The project had to acquire vehicles. There are several paths they can use to do so. They can buy new military gear. They can buy obsolete military gear. They can do a design build of their own stuff. They could also buy prototypes and refurbish them. Each has its own merits and pitfalls and looking through the published canon (which is always dangerous and often contradictory) the publishers over the years have done a little bit of each
Scratch Designs
MARS-1
Science Rover
Gyroscout
The three Hovercraft from Lonestar
HAMM Suit
Experimental or semi experimental
SK-5 (a total of 14 of these were built including the SR.N5 version built in the UK, so two more than the AH-56A)-These could be included as obsolete or no longer in service instead since the US Military use of the PACV version went out of service in the 1970s
XR-311 I thought Israel had bought a small production run of these but I can't find the reference any longer, It seems the US bought about a dozen for trials.
FACME engineering equipment
In production open market vehicles
CG Commando
CG Ranger
CG Scout
Personally I did the same. I don't see taking a prototype and saying "in this fictional universe it actually worked as designed" being any more handwavium than "The Project did a design build of some limited production run equipment". In the later case the Project has to do all the development from building the prototype.
I have some very specific reasons why I use existing vehicles in preference to stand alone Project only ones. One is I can get things like the videos that show machines in operation. I can often get drawings and sometimes even manuals to hand to the players. I can almost always get a few decent pictures. All these help the players visualize their equipment. If the vehicles are stand alone it requires a lot more work, although I am certainly willing to do so. The St. Louis MP crew of days gone by did full manuals for the Science Rover, the three hovers from Lonestar (very heavily modified) and several other vehicles and load outs.
So looking through the canon it doesn't seem that the originators were adverse to using prototypes, production machines or design builds depending on what was available.
|