A84 Inabarom
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| A90 Inabarom | |
|---|---|
 A90 Inabarom with hatches open | |
| Type | Infantry fighting vehicle |
| Place of origin |  Charnea |
| Service history | |
| Used by | See Operators |
| Wars | Ninvite War Fahrani Civil War |
| Production history | |
| Designer | Mount Jekara Research Center |
| Designed | 1982 |
| Manufacturer | Ikyan Corporation |
| Produced | 1984 |
| No. built | 1,144 |
| Variants | See Variants |
| Specifications | |
| Weight | 18.5 tonnes (20.4 short tons; 18.2 long tons) |
| Length | 7.21 m (23 ft 8 in) (hull) |
| Width | 2.5 m (8 ft 2 in) |
| Height | 2.91 m (9 ft 7 in) |
| Crew | 3 (commander, gunner, driver) + maximum 9 passengers |
Main armament | See Variants |
Secondary armament | 7.62 mm coaxial machine gun 7.62mm machine gun on rear ring mount 7.62mm machine gun on turret roof 3,600 - 6,000 stowed rounds of 7.62mm ammunition |
| Engine | Six-cylinder diesel engine 205 kW (275 hp) at 2,200 rpm |
| Power/weight | 11.36 kW/t (0.00691 hp/lb) |
| Ground clearance | 0.34 m (1 ft 1 in) |
| Fuel capacity | 530 L (140 US gal) |
Operational range | 1,000 km (620 mi) |
| Speed | 105 km/h (65 mph) |
The A90 Inabarom (Tamashek: ⴰ90 ⵉⵏⴰⴱⴰⵔⵧⵎ, "Painted dog") is a wheeled infantry fighting vehicle of Charnean origin. It was designed by engineers of the Ikyan Corporation and the Imperial Charnean Army tasked with testing the potential of an armored vehicle based on a truck chasis in an effort to create an inexpensive solution to the ICA's lack of battlefield troop carriers and to replace the ICA's aging Type 63s acquired from the Mutul. The Inabarom was initially intended to replace the by then four decade old and technolocally simplistic A45 Torka when it entered service in 1984, but the plan to fully replace the old vehicles was scrapped due to the financial pressures of the Ninvite War which broke out in 1985. Although the Inabarom would see action in the war and came to be respected as a robust and cost effective vehicle, the plans to phase out the thousands of Torkas in service would never be revisited. Elite formations within the ICA mobile forces would recieve the A90 Inabarom while the bulk of the units would be armed with Torkas, with some featuring both vehicles in the same formation, fulfilling similar roles. Overall, the Inabarom is regarded as one of the most advanced and inovative Charnean vehicles and an important milestone for the Ikyan Corporation with such features as a mine protected hull, twin linked ammunition feed and an operating range that could be extended up to 1000 kilometers to compete with the Torka, all while retaining the desired charachteristsics of being cheap to produce, easy to maintaign, and a generally mechanically reliable design.
Development
The effort to develop the A90 Inabarom streaches back for decades before its actual design and introduction. Experimentation by the Charnean military in the motorization of the ancestral tactics of desert warfare known to the Charnean Tenerians had previously yielded the A45 Torka, a rugged and versatile armored car that had quickly become a mainstay of the armed forces. The Torka provided a highly mobile platform able to carry a variety of heavy weapons suiting it to anti-personnel, anti-air and anti-tank duties. It was also cheap and simple enough for the nascent Charnean industries to produce at scale, and possesed the all important charachteristic of being able to traverse vast expanses of open desert with little resupply. However, the Torka was lacking in the area of troop transport. The A45 Torka had been designed to carry a crew of five into the desert, but once in service had nearly always operated with a crew of 3 or 4 depending on the weapon mount in an effort to conserve onboard supplies and thus extend the range of the vehicle. This meant that any Torka deployed on a mission would very often have little or no infantry support and no capability for dismounts. Attempts to remedy this with the use of military transport trucks and imported APCs were made, with the former proving to be risky due to the unprotected nature of such vehicles, and the latter due to the limitations of foreign designs available to the Charneans which were intended for service alongside tanks and other armored vehicles and were poorly adapted for the requirements of long range desert operations. This created the conditions of the so called "dismount problem", the ICA's chronic lack through the 1950s, 60s and 70s of battlefield troop carriers and thus defficiency in infantry support to screen armored vehicles and fulfill other battelfield roles.
The Ikyan Corporation began to collaborate with the Charnean military in the 1970s towards creating an answer to the ICA's problem under the Carry-All Program (CAP). Multiple competing design teams were formed from Ikyan automotive and ICA military engineers in an effort to create a number of prototypes that could be compared and pitted against one another in a series of demanding trials at the Mount Jekara Research Center, the facility in which most of the ICA's military technology trials are conducted. The teams used Type 63 APCs already in Charnean service as well as a number of other foreign APCs and IFVs purchased for the occasion as references, all of which were put through rigorous trials and were eventually rendered inoperable in destructive testing. Three teams produced prototypes for testing. Team 1 produced a tracked chassis infantry fighting vehicle with four dismounts, Team 2 produced a similar design but with a wheeled design, while Team 3 also created a wheeled design but did so using a modified truck chassis that was simpler and would be cheaper to manufacture than the one conceived by Team 2. Eventually the third prototype, although technically inferior in some ways to the others, was approved thanks primarily to its durability and simplicity of design which appealed to the Ikyan representatives. The final design derived from prototype 3 would finish its trials at the Mount Jekara facility in October of 1982, recieving the designation A90 Inabarom after the wild dogs found in southern Charnea. Like the A45 Torka, the A90 Inabarom was likewise designated after the caliber of its standard armament. The vehicle was delayed from entering full mass production due to the difficulty of setting up production for the Inabarom's night sights. Mass production and entrance into general military service began in early 1984, allowing for small formations of the ICA to be equipped with the Inabarom in time for the outbreak of the Ninvite war the following year.
Design
The A90 Inabarom operates on a modified truck chassis, allowing for the vehicle to use many commercially available components for civilian trucks and easing the logistical strain on the military supply and procurement systems. The controls for the driver are likewise extremely similar to those of a regular civilian truck, facilitating the driver's task and reducing the training time necessary for a driver to be ready for service in the Inabarom. In order to maximize the driver's visibility and general situational awareness of the crew, a three-sectioned bulletproof windshield is provided for regular use. If necessary, the windshield can be sealed with armored covers with the driver navigating by periscope instead. Besides the driver, the crew of 4 consists of a turret gunner, a vehicle commander, and an optional rear gunner depending on the variant. The vehicles large rear compartment can accomodate nine passengers, allowing the vehicle to carry a full infantry squadron.
The armor protection of the A90 Inabarom is relatively thin, comprable to that commonly found on APC and IFV type armored fighting vehicles. It is capable of stopping small arms and small caliber armor piercing rounds as well as 20mm canon rounds such as those fired by a 20mm anti-aircraft automatic canon on the frontal arc. Protection against anti-tank mines and IEDs is afforded by the armored V-shaped underside of the vehicle designed to deflect the blast of a detonation underneath the vehicle. Such explosions almost always damage the Inabarom's wheels, axles and other elements of the drive system but is rarely able to fully penetrate the hull. Overall, the Inabarom is considered to have a high survivability against mines and IEDs.
Both the commander and main gunner sit inside the turret, which is located directly behind the driver at the front of the vehicle. Each has an overhead hatch which can be opened for observation, while the commander is given a cupola with all around vision blocks. The turret is fitted with only one night sight, preventing the commander from searching for targets independently of the gunner in low light conditions. In order to parallel the versatility of armament found on the open topped A45 Torka, the A90 Inabarom features an interchangeable turret module varying between the standard 90mm canon, 20mm automatic canon, 12.7mm machinegun or ATGM missile launcher turret types. The hull of all such variants is generally identical, simplifying production of the combat and support variants of the Inabarom as well as enabling one variant to be converted to another at a maintenance facility should the need arise. In order to maintaign the simplicity of the design and to facilitate manufacturing, the Inabarom was never equipped with any airtight seal or filtration equipment. Therefore, the Inabarom remains incapable of amphibious operation and has no special NBC protection, requiring the crew to maintaign NBC protection equipment commonly issued to infantry.