Editing British Mechanized Company (section)

==IRL==
[[File:37279b9e.jpg|300px|right|thumb|It's a long way, to Tipperary....]]
The vast majority of British infantry are equipped with FV432 APCs, with Armored Divisions transitioning to Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles from 1988 onward; exceptions include the Territorials and the Parachute Regiment. Today, the infantry operate a variety of transports for different missions, including the Warrior, the Bulldog (a modernized FV432) and Cougar Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles.

While the L1A1 is their primary rifle in Team Yankee, by 1985 the British army had started adopting the SA80/L85 to replace it. Designed by people who hadn't fired a gun before, based off a reverse engineered AR18 (a system that was still under patent protection when they initially intended to start production before delays) that they didn't really understand or reverse engineer too well, then poorly converted to bullpup form the L85 never had much of a chance of being a good rifle. This disaster was made worse when workers at Royal Small Arms Factory learned they would soon be laid off after making the things and proceeded to not give a damn ''en masse''. Rather than a light, compact weapon, the resulting rifle was actually ''heavier'' than its contemporaries with conventional layouts. Soldiers literally couldn't fire a full magazine in any moderately adverse conditions without failure, earning the rifle the nickname "Civil Servant" since it didn't work and you couldn't fire it. The only part that worked as expected were the second wave of mags, which were all made by Colt in the United States, and even then had the issues expected of early, black follower ("If it's black, send it back") STANAG mags. After several redesigns and modifications done by German company H&K (that wound up costing more than buying new rifles!) and American made EMags the L85A2 works, albeit at the cost of being even heavier than it originally was. Unloaded without optics the SA80A2 is already the heaviest 5.56 rifle adopted and weighs over 132% of an M16, a full ''two pounds'' heavier. ''Allegedly'' the rifle was more accurate than others, but the test to obtain this result was based on scoped SA80 compared to everything else with iron sights instead of a proper test of mechanical accuracy, so it ultimately amounted to the conclusion "scopes have better practical accuracy than iron sights". Since those fixes did not begin till 1992, didn't actually start till 1998, and in this scenario Germany is on the front lines, those redesigns would never happen, so its reasonable to assume that the Brits would've stuck with the tried<s>-and-true</s> L1A1 for the time being.

Aside from not working, being heavy, and being a bullpup, the L85 is notable for optical sights being standard, since low sight radius makes irons on a bullpup pretty sub-optimal, yet ''not'' making them even semi-integral. The first optic was the 4X SUSAT scope which was... OK. It actually worked, which was more than could be said for the rifle it was attached to, but had a very narrow field of view that rendered it unsuitable for close range engagements (you know, the place where you might actually ''want'' a bullpup) and was before scopes were nitrogen purged so it would fog up a lot. Since the rifle was adopted a decade before the adoption of picatiny rail as standard for optics mount, it uses a proprietary and heavy mounting solution. In 2007 American ACOGs were used an interim solution for a few years followed by replacing the SUSAT with a picatiny mounted 4X ELCAN optic (made in Canada, to ''further'' outsource fixing the rifle) with a small red dot (made in the US) on top of it, which works though is a heavy optic setup on an already heavy rifle. 

{{British Forces in Team Yankee}}
[[Category:Team Yankee]]