Ion Plasma Tank

Ion Plasma Tank
Background info
Faction	Axon
Game info
Type	Ground
Health	1400
Seats	2
Seat functions	Ion Blast + shock wave Machine gun turret
Appears in	Unreal Tournament 2004

The Ion Plasma Tank is a vehicle from Unreal Tournament 2004.

Overview

The Ion Plasma Tank is one of the most powerful vehicles in UT2004, second only to the Leviathan. Unlike most one-appearance vehicles, Ion Plasma Tanks are used exclusively by the Attackers. Often compared to the Leviathan and Ion Cannon due to their similar attacks, health, and rarity, the Ion Plasma Tank is the fastest of the three with the fastest shooting time, but has the lowest health and weakest main gun of the three (it takes as many as 8 shots to kill an idle Leviathan; however, a Leviathan takes 2 shots, and the Ion Cannon takes 3).

The primary firing mode is a devastating energy blast that can essentially kill anyone within a large radius in one shot. While the blast is extremely powerful it takes time to charge each shot. It works similar to the Ion Cannon. The vehicle doesn't need to be stationary in order to fire.

The secondary firing mode is more defensive in that it is a shock wave designed to push people away (i.e. defenders in AS-Glacier). It's not often useful.

Additionally there is a machine gun turret for a passenger to man that pretty much works the same way as the Goliath tank's secondary turret.

It is only seen in the map AS-Glacier and is necessary for the attackers to win on that map.

Lore

The Ion Plasma Tank is a prototype of a new tank based energy weapon developed by the Izanagi Corporation. The design incorporated the devastating power of the Ion Canon fitted onto the mobility of a tank. Whilst not as powerful as the Ion Canon, the weapon can easily be deployed to the battlefield and decimate ground forces and weaker vehicles of war. The tank was the answer to Axon's Leviathan

Due to the Tank being a prototype, only 1 was in existence before Axon's raid in 2260 (Which is why the attackers are the only team who have access to the Tank). It is not known how or when the development of the Tank was leaked to Axon, however it can be reasonably assumed to have been an inside source who was part of, or had access to the development cycle of the Tank as not only did Axon organise a covert operation to capture the vehicle, they knew the timeframe between the tank being operational and the tank entering mass production.

Despite the Izanagi Corporation having enlisted the services of the elite NEG Thundercrash force, the raid force was able to steal the tank, destroy the research facility and drive it out of the base in working order. This reinforces the theory of insider information as it seems unlikely that raiding force would not have been able to progress that far without knowledge of the base.

As the Tank does not appear in the events of UT3, it is assumed that both the research information on the Izanagi base was irrecoverable and Izanagi either was unable to replicate their work or chose not to due to success of Axon's earlier raid, and that Axon was not yet able to reverse engineer the Tank for mass production by 2307. lacked the materials needed to mass produce the Tank or concluded that their own vehicles were sufficient and did not want to put resources into producing the Tank. The former two would be more likely since the Leviathan still has the downside of needing to become stationary to use its most powerful weapon, whilst the Ion Plasma does not have this limitation.

Trivia

• Through a bug, the death message "# was OBLITERATED!" may appear instead of the normal message.
• The Ion Plasma Tank is identical in most sounds to the Goliath, and summoning one is almost identical.
• The Ion Plasma Tank's fire rate is not doubled with the Super Berserk mutator on.

Gallery

The Ion Tank in AS-Glacier.