The Essential Guide to Force Exile/Avatar walker

"This is without a doubt the most complex and terrifying war machine I have ever built."

- Sarth Kraen

History
The Avatar walker was originally designed as a replacement for the aging Challenger and Mauler tanks in the Yanibar Guard Army's arsenal as part of a modernization effort conducted by General Beblos following his promotion of the head of the Yanibar Guard Army in 20 ABY. Work began on a replacement vehicle in the same year and Kraechar Arms submitted several different concepts to the army's review board. In the end, a medium battle walker that was more maneuverable than the late-model Imperial AT-STs but less cumbersome than an AT-AT was selected for development. As the first bipedal design pursued by Kraechar Arms, the design process was fraught with difficulty and setbacks. The design was expensive and complex and the power requirements were astronomical for a vehicle of its size. To reduce the power demands, the crew size was lowered first from three to two and the walker's locomotion was redesigned.

The drawn-out development cycle for the Avatar walker resulted in several high-level officers and politicians deeming the vehicle an expensive boondoggle. In 23 ABY, another concept that Kraechar Arms had proposed from the original competition was selected for simultaneous development. This alternate design for a simpler hovertank that used mostly off-the-shelf technology was resurrected and put into development, with the first prototypes reaching their units within a year due to the relative simplicity of the vehicle. Funding for the Avatar was reduced, but the design had enough proponents to continue development even as the rival design was introduced to the Yanibar Guard in late 24 ABY as the PLACEHOLDER battle tank and saw action in the Saraswan Campaign.

The invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong in 25 ABY was the catalyst that changed the development of the Avatar. Yanibar Guard Intelligence watched with increasing unease as the Yuuzhan Vong armies smashed through planetary defenses and New Republic soldiers alike. Realizing that even the new PLACEHOLDER was severely outclassed by Yuuzhan Vong warbeasts, the Yanibar Guard restored funding for the Avatar and slated it as a high priority, mandating a redesign to serve as a vehicular defense to the Yuuzhan Vong. Sarth Kraen became personally involved with the design and his first major design decision was to upgrade the powerplant to use the same high-powered reactor core that powered the Yanibar Guard Fleet's Whirlwind interceptors. Other improvements that were added specifically to counter the Yuuzhan Vong threat, including kinetic shielding that deflected physical impacts, caltrop grenades to deal with swarming infantry at the walker's feet, and arm-mounted vibroblades. The shield algorithms were some of the most advanced produced by Kraechar Arms, allowing the walker to use some of its shield power to burn off objects clinging to it, or use the shield to absorb the impact of being knocked over.

As additional information and salvaged biotechnology was researched by YGI's Black Works, that knowledge was funneled into the Avatar's development. The walker's skeleton had to be redesigned due to the weight of the additional components, and a New Republic metallurgy advancement in laminamium was "acquired" to serve as the base metal. This advance combined with the shield technology allowed the Avatar to stand back up if knocked over, provided it wasn't too severely damaged. However, all the technological advancements made the Avatar very difficult to control. A recovered piece of Imperial technology enabled a connection between the pilots and the machine for stabilizing control via neural interface, but that complicated communication between the two crewmembers.

Ultimately, the Avatars' crew complement was reduced to one, though in order to multitask sufficiently well, only Force-sensitives could pilot the walker. That drastically reduced the available candidates for Avatar units to a few dozen, which was just as well given that the walkers were fantastically expensive and were not easy to maintain. However, the stunning simulation matches between Avatars and other Yanibar Guard Army units resulted in a ludicrous kill-death ratio of 88:1 in favor of the Avatars. Thus, a two-year training program was established in early 25 ABY to prepare and acclimate the first group of Avatar pilots to the complex war machine, an effort known as the Pathfinders. One flaw quickly noticed in the first phases of live training: the cockpit temperatures of the Avatar grew almost unbearably hot when all its systems were operational. Since the shield algorithms depended on the surface mapping of the Avatar, there was no way to add more heat sinks, as that would change the Avatar's surface profile. Instead, an interim hydration system and improved cooling garments were provided to the pilots.

After nearly two years of testing and evaluation, the first group of Avatars was ready for a combat deployment. The target was a Yuuzhan Vong outpost on Falleen. Four Avatars and their pilots were loaded into the cruiser-carrier Quinlan Vos and transported to Falleen, where they were dropped down to the surface in ablative orbital insertion shields. They landed near a polar region and were confronted by a trio of Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper starfighters, which they promptly shot down.

Advancing into a ruined city, the Avatars faced a Yuuzhan Vong rakamat warbeast. The beast's defensive dovin basals deflected their weapons fire even when it was flanked, leading the Avatar's coordinator on the Vos to coordinate a trap where the beast was lured under a bridge spanning a dried riverbed, which was subsequently dropped on top of the beast. The Avatars then pushed through the city into the suburbs, dispatching a group of infantry that attacked them from the cover of the trees and ruined buildings. Once they were close enough to the Yuuzhan Vong encampment, they called down an airstrike to destroy it.

One YGF fighter was shot down, and the Avatars were instructed to destroy the debris before extraction. After that was done, one of the Pathfinders noticed a path leading into the hills. They investigated, but crashed down into a subterranean cavern. The use of their Avatars' repulsor packs to slow the descent, so they remained damaged but combat-worthy. The cavern turned out to be infested by the Yuuzhan Vong and the Avatars fought off three more warbeasts, another rakamat and a pair of spindly Fire Breathers. The Avatars pushed forward after defeating their foes despite severe damage and found that the Yuuzhan Vong were growing dozens of yammosk living war coordinators in the cavern. The yammosks' telepathic abilities meant that they had to be destroyed in one go, or the distress signal would overwhelm the pilots. To accomplish this since the Pathfinders were out of missiles, two of the most damaged Avatars had their engine shielding deactivated and then set to self-destruct while their pilots hitched rides on the other two vehicles. The remaining two walkers escaped the cave shortly before the detonation, which collapsed the cavern and killed the yammosks. They were then extracted from Falleen by specially-modified Discblade transports.

The loss of two Avatars was a big setback for the program, but the destruction of so many yammosks was a major contribution to the overall war effort. However, no further Avatar operations were planned while more were finished and pilots were trained. When a large Yanibar Guard Force was sent to Rishi in 28 ABY to rescue a smaller YGF force trapped there by the Yuuzhan Vong, they brought a dozen Avatars with them to assist in extracting people on the ground. What was originally intended as an extract-and-evacuate mission turned into a land-and-space defense of the world from a Yuuzhan Vong battlegroup. Four of them were dropped immediately to help secure the governor's palace where an Elite Guardian team had been cut off. The other eight were landed at a hastily-established Yanibar Guard Army field base.

In the next major engagement of the ground battle for Rishi, the Avatars assisted in evacuating civilians from a nearby settlement, serving as the main mobile reaction force for the evacuation convoys. When the Yuuzhan Vong began their final push on the base, eight of the Avatars helped defend it with withering barrages, firing until their cannons nearly melted from the heat and returning only to be recharged and armed with more missiles. The other four had been caught outside the perimeter by the attack, but assisted in protecting a rendezvous point for other separated patrol units. To this end, they also helped a YGA commando squad extract a YGF fighter pilot named Jasika Kraen who had been shot down. The commando squad was fleeing from a large force of Yuuzhan Vong when YGF starfighters and the four Avatars intervened.

Following the mutual withdrawal from Rishi, the Avatars were extracted as well, suffering no combat losses, though two of them were damaged to the point of needing serious repairs beyond what a field depot could perform. They returned to Yanibar having acquitted themselves well and justifying their staggering price and lengthy development process, their pilots hailed as heroes.

Description
The Avatar was an eleven-meter tall bipedal assault walker. Its legs were reverse-articulated in a design adapted from Clone Wars-era and Imperial walkers. Like the much smaller AT-ST, its torso could swivel independently and elevate/depress from the legs. However, unlike Imperial designs, the Avatar also incorporated actuators in the arms, allowing them to traverse, elevate, and depress in limited fashion to bring the laser cannon and arm-mounted vibroblades to bear.

At the heart of the design was a powerful reactor core borrowed from a high-powered starfighter and adapted to a richer fuel blend. To encase such a powerful power supply, the reactor was heavily shielded. The laminamium skeleton of the Avatar's torso was built around the reactor to protect it from damage, as a catastrophic overload could result if the shielding was breached. This became the self-destruct method of choice for the Avatar, as the explosion would utterly obliterate any sensitive components. Heavily-insulated power supply cables fed power from the reactor to the actuators, motivators, gyros, weapons, shields, sensors, life support, and other systems. The power supply and durable skeleton allowed the Avatar to move far faster than contemporary walkers, at the price of being far more difficult to pilot.

For armament, the Avatar had a rapid-firing laser cannon in each arm, along with a slide-out vibroblade that was hastily added after the Yuuzhan Vong predilection with melee combat was observed. The vibroblades were removed after the Yuuzhan Vong War. A chin turret held one of several modular weapons packages: a rail cannon, dual repeating blasters, a flamethrower, or an ion cannon. To defend itself from swarming infantry, the Avatar was equipped with 24 caltrop grenades that could be fired to ring the Avatar in anti-personnel grenades. It also carried a pair of droidekas which could be dropped for fire support. However, the Avatar's main armament was the 72 concussion missiles mounted in thickly-plated shoulder racks.

To defend the complex walker, each Avatar was equipped with both ray shields and kinetic shields to defend it from both physical impacts and energy blasts. A pair of anti-missile blasters helped defend it from anti-vehicle missiles. Thick durasteel fibrous ceramic plating was layered as a final means of defense, particularly over the missile racks and reactor core, which were separated by a bulkhead of the same material. A sacrificial ejection system was also created for the missile racks, allowing a pilot to dump ammunition that was in danger of exploding. Additionally, each Avatar pilot had an ejection system that would propel them hundreds of meters away from a doomed Avatar.

Avatars used a similar sensor suite to the older Challenger tank, supplemented by a number of holocam feeds that allowed pilots to see from different vantage points of their walker despite being perched high in the cockpit. For additional surveillance and spotting, they each carried a pair of flying scout drones which could be launched and guided from the cockpit and feed data back to the Avatar.

Behind the scenes
The Avatar walker was inspired from a number of other series and universe. The foremost of these was the BattleTech universe, most notably due to the depiction of a Mad Dog OmniMech being used for the Avatar, but additional influences include Halo, Iron Man, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and Transformers. Force Exile author Atarumaster88 planned to introduce the Avatars for Force Exile V: Warrior, but removed the storyline involving them and their pilots to a separate short story dubbed Blaze of Glory after the novel grew too complex. Avatars were at one point planned to be part of the Yanibar Guard Army shortly after Force Exile IV, but Atarumaster88 pushed back their introduction until the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong created a pressing need for such a powerful walker.

Appearances

 * Blaze of Glory
 * Force Exile V: Warrior