Free Carnage City: A World at War Novel (World at War Online Book 6) by Mitchell T. Jacobs Page B

range to hurt them.”
    If that was true, then that eliminated one possible issue. Nora had been worried that the Ragnarok would eventually give up on retaking the tower once they met heavy resistance and would then simply flatten it with rocket artillery strikes. But if Paige’s observations were correct, that option was off the table now.
    “Would the 75mm guns be able to take out a tank from long distance?” she asked.
    “Possibly, though we really don’t have good anti-tank ammunition for it.”
    “That has to be making it hard on the assault gun crews.”
    “Yeah, it is. But we might have an alternative.” Paige opened up her own wrist menu and activated the projector. “Get a load of this.”
    “A gun? Isn’t that a lot smaller than the 75mm one?” Nora asked.
    Paige touched her wrist menu and sent her a codex entry. “It is, but size doesn’t mean everything.”
    Nora opened up the message and took a look at it. 45mm anti-tank gun, the entry read. Nora skimmed over it mostly technical data, but from what she could gather it looked somewhat promising.
    “So is this really any better than the 75mm gun?”
    Paige nodded. “Oh yeah. That gun is an artillery piece. Good for fire support against structures and infantry, but against something with heavy armor it’s not going to do much against it except at close range. This might have a smaller caliber, but the gun and the ammunition are tailored for killing armored units.”
    “So we can pretty much take out an enemy tank with this?”
    “Um, most of the time,” Paige elaborated. “It can’t penetrate the frontal armor except at close range, but then again, neither can the 75mm gun. But anywhere else on the tank is fair game.”
    Nora looked back at the entry again. “Looks good,” she commented. “And if we put it up high then we can aim at the top armor, right?”
    “Right. Oh, and another advantage is that the ammunition is much lighter, and the gun can fire pretty rapidly.”
    “How much faster?”
    “Well, the 75mm gun can fire between three to eight rounds a minute, depending on the crew. This is more like fifteen to twenty five.”
    “Oh. That is a lot faster.” She paused for a moment. “Where did you get this from? Did it come out of the archive in Central City?”
    Paige frowned. “Um, I wish it did, but no. We’re still having to decode most of the schematics, and that’s slow going. We’ll eventually have enough skill points in engineering to do it all, but that’s only half the problem. Even if we have the designs, we don’t have some of the resources needed.”
    “So where did this come from?”
    “It’s a public design from the foundries in Old Chicago, like the 75mm gun and the ATVs. Someone must have found the schematic and then sold it for a profit.”
    “Ah,” Nora replied, suddenly understanding.
    Schematics could be sold to NPC corporations for significant amounts of money, and many companies were hard-up for cash. Selling what appeared to be a nearly useless item for hundreds of thousands or even millions of credits seemed like an attractive option.
    Neither Hydra nor Ragnarok took that option, though. In fact, when Black Wolf had discovered their first schematic Nora had been insistent that they keep it to themselves. It gave them a significant advantage on the competition, and they had parleyed that into a fortune, and then into a sprawling alliance.
    Overdrive still sold well to companies that used combat stimulants, and the Hydra Alliance could charge high prices because they were the only ones who could produce it. That was true for many of their other assets, from their helicopters, to their armored vehicles, even to things like their power supply. Ragnarok had their own secrets as well, and both sides remained locked in a technological race.
    “You’d think they would have learned by now,” Nora said. “Even if they didn’t have any use for the schematic, they probably could have leveraged either