2300AD News - Progress on Invasion

[Condottiere]

1. Recalling current events, deployed units utilize local beasts of burden in the rear area.

2. Falklands have a local defence force, but I tend to think at a certain demographic size, you would have a large enough recruitment pool to maintain a regular sized regiment, where one battalion would be expeditionary.

3. Pop culture pretty much makes Marine units close to elite, for space forces; going by Traveller logic, not much point in sending half trained forces at interstellar distances.

 

[Bryn the 2300AD guy]

1. I was thinking that the Blues and Royals [along with one battalion of Foot Guards] would become the Public Duties Brigade. The horses would never leave Earth. It would become rather like the US 3rd Infantry Regiment... the dedicated performers in the dog and pony shows. These guys would spend a hitch being dedicated to perfection in drill, deportment, and dress. OTOH, that doesn't mean they wouldn't have a completely serious guard function, especially the infantry.

The Household Cavalry is now amalgamated into a single operational regiment, and a single public duties regiment, and the old regiments maintain a presence in both.

When the Household Cavalry was still an operational formation, it formed a deployable brigade, and their depot took over public duties when deployed.

2. As I understand the traditions, the British Regular Army has consisted of the Home Army regiments native to England with the 'colonial' regiments being Reserve or Active Reserve. Some colonies simply don't have the population or economic base to support a locally raised garrison [I'm thinking mostly of Crater] and would have to be protected by deployed units from home. If, for example, the situation on Crater gets much more stupid, I could see Her Majesty's Government deploying a regular army battalion or two to keep the peace.

There were essentially four separate forces:

1. The "Home Army" consisted of the regular army, regular reserve and militia (which was more Landwehr-like than American or colonial militias, undergoing the six month regular recruit training for example) was essentially an expeditionary force for European warfare, or to be drawn upon for colonial conflicts.
2. The colonial garrisons were regular troops mainly for the defence of important bases around the globe. Colonial militias were primarily adjuncts to them, excepting Canada who kept something resembling a small field army to counter the US.
3. The Indian Army, which is itself divided into a garrison force and (post ca. 1859) a large deployable force which was about 50/50 British and Indian.
4. The Volunteers at home (later Territorial Force) who had no deployment commitments.

The Colonial Atlas explicitly states the Governor-General of Alicia has his own planetary army. Alicia has a population of about 26 million and so is on the scale of Australia or Canada a decade or two back. In both cases, these ex-colonies can field about a divisions worth of regulars.

The Tiranean colonies have some major issues with population, and the generally accepted fix is to delete a zero. This makes Wellon also roughly Australia sized.

New Africa is about 10 million or so, and it's legal status is uncertain. Alicia and Wellon are semi-independent "associate members" of the British Commonwealth. New Africa may still be a crown colony, like Crater and New Cornwall. Even Dan found nothing on this:

Britain in 2300AD

 

[Bryn the 2300AD guy]

2. Falklands have a local defence force, but I tend to think at a certain demographic size, you would have a large enough recruitment pool to maintain a regular sized regiment, where one battalion would be expeditionary.

The FIDF are a single coy, and their role in war is as observers. They are supposed to disperse and report in on Argentine movements.

 

[ottarrus]

I'm glad they did Bayern first, even with all its flaws it is a great campaign sourcebook. The 2300AD setting has so much to offer - the pentapods, the AGRA intelligence, the Nyotekundu "psionic" find, the provolutionists.
Shame that GDW chose to ignore it all and go down the boring kafer war dead end... (I thought the moties Ylii were the most interesting thing about the kafer war)

I hope that Mongoose produces provolutionist and pentapod themed stuff sometime soon (the pentapod sourcebook manuscript from GDW days is already available for them to build on).

I too would like to see some exploration of the other aspects of the 2300 milieu.
But the Käfer War [or at least Triumphant Destiny's invasion] was inevitable from first contact. The fact that the bugs struck first is no surprise. It's well-within their character.
Also, GDWs basic fan base across all its properties in the 80s was veterans and wargame fans. Had the company held off on resolving the Käfer situation, the fans then would have been just as annoyed then as you are bored now. And no company can afford to make their core audience disaffected. The modern audience for Traveller has spread out some, so those explorations can now take place.
I wouldn't get too excited about the AGRA intelligence, however. It moves at a glacially slow pace and is so far in advance of us that we are insects to it. Meaningful communication is impossible. As it is, the recognition of an intelligence operating in significantly more dimensions than our three will set Earth science on its ear and that science will never understand just what its project in the Pleiades is really for. We can speculate all we want but we will never know the cause for the project, so we cannot guess the what the end result might be.
I would like to see a campaign devoted to rooting out both Provolution and New America both. But you can't kill an idea, so there's always gonna be weed in the garden somewhere.

 

[CordwainerFish]

The fact that the bugs struck first is no surprise. It's well-within their character.

"Many the year since first we met
And clashed in the normal ways of war
They could have conquered, they might yet
We still don't know what they spared us for."

- "Neutral Zone, Romulan View"

 

[Sigtrygg]

The Kafer attacking first does not stand up to scutiny.

The Kafer know there are alien races out there, they have even "enslaved" one of them. So they value the contribution an alien race can make.

How do we know there were no Kafer scouting missions into human space prior to their attack? Their ships are better, their "smart" Kafer commanders are not unreasoning. If they scouted human space and observed human vs human conflict that would give them a reason to suspect the humans to be smart barbarians.

 

[ottarrus]

The Käfer Sourcebook talks about the deep stresses that their Sphere was under that militated towards an attack on the humans:
- First and foremost were the ambitions of Triumphant Destiny.
- Overpopulation and resource shortages on several worlds in the Sphere.
- They had conquered virtually everything in their pocket of space, and the only worthwhile opponent [from their point of view] were themselves. They didn't know about Backdoor and the only open frontier was towards Arcturus.
- Lastly is the innate necessity and love of violence in the Käfer species. Humanity was a new target, one the majority of the Käfer Sphere didn't know about. And unlike the Ylii, the humans were a worthy opponent. They were smarter on average than a Käfer, were of a similar technological level, and were clearly species out to conquer the stars [from the Käfer perspective]. They were the species that Käfer race had been waiting for.

So, yes, war with humanity was inevitable.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Don't you find it odd that the Kafer have had stutterwarp a lot longer than humanity and yet have supposedly never scouted human space? I consider that a bit contrived.

 

[Condottiere]

Are they into anal probing?

 

[Sigtrygg]

If you ask them nicely I'm sure they would oblige you.

Although I imagine that would be more of a pentapod probe thing...

 

[Condottiere]

They might have visited.

Dissected a cow, or two.

 

[ottarrus]

Don't you find it odd that the Kafer have had stutterwarp a lot longer than humanity and yet have supposedly never scouted human space? I consider that a bit contrived.

Most of the time the Käfer possessed stutterwarp, their drives were HUGELY inefficient, that means that not only were they slow, but prone to breakdown as well.
Beyond that, the Käfer have a much smaller population of those who can operate and repair stutterwarp drives, much less pilot/navigate the ships thereof. Furthermore, while the Käfer have the cultural urge to conquer, they do NOT have the cultural urge to explore for its own sake. They're willing to take huge risks if there is a worthwhile fight at the end of the tunnel, but they're not at all enthused about puttering off into the blackness just to stand on a new rock. It's much more rewarding to go raid that Overlord over there's stuff to get the intellectual stimulation you need.
Lastly, their science if fragmentary, inefficient and disjointed compared to humanity's. Certainly it's likely that some Käfer ship went to Arcturus at some point in the last 300 years since Twilight. It may have even detected some kind of signal anomaly. But until the humans put a station there, it simply didn't register as a threat to Käfer scientists [such as they are]. Once that 'the enemy is scouting us' [and remember that to the Käfer anything 'not us' is The Enemy] button got pressed, that increased their curiosity by orders of magnitude.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Check the date they conquerd the Ylii, Their tech improved in leaps and bounds after they got moties on side.

 

[boggo2300]

but culturally their mindset wouldn't have changed

 

[Bense]

Kafer history has taught them that the "smart barbarians" will eventually destroy them if they aren't destroyed first. Humans are basically the Kafer boogeyman.

 

[Sigtrygg]

With good reason...

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Bryn the 2300AD guy]

The Kafers were engaged in a series of bloody nuclear wars before the city-state of Laresi finally won and unified the entire Kafer race into the Associative ca. 1850 AD. The Kafers discovered stutterwarp in 1910, and had working starships around 1920, but they lacked the computing power to produce a stutterwarp capable of high-warp. If I may quote the Kafer SB:

As it was, stutterwarp gave them the stars. Early Kafer stutterwarp was woefully inefficient,
with warp efficiencies of .005 or less. Improvement in the design eventually allowed warp efficiencies
of .01, but further improvements were impossible. The reason lay in the weakness of
Kafer computer technology.
Any stutterwarp requires a high level of computer technology to run, adjust, calibrate, and
maintain the drive. Human reactions are too slow to control or anticipate shifts or anomalies
in the drive fields, and far too slow to make the necessary nanosecond-to-nanosecond calculations
necessary to establish each microjump's position and quantum state. When it is realized
that a stutterwarp with a drive efficiency of 1.0 is travelling at a rate of something like 100 meters
every nanosecond, that each nanosecond's travel requires calculations of field strength, density,
gravitational moment and vector, and position to establish the ship's quantum reality, the need
for fast and accurate computational power becomes obvious.
Truly efficient stutterwarp drives require electronic monitoring systems and system-dedicated
computer control capable of trillions of individual calculations per second. The single weakness
of Kafer systems was not so much the hardware—Kafer computers were bulky and clumsy but
could have handled the task—but in the programming. Kafer programming techniques had lagged
behind the development of the necessary hardware by a century or more.
Kafer stutterwarp theory was sound, but Kafer computer programming was not up to the task.
Early explorations among the stars, then, still required long periods of time...more than 550
days to the nearest star, longer to systems more distant. But some 30 years after they began
exploring near-Serpentean space, they encountered Ylii.

They first encountered a Ylii outpost in 1950 AD and in 1960 attacked the outpost, killing 90% of the Ylii (system not stated, but probably BK+7 5675, 3 "jumps" from GS). In their explorations they discovered a proper colony some time later. They expected a Ylii attack but none came. Instead the Ylii welcomed the Kafers, which confused them. After about 50 years of sporadic diplomacy, the Kafers attacked that colony. We are probably around 2020 at this point.

After this, the Kafers figured out Ylii drives were far better. Eventually a third colony was found, and then a fourth etc. The Kafer started raiding these colonies for slaves rather than nuking them from orbit. However, the third Ylii colony (at O'Neil 723) was only conquered about 100 years ago and they did nuke it from orbit.

This suggests the practice of taking Ylii slaves and the jump to "modern" stutterwarp has happened in the last century. The Ylii worlds were:

BK-2 0075 (M2): 3 "jumps" "south" of GS, second Ylii system found and attacked
HC+ 3 1919 (M7): 4, adjacent to BK-2 0075
Oneil 723 (K2): 5 jumps, adjacent to HC+3 1919, conquered ca. 2200 after being nuked.
DK+21 6825 (K2): 6 jumps from GS, a spur from Oneil 723
HC+25 1902 (K2): 6 jumps from GS, and centre of the "Ylii cluster." Only recently conquered.
DK+32 2390 (M2): Still Ylii
DK-33 1023 (K2): Still Ylii
SS-27 6854: Ylii homeworld

Thus, I think modern Kafer stutterwarp comes later than Human stutterwarp.