Ostroc

Why it earns its tonnage

The shape's the whole design. A low, narrow torso on a walker frame, weapons in pods rather than arms, and you'll recognise that layout because the Stalker and the Marauder both use it and both get far more credit for it. The Ostroc got there first, in 2511, and the only quirk the chassis carries is narrow and low profile.

That matters most exactly where it was built to fight. A sixty ton machine that's genuinely hard to pick out at the end of a street, moving at eighty-six kilometres an hour, isn't a pleasant thing to go looking for.

Every weapon lives in the side torsos. Two large lasers, two mediums, and the four-rack on the right. Nothing at all in the arms, which is the first thing you notice with the panels off, and it explains the second thing straight away: the arms carry almost no armour because there was never anything in them worth protecting. You'll lose one eventually. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.

The energy-heavy loadout's the part I think gets underrated. One ton of missile reloads and the rest runs off the fusion plant, so an Ostroc can operate away from supply for a long stretch. That's why the old readouts keep calling it a raider as well as an urban fighter, and it's why you find it doing guerrilla work as often as street fighting.

Six centuries of being overlooked

Now the answer to the question I opened with.

Ostmann Industries built a genuinely good machine and couldn't build very many of them. Their production capacity was so small they had to hand their other Ost designs to Kong Interstellar on licence just to keep production of this one at a useful rate. Most of what they did manage was posted to garrison duty within the Terran Hegemony itself. It still fought in every major conflict of the Star League, right through the Amaris Civil War and into the First Succession War, but there just weren't very many of them anywhere.

Then in 2777 the Ostmann facility on Terra was destroyed, and nobody built a new Ostroc again. Everybody who had one kept fielding it, the Combine more than most.

Its reputation was set by what happened next, though calling it a reputation is generous. When the Helm Memory Core turned up and every old design in the Inner Sphere started getting modernised, the Ostroc mostly didn't. Sarna's specific about why: it was the small number of surviving machines and how widely they'd been scattered that made it not worth anyone's while to build a proper refit programme. No official refit kit was ever issued for it. What you got instead, per Sarna, was the OSR-2D turning up as a common upgrade in 3050 if a unit could get hold of the parts, which is their way of saying it depended entirely on what happened to be sitting in a particular supply depot.

So the scarcity fed itself. Too rare to justify a programme, which kept it rare. That loop's the real answer to the question at the top of this page, and it's a better one than most designs get.

It did come back, twice. The Capellan Strategios decided after the Clan Invasion that the old machine deserved modernising, and rather than reverse-engineer the original, they told every Capellan manufacturer to bid for a full replacement. Ceres Metals was the only company whose proposal matched exactly what had been asked for, and they took the contract, completing the first production run in January 3067. Versions then started turning up in the Taurian Concordat and the Circinus Federation, which the Capellans put down to espionage and were probably right about.

And in 3139, Kong Interstellar, the licensee that only ever built these because Ostmann couldn't keep up on their own, went back to the design with Clan Sea Fox help and built the best Ostroc there's ever been. Six hundred years after the original, from the company that started out as the subcontractor.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Ostrocs available in the same era. This chassis rewards the comparison more than most, because the variants disagree sharply about what the machine is for.

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. 1 of the 15 Ostroc variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 15 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change how the machine plays.

On the table

Piloting one. Fight where the profile actually helps you. Out in open ground you're just a sixty ton machine with nine tons of armour and no reach advantage worth mentioning, which is a fight you didn't need to pick. In a built-up area you're hard to spot, quick on your feet, and carrying four lasers. Keep something between you and the enemy and keep moving. Make your peace early with losing an arm, because you will, and there's no point spending effort trying to protect them.

Fighting one. Drag it out into open ground, or close the distance and start punching. Both work well. It's got nothing worth calling a long-range game, so at distance you're only ever dealing with two large lasers. Get in close and its arms are short, thinly armoured and physically fragile, and a solid physical attack can knock its main guns out of alignment. 7 of the 15 variants carry jump jets, so don't assume the terrain will pin it down for you.

What I see go wrong. People field it as a general purpose heavy because sixty tons sounds like one. It isn't that. It's a specialist that happens to weigh sixty tons, and on an open map it'll get outranged and outgunned by things that cost about the same.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, the Ostroc is the most single-minded chassis on the site. 13 of the 15 variants are tagged Skirmisher.

• That means balanced range weighting and a modest positive aggression modifier: it goes after whatever is already damaged or separated, and it uses terrain to do it.
• The two exceptions are the OSR-9C, the Ostwar-parts Mk II, which is a Juggernaut and will come straight at you, and the OSR-4L, tagged Sniper, which will hold distance behind its stealth armour.

A useful opponent when you want a scenario about position rather than a firing line, and a good one to put on a city map.

All 15 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. BV is Battle Value 2.0.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the OSR-2C by era, straight off the Master Unit List.

The rest of the Ost family

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.