Tank 82417

A tank designed and used by the Mainframe (nation of the Tebburus Unification War).

Tank 82417 quite notably had no organic crew, which is unsurprising for an AI faction. This allowed it to be fully autonomous and was controlled by an AI programmed to kill any Suons it finds. It had a notable advantage over suon tanks, not having to protect any crew members and being able to do away with their large internal space requirement, allowing it to be more compact than suon tanks but still achieve a similar role and be faster. However, tank designs of the Mainframe were not specialised beyond specific roles which left their military less adaptable than that of suon forces, and were largely outnumbered by the organic tanks. It is largely because of this that they lost the war eventually despite attempts to develop biological weapons to eradicate the suon species.

Later, the 82417 has been fully analysed by much more modern, post-unification war forces. A lot of understanding was gained from its construction which made it more easy to develop similar vehicles as well as other fully autonomous vehicles such as freelancers. They are now mostly seen in structures such as museums where they are put on display for all suons to see. A constant reminder of how close their species got to annihilation and the importance of knowing how to fight AIs. Later, they ended up fighting the Saelian Coalition and even they appreciated the value of these lessons. 

Its main armament was a 124.2mm smoothbore cannon that was largely finetuned by the AI that developed it, and its performance specifications became well known by the AI and suon hackers. This type of cannon was fine tuned very effectively by the Mainframe and was noticeably, if slightly, more powerful and had more range than those of most suon tanks. 

Due to its much smaller mass, it was also faster than suon tanks, and could cross slightly worse terrain. However, modern fire control systems have largely rendered evasive maneuvers irrelevant, so this speed was mostly used to move positions and get clearer views of firing positions. This information was transmitted directly into allied systems, not relying on suon word of mouth to notify others of enemy presence. 

The tank 82417 was also particularly notorious for being hard to destroy. Its very compact nature made it explode if most weapons penetrated its armour, leading to some suons nicknaming them as 'robot cookers'. However, its armour scheme was also fine tuned perfectly. Later the Mainframe took selection bias into account, but before this the first several upgrade packages made the tank less effective as suon forces would strike the weak points more and more as the weak points became more significant. These first few versions of multiple Mainframe war vehicles were often suboptimal which allowed suon forces to quickly fight back in the initial waves of expansion but shortly after that the largely intelligent AI learned.