Axman

Why it earns its tonnage

Sixty-five tons with four jump jets is the design, and everything else is arranged around it. Most heavies that close on you have to walk, which gives you time to arrange your line. An Axman can be ninety metres to your flank on the turn it decides to be, and that changes what the autocannon and the hatchet are worth.

The Devastator-20 is the honest damage. A ton of armour off a target in one hit, at short range, from something that just jumped into your rear arc. The Sutel large pulse and the three Inteks fill in around it.

Then the hatchet, and I have sharpened a few. Five tonnes of hardened head on a shaft, held rather than fixed, and it works exactly as crudely as it sounds. What it is genuinely good for is not the swing. It is that the other pilot has to keep thinking about the swing.

The thing to know before you sign one out is what is underneath. Most Axmen run an XL engine, and on 3 structure that means a side torso takes the machine with it. The Lyran 3S and 3Sr fixed that with a light engine and it is the single biggest improvement anyone made to the design.

A hundred years, and a union coming apart

The prototype was the -1X, and its job was to convince the AFFC to release the funding and the recovered technology the real thing needed. Without an advanced engine it had to make do: the autocannon came down to a ten, the large pulse became a standard laser, and it lost a medium. Closer to a scaled-up Hatchetman than the machine that followed. It worked as a pitch, which was all it had to do.

What came out of that was the 1N, and it arrived at exactly the wrong moment to be a symbol of anything. Full production began in 3048. The Clans arrived the following year.

Then Katrina Steiner-Davion created the Lyran Alliance in 3057 and the Federated Commonwealth started coming apart. By 3060 the Alliance had its own Axman, built for it alone by Defiance Industries. By 3071 the Federated Suns had replaced the 1N line on New Syrtis with a version designed explicitly to reduce its dependence on equipment made somewhere else.

And then the last one, which I find oddly hopeful. The 3148 AXM-5N was rushed into production for a desperate AFFS after the Davions took New Syrtis back from the Capellans. It carries a hyper-assault Gauss rifle supplied by the Tiburon Khanate and a Clan Sea Fox ER PPC. A machine built from whatever three unrelated suppliers could provide, in a hurry, because it was needed. Which is closer to how the original actually got made than any of the politics in between.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Axmen available in the same era. This is a short list by the standards of this site, which makes the era filtering less important and the engine choice more so.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 0 of the 8 Axman variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants

On the table

Piloting one. Jump first, shoot second. The four jets are the reason the machine is worth its Battle Value and sitting still wastes them. Get into a flank or a rear arc, put the Devastator-20 into something, and let the axe do its work by existing. Watch the side torsos on any of the XL fits, because that is how these die.

Fighting one. Keep it at range and keep moving. Most fits have nothing worth speaking of past medium range. Four of the 8 do reach further, and two of those, the Thunderbolt-armed missile variants, gave up the jump jets to manage it. If it does land next to you, the autocannon is the problem, not the hatchet. Against an XL fit, concentrate on a side torso.

What I see go wrong. People chase the axe. They spend turns manoeuvring for a physical attack that misses, while the autocannon that would have done the job sits unfired. The hatchet is a deterrent. Treat it as one and the machine is good.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, the Axman splits in a way that matters more than usual, because the two groups do not play alike at all.

• 5 of the 8 variants are Skirmishers, including the AXM-1N. Balanced weighting, positive aggression, and they will use the jump jets to go after anything already damaged or cut off.
• The AXM-6X and AXM-6T are Missile Boats, which get the most negative aggression in the engine. They will sit at the back and throw Thunderbolts, which is the opposite of what an Axman is for.
• The AXM-4D is the only Brawler, and with no jump jets it has to walk into the fight the rest of them jump into.

All 8 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. The hatchet is a physical weapon and does not appear in the loadout.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the AXM-1N by era, straight off the Master Unit List.

Related designs

Other machines that do the same job

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.