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Rainy day random rambling though, between an imperial Titan and a BOLO super heavy sentient tank, who would win?

My friend goes on about BOLO's a lot, given by his statements on what they can do, the BOLO would hardly notice the titan as it destroyed it from a massive distance. I guess A Titan legion might actually attract its full attention.

If he is correct then it would need something like a Culture ship to sort it out...............

A lot depends on the mark of the BOLO. The early ones would probably be on par with a baneblade. The later ones could probably blow a battle fleet out of space. Somewhere in the middle I think there should be one that is a match for a titan.

I am fairly sure a BOLO could win in a fight against a Titan.

Wow, I have never heard of a Bolo tank until now. Am I missing out?

 EngulfedObject wrote:
Wow, I have never heard of a Bolo tank until now. Am I missing out?

You are. IMHO the older books are the best if you can find them, originally by Keith Laumer. More recently there have been collections written by other authors, some of which are quite good.

Basic premise is huge AI driven cybertanks blowing things up in the classic space opera style.

Well worth the read.

... it looks small enough to fit into a barrel of a mega-bolter.

Yeah, but IIRC, each of those guns is equivalent to the Tiger Shark's super-railguns.

That thing is BA. Pretty sure it would get 1 shot by a turbolazer though.

Personally, I'm much more partial to Steve Jackson's OGRE's (which are admittedly based on BOLO's).

Besides, who doesn't love their super-cyber-tanks armed to the teeth with small tactical nuclear cannons?

I often get my BOLO and OGRE lore mixed up, as it’s been a while since I’ve read the core bolo books (borrowed them from a friend now 3 states away) but IIRC the later models were shrugging off nuclear fire with minimal loss of effectiveness.

And their primary armament, Helbores, are basically melta/plasma guns with orbital range.

Cross sci-fi comparisons are always iffy, but don’t sell those tanks short.

Yeah late model Bolos could slug it out with capital ships in orbit and win.

I don't normally get involved with crossed universe comparisons, but late model Bolo vs Titan wouldn't be a very fair comparison.

Some Bolo marks did carry tactical nukes that they could fire off like a modern nuke sub, and those weren't even considered their primary armament.

Superman swoops in and beats them both! Ta-da! :-)

(barring that: Q. Always Q.)

A medium or later mark of a Bolo Tank utterly, horribly, completely obliterates the Titan. A single later model of the Bolo Tanks would easily be able to conquer an entire Imperial world with little fuss. IIRC they typically store enough nuclear weapons in the middle marks to glass multiple continents in the first exchange of fire, and their basic "machine guns" are actually railguns that have an absurd fire rate. IIRC the MK33 can pump out megatons of energy per second.

Just look at the Hellbore cannon. IOM plasma weapons are cool, but they just fire what is pretty much a small solar flare. Hellbores fire actual miniature stars.

 Psienesis wrote:
... it looks small enough to fit into a barrel of a mega-bolter.

nah BOLOs are big... really big

 Psienesis wrote:
... it looks small enough to fit into a barrel of a mega-bolter.

It's driving across a full forest. Those sticks around it are fully grown trees.

Batman wins.

Judging from the impact effect of their guns, it seems Titans have them horribly outgunned.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Judging from the impact effect of their guns, it seems Titans have them horribly outgunned.

Bolo's can wipe out entire fleets of ships or single handily perform an exterminatus against a planet, while pumping out constant megatons per second. Titan's don't really have anything to match the armament of a bolo like the MK33.

How does a narrative fight between them work then? Unless they move at FTL they can't outmaneuver one another, they can't take cover against one another. That sounds terribly boring to read.

Never even heard of a BOLO. Going to have to google. From what everyone has said so far, the BOLO would win fairly easily.

THe medium scale BOLO are refered to as CONTINENTAL SIEGE UNITS, i.e a single one is capable of bringing war to a single continent on a planet.

example: Earth has 7 continents. It would take 7 of such machines to bring Earth to its knees if the whole of earth was populated and possibly milliterized


The latest, largest, and more powerful of BOLOs are refered to as PLANETARY SIEGE UNITS. A single one could conquer a planet by itself. But they are still deployed in teams



Bolos are so large and powerful they are not transported to planets in the normal manner. The Bolo actually flys (yes, these monsters can fly) into the upper atmosphere and attaches itself to a special spacecraft to then serve as the spacecrafts weapons and protection. Said ship then can move the Bolo between planets.



mid- to late marks of Bolos carry legions of smaller "normal" sized hover tanks and VTOL craft for extra support, have missile tubes to launch many different kinds of missiles (from AA to AG to nuclear and then some). They can even launch their own comms, spy, and surveillance satellites.


hell the first BOLO (Mark 1) was 150 tons with diesel engines and lots of servos and mechanics to reduce the crew. It also carried a 150mm main gun and various secondary weapons like gatling guns.... Sounds like the Baneblade's daddy?

edit: continued reading of all the Bolo Marks.... Each one gets bigger and bigger dwarfing a Baneblade right after Mark 2 and instantly having far more firepower than a Baneblade at Mark 3. They only get bigger and get more Dakka from there....

 BlaxicanX wrote:
How does a narrative fight between them work then? Unless they move at FTL they can't outmaneuver one another, they can't take cover against one another. That sounds terribly boring to read.

A battle between the two would probably come down to how much of a Titan's firepower the Bolo's battlescreens can absorb and how quickly the Bolo can strip the void shields. Likely the Bolo would have stripped the shields long before it was in range of the Titan's guns.

For the record, with anti-grav engines, a Mark 33 can travel several hundred KPH all the while lobbing ballistic missiles like mortar shells.

Bolos are amazing.

The tanks have battlescreens (basically voidshields but the energy absorbed is stored in an internal capacitor until it is used to supercharge the return fire), which are only limited by the capacity of said capacitor, which is constantly being drained to power the Bolo's energy weapons.

The Bolos have FTL sensors called Kloude Chambers that can see faster (and further) than light can travel.

Their main guns are capable of engaging and destroying targets in high orbit, and a conventional load of nuclear missiles for its VLS cells is sometimes used to generate a smokescreen in battle because the nukes are so useless against other Bolos.

In an engagement during Unit HCT "Hector"'s war with the !*!*!, it destroyed a massive (I would say Titan sized, since it stands up and moves around in the center of a large lake) !*!*! walker in 5.06 seconds of main battery firepower from its Hellbore cannons, which are rated at 5 mt/s beam output.

That's five megatons. Per second.

In short a Bolo is what a Baneblade dreams of being....

maybe a better comparison would then be between a BOLO and an Emperor class battleship? or SM strike cruiser or w/e the heck abbadon is flying around in now I think it's the planet destroyer or maybe a blackstone fortress?

How about BOLO vs the Necron World Engine or an Eldar craftworld?

I have a feeling the BOLO would be totally wrecked by daemonic incursions right inside it's hull with scrapcode attacks against and hopefully corrupt the AI which I vaguly remember they had a weakness for. And possibly a hades drill if it didn't know it was comming since it's underground...(when it lands, not when orbiting of course)

I've always found BOLOs boring. It's like superman with no weaknesses... What's the point?

 Lobukia wrote:
I've always found BOLOs boring. It's like superman with no weaknesses... What's the point?

What's the point to building something that is not perfect? With the proper technology, there is no reason to put weaknesses in that which you construct. The optimum of any future tech is endless hordes of von neumann drones murdering anything that looks at the owner funny.

What can beat them in their. Universe? Are they basically unkillable?

The only things that wreck Bolos in situ are other Bolos, Bolo-copies, or treachery.