Ballista Programme

Project BALLISTA is a UNSC Army project started by General Anastasia Greyson. The Project sought to create a new generation of heavily armed and armored war robots which were far smaller but no less deadly than existing armored units. They were to be made off of the existing technology of the Tactical Autonomous Robotic Defense Systems (TARDS) but advance on it in several ways.

Development History
In 2539 there was a renewed interest in the idea, namely by one General Anastasia Greyson. General Greyson believed that, with some modifications, the idea proposed by the TARDS could become something far more effective than what its original developers had ever thought of. She had seen first hand how effective augmented soldiers could be in combat as she came across files and recordings of the ill fated GOLIATH Program which exhibited fantastic capabilities and results but in achieving such results the long term effectiveness of the units was diminished. This also had the effect of further galvanizing General Greyson's resolve that lives need not be wasted for such dangerous endeavors. The initial reason being the near annihilation of the 51st Mechanized in a pyrrhic victory early in the war which resulted in her promotion to General.

The next year was spent both refining the design and in a constant battle with ONI to obtain select information about the MJOLNIR Armor for her Project. The largest of these clashes came in October 2540 where General Greyson directly spoke to Admiral Parangosky regarding the Project and it's prospective future, at the end of a eight hour long conversation the Admiral had agreed provided some of the units of the Project could be used for ONI purposes.

The official development and testing phase of the project began from December 2540. During this time several mock-ups of the redone design were created and the common design cues of all of them were large, armored and heavily armed robots which looked more akin to mechs than anything else. Initial production variants stood at nearly eleven feet tall and weighed over one thousand kilograms. This excessive size and weight did allow a considerable amount of weaponry to be fitted to them but it also made them far more vulnerable due to their lack of shielding and slow speed.

Subsequent models were only slightly shorter and stood around ten feet tall but thanks to advancements in weapon miniaturization and more effective armor compositions, they were able to mount similar weapon loads to the larger prototypes, however the issue of mobility stuck out as an ever present issue due to the humanoid structure of the robots. While the fusion reactor schematics were derived from the MJOLNIR/ Powered Assault Armor did provide an ample amount of power, they struggled when having to power an entire body as opposed to just the armor systems. Consideration was given to a dual reactor set-up but this was deemed far too risky due to the increased risk of a critical kill.

In 2544 the project had also received an official name on behalf of General Greyson who had chosen the name Ballista. Her decision to name the project after such an archaic weapon confused many but it stuck as the once basic combat robots became more akin to hypermobile heavy weapons platforms and anti-armor units.

By 2545 however there was serious consideration to the closure of the project as the prototype units exhibited questionable combat efficiency and awareness while their monetary cost remained substantial. Therefore in a gamble General Greyson authorized the development of a new type of 'Dumb' A.I which she would come to call 'Bolts' as a play on the projects name. These A.I greatly differed from normal 'Dumb' A.I in their capabilities as they could actually learn overtime both from combat and interaction with others, although there were limits to this which were mostly due to the hardware's capacity to deal with the mass amounts of information.

With the new A.I the prototypes and testing units had a greatly increased combat effectiveness which seemed to grow between each test as the A.I were exposed to combat feeds and tactical maneuvers. By late 2547 the design for the robots had been finalized and production models were soon being produced, however as a result of the changing design over the years and the choice to develop an entirely new form of A.I the project had overrun its expected cost, as more funds were being directed towards the Spartan Programs as they were deemed more effective.

Therefore by 2548 after 172 examples had been made, four of which were sent to ONI as per the agreement, the production of further models was halted until results were achieved with the existing models.