Linwood said:
It’s hard to picture a high-tech military deliberately recruiting low-IQ soldiers. As weapon systems get more sophisticated the troops that use them usually require more intelligence and training to use them.
Low-tech peasant conscripts, maybe not so much.
This. It depends on who we're talking about, but pretty much any 'imperial' military needs to be a high-skilled trade.
The most important item in a combat-ready imperial marine is
sapiens, homo, one off and costs about the same to bring across interstellar battlefield whether they're a mouth-breathing cretin or a highly educated professional.
Carrying 20,000 generic grunts with assault rifles and ill-fitting BDUs is not therefore massively easier (if at all) than carrying half that number of troopers in TL15 battle dress with plasma weaponry, and I know which of those two is going to be more of a credible threat to a recalcitrant planetary government at the other end.
By comparison, a planetary army, not needing to worry about logistics so much, can afford to employ a large-scale militia.
It's the same logic as NATO vs Warsaw Pact armies in the cold war - The Soviet Union had enormous reserves of manpower - as, on a war footing, did the US (even if not quite to the same extent). But the Soviet Union shared a land border with the place where any fighting would be happening whilst the US army would have to be shipped across a potentially hostile ocean to get anywhere useful. Hence a massive, heavily conscript Red Army could actually be brought into a fight in a timeframe that mattered and (in theory) win a heavy-attrition land battle.
One other thing to note in the Warhammer 40k setting is that slug weapons are common - gangers, cultists and PDF (planetary defence forces) use them a lot, because they require lower tech levels than equivalent las weaponry to make.
They also have their own advantages (better automatic fire, cheaper, able to use specialist ammo like AP, Tracer/Incendiary or Dum-Dum rounds), but none of those advantages come close to the awkwardness of carting a fully loaded magazine across interstellar space for every 30 rounds you plan to have your army fire off at the other end, which is why the Imperial Guard rarely use them.
Seven is the acknowledged average in Traveller, six is acceptable, and I'll say that five would be the minimum intelligence factor that would allow a recruit to be generally functional in a military organization, specifically in a frontline combat role.
I'd probably have said six, just because that's the point below which a negative DM kicks in on technical tasks. It's a bit of a meta-game observation, but then so are INT characteristics in the first place.
However, one aspect of McNamara's premise seems relevant to Traveller, you can improve your characteristics.
True. But the effectiveness of that premise is very dependent on how much time, effort and resource you're prepared to put into training people before you ever put them in the front line. When you're in a situation involving draftees, that's almost invariably "
not as much as you would like".
Linwood said:
Another model is the Posleen from John Ringo’s Legact of the Aldenata (A Hymn Before Battle). Hordes of low-IQ infantry with advanced weaponry in massive sophont-wave attacks.
Which probably isn’t a good fit for normal Traveller. Even though the mental image of orbital-defense supertanks built on the linked hulls of multiple M1 tanks is a great mental image....
The Posleen are extremely dangerous but a big part of the difference there is that they have some specific tactical blind spots. The amount of armed shipping represented by a formation of B-DECs could basically make the landing a mopping-up operation if they were used sensibly, but as noted the Posleen don't use orbital support and mobility effectively for [Reasons discussed in series].
Also, whilst the Posleen normals are low-IQ, note that they have similarities to 40k orks - they breed incredibly quickly and require very little training; they are fantastic shots (given that they're firing sightless weapons from the hip at a run, their accuracy is in the same range as assault rifle-armed humans shooting "properly"), they have genetically encoded loyalty and discipline which is a big part of what basic military training is supposed to instil 'built in' to a level equivalent to elite human units (they will stand and fight horrific odds and happily play 'secret service' and physically interpose themselves as a shield against fire for their respective god-kings).
Quick estimate:
Given the number of posleen carried - "about four million" dumped from one ship cluster in Gust Front - you'd need 8,000 kDtons of barracks decks
alone to deploy that many soldiers in the traveller universe.
Using capital ship design rules, even the most basic interstellar transport needs a manoeuvre-1 drive, jump-1 drive, and fusion-1 p-plant, fuel for a single jump-1 and for a few weeks of plant operation. That adds up to 17.5% of its volume, plus about another 0.5-3% on command modules depending on the size of the ship, another 5% of volume for a layer of armour (of whatever type), and another 1-2% on staterooms for compulsory command, engineering and service crew. So even if unarmed, carrying nothing but the soldiers in barracks decks, you need about 25% again as "ship structure". Meaning that's more like 10,000 kDtons - or to put it another way, if you tried to 'traveller-ise' the posleen, they'd need to turn up in the equivalent of
twenty Tigress-class dreadnoughts converted to do nothing but carry soldiers across a jump-1 round without a single weapon to protect themselves.
A better example of that sort of tactic is Warhammer 40,000's Tyranids - yes, they still turn up mob-handed, but the point is that over any meaningful conflict length (as in, a few weeks plus) they can 'force grow' almost any quantity of troops required; the big advantage of biological technology is its ease of self-replication; "bomb" a prospective battlezone with spores holding immature hormagaunt broods and you'll have battalion-sized forces of the things swarming over the enemy in no time for a relatively limited expenditure of (your) resources.
