Gator Amphibious Combat Vehicle

The Gator is the one unit that drives and swims. Built at the Advanced War Factory or the Advanced Naval Yard, it rolls off the ramp or the slip, crosses water at a little over half its road speed, and climbs out on any shore it reaches: no Landing Craft, no beach to load from, no beach to unload onto. Its gun is the Wolf's class, a 30 mm autocannon for soft skins and light armour, on a hull a quarter tougher than the Wolf's, at twice the price and twice the population. Two Wolves beat one Gator on land, and that gap is what the swim costs.

What it is depends on where it is. In the water it is a ship to every gun: torpedoes and anti-ship missiles find it, a Barracuda it cannot even see takes it apart, and five Gunboats beat three Gators for less metal. On land it is a vehicle: a tank gun and a turret reach it either way, flak never does. It is medium armour in both places.

How to use

Land where the enemy's boats are not. A crossing under an Orca or a Barracuda is a crossing that ends in the water, so escort it, or cross a strait the fleet has already cleared, or cross where nobody is looking. Once it is up the beach it is a raider: send it at what cannot answer it at four tiles, the Thunder battery behind the line, the Hawks, an engineer's outlying extractor, the Buggies. It is not a line unit. A Bison opens it in five shots for less metal, a Cannon Turret outranges it, and a Viper deletes it from well outside its reach.

Against the Landing Craft it is even by the metal (three Gators for a craft and four Wolves) and different in kind. The craft is faster in the water and carries what the Gator cannot be: Bisons, Vipers, a Mammoth. The Gator needs no beach at either end, does not put four tanks in one hull that can be sunk, and is fighting the moment its wheels touch sand. It weighs the water when it plans a route: a short strait is swum, a wide bay is driven round when that is quicker. It never boards a transport. It is its own.

Anecdotes

The amphibious tractor was invented for a swamp. Donald Roebling built the first Alligator in 1935 to rescue hurricane victims in the Florida Everglades, and the Marine Corps bought it as a cargo hauler. At Tarawa in November 1943 the landing boats grounded on the reef a quarter of a mile out and the men walked in under fire; the tractors were the only vehicles that climbed the reef and kept going, and after that every Pacific landing led with them.

Its descendant, the ACV, is a wheeled vehicle rather than a tracked one: eight wheels, a boat's bow, two water jets at the stern, launched from a ship beyond the horizon and swimming in at about eight knots before driving inland at motorway speed. The Gator's swim is scaled to the same idea. The crossing is slow and exposed, and the point of the vehicle is that it needs nothing else to make it.