Cougar High Mobility Tank

The Cougar is a high mobility tank used mostly in scouting, flanking and raids.

While relatively lightly armoured for a tank with armour comparable to that of a VTOL transport, its low weight allows an extra lateral articulation giving it exceptional agility in all terrains.

Being the lightest Akras tank it's also the one most easily airlifted, with the Silverwind VTOL being able to carry two of them.

Systems
As a reconnaissance vehicle, it is equipped with a 30x zoom multi-spectral camera, radar, electronic interception/warfare systems, and two aerial drones.

Weapons
An armoured automatic turret houses a 50mm gauss cannon, a 12.7mm HMG and a spy camera coaxially. It can rotate 360º and elevate 45º allowing it to be used in an indirect fire role, and can depress 15º; these limits can be increased by tilting the entire hull using the legs' mobility.

Armour
The cockpit is NBC-protected and is wrapped all around in 75mm of lightweight composite sandwich armour. It can resist 14.5mm weapons, proximity detonation explosives and anti-personnel land mines.

The Cougar is manned by a crew of four in separate partitions to prevent total team kill by beyond-armour effects: a driver on the front left seat, the commander who keeps battlefield awareness and designates targets in the front right, a systems operator who deals with sensors and electronic warfare systems on the left rear seat, and a drone operator responsible for deploying, operating and retrieving the drones on the right rear seat. All controls can be slaved to any partition, should the specialist be incapacitated.

The turret ring and secondary ammunition storage are positioned in the centre. It provides enough room for the breech when the weapon is elevated, for for crew to access or manually operate the systems, or to move between the seats; a proximity sensor disables the turret when someone approaches it lest its spastic target-tracking motions injure the crew member.

Mobility
Akras recent advances in heat disposal allowed it to rethink its paradigms. All Akras vehicles are now equipped with miniature Helium-3 fusion reactors thermally shielded by Heatsink Stone(TM) technology.

Its four independent legs are fully mobile, allowing the Cougar to move in the most rugged terrains, crab sideways, cross ditches longer than itself and even climb ledges. When the legs aren't enough, the harpoon and electric winch allow the vehicle to hoist itself to otherwise inaccessible heights.

On flatter terrain, the tracks can deploy their full power for the tank's top speed, being broad enough to keep the Cougar from ever being bogged down.