but I think we both know how low my standards are by this point), YOU get to explain to an irate enginseer why you need an ARV in bumfuck nowhere land.

5. Keep A Cogbro A Cogbro: I don't care how much a pedantic whiny shit your local enginseer is, he or she is what keeps your metal beast running so you are going to be professionally polite to them at the very least. Nothing is more embarrassing than having a supply depot overrun because your tanks could not make it down a five click road without a breakdown. (Doubly so if the engiseer actually did his job, some people are just that stupid) This will happen if your enginseer does not like you for whatever reason and comes up with some bullshit excuse to avoid maintaining your beast whenever possible.

6. Cogbros, Be A Cogbro: Enginseers if you insist on being a pedantic whiny shit that will maintain tanks in a specific order only, like say by serial number, then do not be surprised when the machine spirits with a high serial number take a severe dislike to you. To the point they refuse to drive down a five click road to save a certain supply depot. (THAT'S WHERE THE FUCKING ARMOR WAS!?) Not actually assigning blame here, both our erstwhile commander and the enginseer were dicks, but this cost a lot of good men and women their lives.

7. Do Drops Dismounted: Do you know these brake rockets that allow the navy to literally just drop a base from orbit? They can be fitted to a Russ too. This is actually fun if you're an adrenaline junkie like this author, (I feel like I'm being mocked) but there is a very basic mistake here that catches people out. Namely, a Leman Russ is mostly solid metal, pretty cramped, contains no inertial dampeners, and an orbital drop is shaky as hell. The end result was that tankers who dropped while mounted up had to be hosed out of their vehicles after touchdown. I was kind of grateful for these chucklefucks as their demise got me a spot as a tanker in the first place, but seriously that was rancid to clear out.

8. Mind the Machine Spirit: A Leman Russ is as much a part of the team as any given crewmember. A friendly machine spirit will save your ass and attached fleshy bits, a pissed off machine spirit will level a city block, and yes I have experienced both firsthand. Example one my first machine was like a stern drill sergeant that demanded you kept every single bit of kit in order and observed every ritual with due diligence, or it simply would not start up. In return it got us through seven ambushes by Nurgle cults without so much as a scratch. Kept it together even as track links rusted over and filters nearly rotted away. Hissing puffing and screaming it got all of us out of there and back to base, where it only fell apart after we dismounted. Like, we literally walked five steps and clang.

Second example, my third ride was a much more laid back girl that accepted some affectionate murmers as an activation rite (Five Thrones say she was just too polite to call out the ones who sucked at flirting) and had a lot of patience for the new guys. Emperor help you though if you messed with the purity seals on her. Some jokers thought it would be hilarious to add some fake ones that protected from 'Warp Lemons' (a high gothic 'd' can turn into a high gothic 'l' quite easily). She thought it was hilarious to blow their barracks to rubble when no one was looking. Seriously. We, as in the crew plus a few enginseers, had our backs turned going over a briefing for one or the other, and all of a sudden there's a cannon blast. If we hadn't had a holovid recorder that captured the tank turning it's turret on it's own (recorder was mandatory administratum bullshit, to preserve the meeting notes in long form) we would have spent the night looking for saboteurs. Stories go all the way up to a Land Raider that turned a continent into rubble when it got pissed at some Orks, but I can't personally comment on that one. Let's just say it would not surprise me in the slightest if it's true.

9. Trigger Discipline: (Something that every branch of our holy military seems to struggle with I see) Tanks have much more firepower than a simple lasgun, so keep the booger hooks off the bang switches (or feet as the case may be) unless you are certain something needs to get shot. In addition when you dismount, do not leave a live round up the pipe as machine spirits can and will get up to mischief with them, and then your commisar will want to have a word with you. Only reason I walked out of there alive was because the cogbros stood up for the crew, myself included, and pointed out the obviously heretical purity seals, as well as the fact only the pranksters got blown up.

10. Flamers Are Useful Cleaning Tools: As my esteemed crunchy colleague has established, things like Genestealers don't particularly mind it when their legs are shredded by metal tracks. In fact they'll take the opportunity to literally hang in there and wait for the cleanup crew to come find them. (They can wait for days, they're patient little fucks) After which they will stab the cleanup crew. Shot the nid bastard myself, but by then the sponson gunners were already goners, so do yourself a favour and make sure that everything is well and truly dead before you clean it out of there. Don't worry, your tank can take it, just be sure to do it properly (when in doubt ask your enginseer for details and equipment).

11. Do not challenge Orks to a race: Seriously. What the fuck were you thinking?! (Oh wait, I know this one. FUCKING NOTHING!) Their trucks are rickety frames with an engine: They will outpace whatever you're driving. Second, they think that using anti tank rockets are fair and viable. Lastly, even if you do win you successfully managed to piss off a bunch of Orks.

12. Helmets on: As previously established, Leman Russ tanks are hard as hell both on the outside and the inside, and don't come with inertial dampners. So if you're thrown about inside of one when an AP round tosses your tank five meters to the side your flashy peaked cap is only going to get blood all over it while a helmet keeps your braincase safe. Clear? (Seriously, we've been over this, it isn't theoretical warp science)

13. Tankers are not infantry: If you ever wonder 'how hard can it be to shoot someone with a lasgun' you are free to report to any NCO of an infantry unit for a crash course on building clearing. Go on. I will even grant you all the time off the NCO says you need. (Send them my way, always a Chaos holdout around here nowadays. We could use an idiot to soak up a few shots) Just don't embarrass the tank regiments by jumping out of a perfectly functional Russ to chase after a cultist who has popped into a building you cannot HE for some reason. Especially when the nearby infantry unit just called in an EOD team to deal with booby traps.

14. I do not care how many holovids you saw where a single man operated a Leman Russ: He probably just slaughtered a hundred cultists with a heavy bolter, his bare hands and his tremendously hard erect penis too. (He's not joking, I saw the same vid during movie night. I honestly thought I had walked into a showing where there would be mainly women and only a few men in the audience) That just goes to show vid producers know somewhere between jack and shit about how the guard works, how tanks work, or how heavy a heavy bolter really is. Tanks take a team effort to operate, and trying to steal one solo just leads to a very amused tanker crew yanking your ass out the hatch for a short talk with the commissar's laspistol. Just goes to show the other team has their fair share of bad apples as well.

15. A commissar in civvies is still a commissar: Sometimes you have slow days on a planet, for whatever reason you're given enough time off to go out on a fair and then hey there's that commissar that executed three of your mates for being heretics. You can leave. You can just ignore her and go about your business. Or you can try and shank her only to find out that with proper motivation those close quarters drills she keeps banging on about also work just fine when done with a shooting stand grade airgun. Turns out that a rifle's firepower doesn't really matter when you're re-educating someone by rapidly introducing them to the shoulder stock. (Usually because it ends with a prick having a cracked skull)

Side note that I just got to regarding 219. Can confirm. We don't do it on purpose, visibility is shit once you're trundling along even when you can open top. Worst one was after some fucking around a very serious exercise with paint rounds. Our tank was literally a mix of bright fluorescent pink and yellow. To our great surprise we did find a hint of brain stuck in the idler wheel afterwards, but to this day I think the guy stole it off someone else and carried it in his pocket rather than his head. (I think that's how we met)

16. Shooting paint at a land raider does not end well: (...I don't want to know) Okay to be fair it did help a little bit when a Vanquisher finally showed up to deal with the damn thing, all we had to tell them was 'shoot the pink thing'.

17. Tank jousting: Take that weird plastic stuff they use to make practice blades with. Get the mold for a bayonet, scale up it up and hang the resulting monstrosity on the barrel of a tank. Now use that to try and poke off the banners from other tanks. It's absolutely hilarious, right up until the local brass finds out several tanks are now totaled in head on collisions, several regiments have to use actual metal blades for practice, and half a tank regiment is down with injuries. I don't know if the tech-priests or the commissars got them first but I never saw them again. (WHEN DID WE TURN INTO THE FUCKING ORKS!?)

18. Tank jousting on the battlefield: What happens when someone with more money than sense sees giant practice tank bayonets just lying around? Well they think tank bayonets are a splendid idea and commission an actual tank-scale bayonet. Subsequently every single Ork in the sector drops what they're doing to loot their ride. (Rule of thumb. If an Ork would do it, DON'T DO IT!) Then finally the crew are immortalised as an entry on this list.

19. We don't all have to shoot the same target: Secondary weapon gunners, I am looking at you in specific here. If I am coaching the gunner onto an enemy tank, I demand our heavy bolters are busy keeping us free from enemy infantry. I do not need or want you to waste shots on a hard target when there is a cultist literally right there waving a melta bomb at us. Thank the Emperor's holy titty bars this bomb just melted our sponson right off along with that incompetent moron manning the heavy bolter there. Apparently the lesson here has become part of standard training routine nowadays, so even the Emperor-damned adminstratum noticed how stupid this was. (Apparently Guilliman smacked the Master of the Administratum over the head with a book titled "Basics of Combined Arms Tactics for Dipshits")

20. Just because you can penetrate the commander's hatch on a Leman Russ tank, does not mean that the vehicle just blows up after it's hit there: If you pull this shot off, good on you, now adjust your aim. Try to go for the seam between sponson and hull or the turret ring for an instant kill, or just shoot the tracks to immobilize the thing while you flank round for a better shot. Do not just shoot the same spot over and over while sitting there. The other team is not stupid. It will take them a while to recover from a significant emotional event like the loss of their TC, on average around five or so shots with a fresh loader. Make those five shots count. Make them somewhere else than a spot already reduced to Serris Cheese. (People don't seem to get that tanks explode because either the fuel line or the munitions storage ignites. They just think it blows up because vehicles just do that. Idiots.)