V-2 Rocket Launcher
The V-2 rocket was first developed by German military scientists, as was also an older version of the missile called the V-1. However, the designs for these weapons were stolen by Soviet spies and were integrated into the Soviet military arsenal. Rather than building stationary launch facilities for the V-2 missiles, which were preferred over the V-1 due to greater effectiveness, the rockets and delivery systems were mounted on light-armored vehicles. As a result, the V-2 rocket launcher was born. It became an essential combat unit for the Soviet military. Further research in German missile technology allowed the Soviets to develop surface-to-air missile batteries for antiaircraft defense.
Mobile Construction Vehicle (MCV)
Trench warfare in World War I, lasting from 1914 to 1918, proved to be costly and frustrating for the commanders of both the Allied and Central Powers. Due to the trench battles, military strategists and tacticians were more than convinced that rapid deployment was essential towards winning armed conflicts. However, the deployment of troops required the construction of bases, and base construction was a long and arduous process. The creation of the Mobile Construction Vehicle helped quicken the process. The MCV, when deployed into a Construction Yard, contained the supplies, blueprints, tools, and kits needed for the building of structures such as the Barracks, the War Factory, the Power Plant, etc. The immediate availability of construction materials allowed for quicker base establishment. And thus, rapid military deployment was made possible. Furthermore, the usefulness of the MCV during the Great World War II and the wars of the Tiberian Age meant that military suppliers could place a lesser emphasis on hauling construction implements and concentrate more on carrying food and weapons to the battlefront.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik during the Great World War II had astounded the international community. Since Sputnik was launched during wartime, it was believed that the Soviets intended to utilize their space program for military purpose (the Soviets later discontinued the program and focused more on developing the MiG jet fighter, the Mammoth Tank, the Iron Curtain, the super-commando called Volkov, and the high-powered attack dog called Chitzkoi). But regardless of Soviet intentions, Western leaders felt that it was imperative to match or even surpass Soviet space superiority. Soon enough, the Canadian and United States governments allocated funds for a satellite construction project.
When Canada and the US entered the war in favor of the European Allies, it was decided that the satellite program be completely militarized (the project was originally run jointly by the civilian space agencies and militaries of Canada and the States). The launch of the first experimental satellite proved to be a success, and it prompted further test launches and additional funding. When Allied military officers wondered if the US-Canada satellite project could be utilized for actual military purposes such as intelligence-gathering, the project engineers obligingly installed cameras on a test satellite. As it turned out, the camera-equipped satellite was indeed able to track movement on Earth. The success of the test mission gave hope to the Allies, now that a highly convenient means of battlefield knowledge was at their fingertips. Later satellites were outfitted with cameras and became a network called the Global Positioning System (GPS). This satellite system was able to observe the numerous regions of Earth, including Soviet territory. The GPS went into service in the later years of the Great World War II.
The GPS played a vital role in several Allied-Soviet battles. It was able to provide data for the Allies on enemy troop movements during the defense of a research base that held a Chronosphere prototype, the attack on a Soviet nuclear missile base, the battle for control of the River Volga in Soviet Russia, the disabling of the revived Iron Curtain Project, and the siege of Moscow.
After the war, the advocates of space exploration, among them a newly formed US government agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (initials: NASA. Its predecessor, called the United States Department of Outer Space, was involved in the US-Canada satellite project) of the United States, proposed that the GPS satellites should be used for observing the solar system. Entrepreneurs, however, discovered that television could be broadcast all over the world via satellites. This realization, and the fulfillment of it, led to the development of international television networks such as the Cable News Network (CNN). And in the 1980s, the GPS would become a model for the Star Wars space defense program that was proposed by the American Presidential Administration headed by Ronald Reagan. The Star Wars program in turn would be the foundation for the Ion Cannon, developed by the Global Defense Initiative during the 1990s.
The components of the GPS satellite and other satellite types also attracted attention. These components were: the camera, the microchip, and the solar panel. The cameras used by the satellites were modified for security systems and spy operations. The microchip allowed for the improvement of computers (as a matter of fact, it revolutionized the computer industry) and further progress in Chronosphere technology. The solar panel was seen by many as a clean and affordable energy source. The GPS, of virtue by its own abilities, was of value for other purposes.
Tesla Coil
With Einstein's meddling in the time stream, Nikola Tesla's stay in the United States was shorter-lived. Originally, Tesla had worked with Einstein on the Chronosphere and Gap projects. In the new, alternate, reality, he returned to Croatia soon after completing his graduate studies in the US and founded that country's first major science-oriented university. He crafted many of the same, soon-to-become mundane, technologies that he researched in the "original" world such as alternating current, power transmission, and Tesla coil transmitters (for radios).
Meanwhile, Stalin's Soviet state spread its communist tendrils and they reached south to Croatia. Tesla was invited to help found Russia's new Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. There, he worked on much more sensitive projects, such as a new military technology, dubbed the Tesla Coil.
The Tesla Coil is, essentially, a lightning generator. As with other static-electricity generating equipment like Van De Graff generators, a Tesla Coil builds up static charge and discharges it at a target. However, unlike other generators, the bolt is not attracted to the quickest route to the electrical "ground", nor is it capable of only jumping a short distance. Instead, a Tesla Coil coerces the bolt into striking a specific target at a long range, such as a tank or a soldier, even if this is not the shortest route to ground.
The net effect on personnel is similar to the net effect of lightning, i.e. severe burns, charring, and mental shock. In combat, a soldier would be rendered incapacitated for hours, if not dead.
Tesla Coil "burning" a tank.
Tanks can also be targeted by a Tesla Coil. Tank armor, being made of metal, is conductive to electricity. However, this is not to say that the bolt harmlessly passes through the tank. Though occupants inside are safe from direct effects, the metal plates making up the tank's armor will begin to fuse, just as if an arc welder was being used. Non-metallic chemicals in the armor will insulate against the electric bolt and heat up considerably, causing parts of the armor to melt. Repeated bolts are likely to fuse the chassis solid; turret rotation and tank movement become difficult or impossible and the tank becomes useless in battle. Meanwhile, the melted armor plating has lost its ability to resist enemy shells and the tank becomes a deathtrap for its occupants.
Nikola Tesla died before the war began, but his legacy lived on. Soviet engineers eventually managed to build power plants small enough and Tesla Coils compact enough to be fitted to tanks and used as an excellent short-range weapon.
Chronosphere
Einstein's very basic time machine - used to eliminate Hitler's World War II - was, after his return, enhanced and transformed for military applications. The original prototype was specifically geared to transport a single person of no more than 250 lbs to the specific time and place of Hitler's release from prison, and was not capable of being re-targeted at all.
Chronosphere
Although a small-scale, specifically targeted chronoshift device could still be useful for military applications - for example a setup to transport a bomb or a commando team straight into the heart of enemy military or civilian centers - it was decided to not waste resources creating easy-to-overcome single-shot devices, but rather a more generic spatial teleportation device.
It would take many years to achieve this feat. During the Great World War II, the technology wasn't completely to point, nor was sufficient power available to send significant amounts of material through space/time. Computers were also fairly primitive and targeting information was not easy to calculate - therefore, only a single unit could be teleported. Early experiments with the technology showed that it was unstable and could potentially teleport units to what military experts euphemistically called "undesirable locations". Hence, early models were built with an automatic-recall device that pulled the target back to its original location after a few minutes.
During the war, Allied special operations came up with an ingenious solution to the "undesirable locations" problem. They put a very small Chronosphere device inside a tank, allow it to teleport itself: the Chrono Tank. Thus, the problem of potentially teleporting a unit to an inhospitable location was solved. But so much weight was given up for the chronosphere device and the massive power plant that the Chrono Tank proved too frail on the battlefield. It was abandoned, to later be utilized for other concepts.
Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
When the USSR's isolationist (and potentially expansionist) policy became clear, observers in the West said that an "Iron Curtain" had fallen over Europe, alluding to the strict immigration rules and general attitude of "if you are not with us, then you are against us" of the Soviet government.
Apparently, a scientist in the Soviet Union thought this was a great name for a remotely projected force field project he was working on as part of his graduate studies, and the name stuck. At a national science fair in Moscow, the project attracted Stalin's attention, and the military application of a large-scale version of such a device was quickly realized.
Unfortunately for the USSR, the first war broke out before the Iron Curtain was completed. Fortunately, the war dragged on and the prototype was completed.
However, the device proved not to be very useful. As with the Chronosphere, due to the limitations of computer systems at the time, it was only able to render a single unit invincible. A single invincible tank, with the dark red glow it radiated, was clearly visible in a tank battalion. Allied tank commanders quickly learned to simply target all the other tanks. By the time they'd finished off the rest of the battalion, the invulnerability effect had worn off.
Phase Technology
During the first war, engineers attached to the Afghanistan divisions of the Soviet army recognized that the flat and open nature of the desert lent itself to speed and stealth rather than durability and firepower. As the Soviets were having great difficulty against the Allied tank divisions in the Middle East, they made modifications to their tanks to make them lighter and lower-profile - and hence, more competitive with Allied armor. When Stalin found out about this, he was considerably upset - his idea of the perfect tank was that of a towering monstrosity that would crush all in its path. He quickly ordered tanks stripped of speed-enhancing modifications.
Stalin's Afghan division generals were aghast. The Allied Light Tanks and fast jeeps were slicing their divisions up. After quite a lot of badgering, they managed to persuade the research sections to provide some money and tools to develop new stealthy technology in the form of a non-tank vehicle - thus avoiding Stalin's "tank requirements". Unfortunately, they may have got a bit more than they bargained for. The lead scientist that the R&D department sent along was a fanatic obsessed with making an invisibility device. However this scientist was also quite brilliant and the relatively featureless desert environment meant that even a primitive cloaking device would work wonders.
It took several months, but a prototype was finally completed - a modified APC called the "Phase Tank". However, in all those months that the development was proceeding, the Afghan corps suffered a severe loss when the Allies managed to push the Soviet divisions out of Afghanistan, capturing the research facility and the prototype. Stalin was outraged, and had several of the responsible generals executed for treason.
It took the Leningrad research team's prototype augmented cyborg, "Soldier Volkov" (and his companion, the cybernetic dog "Chitzkoi") to recover the prototype and destroy the captured lab. The prototype later proved to be of limited use against invading forces. Although handy on the open field, in forests the stealth effect was less convincing; less than a week after it was recovered, an Allied field gun spotted what looked like the outline of a tank and destroyed it.
Harmonic Shockwave (M.A.D. Tank)
M.A.D. Tank (Modeled by Sir Phoenixx and textured by Darkblade for the Renegade total conversion Renegade Alert.)
In the final months of the first war, Soviet armies were literally beating a fighting retreat. Several Western division generals were charged by Stalin with creating what he called an implement of "mutually assured destruction" - a final-solution weapon that would halt the Allied advance out of fear, giving Soviet armies enough breathing room to mount a hell-fired counterattack.
The reasoning was that Allied tanks and installations were by far the greatest threat. Russia's own troops and tanks were quite capable of dealing with infantry threats, but the near-endless supply of Allied tanks were simply steamrolling over everything in their path. Thus, scientists were ordered to develop a weapon specifically designed to destroy tanks and buildings - without regards to friend or foe.
The first plans called for a suicide nuclear device - but these were already in use by Russia, and were considered too fragile to be successful. Furthermore, nuclear effects would affect infantry far more than they would tanks. The solution lied in realizing one of the key differences between tanks and infantry; tanks (and structures) are made of metal.
Work on directed sonic weapons - called "shock cannons" - were abandoned in favor of a new idea: a massive shock surge that would cause metals to resonate catastrophically, twisting themselves out of shape and resulting in useless tanks and crippled buildings. This "harmonic shockwave" system was eventually developed into the M.A.D. Tank[1].
Initial prototypes used "dirty nukes" - nuclear devices that poisoned the land with long-term radiation effects - to power this shockwave. However, several generals were quite aware that Russia might lose the war. Knowing that rebuilding Russia would be impossible if large tracts of ground were contaminated, they secretly ordered that the M.A.D. Tank be changed to use a "clean" nuclear reactor.
These generals put themselves in great peril by taking this action. So much as thinking of the Soviet Empire's defeat was tantamount to treason. What they did was practically heresy against the state. The new weapon was demonstrated to Stalin, who was suitably impressed and had no knowledge of the extra resources that were spent on making the device "clean". It proved highly effective against the fragile Allied tanks; most estimates say that the use of the M.A.D. Tank alone slowed down the final victory by at least three weeks.
Gap Technology
Gap technology is completely different from RADAR[2] jamming - though Soviet generals never actually realized the difference in combat, as the two techs actually had quite similar effects. Allied units were rendered completely invisible - even when firing - until Soviet forces approached close enough. Initially, Soviet commanders thought that Allied troops had simply positioned themselves incredibly well with respect to using the terrain to hide. But as tanks seemed to effectively appear out of nowhere, officers began to suspect that something unusual was at work. Even at the very end of the war, most Soviets thought the Allies had simply developed a highly advanced form of RADAR jamming.
Gap Generator
The truth is that gap technology is as far from RADAR as quantum physics is from organic chemistry. An offshoot of the Philadelphia Experiment and Einstein's Chronosphere, gap generators use an extremely low-power Chronosphere device (which is not even a sphere at all) to put units and structures in the vicinity into a state of quantum flux. This state is a transition state. In a normal Chronoshift, matter enters a state of quantum flux, then several other states during the shift before at last returning to "normal". Essentially, a gap generator takes matter to the very first step of a Chronoshift, but no further.
The net effect of the quantum flux is to render the unit completely transparent to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The matter's gravity field still remains and physical laws such as friction and buoyancy still apply. Thus, a unit is invisible but not impenetrable.
When normal-state matter comes close enough to matter in a state of quantum flux, there is a stabilising effect. The new normal matter cancels out the flux, restoring the unit or structure to its normal state. This is the reason Soviet tank commanders saw Allied armor appear at close range seemingly from nowhere. The units were already there; the presence of the non-fluxed Soviet tanks caused them to be visible.
Gap technology proved to be incredibly useful. Thick Soviet tank armor was useless against Allied tanks firing at point-blank range. Soviet airplane reconnaissance was completely ignorant of entire Allied bases. Invisible Allied naval units shelled the coastline with impunity.
The only downside to gap technology - and the reason that it wasn't as extensively used as it might have been - was the incredible power demands. Only a few prototype mobile gap generators were ever built - though these came in incredibly handy. Most gap generators were used as part of bases. Some especially far-reaching ones were used for naval units, while small and easy-to-construct small models were used to hide forward firebases.
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