RZ-033 Hammerhead
Type: Hammerhead Shark
Total Length: 17 meters
Total Height: 6.6 meters
Weight: 66.5 metric tons
Speed:
Airborne
1120 kilometers per hour
311.11 meters per second
Undersea
65 knots
33.22 meters per second

Equipment
Two-tube AZ Maneuver Missile Pod x2
AZ 30mm Hyper Beam Gun x2
AZ 30mm Double-Barreled Hyper Shock Gun x2
Six-tube AZ Maneuver Missile Container
AZ Pulse Laser Gun
Ion Pulse Jet x2
Ion Booster x2

Armor Description:
The Hammerhead was designed as a gunship to engage and destroy enemy vessels. As such, it has good speed, good firepower, and better armor. The Hammerhead has a durable structure designed to withstand the pressures of the deep ocean up to four hundred meters down. While this diving depth isn’t quite on par with the Warshark’s and Whale King’s, it’s more than enough to engage Sinkers and surfacing Whale Kings. If it takes too much damage, the Hammerhead would have serious issues with water getting to the armored ballast and air tanks, and as such the zoid has a decent coating of rather durable armor. It is a lightweight and durable metal, roughly as tough as the Shield and Blade Liger’s armor, but it's quite a bit thicker than on those Zoids. It has few gaps, and even those are simply areas of lesser coverage. The Hammerhead is essentially a flying, seagoing brick designed to chow down on Imperial Sinkers with its excellent variable-direction firepower and pursuit missiles.

Mobility and Power Source
Designed for long patrols, the Hammerhead is a rather languid swimmer and flyer. Rather than true ballast tanks, it has a powerful antigravity unit built into the internal structure that allow it to fly above and below the water’s surface. Antigravity is a more "pure" form of the basic flight principle behind magnessers and antigrav, and as such it doesn't have as many of the limitations of the magnesser systems. For one, it doesn't require an enormous wing area, simply a compact unit, and second, it can fly much higher than magnessers. Finally, since it's completely internal, it can operate like ballast underwater, whereas magnesser-powered aerials have trouble with too much moisture. It does, however, suck down a lot more power.
- That said, the Hammerhead isn't the most agile thing in the sky, about on par with the Pteras. Make no mistake, its antigravity system makes it an excellent hovering gunship. It has a beefy enough core to handle the antigrav system with power to spare. Not that much power to spare, though. For its endurance, the Hammerhead's core doesn't handle "bursts" of power too well, and overzealous pilots can stall their zoid by getting to eager with the pulse cannons. Still, the Hammerhead can fight for ages otherwise, considering it has no real energy sappers besides those two. Stalling is somewhat catastrophic, though, as you're only kept in the air by that antigrav system.

Equipment:
Two-tube AZ Maneuver Missile Pod x2
One of each of these mounts in the armored pods to either side of the zoid’s head. They are protected by armored plates and fire high-powered missiles using line-of-sight locks above the water or sonar locks below – in either case, it takes about two seconds to acquire a lock. An advancement of certain torpedo designs, these missiles are capable of flying above or below the water’s surface thanks to the envelope of gasses the cone emits. The missiles’ speed is subsonic, barely breaking eight hundred kilometers an hour, but the two-staged warhead delivers an initial armor-piercing cone-shaped charge and then a charge roughly eight times the strength of a normal missile. They are designed for crippling heavily-armored targets, but are almost useless as pursuit weaponry thanks to their limited range of two kilometers. Each pod holds only two missiles, one per tube, and requires reloading at a base once expended.

AZ 30mm Hyper Beam Gun x2
These weapons are the prime energy-drainers in the Hammerhead’s arsenal, being the Hammerhead's prime anti-Sinker weapons outside the missiles. Mounted on the undersides of the missile pods, able to turret forty degrees inboard and two-seventy degrees outboard, these guys fire high-penetration bolts of plasma sheathed in laser energy. The guns are quite accurate, able to tag a Sinker out to eight hundred meters thanks to their fire-control system, a smaller, less sophisticated version of a sniper system. They feature excellent performance in both air and water, and feature a rapid firing rate of ten beams per second, the better to tag the more agile Sinkers.

AZ 30mm Double-Barreled Hyper Shock Gun x2
A smaller-caliber and longer-barreled version of the Blade Liger’s weapon, the Double-Barreled Hyper Shock Guns are mounted on ball turrets on the undersides of the fore fins. Unlike the previous two weapons, the Hyper Shock Guns are not very useful underwater thanks to the shell’s lack of hydrodynamics. Still, if they do hit underwater, they hurt like hell. They fire explosive shells at a rate of two shells a second per barrel, to a total of eight shells a second from both of the guns. The shells are very good at stripping armor but deal less damage against the less solid structure. They suffer reduced effectiveness against poly-weave armors while doing even more against solid plated armors like that of the Gojulas and Whale King.

Six-tube AZ Maneuver Missile Container
This weapon is more reminiscent of the cruise missiles on earth’s submarines than anything else. Mounted aft of the dorsal fin, three port and three starboard, they are hidden inside the structure of the zoid’s tail. The missiles fire at a seventy-five degree angle, just a few degrees from being vertical. These missiles are long-ranged cruise missiles, though not quite inter-continental. They have to be fired from above the surface, and achieve a maximum top speed of four thousand kilometers per hour within four seconds of launch. The missiles have a maximum effective range of three kilometers, requiring outside assistance beyond that distance. Despite superficial similarities, however, these are not tactical missiles. Their warheads are only half again as powerful as standard. The missiles also target enemy zoids based upon radar tracking, and feature terrain-hugging and intelligent heat-tracking features most other missiles would sigh wistfully to have. The missiles are highly maneuverable, making them good for smiting aerial targets. Not so good for other targets, thanks to their speed.

AZ Pulse Laser Gun
The aft ventral mounted weapon, the AZ Pulse Laser Gun is handy for shooting at missiles and torpedoes but not much else. It is similar in design to the Gojulas Giga’s and the Geno Saurer’s pulse rifles, though it is necessarily much smaller. Firing repeated pulses so as to look like a continuous beam, the pulse laser gun is almost overkill against pursuing missiles. The beam is high-penetration but low-aperture, resulting in little real damage to targets the size of zoids. It mounts on a ball turret, but it’s not such a hot idea to shoot the tail fin.

Ion Pulse Jet x2
An ionic equivalent to the pulse laser, the pulsejets fire rapidly-repeating bursts of plasma guided by a magnetic field wedded to the chassis to generate thrust. It is by no means a stealthy method of generating power, but it gets the job done. Rumors of the Republic looking into altering the technology to make it run quietly underwater are completely unfounded and inquiries may or may not result in disappearance.

Ion Booster x2
Overload the pulsejets and you get a speed boost enabling the Hammerhead to exceed its cruising speed of seven hundred kilometers an hour in the air or forty knots in the water. Activation also requires going into the Hammerhead’s more streamlined retracted mode, and can only be maintained for eighteen seconds or so before the zoid begins to tire.