From: Tom B <kaladorn@g...>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:44:33 -0500
Subject: [GZG] Traveller Battle Dress
_______________________________________________ Gzg-l mailing list Gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu http://vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu:1337/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lJus t to clarify a few points about Traveller and its use of Battle Dress aka powered armour.... 1) GURPS and the GTU are a bit different to other versions of Traveller. A bit more coherent in places, such as the minimal levels of competence you get from military training, but they also filled in a lot of fluff that has game ramifications (Doug B did some good work with Ground Forces). In the GTU, Battle Dress is fully stealthed and is the standard armour of the Imperial Marines. In other versions of the Traveller Universe, Battle Dress would be: 1) Good armour, but in theory vulnerable to small arms of varying tech (Classic Traveller) and stealth was not a factor in such sorts of things, and also not the 'standard gear' of anyone since the original Classic Traveller universe, pre 3rd-Imperium, actually was very sketchily described. I actually have an old article that suggested laser rifles and reflec as standard Imperial Forces weaponry. (Of course, the 3rd Imperium and later supplements in the CTU changed things and gave more hard detail on what weapons would be available at what tech...) 2) Good armour, nigh invulnerable to many small arms that were not a TL-13 laser rifle or a plasma or fusion gun or a RAM grenade. Standard equipment of the Marines quite likely, limited in operational life by power requirements, sometimes having chameleon features (but this was mostly optical if I recall) and sometimes using grav belts. Some of the fusion and plasma guns had their own gravitic support. (MegaTraveller) 3) Great armour, invulnerable to small arms except some high tech ones like possible the Gauss Rifle which was much nastier in this rules variant than its predecessors (plus fusion and plasma guns), and built using essentially vehicle construction rules. (T20) 4) GURPs GTU Battle Dress already described. 5) T4: Shuddering just thinking about that. Won't go look, burns the eyes. 6) Mongoose Traveller: Haven't actually looked this one up yet. 7) T5: Snuck out without me looking, have to acquire a copy soonest. The point of all that being that in some iterations, the battle dress was not stealthed and was somewhat vulnerable, in some versions it had optical stealth but not other forms, in some versions it is very resistant to small arms or invulnerable to things like pistols and rifles firing normal slugs, and in some iterations Grav belts were options, some weren't mentioned, some were standard equipment. My own favourite ruleset in MegaTraveller (best skill system) and it made battledress the thing you didn't want to see unless you had a *very* powerful modern weapon. Vehicles, however, could probably cook it at loooong ranges if they had even moderate sensors and even a crappy TL-9 main gun. When we look at examples in canon of the use of Battle Dress, we see flying Droyne troops with Battle Dress and fusion or plasma weapons, Imperial Troops depicted as patrolling in flying Battle Dress, etc. One important thing to keep in mind with the *TUs is that they all have fragmented tech across sectors of space, even planet to planet. This means Imperial Marines might well encounter many environments where their Battle Dress is essentially immune to local weapons through armour and range limits of the weaponry relative to those possessed by the Marines. So if you are suppressing an insurgency or even fighting a main force that has low tech weaponry, your Marines could use the grav belts and Battle Dress very aggressively, even in close contact. If the enemy tanks have to focus on your Battle Dress, that renders most of their force useless, and your personal plasma or fusion gun may well be able to injure or kill the lower tech MBT and certainly your APCs weapons can (Tac Missile) with efficacy and at long range. Enemy infantry is almost a waste of effort and your high mobility makes you hell-on-wheels for a lower tech command structure to fight. In high-tech conflicts, you are hoping that the enemy has equal or fewer guys if he has the same tech, because your troops are vulnerable. They are highly mobile, resistant to most small arms and partially resistant to heavier arms, but ultimately are only as good as the enemy infantry and enemy PDS, ADS, and vehicles will kill your guys. Of course, approaching on foot at speeds less than 100kph doesn't necessarily change that at all. So even what are essentially PA troopers in high tech forces fighting one another are roughly as casualty prone as lower tech infantry fighting each other, if you adjust for med-tech differences. John A covered the real crux issue though: If you are fighting enemies who are near your tech, floating around in the sky in predictable ways is a good way to get walloped. Of course, your gear may be stealthed, you may used dispersed formations (classic skirmish tactics), or your grav belts may have random evasions and your suit may have active countermeasures. But still, you don't get ANY benefit from cover or concealment up in the sky unless you use skyscapers and the like in urban areas as cover (a possibility for flying troops who may be able to crash in and out of skyscrapers with ease). Weightwise, John also points out that the unit would have to cancel its own weight. The issue here is battery life. A powered down suit of Battle Dress or a powered down Grav Belt are just excess weight. And, often, a sizable one as once you get used to having available power and grav, you often cease to worry about unpowered weight much. Think of grav belts as an extension of the hang glider, ultralight, or parafoil or the new flying wings. We use them to deploy troops to a battle area but we don't parachute into fights, no one would fly an ultralight (even an armed one) into a battle, and the glide wings or hang gliders are all about getting you into position to work, not transport during tactical engagements. They ARE good for movements (even risky ones) you have to take to redeploy, exploit or fill breaches and they are good in some situations for casevac and scouting. But bounding in combat would be NOE and probably at speeds no greater than 50 kph (a guess). Although Traveller didn't explore it, one assumes you might have a variety of anti-PA mines and weapon systems and similarly anti-grav mines and weapon systems as well as grav detectors. These may vastly change the optimal tactical and strategic uses of these sorts of technologies. Last thought: They don't stress it much, but even in Traveller, high-tech forces live and die by their logistics chain. If you've got PA going, you need to recharge every so often and not just one-guy-at-a-time so you'd need some sizable power infrastructure. Grav belts will need power too. Spares will need to be available for battle damaged units. And so on. Fortunately, a higher tech force has higher tech logistics, but this is something to bear in mind as well.