----- Original Message ----- > From: Onno Meyer <[email protected]> > > Back in the 90s we had long debates on battlesuits vs. tanks, mecha vs. > tanks, and so on.
There was also a debate on internal vs external weapons for battlesuits. My preference is one light weapon in each arm to deal with regular infantry and a removable shoulder pod with a heavy weapon (cannon, rockets, etc.). This keeps the hands free most of the time. A heavy rifle (20mm_) could be carried in certain situations. > Battlesuits go with space marines like peanut butter goes with jelly -- does > it make sense to equate boarding actions with urban combat? Or does that > require smaller suits? I would think you would have light suits for scouting and urban combat and heavy suits for "open field" combat. The heavy suits generally wouldn't go into buildings except perhaps warehouses and vehicle hangers/garages (which have strong floors). > One thing I've been wondering about, the usual assumption in literature > seems > to be that battlesuits are issued to privates fresh from boot camp, and that > battlesuits replace unpowered troops at one for one in an infantry TO&E. How > reasonable is that? This depend on several factors. At low TLs, battlesuits are probably a novelty, so are probably only operated by junior officers or senior NCOs. As they become more common, junior NCOs might use them. Battlsuits would probably have to be quite common for privates to be issued them. As forunit size, the WWII infantry and airborne suits I designed were organized in small squads, mainly because weight prevented the practical squad from being 10-13 men. For my TL 8 campaign, suit squads were about the same size as my regular infantry squads (which are smaller than in WWII anyway). > Do you put powered armor into sustained operations, or are they for short, > sharp fights like commandos? I think they can take part in sustained operations, but commanders need to think of them as heavy infantry, not light tanks. > * How do you recharge a battlesuit in the field, anyway? At TL (^+1) and 8, I wouldn't use batteries as the primary power source, at least for the heavy models. Turbo ceramic engines were my go-to powerplant at TL 8. > There seems to be a trend these days to reduce the number of rifles at the > sharp end and to increase the number of headquarters people, even at the > company level, with intel and operations staff. It's been a trend for over 60 years ;) Brandon _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
