Programa Ayar
| Programa Ayar | |
| Type | Land-systems and precision-fires modernization program |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Location |
 Nouvelle Alexandrie |
| Start Date | 1758 AN |
| Participants | |
| Objective | Sustain and modernize the Federation's armored firepower and conventional precision-strike capability under the Force 1760 program without deepening dependence on Alexandrium |
Programa Ayar (named for the Ayar brothers of Wechua tradition) is a conventional land-systems and precision-fires modernization program of the Federation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, launched in 1758 AN under the Force 1760 defense program and developed by Rimarima Armaments. Its central product is the ASCALON main gun, a platform-agnostic tank cannon designed to re-arm the Federation's in-service MBT-2 Victor II fleet and to serve as the production-gun option for the next-generation MBT-3 Sovereign. A paired effort, Programa Vendaval, develops a family of conventional long-range precision-strike munitions for the Grand Army of the Federation. Both elements are conventional, and the program carries no nuclear or Alexandrium-armed munition. Open development is administered by the National Research and Development Corporation, with Rimarima Armaments as prime contractor and the Institute for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as its principal academic partner. The program's stated rationale is to sustain the Federation's armored firepower through a gun that fits more than one hull, drawing on kinetic and telescoped ammunition rather than Alexandrium, whose glut and price collapse drove the Recession of 1757.
Background
The Force 1760 defense program, authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, 1755, set consolidation and readiness sustainment as its first objectives: holding the force structure delivered under the earlier Force 1752 initiative at a high state of readiness rather than expanding it, and managing the industrial effects of that shift against declining Alexandrium availability. The Institute for Strategic Studies' report The Alexandrium Horizon (1751 AN) had projected that domestic extraction would peak by 1768 AN, and the Recession of 1757 then collapsed the commodity's price. A modernization that sustained combat power while reducing the Federation's exposure to the resource sector fit both objectives at once.
The Federation's armored fleet framed the problem in concrete terms. The Grand Army of the Federation fielded a high-low mix built by Rimarima Armaments: the next-generation MBT-3 Sovereign, some 1,800 of which had entered service from 1743 AN as the core of the heavy armored regiments, and the MBT-2 Victor II fleet of about 1,750 tanks, a cost-effective upgrade of the MBT-1 Victor that formed the backbone of the force. The Victor II upgrade had renewed the tanks' protection, fire control, and power packs but left the original 120-millimeter smoothbore in place, and the residual base-model Victors passed into the operational reserve. Recapitalizing the backbone on an entirely new hull ran against the program's sustainment logic and flat real-terms budget. What the Grand Army wanted was a modern gun it could fit to the tanks it already owned and offer to the ones still in development.
Programa Ayar was chartered in 1758 AN to supply it. Rather than tie a new cannon to a single platform, Rimarima proposed a gun designed from the outset to be hull-independent: fielded first as a re-arming of the Victor II backbone, whose service life the program extends, and offered as the production gun for the Sovereign and for Rimarima's MBT-4 Kuntur development tank. The paired Programa Vendaval carried the same logic into the artillery arm, developing conventional guided munitions of longer reach for the Grand Army's rocket and tube batteries.
Organization and governance
Programa Ayar is run as a public-private program with Rimarima Armaments as prime contractor and design authority. The company is the Federation's ground-combat prime, founded in the Wechua industrial city of Rimarima in 1657 AN and privatized in 1700 AN with the federal government holding a 35 percent stake. Its Ground Combat Systems Division holds the gun and integration work; its Defense Electronics Division supplies the fire control; and its Alexandrium Applications Laboratory, established in 1735 AN, develops the advanced ammunition. Open research is administered by the National Research and Development Corporation, the customary bridge between the government and the private defense industry. University work is contracted principally to the Institute for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, whose mechanical-engineering faculty carries the barrel metallurgy and autoloader research.
The Grand Army of the Federation is the customer. The re-gunned Victors are to enter the heavy armored regiments of the Combined Arms Brigades, the maneuver formations the Federal Forces stood up under the brigade-conversion program, beginning with the 700th Combined Arms Brigade at Baracoa in Boriquén. Platform and mobility integration on the Victor is subcontracted to ESB Susa Land Platforms, the ground-vehicle arm of the ESB Group's Aldurian residency, which builds armored carriers and military trucks for the Federation.
Funding follows Force 1760 and the National Defense Authorization Act, 1755 that authorizes it. Programa Ayar is a defense-procurement effort and draws no money from the civil diversification appropriations that fund the Federation's parallel science programs; it contributes to the Federation's diversification effort not through its funding but by sustaining armored capability without adding to Alexandrium demand.
The ASCALON gun
ASCALON is a smoothbore tank gun designed to be fitted to more than one hull. Its baseline is a 120-millimeter barrel firing at a muzzle velocity of about 1,750 meters per second, dimensioned to drop into the Victor's turret ring in place of the tank's original gun. The same mount accepts a 140-millimeter barrel and breech that fire cased telescoped ammunition, a change a field workshop can make in under an hour; the larger caliber extends the gun's reach against heavier armor at the cost of a smaller ready magazine. Rimarima's telescoped-ammunition work is not new to the program: it was already fielded in the 40-millimeter cannon of the IFV-4 Amaru infantry fighting vehicle. A guided non-line-of-sight round, fired on a lofted trajectory to a range of about 15 kilometers, lets the gun engage targets its crew cannot see, cueing on data passed from other sensors.
Fire control is Rimarima's Pampa system, which gives the gun the hunter-killer capability that lets a commander find a second target while the gunner engages the first, and ties the tank into the Condor battlefield-management network. The gun's ammunition family is deliberately led by kinetic penetrators of conventional metallurgy, so that the Federation's principal tank round does not ride the Alexandrium supply the program is meant to move away from. Rimarima's Alexandrium Applications Laboratory continues to develop an Alexandrium-stabilized hypervelocity penetrator under its Project Illary, and that round is carried as a high-end option rather than the standard load.
The gun's platform-agnostic design gives it more than one path into service. The first is the re-gun of the MBT-2 Victor II backbone and the residual base-model MBT-1 Victors, whose turrets were left able to take a heavier weapon and which gain a further decade of relevance from the change. The second is the MBT-3 Sovereign at its mid-life refresh, where ASCALON offers the heavier 140-millimeter round and a gun held in common with the rest of the fleet in place of the Sovereign's original 130-millimeter smoothbore. The third is Rimarima's MBT-4 Kuntur development tank, where ASCALON stands as the conventional alternative to the experimental 130-millimeter electrothermal-chemical gun the Kuntur has carried in trials. Adopting the common gun across these hulls would let the Grand Army field a single ammunition and gun-maintenance chain throughout its heavy fleet. The Kuntur's electrothermal-chemical armament remains its own development gun; ASCALON is presented as an option, not a replacement for it.
Programa Vendaval
Programa Vendaval is the fires half of the modernization, developing conventional guided munitions of longer reach for the Grand Army of the Federation's artillery. Run within Rimarima by the company's Artillery Systems Division, it builds on the existing rocket-artillery line, chiefly the MLRS-2 Wayra, a truck-mounted system that fires 227-millimeter guided and unguided rockets to about 70 kilometers, and carries it toward a precision strike round of greater range and accuracy. The program's stated purpose is to give New Alexandrian formations a deep-strike option that does not depend on tactical aircraft, which the Force 1760 air-defense consolidation assumes an adversary will contest.
Every Vendaval munition is conventional. The program's charter excludes any nuclear, chemical, or area-effect submunition warhead, and the longest-range element is carried as a study and demonstration effort rather than a fielded capability. Where the ASCALON gun modernizes the weapon a tank already carries, Vendaval is the earlier and more tentative of the two efforts, and its schedule trails the gun's by several years.
Industrial base
Programa Ayar's industrial base is built around Rimarima Armaments and the supplier network the company assembled for its armored-vehicle work. Rimarima holds the gun, the fire control, and the ammunition through its own divisions, and manufactures at its main plant in Rimarima and its ballistics and protection testing facility at Amapola in Alduria. ESB Susa Land Platforms carries the platform-integration work on the Victor re-gun. The Institute for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering holds the barrel-metallurgy and autoloader research contracts, and the gun's barrel and breech forgings are supplied by Fonderies Militaires Nationales, the state-backed metallurgical firm behind the Bouclier military-alloy series.
The program also draws on allied industry within the Raspur Pact. Neridia Defense Industries, the Natopian armored-vehicle firm that has partnered New Alexandrian primes on the Area Denial Sentinel Swarm and the trilateral Dominion-class arsenal ship program, contributes to the Vendaval guided-munition work. Each element of the program names a prime and at least one subcontractor, the structure the National Research and Development Corporation uses to spread its programs across the private sector rather than concentrate them in a single firm.
Technical limitations
The program's managers describe the 140-millimeter option as its hardest engineering problem. Firing telescoped ammunition at the pressures the larger caliber needs wears the barrel faster than the 120-millimeter gun, and barrel life has fallen short of the service interval the Grand Army set; the Institute for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering holds the metallurgy work meant to close the gap, and no procurement of the 140-millimeter variant is planned before it does. The Victor re-gun carries its own constraint, since the recoil of the heavier weapon loads a hull and turret designed around the original gun, and the early conversions are restricted to the 120-millimeter barrel until the fleet's structural margins are measured. The non-line-of-sight round is costly enough that it is treated as a specialist munition rather than a general-issue one.
For Programa Vendaval, the limiting factor is guidance rather than propulsion, since extending a rocket's range is of little value without a terminal accuracy the program has still to demonstrate. Rimarima's stated policy across both efforts is to claim no capability ahead of a documented trial.
Reception
Programa Ayar has drawn the scrutiny attached to the Force 1760 program that funds it. Vice-Premier and Secretary of Defense Fred Strong, whose review posture favors demonstrated capability over projection, has required the gun to meet comparative and live-fire benchmarks against both the Victor's existing weapon and foreign guns of its class before any fleet-wide procurement decision. The Cortes Federales' Defense Oversight Committee, which has for years pressed the defense contractors and program offices over cost growth, has asked Rimarima to hold the re-gun to a fixed price per tank rather than an open-ended development contract.
Critics outside the government have questioned the program's place in the Federation's priorities. Yuiza Bohi'o of the Wakara People's Party has contrasted federal spending on tank guns with unmet needs in the outer regions, in the same terms the party has used against the rest of the Force 1760 modernization. Francisco Gabaza of the Federal Consensus Party has questioned the borrowing behind the defense budget in a year of falling Alexandrium revenue, and Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves of the Democratic Socialist Party has raised the influence of Rimarima and its partners over a program written around the company's own products. The governing Federal Humanist Party has defended the program as the kind of sustainment-first modernization the post-crash budget calls for, an argument that has become part of the wider debate over the diversification agenda in the run-up to the 1759 general election.
