Allied MBT-X8 Guardian tank image

The British designed Guardian boasts an impressive balance of power, durability, and maneuverability and has a molded frame that helps keep production costs down. Its 90 mm main gun can punch through Soviet and Imperial armor reliably and packs more firepower, though a slightly lower rate of fire, than the Guardian's Soviet and Imperial counterparts. However, the Guardian's counterparts were not the Allies' greatest concern, for they needed to be able to contend with an assortment of heavy vehicles. To this end, a relatively heavy platform like the Guardian Tank proved to be a suitable home for a special targeting device that could be used to even the odds against the worst that the Soviets had to offer. Each Guardian Tank now comes standard with a target-designating module, which replaces the exposed machinegun mount found on older models. Designed to complement other Allied weapons platforms, the Spyglass target designator (colloquially called the "target painter") relays targeting information to nearby Allied forces. By automatically interfacing with their weapons systems, the target painter makes other forces more accurate and deadly by compensating for wind direction, visibility, and more than 100 marginal factors—all of which add up. A Guardian Tank is unable to maintain the beam through the recoil of its main gun's firing sequence, so Guardian crews must coordinate well to decide which unit within the column is going to "cast the lure" (as Guardian technicians put it) while the others press the attack.