Moray Infiltration Submarine

The Moray is a transport with a hold of four cargo weight that nobody without sonar can see: one Mammoth, or two Vipers, or four Engineers, delivered where they were never expected. The Landing Craft delivers in plain sight; the Moray delivers behind the line.

How to use

The beach is the only door, and the hatch opens only on the surface. Boarding is walking to it, and it sets its cargo down on ground within two tiles of its hull, so it has to come in close to a shore. While a squad is walking aboard or stepping off, it rises: a surfaced Moray is a ship like any other, seen without sonar and shot by anything that fires on ships, and it dives again a moment after the last one is through. T brings it up by hand as well, 30% faster and seeing half as far again on the surface, and in plain sight, and a Moray already up takes a squad aboard at once. Most beaches have a shelf of shallow water off them, where no submarine can dive, so the Moray comes up where the shelf begins and makes the last few tiles in plain sight. Some coasts drop straight into the deep, with nothing shallow but the surf line: there it stays under until it is all but on the sand, and those are the landings to look for. Pick a quiet stretch of coast, load in your own harbour, and put Engineers on the ore behind an enemy's base, or on an island nobody has claimed. It is unarmed, its sonar only warns it, and its cargo dies with it: an Aegis or a Cormorant patrolling a coast is the end of the trip, and so is a Gunboat that happens by while it is up. Once ashore, the squad is on its own.

Anecdotes

In December 1941 the Italian submarine Scirè carried three manned torpedoes to the mouth of Alexandria harbour. Six frogmen rode them in under the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant and left both sitting on the bottom, the most a submarine's cargo has ever done.