Striker Book 3 DS 4 MRLs Installment 4 Carraige and Crew

[snrdg082102]

Late afternoon from the Pacific Northwest,

Can anyone explain why Striker MRLs all appear to be towed and have larger crews than CPR guns?

I have dug up one of my books "Land Forces of the World" by Christopher Chant published in 1990 that has write-ups for artillery and rocket artillery systems. I also checked on the Internet to see what information may have changed and for the most part the data matched.

Going through the rocket artillery section, Multiple Rocket Systems, the first thing I noticed is that most of the systems are mounted on a vehicle and not towed on a carriage.

The second observation is that the crews ranged from 2 to 12, with the average being 4 or 5. The towed versions crews average comes out to be about 5.

The conventional CPR artillery crew numbers for the most part were about the same as what is listed on the CPR Gun table, usually a couple bodies lower, but not a big enough difference to really worry about.

I realize that the odds of changing the rule are small but I would like some feedback on the topic.

Pulling a MRL from "Land Forces of the World" a 36-tube 12.7 cm system is mounted on a vehicle and has a crew of 5.

Since DS 4 indicates that MRLs have a carriage at 12.7 cm the system requires 11 or 12 personnel. Using the crew for a 12 cm gun the MRL requires 40 or 43 if the 13 cm crew requirement is used. Having the MRL mounted on a vehicles the crew is between 18 and 22 which is more than triple the real world size.

 

[Carlobrand]

Because.:devil:

Honestly, I haven't the foggiest.

The MRL crew requirement is 1/10 the crew requirement of a mortar of that size, times the number of tubes. An MRL of 20 tubes could have twice the crew requirement of a comparable mortar; an MRL of 10 tubes has the same crew requirement as a comparable mortar. Per Book 2, that crew takes 20 game turns (10 minutes) to reload the beastie regardless of size (bigger size means bigger crew), while a mortar crew can have the next mortar round ready to fire in anything from 2 seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the mortar size.

So, basically, the crew that could load a single mortar round in 2 seconds to 2 minutes can load ten MRL tubes in ten minutes, or one MRL round per minute. A rocket weighs twice as much as a comparable mortar round; that might slow things down a bit. Still, for anything under about 18cm, the mortar crew seems to be working much harder.

As to the carriage/vehicle bit: Book 3 mentions a carriage, which is the mortar carriage. I would interpret that "same characteristics" bit to imply that you could mount the MRL on a vehicle and dispense with the carriage, same as you would a mortar - except that the MRL can't be loaded from inside because the thing has to be mounted externally to give the rocket exhaust somewhere to go.

Add: don't forget you can reduce the crew by up to half - you just end up doubling the reload time, and if the crew drops below half then the MRL can no longer be reloaded.

 

[Timerover51]

I suspect that the developers were thinking only of the WW2 German Nebelwerfer, never looked at anything else, and used that as a basis to extrapolate from. The more I look at the design process for Striker and MegaTraveller, the more I wonder exactly how much research the developers did, and how much they really knew about weapons and weaponry. My advice would be go with the real world data and forget the design process, unless you absolutely have to, in which case, use common sense and what something looks really weird, chuck it and go with what looks right.

 

[snrdg082102]

Morning Carlobrand,

=Carlobrand;405797]Because.:devil:

Honestly, I haven't the foggiest.

At least I'm not the only one in the fog on this one.

The MRL crew requirement is 1/10 the crew requirement of a mortar of that size, times the number of tubes. An MRL of 20 tubes could have twice the crew requirement of a comparable mortar; an MRL of 10 tubes has the same crew requirement as a comparable mortar. Per Book 2, that crew takes 20 game turns (10 minutes) to reload the beastie regardless of size (bigger size means bigger crew), while a mortar crew can have the next mortar round ready to fire in anything from 2 seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the mortar size.

So, basically, the crew that could load a single mortar round in 2 seconds to 2 minutes can load ten MRL tubes in ten minutes, or one MRL round per minute. A rocket weighs twice as much as a comparable mortar round; that might slow things down a bit. Still, for anything under about 18cm, the mortar crew seems to be working much harder.

The data in Land Forces of the World did have an entry for reload time, unfortunately I didn't think to compare the numbers. However, I just made a quick check in the book which, when the data was revealed, showed reloading took between 2 and 20 minutes.

As to the carriage/vehicle bit: Book 3 mentions a carriage, which is the mortar carriage. I would interpret that "same characteristics" bit to imply that you could mount the MRL on a vehicle and dispense with the carriage, same as you would a mortar - except that the MRL can't be loaded from inside because the thing has to be mounted externally to give the rocket exhaust somewhere to go.

Add: don't forget you can reduce the crew by up to half - you just end up doubling the reload time, and if the crew drops below half then the MRL can no longer be reloaded.

The book and the material I found on the Internet agrees that the vehicle mounted MRLs are not carried internally.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[snrdg082102]

Morning timerover51,

I suspect that the developers were thinking only of the WW2 German Nebelwerfer, never looked at anything else, and used that as a basis to extrapolate from. The more I look at the design process for Striker and MegaTraveller, the more I wonder exactly how much research the developers did, and how much they really knew about weapons and weaponry. My advice would be go with the real world data and forget the design process, unless you absolutely have to, in which case, use common sense and what something looks really weird, chuck it and go with what looks right.

To the best of my knowledge at least one of the GDW staff had an Army background and that a couple of more were historical table top war gamers.

Pulling together designs for a local game I'll make the appropriate changes to the numbers that seem to be out of whack and let the group know what they are and why they were made.

One of my issues is that more often than not the designs that are posted frequently don't provide information on what, why, and how the tweak was made. The undocumented tweaks throws someone like me for a loop when I try to recreate the design using the games design system.

Of course a lot of the published designs in Traveller books suffer from being built during testing using draft rules that didn't make the final published draft and the designers didn't have the time to go back and rebuild using the published set.

Thank you for the feedback timerover51