Guardian Tank

The MBT-X8 Guardian Tank is the MBT of the Grand Alliance during World War III. A main battle tank of British origin, it features a powerful main gun as well as a unique target designating systems, allowing it to "paint" an enemy unit and relay targeting information to other Allied units, boosting their effectiveness against the enemy unit.

Faced with Red Star incursions on multiple fronts, Allied nations hurriedly banded together to form a military alliance from the toughest or surviving bits and pieces of representative nations' defense forces. Although the need to form a cohesive military network was urgent, certain key elements needed considerable time to be flushed out. After all, despite widespread differences of opinion within the Allied ranks regarding how best to repel the Coalition of the Red Star's advancements, everyone was on the same page about at least one thing: The Allies would not get a second chance to keep their nations' sovereignty. So it was with great care (and some trepidation) that Allied War Council made the decision to move forward with plans to double down on production of the MBT-X8 Guardian Tank, mainstay of the Allies' armor divisions, and a crucial component in the free nations' struggles to keep the coalition from expanding its borders any further.

A main battle tank of British origin, the Guardian became the mainstay of Allied forces on the ground worldwide after besting the Grizzly, an American-made design, in field tests across the board. While the Guardian's performance characteristics admittedly did not exceed those of the Grizzly by a wide margin, even a narrow victory was enough to justify switching production lines over to this newer model. After all, the Allied War Council fully expected to have to deploy Guardians in bulk in order to stave off Soviet armor divisions, believed to be the strongest in the world. To that end, the Allied Guardian Tank has proven to be something of an underdog, effectively helping to repel larger Soviet forces while bolstering the combat-effectiveness (if not the morale) of coalition forces caught in the same struggle.

The Guardian boasts an impressive balance of power, durability, and maneuverability and has a molded frame that helps keep production costs down. Its 90mm main gun can punch through Soviet and Imperial armor reliably and packs more firepower, though a slightly lower rate of fire, than the Guardian's Red Star and Union counterparts. However, the Guardian's counterparts were not the Allies' greatest concern, for they needed to be able to contend with an assortment of heavy vehicles. To this end, a relatively heavy platform like the Guardian Tank proved to be a suitable home for a special targeting device that could be used to even the odds against the worst that the Soviets had to offer. Each Guardian Tank now comes standard with a target-designating module, which replaces the exposed machine gun mount found on older models. Designed to complement other Allied weapons platforms, the Spyglass target designator (colloquially called the "target painter") relays targeting information to nearby Allied forces. By automatically interfacing with their weapons systems, the target painter makes other forces more accurate and deadly by compensating for wind direction, visibility, and more than 100 marginal factors—all of which add up. A Guardian Tank is unable to maintain the beam through the recoil of its main gun's firing sequence, so Guardian crews must coordinate well to decide which unit within the column is going to "cast the lure" (as Guardian technicians put it) while the others press the attack.