Mechanical Horse: The Broken Clockwork World

The Broken Clockwork World is a 10 page PDF that was sold as one of 12 in a 3$ bundle on kick-starter. As such, its a fairly small PDF, and using the world probably requires a little expansion on the part of the GM. 

A big element of the Broken Clockwork world is its steampunk robots. One line in the PDF makes reference to soldiers on mechanical mounts or horses with gas masks. These have caught my imagination, and the image of troop of soldiers on steeds of iron is an awesome one.

The Basic Iron Horse:

ST:25	HP: 50	Speed: 5.50
DX: 10	Will: 6	Move: 10/20
IQ: 6	Per: 10	Weight: 1800 lbs
HT: 12	FP: N/A	SM:+1
Dodge: 8	Parry: 8	DR:10

An Iron Horse costs $18,500. It can work for 32 hours before needing to be rewound. Winding an Iron Horse requires a massive power source, usually a steam engine of some kind. It can be wound by hand, but this is slow and laborious, requiring more winding time than operating time. A properly sized steam engine can wind up a horse in 5 minutes. The horse has 200 lbs of payload built into its torso. The iron horse acts much like a horse of flesh, blood, and bone, able to interpret simple orders from its rider and stop before charging off a cliff. 

Stability is 5, maneuverability is 3. 

How We Built It:

The horse is a "robot as spaceships" based on a 1 ton chassis with 6 Double Downshifted cinematically cheap leg systems distributed over four legs and 6 systems of Deflection boosted steel armor because we need it to be heavily built for the right aesthetic. Yes, that's really leveraging my robots as spaceships series, and our first real chance to see it stretch its legs.

The power source is in powerful springs. Each spring system costs the same as a power cell, and will power the steel beast for 8 hours. We'll include 4 of these springs. The springs are far too powerful to be wound by hand, except in dire circumstances, where a very slow winding can get the beast a little more energy (often useful for lining up a one ton machine with a steam engine that can wind it)

Two more systems will be taken up by an engine room system and a control room system. The engine room system represents all of the flaps, appendages, splints, and on-board tools carried with the beast for field maintenance, and the control room is of course, required for all robots, especially ones with limbs.

All told, that's 18 systems, meaning 90% of the robot is chassis and the rest (200lbs) can be cargo. (It can be encumbered if it needs to carry more than 200lbs, which will usually be the case). Its base cost is $100, and it has a cost factor of 85, meaning that it will cost $8,500.

We get to use "Mind Metal" for the mind and sensors of the beast. We could use the fantastic AI rules from steampunk 2 to build a 50lb brain with IQ 6 for $250,000, but that feels excessive for what we are doing. I'm going to say that $10,000 dollars is probably in the right ballpark for IQ6 robots, given the setting. Too much cheaper, and they begin to overwhelm the setting. Too much more expensive, and we can't justify using them to replace cars.

Different sized people need different sized saddles, but the machine has a built in mounting where the saddle can be bolted on. The default saddle weighs 15 lbs. The reigns are part of the control room system. The horse has built-in watertight compartments, but most riders will want saddlebags to take advantage of the strength of the horse.

The ST of the horse has been halved, though the HP remain appropriate for its base weight, in fitting with most steampunk automatons.

 Going Forward

So here we have an iron horse (a steel one, really). I like how it turned out: the machinery itself is pretty cheap, but the horse is probably not more useful than a car of the same cost. It feels very steam-punk, and it gives us a good base to tweak. 

From a military perspective, this is a decent vehicle. It needs to find somewhere to rewind every 32 hours, but that's over 2 days of forced march, and 4 days of a more typical march, and they can move across country very quickly. The iron beasts are faster than any horse, and possesses an uncanny intelligence. While not actually bulletproof, they can absorb a remarkable amount of riffle fire, and soldiers seeking to stop them with bayonets must aim for the rider rather than the horse. Of course, guns large enough to stop them exist, and explosives are not unheard of in the broken-clockwork world.

We will return to this horse soon, to see different variants of it with different purposes.