TO&E and US Marine Cam

1) The Canadians went to a pixelated pattern a year or two back for the
helmets and some of the BDUs (LBE mesh vests are coming or are here now). It
looks... odd. Like the one in the pic on the Marine link. (ish). It is like
Flektarn, but the square-ish pixels are more visible. But what is
visible close up, blends easily at a distance. It apparently works like the
dickens.
Interestingly, it has some sort of anti-IR properties and the lecture I
heard on it suggested you NOT use scrim (leaves/netting/etc) because it
would somehow disrupt that efficacy vs. IR. (OTOH, there is nothing worse than
round helmet shapes and the like for skylighting... I still think I'd
apply scrimmage to my kit... I can't see it messing up the IR _that_
badly that it outweighs the visible light cam effects).

2) Eli said: Alright,

I'm designing a TO&E to go along with the PAs I'm having made through Eureka's
100 club. The idea is for mercenary unit, utilizing rugged PA
Companies composed of three 16-man platoons.

--> Care to describe this PA? I'm interested. What stage is it at?

My question is for vehicle mobilization. At what level of command is it
realistic to assign vehicles? Also, is it believable to assign advanced
communications at the Platoon level and Company Level? Is a seperate recon
section a realistic attachment to a Company? I envision the Recon section
as 3 2-man teams of recon-equipped PAs.

--> You might want to look for a series of books from Rick Shelley
(Officer Cadet, Lt, Captain, Major, Lt Col, Colonel). They're pretty good and
they give you a good idea where comms might fit in and some of the
benefits/pitfalls (and one view of why we'll still be using hand
signals...).

--> Based on current trends, I'd suspect every combat helmet will have
some
fancy vision/sound systems, some baseline scans into IR/UV with perhaps
LIDAR for the recon guys, probably telemetry, and comms of at least 5km range
but perhaps even satellite range. Low power satphones are a reality now...
given 150 years, they'll be old news. A company probably has satellite LoS
uplinks as well as quite a variety of portable and effective comms (spread
spectrum, frequency hopping, crypto, etc). As for the Recon section, I've seen
recon sections that are quite large... it depends on the unit type and your
reliance on external recce capabilities. If the force is self sufficient,
maybe organic recce capability needs to be good, so half a
dozen scout-suits (with heavy duty stealth/scanning in active and
passive plus comms and some AI for threat assessment) probably makes lots of
sense. Probably not armed with anything heavier than an IPW.

Just my 0.02.