Hello people
Can anyone let me know of any books with either Full Thurst ship to ship
combat or DS2 style combat. I've read some Hammers Slammers stuff and was just
wondering what else existed. Please bear in mind I'm looking for background
material and written examples of how authors see space and future ground
combat. So I'm not into character interaction and complicated plots. I'm
looking for detailed descriptions of combat and tactics.
Many thanks
(you can mention any books, working for a london university library service
does give me more scope to obtaining rare books.)
> jeremy claridge wrote:
PASSAGE AT ARMS by Glen Cook ("Das Boat" in deep space)
> You wrote:
> 2.On Deadly Ground: The known universe faces it's most deadly threat
YM, "In Death Ground" HTH.
Fifth Foreign Legion was done by Andrew Keith of Traveller fame.
great books!
I also recomend "Aliens and Allies"by Robert McBride Allen (very GDW
2300ish,but some realy funky starships designs, and a good argument aginst
capital ships...
Darryl
[quoted original message omitted]
> Jeremy Claridge wrote:
> > Can anyone let me know of any books with either Full Thurst ship to
To which Los replied:
> Pick up David Weber's Starfire stuff. It's my favorite, and is
But the title is "In Death Ground"...
> 3. Insurrection: The terran federation erupts into civil war.
The main problem with these three is that they describe *Starfire* combat
rather than *Full Thrust* combat - complete with the strange background
physics used in the Starfire game universe to explain how the ships could
possibly behave like the Starfire game mechanics suggest. As background
material for Full Thrust I'd consider them suspect, to say the least... OTOH,
their lack of varied plots and interesting characters fits Jeremy's
wishes perfectly :-)
(Mind you, I do like Weber's books. After all, I use them as background
material in the Starfire design work...)
The Honor Harrington series, also by Weber (NOT by David Drake as Los
seems to think ;-), use vector movement which fits better into the FT
background. There are some quirks, though - beams being decidedly less
important than missiles, for example. There is at least one Harrington
adaption for Full Thrust on the Page.
Later,
Pick up David Weber's Starfire stuff. It's my favorite, and is intimately
about ship combat (And some ground combat), both staregic and tactical. The
books are:
1.Crusade: A influenced by a human that had violated their prime directive 100
years earlier returns to human space in an attemptto liberate EARTH in the
name of Holy Mother terra.
2.On Deadly Ground: The known universe faces it's most deadly threat from an
arachnid like race. (My favorite)
3. Insurrection: The terran federation erupts into civil war.
As far as ground combat. besides the Standard SST, Halderman, and Hammer's
Slammers.
1. John Steakley: Armor. This is kind of a weird book. The beginning
and end of the book cover some pretty good ground SST-like combat, but
the middle has a completely seperate story which many might find an annoying
diversion.
2. John Dalmas: The Regiment, The White Regiment, and the Regiment's War.
Three excellently written books by a former grunt. It's about a mercenary
regiment and their combat in the far future. Very well done.
Anyway that's a few for now.
Los
Also, Drake's Honor Harrington series has cool ship combat for which there is
a FT conversion.
> jeremy claridge wrote:
> Hello people
The David Weber "Honor Harrington" and "Starfire" series (with Steve White)
are excellent.
John Steakley's "Armor" is great Power Armor fun.
Brian Keith's "Fifth Foreign Legion" series is VERY SGII/DSII ish
Michael Wikan, Game Designer Accolade, Inc.
> -----Original Message-----
Los spake thusly upon matters weighty:
> 2.On Deadly Ground: The known universe faces it's most deadly threat
As someone pointed out, it is On Death Ground. It's from a Sun Tzu quote which
went
In difficult ground, press on. In encircled ground, devise stratagems. In
death ground, fight.
> 1. John Steakley: Armor. This is kind of a weird book. The
Talk about a depressing book.... the main character certainly has a rough time
in this book. But it is worth a read.
> Also, Drake's Honor Harrington series has cool ship combat for which
Weber's perhaps? Drake and Stirling wrote an 'addenda' to this series, but the
books On Basilisk Station, Honour of the Queen, A Short Victorious War, Field
of Dishonour, Flag in Exile, and the new hardcover (name forgotten) are all
written by David Weber.
The Sten Series by Bunch and Cole has some spec ops, some fleet combat, and
some ground combat.
The Crisis of Empire series that David Drake attached himself to is worth
reading as well (Thomas T Thomas was another author involved with that
series). It has fleet combat.
Any of the Hammer's Slammers series (At Any Price, Counting the Cost, The
Sharp End, Hammers Slammers, Rolling Hot, etc) are good military SF.
There is a series by an author whose name I forget (but I will look up) on La
Legion Etrange in the future (FSE Legion if you wanted to put it roughly into
the FT universe). It had two or three books that were all worth looking at.
Including a good discussion of 'defeat in detail' as a concept.
Joel Rosenberg has two excellent books for the Mercenary fiction side (for you
New Israeli fans) called Not For Glory and Hero that tell the story of Metzada
(Masada) the New Israeli homeworld after Israel was nuked by Arabs (then the
Israelis nuked Meca in revenge). It gives an impression of how a poor planet
might export mercenaries as a resource in order to trade for things it needs.
Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle was another interesting book, as was Falkenberg's
Legion.
There's some current series featuring US Marines in the future, whose name an
author I forget (again, I'll look on my bookshelf).
There are many more. Some focus to a greater or lesser extent on the
characters (most are stories, after all, rather than some sort of future
military treatise) but many will give you a good flavour for unit traditions,
some potential TO&Es, and some ideas for mission cards.
Tom.
> You wrote:
> As someone pointed out, it is On Death Ground. It's from a Sun Tzu
In.
> There is a series by an author whose name I forget (but I will look
Dietz did some with the Legion which carried the lineage of the French Foreign
Legion (I know I can't spell "Foreign" in French...), and someone else did a
Fifth Foreign Legion series.
> was nuked by Arabs (then the Israelis nuked Meca in revenge). It
Any of the Dorsai books by Gordy Dickson also discuss this.
> Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle was another interesting book, as was
Prince of Mercenaries was another one. Then we have the Prince of Sparta and
Go Tell the Spartans, which is as good a fictional look at guerilla warfare in
the future on a colony world as I have EVER seen.
> > Please bear in mind I'm looking for background material and written
If you are looking for combat and tactics you couldn't go very wrong looking
either at modern military books. There are a number of books written from an
infantryman's perspective (one that springs to mind is A.F.N. Clarke's
'Contact', written by a Para Lt who served in Northern Ireland in the 70's).
Another popular genre in this field is the Vietnam War book. There has been a
veritible library of books written by infantrymen who served there, rather
than pick out individuals (and risk upsetting folks if I don't pick out
thiers) have a look in a decent book shop, a good start point may be 'Bloods',
or 'Chickenhawk' (OK so its about a helicopter pilot, so what, I'm partial to
helicopters!). In more modern times there are books written by soldiers who
served in the Falkland Isles (for example Vince Bramley's book which I've
forgotten the title) and in the Gulf war (no, not Bravo Two Zero as it's total
toss!).
OK, so my point is that generally (and I feel reasonable confident saying
this) sci-fi combat is poor on tactics and heavy on gizmos, whereas
modern novels, especially in the genres that i've metioned tend to be weak on
gizmos and very strong on the thoughts and actions of the individual soldiers.
I personally think that future war, at least in the timescale GZG espouses
will not be too dramatically different from modern war, save for the gizmos,
and lets face it, an infantryman will always feel the same, dirty, tired, and
shot at!
As far as future space warfare goes I've read a few books with space battles
and while I don't feel as confident as i do writing about infantry based
novels I can't say I'm too impressed with most of the books I've read. One of
the better sources I've seen is a section in the 'Colonial
Marine Handbook' by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. In a nutshell this guy
desribes space warfare as akin to submarine warfare, a case of hunt for your
enemy, control your emissions and get the first shoot in as the first volley
will in all likelyhood be the last.
Oops, time's up I've got to go get my media out of the autoclave....
I hope some of thie ramble has been useful, if not a diversion from
Sci-Fi
stuff.
> Dietz did some with the Legion which carried the lineage of the French
Its La Legion Etrangere I think, though my spelling may be a bit off. A mate
of mine's uncle was in for a while. He ended up writing a quite well known
book about his service, if only I could reemember what the damned thing was
called, DOH!
> Thomas Barclay wrote:
> Los spake thusly upon matters weighty:
Sorry, I have this annoying recurring habit of typing Drake when I mean Weber.
> There's some current series featuring US Marines in the future, whose
I too can't remember the name of this but it's a real good book. And the
PSGT's name is Charlie Bass from Sands of Iwo Jima fame. I thought it was
something out of teh Marine Corps Hymn like First to Fight or something. The
coauthors are an Army Sgt Major and a Marine Gunny Sgt.
(ret.)
John spake thusly upon matters weighty:
> You wrote:
Yes. Sorry.
> >There is a series by an author whose name I forget (but I will look
> Foreign Legion (I know I can't spell "Foreign" in French. . . ), and
Read both of those. I think the 5ieme Legion Etrange (5th foreign legion) was
the books I was thinking of. Made references to lots of historical events like
Camerone.
Tom.
> On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
> jeremy claridge wrote:
Also GO TELL THE SPARTANS & PRINCE OF SPARTA, colonial civil
war/insurrection w/ part of Falkenberg's 42nd. (these two are with S.M.
Stirling, who's a good combat-SF writer, IMHO)(but his alt-hist books
are strange, esp the Draka lot...)
Those two books plus Drake's Slammers books have been the largest
influence on my DS2/SG2 gaming...
In a message dated 8/13/98 6:29:11 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> jeremy.claridge@kcl.ac.uk writes:
> Hello people
A few of my personal favorites:
Roland Green Peace Company, The Mountain Walks, Those Green Foreign Hills
The Starcruiser Shennandoah -series (6 books I believe) to
include Squadron Alert.
> The David Weber "Honor Harrington" and "Starfire" series (with Steve
Actually these are by William H.Keith and Andrew Keith (of Battletech novels
fame, or should that be infamy....). But yes, all 3 books in the series are
fun and good ideas references. There are also two "future Foreign Legion"
novels with a cyborg twist, by
William C. Dietz - Legion of the Damned and The Final Battle.
Also try: several books by Rick Shelley, including Jump Pay, Side Show, Until
Relieved, The Buchanan Campaign, The Fires of Coventry (mostly
> Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
> The main problem with these three is that they describe *Starfire*
Hey wait a minute, as space combat fiction these are top notch. Last time I
checked, Full Thrust touted itself as a system adaptable to ANY background.
True noone, including me, has gotten off their ass and developed a conversion
of the starfire background to Full Thrust, (it's on my list of things to do)
but that doesn't mean you can't use starfire type weapons or combat in FT. In
fact I do it myself informally. And the FB addition of Salvo missles is right
up the alley of the classic missile engagement that Weber always writes about.
> At 12:49 8/13/98, Thomas Barclay wrote:
You're probably thinking of the Fifth Foreign Legion series by Andrew Keith
and William H. Keith Jr.: March or Die, Honor and Fidelity and a third one
which escapes memory. Good hard-SF tactical grunt combat.
There was another series about the future of the foreign legion (Legion of the
Damned was one of the titles) whose author I forget. This series was a
bit more on the space-opera side, but was interesting in that most of
the legion (especially those sentenced to join because of capital crimes) were
cyborged into various types of killing machines.
> There's some current series featuring US Marines in the future, whose
For what it's worth the Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual actually goes
beyond the cheese one expects, and deliver's some surprisingly well
thought-out development of the Colonial Marines: rough TO&E, and
detailed looks at equipment, tactics, etc with some good 'color' bits thrown
in.
David Drake wrote a novel called The Forlorn Hope about a mercenary regiment
much like the Slammers. I believe this predates the Slammers, actually.
In the short story side of things: Any of Jerry Pournelle's There Will Be War
series is good source material. Joe Haldeman did a couple of themed
anthologies: Supertanks and Body Armor:2000 with interesting tidbits. David
Drake has a collection called The Military Dimension, and there is also the
War World shared universe (ed. by Jerry Pournelle) which varies wildly in
quality, but the short story Necessity by SM Stirling is well worth the price
of Vol 1: The Burning Eye (if you can still find it. Baen Books, 1988)
On the fringes: Hyperion by Dan Simmons has (in places) some detailed
combat sequences, including a rather good Zero-G fight. It's also an
excellent book, very thought-provoking, and deserves to be read for
that
reason alone. Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper is on the space-opera side
of
things, but still a fun concept. He also wrote some more hard-sf type
stories (collected in Federation and some other book), neither of which I own,
unfortunately:(
> At 15:57 8/13/98, Stuart Murray wrote:
> If you are looking for combat and tactics you couldn't go very wrong
I tend to agree! Some recommendations:
Non-fiction
Anything by Matther Brennan. _Brennan's War_ is his story, _Headhunters_
and _Hunter-Killer Squadron_ are stories collected from others in his
unit. Excellent autobiographical material. And through the stories, you get a
feel for how units on the lines adapted their equipment and tactics to meet
the tactical challenges they faced.
_Inside the LRRPS: Rangers In Vietnam_ by Michael Lee Lanning. A bit on
the
dry side, but an in-depth look at the development of LRRPS and
specialized
small-unit tactics in Vietnam. Includes TO&E, SOP, training details,
etc.
_Low Level Hell_ by Hugh Mills, Jr. Helicopter action
_Tank Sargent_ by Ralph Zumbro. The only first-person account of armor
actions in Vietnam that I've been able to find. Reminds me a bit of Hammer's
Slammers, but that's not surprising, as I believe Drake was attached to a unit
similar to this one.
_Sniper_ by Adrain Gilbert. A historical look at the development of the
sniper as a specialized troop type from the civil war to the present. Very
comprehensive, good source material.
Fiction
Anything by Bob Mayer, especially _Operation Dragon-Sim_ (Dragon-Sim 13
in
hardcover), _Eyes of the Hammer_, _Synbat_ and _Z_. The last two border
on science fiction, but all are good action novels with technically accurate
looks at small unit action. The author is a former Green Beret.
Steven Hunter: _The Master Sniper_, _The Day Before Midnight_, _Point of
Impact_ and _Dark Light_ are my favorites. A bit less applicable to
wargaming, as the focus is squarely on the action of a few individuals. But
Hunter knows his firearms, and writes good action. There may be something here
to steal for a scenario (especially Day Before Midnight!)
_Vortex_ by Larry Bond covers a South African civil war, and the
subsequent
invasion and counterinvasion of Cuban and US troops. Good company- and
brigade-level action.
Anything and everything by Harry Coyle, of course. _Trial by Fire_, _The
Ten Thousand_ and _Code of Honor_ are my favorites. Techincally accurate
and compelling stories set in the modern US armed forces. Fire and Code both
feature as a side story the exploits of a female infantry officer, one of the
first few the Army allows. Not quite Honor Harrington, but still a quite
likeable character.
_The Five Fingers_ and _The Teheran Contract_ by Gayle Rivers and James
Hudson purport to be fictionalized accounts of real-life mercenary
actions, but I'm not sure how true they are. Fun reads, though.
_Mission MIA_ by J.C. Pollock is a bit dated, but still decent. One of
the
early 'let's go back and rescue the POWs' books of the early/mid-80s,
and probably the one I liked the most.
> On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Jim 'Jiji' Foster wrote:
> _Tank Sargent_ by Ralph Zumbro. The only first-person account of armor
Actually, Drake initially wrote Vietnam shorts (with an SF touch) to purge
it out of his system -- but he couldn't find a buyer for those so he
redressed the stories (in classical REH fashion, though the rewrites are not
quite so obvious) as pure science fiction and wham, Hammer's Slammers was
born. The Vietnam stories have been published later in a collection called
"Military Dimension", IIRC.
> The David Weber "Honor Harrington" and "Starfire" series (with Steve
> At 12:49 8/13/98, Thomas Barclay wrote:
Third FFL book is Cohort of the Damned, not to be confused with Dietz's Legion
of the Damned (see below).
> There was another series about the future of the foreign legion (Legion
were
> cyborged into various types of killing machines.
[snip]
> At 15:57 8/13/98, Stuart Murray wrote:
For some very good near-future (on the blurred line between modern
techno-thriller and SF, actually set in 2006) wet-navy action, try
James Cobb's Choosers of the Slain and Storm Dragon, both set around the US
Navy's first Stealth Destroyer, the USS Cunningham, and her female Captain.
First book is a battle for the Antartctic, second set in China.
> You wrote:
> _Tank Sargent_ by Ralph Zumbro. The only first-person account of armor
He was an interrogator/interpreter for a squadron of the 11th ACR
during 1970. When he got back, he found himself writing Vietnam stories that
didn't sell. So he put it in a rayguns and rockets setting, and found that it
sold much better. The only one that's not even loosly Vietnam based is, of
course, Counting the Cost, which is based on the Nika riots in Constantinople
during the reign of Justinian the Great.
> John Atkinson wrote:
Two related stories that are in the same universe, 'To Cross the Stars' and
'The Voyage' are based on the Odessey and the legend of Jason and the
Argonaughts respectivly.
> On Fri, Aug 14, 1998 at 08:41:39AM -0500, John Atkinson wrote:
Which seems to be a _very_ popular source of inspiration for
SF writers. Drake's used to it twice -- _Counting the Cost_ and less
veiled in latest book he coauthored with S.M. Stirling(?) -- the sequel
to _Oblique Approach_.
There's also a book by Pournelle that uses the Nika riots as
inspiration -- one of the Falkenberg books, I think. I remember this one
well because someone on a newsgroup once claimed the story proved Pournelle
was some sort of reactionary. I wish I had known the historical basis of the
story...
Hmmm... can anyone suggest a good general history of Byzantium?
> There's also a book by Pournelle that uses the Nika riots as
Inspiration? He pretty much just retold the story of the Nika riots in a
different setting. Excellent book. Falkenburg was the protagonist. Not Go Tell
the Spartans or Prince of Sparta...I think it may have been The Mercenary but
I don't recall for sure.
> I remember this one
Pournelle is pretty conservative (or sensible, depending of your own politic
view) but this particular story is a retelling of an historical event.
I wish I had known the
> historical basis of the story...
IIRC Sir Steven Runciman has history of Byzantium. I think also Jonathan
Riley-Smith.
If you happen to like Byzantine history, Harry Turtledove has books (Agent of
the Empire, and the Misplaced Legion books) which take a great deal from
Byzantium; Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history.
> You wrote:
> I wish I had known the
My recomendation for the layman's introduction to the Roman Empire
post-Constantine (Byzantium is a modern invention, originally
derogatory. The Rhomaioi continued to use the Greek form of the word "Roman"
until the Turks came over the wall in 1453, after which they
were known as the Rum Millet--the Roman Nation as subjects of the
Sultan) is Lord John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium, which is a
mere 383 pages, or roughly one per 3 years. It's readable, presumes no prior
knowledge of the subject, and entertaining. Then read the three volume
"History of Byzantium" that it was based on. Then go on to Vasiliev and
Ostrogorsky and the rest, who write in a more scholarly and difficult style,
and also, it seems to me, assume some prior knowledge.
> If you happen to like Byzantine history, Harry Turtledove has books
Also see: Krispos of Videssos. Barring the magic, the first volume is entirely
derived from the story of Basil I, the Macedonian, founder of the greatest
dynasty ever to walk the face of the Earth. The second two are loosely based
on other events in Roman history.
> >IIRC Sir Steven Runciman has history of Byzantium. I think also
Oops. Runciman's is Crusades. I was thinking of Norwich. Obviously time for me
to go to Barnes and Noble's again.