Hercules Recovery Vehicle

The Hercules is the Anvil doctrine's recovery tank: a tank hull with a heavy crane instead of a turret, carrying the Repair Tower's aura into the field. It mends the vehicles and ships round it as a tower does, two at a time and the worst hit first, and it bills the same, a quarter of each hit point's price. It never mends a building (that is an engineer's trade) or an aircraft, and one Hercules does not mend another. It has no gun and heavy plate, so it can follow the column into the fire. It is born with Emergency Repair, which triples the aura for six seconds.

How to use

Keep it a little behind the line, where the tanks come back hurt, and use Emergency Repair when two or three of them are in the red at once. A Hercules turns a skirmish won into an army still whole for the next one. It is the counterpart of the Repair Tower: the tower holds a place, the Hercules goes where the fight is. Guard it: a column's enemy should shoot it first.

It is researched at the War Lab (Field Recovery, Anvil doctrine) and built at the Advanced War Factory. Tell it from an engineer by its size and its crane: it is as long as a battle tank, with the crane's jib laid along its right side.

Anecdotes

Armies have always lost more tanks to breakdowns and ditches than to guns, and most of them came back. The American M88, in service since 1961 on a tank's chassis, is a crane, a winch and a dozer blade on tracks, built to drag a sixty-tonne tank out of whatever it is stuck in while under fire. Its current version, the M88A2, is named HERCULES: Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utility Lift and Evacuation System. The German Büffel, on a Leopard 2 hull, carries its crane on one front corner and can lift a whole tank engine out in the field; it brings a spare one strapped to its deck.