> I was proposing a definition to structure the debate. You're free to > suggest a different one. As far as I remember the 3E rules, there is > one skill for armed suits and another skill for unarmed suits.
No need. I'm just new to GURPS vehicle design so I want to frame in my mind what we're discussing. I hate those debates when you get three quarters into it and you realize you're saying the same thing as the other guy. > Ripley's Powerloader is unarmed, so it gets classed with unarmed > military suits. It would make just as much sense to talk about combat > suits (with integral or handheld weapons) and civilian work suits. I agree, but you pointed out the different skills, so I just wanted to verify that I wasn't going off the rails at the start. > Should suit weapons be built-in? In my opinion, not exclusively. There are cool suits of both variety in the various fictions, be they TV, comic books, cartoons, or books. I think it goes with the concept of the suit. As GURPS Mecha says, you can design a "rifle" for a battlesuit/mecha and attach it via cable to the power system and armor it. > We tried to figure out what the GURPS rules imply, not a specific > setting. Do generic, universal rules actually imply anything? > I would think that residential buildings are no stronger than they have > to be -- if you get stronger materials, the walls get thinner. I don't think that stronger necessarily equates to thinner. Granted, in GURPS tech levels you get a reduction in weight implying a reduction in size, but construction takes more into consideration than just that. Maybe they want more space in the walls for surround sound systems (or the equivalent). I know, before you say it, wiring is small. I got it. But the principle of "Hey builder, I want more in the walls even if they have to be a little thicker than normal," is a fact of consumer buildings. Even cookie cutter subdivisions have some variety if you buy the house early enough in construction. > MOUT is more than just house clearing -- it covers fighting in the > streets, too. And houses are usually more expendable than ships, if you > try boarding at all. That suggests bigger suits and more raw power than > finesse. You're right about MOUT, but so are boarding actions. Collateral damage is a risk of any operation that is addressed in fire control measures in the plan. Not when a weapon system is designed. Once something gets that specialized, typically the only organizations with budgets for it are SOFs and OGAs, not the conventional military. > Rooms and corridors in houses tend to be bigger than those in ships. As to hallway size? Yes, it matters. But even at that, some of the bigger ships have huge hallways. My wife and I went on a cruise, huge hallways. I spent a couple of weeks on a Navy ship for a training exercise, it had a mixture of big and small hatchways. My buddy from high school was on subs when he was in the Navy, he hated life when it came to moving around. Some of the dive boats I've been on have had dinky little cabins and a four-step stairway into them. In most science-fiction though, I would argue ship corridors are wide, at least wide enough for two or three people to stand abreast. Which would be in line with a generic, mainline battlesuit for multiple roles. > If small and light is the priority, why use powered armor at all? Send > a guy with running shoes and a rifle. A 1,000-lb. > suit is not much larger than a 500-lb. suit, but it is much more > capable. I said I like to be small and light and present a smaller target. I didn't say I'd do so at the expense of all else. FREX, when I came in the Army, we operated in LCEs and helmets, no body armor. I loved it. Light, quick, quiet, flexible. Flak vests were stored in wall lockers and kept dust off of the floor of it. Then I was issued RBA with a plate. Heavy, constrictive, still fairly quiet. But it'd stop a 7.62x39 they said (luckily never tested it). Then I got back into Big Army and was issued an IBA with front and back plates. Even heavier. Now I have an IOTV. But my paradigm has shifted, I can't imagine going into a firefight without armor now. Combat load/design is a trade off. Very few manufacturers are willing to cut out potential customers by overspecializing into what we're debating is arguably a niche market of combat. > The commander of a Bradley or Abrams would be a sergeant, right? So is > a battlesuit operator comparable to an AFV driver or an AFV commander? Or higher all the way up to Colonel. Some are Corporals on occasion if you're short on leadership. But that's an artificial constraint based on safety concerns, not tactical or technical. Comparable? That depends on your setting. > The M4 is no more difficult to use than the M16. Both can be handled by > a recruit who comes from basic training. Acknowledged. If you give me training on a piece of equipment, the equipment and time, I can train others. NASA trained monkeys to push the correct series of buttons to enable return of spacecraft, after all. I was discussing the technical complexity of the equipment but the distribution plan. The two are separate arguments. > I was talking about the scenario where just one guy/gal in the squad > has powered armor to haul the supporting weapon. > The trained alternate would need powered armor, too. Okay, I see two sides of this argument. Operator injury or suit inoperability. Operator injury, the injured pilot comes out of the suit, someone else within +/- 20 lbs. of his body weight gets in and moves out. That's a planning consideration that the platoon leader and platoon sergeant should have addressed before they ever left their base. Suit damage/maintenance issue is a concern with ANY piece of equipment. When a Bradley or Abrams goes down in combat, the platoon typically pulls security until Battalion can spin up a recovery mission from the mechanics. It might be as simple as getting a mechanic on site to flip a circuit breaker or it may require a M### Mecha Recovery Contragrav Whatsit. > It also implies that the supporting weapon is not integral to the suit. > And if you have a backup supporting gunner with a backup suit, why not > issue a second supporting weapon to start with? That doesn't cost much > more. No, I implied that the whole suit was the weapon system the same as a Bradley is a system, an M240 and tripod and T&E are a system, or a mortar, sight, baseplate, and bipod are a system. > If there are both battlesuits and unpowered armor, I could see the > suits operating a bit like attack helicopters. Say the commander of a > leg infantry brigade has a battlesuit platoon. They are kept back under > brigade control until they are committed at the critical point, then > they come in and unleash plenty of havoc in a short time, then they go > back to the rear to rearm and refuel. That's an option. Not good, not bad. Not in line with US doctrine. Brigades don't fight, they exercise Mission Command. Typically the largest element that fights in our military is company but structurally could be a battalion. > A bit like tank doctrine in early WWII. If you send them out in penny > packets instead (like my suggestion above that the equivalent of each > machine gunner gets a suit) they are much harder to resupply and > maintain, and the shock effect from concentrated suits is lost. That's why we have Forward Support Companies as part of the battalion that owns them. Heck, even Special Forces and Ranger Regiment have their own maintenance companies that are right there with them. > I'm just an armchair analyst, but I was talking about the real world. > The Marines are talking about the Company-Level Operations Center, the > Company-Level Intelligence Cell, and Enhanced Company Operations. I've been in the infantry for almost two decades now (minus a couple of years for college so I could transition to the officer side). I've done everything company level except for Platoon Sergeant and First Sergeant. Please don't think I say that to brag or say that I know everything, I'm not and I don't. But I do have a lot of doctrinal training of what it should be and a lot of experience of what it really is. In the Army we call it a COIST, Company Intelligence Support Team, but it's manned by people we pull off of the line. Marines and Army have generally the same goal but we have different methodologies of getting there. When I went through the Captain's Career Course, I had three Marine captains in my two small groups (and we had two or three dozen in a class of 160+). We had a lot of discussions on doctrine and differences, but when it comes down to it, it really just is different names with a few different details. One issue the Marines have compared to us though, is they have about 180K people and we have 540K or something like that. More bodies equate to more options. > Again from my distant armchair, I thought the 9-man squad was a > compromise solution between manpower limits, the capacity of afforable > APCs/IFVs, and the need for firepower. Without those limitations, > wouldn't 11-man or 13-man squads be better? Of course. All of that is accurate. The US Army, and I think the US military as a whole, works on a 3-5 person span of control. If you go above that things get unwieldy. Optimum though, is you do this, you do that, and a leader can keep track real easy. Hence, the basic construct is two team leaders reporting to one squad leader. Now then, referencing my above discussions with my Marine buddies, they use a three team squad, IIRC, which is the same thing Army Airborne Infantry and Ranger Regiment are designed to do (the fourth weapons squad can operate autonomously but is designed to break down and attach a gun team to each rifle squad - sometimes it happens, others it doesn't, but platoons typically don't want to underemploy that WPNs Squad Leader). When that happens, the gun team stays with the Squad Leader and while the gunner is the gun team leader, the Squad Leader effectively becomes a static fire team leader providing the fire portion of Fire and Maneuver. Based on the already mentioned distribution plan of the powered armor/battlesuit/uber-powerful-thingamajig, this could be your employment. If the pa/bs/uptamj is analogous to the M4, this suit might be carrying a super cannon or missiles or somesuch. > A notional platoon of three infantry squads, platoon leader, platoon > sergeant, and radio operator will always get weapons teams, medics, > forward observers, translators, dog handlers, EOD teams, ... who will > have to ride somewhere, and four Strykers only have room for 36 > dismounts, right? There's always room for one more. :D It depends on what that notional platoon is MTOEd. Is it Light Infantry? Airborne? Ranger? Stryker? Each of those is different. LI = 36 personnel, Airborne = 41, Ranger = 43, Stryker = 42, Mechanized = 36; but the medics, FOs, and gun teams are part of those numbers already. EOD rolls on their own in their own vehicles. Translators squeeze in. Dog Handlers with the infantry is rare. Those are MPs and typically they are a Brigade or higher level asset unless you're actually in an MP battalion. > Because the full-strength fire team doesn't have to split for fire and > maneuver. Yeah it does. If you assault with a Fire Team, two guys establish a base of fire, while two guys maneuver on the objective. Typically, this can be no more than a 1-man LP/OP, though you don't always know until it's too late... > But a battlesuit has heavier weapons, improved sensors, etc. > could two suits maneuver on their own? The question is can one suit establish fire superiority? Bigger and badder doesn't necessarily equate to keeping them pinned down if it can't do it fast enough, in enough places... > If you look at the history of IFVs and their dismount squads, that > doesn't go without saying. Look at the Bradley platoons with two or > three dismount squads split between four vehicles, and the trouble to > get them into action. I just left company command in 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Believe me, I have voiced that exact argument on more than one occasion. Especially after being a Stryker Infantry Platoon Leader where I *could* load up all of one squad in one truck (coincidentally, one 9-man squad and two vehicle crew compose an 11 man squad there or one vehicle squad - ergo weapons - and three rifle squads, I saw both configurations). > The hard part is to find out what suits will change. Absolutely, and all three versions you wrote provide a unique viewpoint but I still think it will come down to fundamental doctrine for ranged combat won't change much. Techniques and procedures will change, but the doctrine will remain largely the same. At least until the next big game changer like going from Plate Mail and swords to the machinegun (granted, I'm including a few hundred years of change in that). Personally, I don't think that the advent of more armor and carrying more/bigger weaponry will necessarily be as big of a game changer as the introduction of the machinegun was. YMMV, though. Eddie. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
