Scout Detached Service

[stofsk]

I'm interested in something: would it make sense for a Scout to be allowed detached service even if in times of war? I'm thinking of a Scout, who has his own Scout Ship, around 993 Ley Sector, the Solomani Rim War raging a couple of sectors rimward.

He joined up when he was 18. Worked in it for 12 years before requesting detached service. Would he be allowed to do so? Can anyone think of a reason for it?

 

[kafka47]

Well, even Scouts do retire, one should make the mustering out benefit, not a ship, as most of those would be called into service or if it is a ship, a very, very old one. A failed service roll can indicate a disability that prevents the Scout from doing his job effectively. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, perhaps, from events seen in the Rim. I always like rolling on the Cthulhu insanity tables to give players a better sense, who says all survival rolls refer to physical injuries sometimes the mental are much more effective especially in the context of role playing.

 

[Badbru]

How about "Tradition".
Military and Para-Military, and even Civil Service formal duty organisations can be pretty steeped in traditions, some of which may seem difficult to comprehend decades, centuries or millenia down the track but heaven help you if you try and go against them. Perhaps 12 years is one of those "Traditions". Get yourself twelve years of service under your belt and not even the Emperor can deny you detatched duty, or so they say.

They may also be a little cavalier about it, as they recognise the types of things detached duty scouts get up, or could be put to work doing, whilst on DD, are not usually bad things. Plus there's allways a war somewhere in the Imperium, probably lots of them, ok this one is Interstellar and not merely Planetary, but when one considers the size of the Imperium and the value of one small scout ship to it, well, what does it matter...? It could be their attitude.

 

[stofsk]

I was thinking along the lines of "Well he's detached... but not really" if you catch my drift.

He was probably allowed to be detached, but told he can only be autonomous in a particular cluster. If he's in one particular cluster of one particular subsector, then it should be relatively easy to chase him up to reactivate him and his ship. While he's 'detached' he can also keep a close eye on this particular cluster, while doing whatever he likes he makes those charming 'unofficial' reports of his exploits.

(Given this is Ley Sector, it's not really practical to take a Scout and shanghai him over several sectors just to get to a war front. Especially not when other powers in the region of Gateway might need to have an eye on them in case they try anything clever)

I'm not really looking at this from a rules perspective. Actually I'm looking at it from an adventure seed perspective. I want the character to be 30, on detached duty and with his own Type S... during the Rim War in the year 993, but in Ley Sector.

 

[Golan2072]

Remember that with most of the top-of-the-line Scout Service craft being sent to the Rim to help the war effort, the Service will probably be short on craft in sectors such as Ley; the "detached duty" could possibly be something along the lines of "stay in the Beta Quadrant (of Ley) and carry 2 tons of high-priority mail whereever you go; jump atleast once per month". Additionally, you could have the Service give the PC scout a mission every once in a while in order to fill in for agents who've been sent to the Rim.

 

[stofsk]

Also: quite a few of the adventures/supplements for T20 have a list of rumours, one of which goes along the lines of "Due to Naval shortages, some Scout vessels are being pressed into anti-corsair duty. How successful this will be is an open question."

 

[mbrinkhues]

I know that traditionally the "Scout" ship is the classical Typ-S. But what if we interprete the entry as "a small scout craft to old to be used by the service" and include some other craft up to a low-tech variant of a Donosev? Making the detached ship old (1-2 TL below current) serves as an explanation why it is no longer used.

As for the rest, the Scout will check in once per year at a Scout base for the IIRC free anual overhaul. And one can assume that he will be de-briefed about what has happened during those 50 weeks since he came in last.

Maybe in case of war they simply have to check in more often (say (bi)monthly) Just from the observations of the Scout (who might not have any Intel training) the service can gather a lot of soft data. And if the Scout does not appear, they get a hint where a pirat may be(1).

A third thing: What if certain Scouts are not detached but rather act as the 3I equivalent of Domenic Flandry, wandering the Spacelanes with a rather broad mission? This would work best for intel types

(1) Known as the Canary or Kradmelder system - If either drops dead there is danger

 

[sgbrown]

A note from the not so disinterested peanut gallery.

If the 3I is pulling every available scout ship to the war front then they're asking for trouble. Just because you have an active war going on in one area doesn't mean you let your intel die down in other areas. If anything you need to get better intel to make sure no one wants to open up another front.

Detached Duty may actually make more sense in this case because it takes less overhead and oversight - the planners are concentrating on the rim but they still want to have their "eyes and ears" in Ley Sector letting them know if any serious trouble is brewing - say from the K'Khree (sp?). They may even encourage detached duty scouts to spend more time on the fringes like the Ley Sector. (Kind of like the mountain men in the American Civil War - yeah we got our hands full fighting each other right now, but could you please make sure we know about it if the Indians decide to pull anything major? A lot of the mountain men were drafted and sent to the front - but a lot of them weren't. I suspect some that weren't rode US Army horses as well.)

Even if I didn't have a vested interest, I'd say you need scouts on the "quite" borders if you want them to stay quite... but like I said - I'm not impartial on this one.

I really want Stofsk to have an excuse to provide a really good scout ship...

 

[stofsk]

Heh - actually this is another project, not related to "Off the Far End". Sorry Steve.

 

[sgbrown]

Originally posted by stofsk:
Heh - actually this is another project, not related to "Off the Far End". Sorry Steve.

Oh drat!

Then count the earlier post as independent analysis. While I could easily see a government making that type of mistake, I still think it would be a mistake for the 3I to send all the scouts to the rim. The wise move is to keep an eye on the other frontiers to allow you to draw down the right amount of the gaurd force (combat capable ships). To do that you need to keep the scouts very active. From a resource standpoint, encouraging detached duty to pick up this duty makes sense.

 

[Plankowner]

It also makes sense to use Scouts for that, freeing up Naval assets for the war effort.

 

[BetterThanLife]

However since the Scouts are also an intelligence gathering service, run through the Detached Duty Office. Intelligence gathering will still be going on against other entities besides the Solomani. So there is plenty of work for Scouts that aren't pressed into service in the war effort. Further many Scouts, for one reason or another, will not be called up. (Mostly because the Scout Service doesn't want them back.)

 

[kafka47]

It also remember the role of the Scout is similar to the role of The Postman from Brin's novel of the same name(the Costner's film does not add the complexity - read the book).

A haggered and detatched Scout, could be given an old horse, I mean Starship, recruit a crew of irregulars of similarly retired or newbies for missions.

Also, it is important whilst the Rim War is an all-Imperium effort, it is not an all consuming war or total war. Again, comparisons with the American War of Independence should be a good starting point, rather than, say, the Russian Civil War or the World Wars.

One of the problems of Traveller is actually conceptualizing War. In the future, I should imagine war will be quite different than how it is waged now. Strategic objectives need to be met and assume the population will go along. In this way, warfare goes back in time before the advent of Total War and becomes a test between combantants rather than an exercise in domination and subjegation.

The Imperium in the Rim War, probably knows that it will loose but the question is how much is it willing to give up which is what the real issue of the war is all about. As both the Solomani & the Imperials are basically the same elites running them. Nobles have converted to cause of the Patriots and became Party Members and embraced "democracy" and on the other side, Imperial Solomani have embraced tradition and stated that their destiny lies in the greatest human polity ever created.