How good is battle dress?

[Dragoner]

BD is good enough, by the time it's there it probably represents minimal survivability for infantry on the battlefield with grav tanks, mobile fusion gun art batteries and SDB's in atmosphere toasting everything in sight. Anything unarmored has little chance chance I would think, even Battle Dress probably provides better mobility with asisted jumps so the inf can skip out of an area before it gets plastered with FFE's or other fire.

 

[mike wightman]

Here's a thought.

Perhaps BD isn't about making the soldier more casualty proof but more about being able to carry more powerful battlefield sensors and weapon systems.

Infantry on a future battlefield really do stand a snowball's in hell chance against the direct and indirect weapons that can be brought to bear against them. Intelligence and mobility are the only way to avoid being a statistic.
BD allows greater sensor awareness, communication and mobility. The armour is just an afterthought really since it isn't really proof against equal TL weapons.

Now send in a squad of TL15 marines in BD against TL12- opponents and you have the man shaped tank...

 

[aramis]

BD itself doesn't provide enough mobility advantage to make a difference, Dragoner.
Grav Belts allow infantry to make better targets of themselves... and BD makes infatnry hard enough to make the RPX fusion gun worth shooting at a squad, while making the VRF gauss pretty anemic at them.

BD makes troops immune to most small arms, and to shrapnel and non-direct-hit explosions. It's damned good armor. Combat Armor of the same TL's has much the same effect.

Adding grav belts to BD gives a lot of non-combat mobility, but in combat, start flying those BD troops, and they become TARGETS... and a Fusion Gun has enough pen to actually make a near miss hurt.

Let's see looking in striker:
4CM RAM HEAT TL 8 Pen24; burst 1cm (10m); primary target takes pen 24, squaddies take pen 12. Net DM -6 on the damage table for squaddies. Still can wound. Primary target rolling at DM+6... minimum major wound.

TL9 is pen 28, squaddies are taking DM-4, primary taking DM+8
TL 10 is pen 32... Sauaddies taking DM-2, primary taking DM+12; primary is dead.

Broadsword is Pen 7; that's a DM-11. Broadswords can't hurt TL14 BD nor CA. Period. And they are the highest pen melee weapons listed.

CA12 and BD13, with AV 10, a broadsword is a DM-3 damage roll...
And Squaddies are rolling frag vs any RAM grenade at positive DM's, and the primary just dies.

HMG's Pen 6/5/4 (E/L/X) roll vs BD13 and CA12 at -4... light wounds only. Vs CA14/BD14, they roll at -12/-13/14; no damage at all possible
VRF gauss guns mow down BD13 at all ranges, but BD14/CA14 can survive with light wounds. Unarmored troops, troops in cloth, they just die from VRFG fire that hits.

Plasma and fusion gun hits (PGMP/FGMP) do enough pen to autokill any BD on a direct hit, and to injure adjacent guys. Unarmored or cloth armored troops die from being adjacent to the target... PGMP12 pen 20/8/1... BD13/CA12 direct hit kills, with minimum pen roll total being 12... and roll is straight up vs adjacent guys... at effective range. At effective range, the adjacent guys in cloth are rolling 2d+5... minimum serious wound, and the primary target at +15... for toast.

Striker makes BD REALLY tough stuff.

The LAG (TL8) is pen 8/7/6. It can hurt BD13/CA12 (AV10), but can't hurt BD14/CA14 (AV 18) at all. Same for the 4mm Gauss Rifle (Pen 7/3/-)

 

[mike wightman]

Trouble with Striker/MT - what does a TL15 RAM 'grenade' do to BD?

What are the stats of a TL15 laser rifle?

But I'm sure you get the point.

 

[sabredog]

Trouble with Striker/MT - what does a TL15 RAM 'grenade' do to BD?

What are the stats of a TL15 laser rifle?

But I'm sure you get the point.

TL-15 RAM?...open it like an RPG on a Hummer.

WHo cares about the TL-15 laser...an FGMP-14/15 is bad enough.

I totally agree with your take on BD - it should be a force multiplier, not just a passive defensive suit of powered combat armor. It ought to augment all the abilities of the infantryman.

Look here for my take: http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=20073

 

[sabredog]

BD is good enough, by the time it's there it probably represents minimal survivability for infantry on the battlefield with grav tanks, mobile fusion gun art batteries and SDB's in atmosphere toasting everything in sight. Anything unarmored has little chance chance I would think, even Battle Dress probably provides better mobility with asisted jumps so the inf can skip out of an area before it gets plastered with FFE's or other fire.

No kidding! Not to mention battlefield meson cannon firing through mountains at you and autocannon firing collapsing rounds.

Good point about the "shoot n' scoot" concept. Starship Troopers (the book, not the abomination of a movie) had it right with the "bounce" tactic. Jump into position, fire at the enemy, then immediately "bounce" out before his counter-battery nuked you. Stay on the move and survive, but also have the ability to hide in the terrain (and rubble) better than any tanks.

 

[Dragoner]

Aramis, thanks for the rundown on the striker stats, that is very interesting; sadly enough I sold my striker set 20 years ago before moving to California from Indiana, so I am a bit hazy on it. I am really just going off book 4, though I still think that the servo assist would increase movement quite a bit, which is important for without that the inf now are just sitting ducks; art fire must be quicker reacting (the FO just pointing to a spot on his visor based HUD to bring in an immediate FFE from a battery with an open mission for example). If this is still semi-traditional conventional warfare, the I would bet artillery will still be the largest casualty cause. Though this movement effect is really where the BD skill comes into play over say normal vacc suit? Looking at book 4 I see in the back a lot of heavy art (high tech such as fusion y guns), which would produce KIA's of BD equiped inf in the immediate blast zone and even WIA's on the perimeter.These must be bloody and destructive battlefields and a lot of attention must be placed on electronic counter-measures just not to get hit. Though I also feel the BD is probably a high maintenance piece of equipment as well, which is a big negative on the wild frontier.

I also mod and do artwork for a game called panzer general 2

http://www.panzercentral.com/forum/index.php

and I have always had in the back of my mind to do a "grav tank" equipment file, much of this largely influenced by Traveller. It could be highly entertaining for me at least, I wonder what other people's opinion would be, eg if it would be played much.

 

[aramis]

Trouble with Striker/MT - what does a TL15 RAM 'grenade' do to BD?

What are the stats of a TL15 laser rifle?

But I'm sure you get the point.

TL15 Laser Rifle? the TL13 is Pen 20/12/4... it opens a BD14/CA14 at eff range, insuring a wound. It kills guys in BD13/CA12 (AV10) at eff. range, and wounds them to Long range.

The RAM15 is gonna kill the schlub inside.

MT handles it better, separating Pen and Damage.

Still, BD and CA at TL 14 are FREAKING TOUGH. You don't die from small arms. You die from anti-tank weapons.

 

[Dragoner]

No kidding! Not to mention battlefield meson cannon firing through mountains at you and autocannon firing collapsing rounds.

Good point about the "shoot n' scoot" concept. Starship Troopers (the book, not the abomination of a movie) had it right with the "bounce" tactic. Jump into position, fire at the enemy, then immediately "bounce" out before his counter-battery nuked you. Stay on the move and survive, but also have the ability to hide in the terrain (and rubble) better than any tanks.

Thanks, you know I also have the old Avalon Hill Starship Troopers boardgame in my closet, though to honest I was thinking of Ogre/GEV as well (though I know that must date me ), that game had powered infantry as well. In the future I think the battlefield will be much more fluid, high mobility would have to be a key factor.

I'm wondering how much actual cover rubble provides by this period, maybe heavy art will just make the rubble bounce, which even a BD trooper might not want to stick around for that, the only benefit being concealment. Not accounting for destroyed mega cities which of course could be a beautiful scenario also, though I think any commander sending in troops on urbanized terrain (the worst terrain) would still be looking at high casualties even with BD troops.

Though I think that the rule of needing infantry to hold ground (and it would be combined arms with tanks providing close support) will always be in effect.

 

[sabredog]

I have the same game, that was the first one I bought when it came out! But then, I also bought D&D when it first came out, along with WarpWar, Ogre, and Rivets!!! Holy Cow that makes me old. But at least now when I play Traveller I play characters closer to my own age, or younger.

I dunno about cover per se by the rubble alone, I think it's more a combination of a lot of factors. Stealth technology wasn't thought of much by the public back then (though HAVE Blue started in 77) so other than the chill cans in Mercenary you don't have much described officially by way of stealthiness and camouflage. I took my cues for that from Haldeman's The Forever War, in addition to Heinlein. Haldeman described a more solid state cooling system for the suits that worked to help keep it IR masked, but still had vulnerabilities.

But also you have to wonder how much rubble even gets produced, and if it is, then how much background radiation, fires, ECM screening, and other stuff is going to "help" you use the rubble for cover? Does the military doctrine in your universe dictate that nuclear weapons and meson bombardment is limited only to most extreme cases, and built up areas are to be preserved as much as possible. So instead of rubble hiding you from tanks and meson artillery, you're back to man vs. man in an urban environment trying not to reduce the TL of the planet by more surgical, counter-insurgency combat?

You have to imagine that if the Imperium ever wanted to it could fry any planet at will without losing a single Marine to enemy fire on the ground, but you can't do that all the time or you'll just have open revolt even from the nobility in charge of the subsector you would be attacking in.

So instead it's like they say in Starship Troopers (to paraphrase: "You can have all the biggest cannon, missiles, bombs, but in the end it takes the dogface with a bayonet to winkle the enemy out of his hole." Or something like that.

Here's some geek cred! The original BD:

 

[Dragoner]

I have the same game, that was the first one I bought when it came out! But then, I also bought D&D when it first came out, along with WarpWar, Ogre, and Rivets!!! Holy Cow that makes me old. But at least now when I play Traveller I play characters closer to my own age, or younger.

I dunno about cover per se by the rubble alone, I think it's more a combination of a lot of factors. Stealth technology wasn't thought of much by the public back then (though HAVE Blue started in 77) so other than the chill cans in Mercenary you don't have much described officially by way of stealthiness and camouflage. I took my cues for that from Haldeman's The Forever War, in addition to Heinlein. Haldeman described a more solid state cooling system for the suits that worked to help keep it IR masked, but still had vulnerabilities.

But also you have to wonder how much rubble even gets produced, and if it is, then how much background radiation, fires, ECM screening, and other stuff is going to "help" you use the rubble for cover? Does the military doctrine in your universe dictate that nuclear weapons and meson bombardment is limited only to most extreme cases, and built up areas are to be preserved as much as possible. So instead of rubble hiding you from tanks and meson artillery, you're back to man vs. man in an urban environment trying not to reduce the TL of the planet by more surgical, counter-insurgency combat?

You have to imagine that if the Imperium ever wanted to it could fry any planet at will without losing a single Marine to enemy fire on the ground, but you can't do that all the time or you'll just have open revolt even from the nobility in charge of the subsector you would be attacking in.

So instead it's like they say in Starship Troopers (to paraphrase: "You can have all the biggest cannon, missiles, bombs, but in the end it takes the dogface with a bayonet to winkle the enemy out of his hole." Or something like that.

Here's some geek cred! The original BD:

I guess this is the one time I can say "hail and well met fellow traveller." :rofl:

As far as military doctrine I follow canon and what is logical, which is that large scale destruction with WMD's is to be avoided unless in a massive total war scenario and worlds and cities will declare themselves "open" rather than become battlefields. For example from Adventure 3, the Battle of Porozlo (980) during the Third Frontier War on pgs 46-47: "The threat of action against the planetary defenses and facilities prompted the world organization to declare Porozlo an open world."

For stealth I go with an idea of advanced EW, at every point you will have EW troops part of every unit trying to disrupt sensors with each side deploying counter-measures to try to overcome each others defenses. Certainly there will be physical counter-measures, but with greater distances and a quicker more fluid battlefield, true line of sight combat will be limited, you want to hit them before they even know you are there. This true today as well IIRC in Desert Storm, the US armor took out Iraqi tanks before they came in range of Iraqi counter fire.

Of course surgical strikes by strategic ground forces will occur when the Imperium needs to show some hard power, but for the most part it will work through other means.

 

[sabredog]

LOL, I envy your collection; I no longer have GEV or Ogre. But still I have the boxed version of Starfire with all the fighter rules, too.

I never used the OTU so I had to come up with my own doctrines and details of things. IMTU the Terran Empire is TL-15 (average around 13 but the closer you get to the core, the higher the average is) with all that that implies military-wise.

So it can force an issue with a rebel world if it wants to "destroy it to save it", but hasn't done it yet. The problem is that if the Empire needs the world it can't just scrub the population off and destroy the ecostructure. Too expensive in politics and in making use of the world afterward. Besides, once cities have Black Globe defenses (they are not Ancient tech IMTU) and deep meson emplacements to protect the world from bombardment and landings then it gets expensive all around.

So negotiations ensue, reinforced with counter-insurgency combat and surgical assaults to try to overcome resistance as quickly as possible without destroying the resources or population the Empire is there for in the first place. In a few instances there has been total war on some worlds with all the imaginable results (some systems are now Red Zones as hazards to navigation with all the rubble and wreckage) but those were fights between my two major Imperial powers (alien and human). When the Terran Confederation fell apart during the last war and was rebuilt as the Empire under a new coalition it was a fairly bloodless event. Mainly a way to force a "Not one step back." approach to the outside threat that was starting to win because of the fragmenting and rebuild a stronger, more cohesive force to prevent similar events in the future.

So, so far there hasn't been any need to use the Imperial Navy and Marines within the Empire in any seriously destructive way. But that will probably change as the Empire now starts to expand back out to the size it used to be under Confederation by reclaiming the colonies that are now starting to say, "Hey, the Empire left us - we didn't leave it. So leave us alone."

It provide a rich source of adventure for the PC's in my space opera way.

 

[Dragoner]

I loved Starfire back then played the hell out of it, played a bunch of D&D as well.

I generally go with the brush war theory put forth in the game, a lot of little wars but nothing too big or here come the Imperials. By TL 15 most infantry are Battle Dress equiped by what Book 4 says. Though I'd say some forces are up to full TOE in this regard and others sorely lacking and this could mean both Imperial and regular planetary forces. Though fighting with the Imperial forces is most likely a bad idea because in the end they will always have numbers eventually if nothing else.

I don't know about black globes for cities, just because it has to be a globe (and I think the 3I can make them, even if reverse engineered copies) but I definitely belive there will be heavy meson/particle accelerator batteries on planet to to defend against naval bombardment, plus swarms of fighters and missiles and deployed active mine belts. Infantry will always be needing to take and hold ground though and by the higher tech levels it will be BD inf.

 

[aramis]

An active Black Globe, if it has to remain spherical (which is implied in the CT and MT rules), then it will in fact overload almost the moment it is activated within an atmosphere or on a planet's surface. It will immediately come into contact with LOTS of air, and quite a bit of solid matter, and will carve downwards into the planet carrying down a goodly chunk inside as it falls. With a large enough battery bank and small enough radius, a single flicker might survive... dropping a cm or so per flicker, and carving that several times, and you can make artificial lakes really quick.

Even if you don't have to have whole sphere BG's, you have the atmosphere issue.

 

[sabredog]

An active Black Globe, if it has to remain spherical (which is implied in the CT and MT rules), then it will in fact overload almost the moment it is activated within an atmosphere or on a planet's surface. It will immediately come into contact with LOTS of air, and quite a bit of solid matter, and will carve downwards into the planet carrying down a goodly chunk inside as it falls. With a large enough battery bank and small enough radius, a single flicker might survive... dropping a cm or so per flicker, and carving that several times, and you can make artificial lakes really quick.

Even if you don't have to have whole sphere BG's, you have the atmosphere issue.

Yes, with the canon globes that's true - the caveat I should have made was "IMTU I do this...". But I treat them the way the Langston Field worked in The Mote in God's Eye, which I was reading when I first got the game. I also figure that the absorbed energy would be radiated away from a city field easier than with a ship because you would have access to larger capacitors, power grids, redirected through defensive weapons.... Like the huge underground armored spheres with spinal meson guns floating inside them using grav generators to aim and fire them through the surface at orbiting ships.

The cities don't flicker the fields...they are on or off only, so it's a siege. You could reduce the land all around the city to lava and the place would be fine. Like in the beginning of the book I mentioned, the field for the last city taken didn't come down until Imperial agents inside the place helping drop it so the Marines could land.

Or as I have in some of the background legend of my game, when one enterprising commander made a controlled crash through a field to capture a defense bunker. Lost most of his volunteer crew doing it, and was a wee damaged psychologically himself, but he earned the Imperial Cross and a Knighthood for it and no one's tried it since.

I know it's not canon, but it's close enough for my purposes, especially since the BG's are awfully similar to the Langston Field. And I wasn't under the impression from CT or MT that they were air tight? But IMTU they are not. Since there is always the chance of passing through dust and other matter in space while cruising around in a BG then I always figured it was energy input vs. output that mattered. Or at least there must be some threshold at which enough matter starts effecting the field the same way a missile detonation or beam weapon would.

 

[aramis]

In CT, they destroy any matter the surface encounters. So they are NOT Langston fields, tho' fairly similar. In fact, to get any data or material in or out, or even laser fire and surplus heat, one must flicker the field.

 

[sabredog]

In HG 2nd ed. on pages 31 and 42 the rules specify "all energy" is absorbed and kept out by the Black Globe. No mention is made at all of atmosphere, matter, or anything else other than missile detonations.

It says in order to use the ship's weapons and maneuver it has to flicker the BG, but no mention is made anywhere I can find that non-energy objects cause a reaction to the field except the explosions of missiles. The speed at which missiles travel might cause that, or the missiles detonators might be interpreting the field as a solid enough object to cause the warhead to go off, but where is it written in CT that a BG will overload in atmosphere or if it contacts other matter?

 

[aramis]

At the very least, all energy would result in lowering the material to absolute 0 and 0 relative velocity... at which point, it's still likely to overload the field.

 

[Icosahedron]

I have to agree, no BGs in atmosphere for me. As Aramis suggests, the kinetic energy of the air molecules would be absorbed by the field resulting in instant overload, and logically, if the field doesn't absorb kinetic energy, then missiles can penetrate it...

 

[sabredog]

Yes, one would assume that the BG would block kinetic energy or else missile would penetrate it, unless, as I said, the missile's warhead interprets the BG field as solid matter and detonates for that reason. Or because of the part in the rules where it says, "all transit across it is stopped". Maybe, not...it might also be a question of velocity, and since flickering the field allows a certain percentage of the incoming whatever to penetrate then it might only be question of timing since the flicker rule seems to contradict the "switching it off allows all incoming fire to hit automatically rule", as well as the absorbing all energy rule (as pointed out below). IMHO. Maybe a city sized field could flicker, too?

In any case, I tend in cases like this to follow my sometimes fallible rule towards rules like this as follows: unlike wargames, if it is not explicitly stated that you cannot do something in an RPG then you might be able to do it so long as it doesn't mess up the game.

I believe it says something to that effect in the game itself (as most RPG's used to at least before games like MT and onward succumbed to monstrous expansions of rulings over every little detail) when it is suggested in the afterward that the referee and players should use their imaginations to expand upon the universe and the rules that govern it instead of being solely confined to the printed rules. I think I pointed out several times that this was IMTU.

So IMHO there is no reason that a BG cannot be used in an atmosphere since there is nothing in CT that says you cannot. Now in a strictly ubercanon official universe you might not do it since the things are rarer than hen's teeth being Ancient artifacts and all, but in my universe the things were invented by humans, and is their most closely guarded secret. I don't have "Ancients", droyne, uplifted dogs, talking starfish, nor pseudo-Kzinti, and the only rules I use are LBB 1-5, TCS, and part of 6 & 7, and Striker - the rest is just interesting reading material. So to clear things up for myself, where it is not explicitly outlined I treat the BG as more of the Langston Field it seems to be inspired by.

More points to ponder about BG's:
What about jumping using the energy the thing has absorbed? Does that mean the BG is still on, or does it have to be shut off? The rules don't say either, nor do they say in CT anything about the mechanics of jumping as far as to how the drive is constructed and what sort of energy it produces. The jump drive takes time to warm up, what about that energy? If you are assuming that jump grid thing then that must be emitting energy (so are the ship's meson screens and nuclear dampers, not to mention the M-drives and sensors. Oh and the weapons firing and all that stuff when "flickering")why doesn't all that overload the field?