Yet another Battledress debate

[IanW]

From the days of Striker, Battle Dress has been vulnerable to surprisingly low-tech anti-tank weapons.

It provides you with great protection against fragmentation, however, and thats enough to make it worth using at a mere single digits of MCr a suit (some of the people in this long-dead thread have issues with just how much military kit a mere 4 billion taxpayers can pay for - remember, one of the very early supplements was called Trillion Credit Squadron. A rounding error in such a squadron can easily put several thousand-strong battallions of Imperial Marines into vaguely-more-useful-than-not-wearing-it Battle Dress at MCr 10 per suit).

I'd be looking for a copy of Doug Berry's Gurps Traveller Ground Forces for the definitive on all this.

http://www.amazon.com/Gurps-Traveller-Ground-Douglas-Berry/dp/1556344449

Also remember that armour and military organisations have a funky history on Terra. For example, nineteeth century cavalry planned to fight with swords, carbines and revolvers, but only elite cavalry, Cuirassier, were issued with a breastplate and an open armoured helmet. Line cavalry - dragoons, hussars and so on - had no armour at all. A mass produced breastplate and light metal helmet, costing perhaps a weeks feed for a troopers horse, will protect against shell splinters quite effectively.

Dont assume the Imperium is any more sensible.

 

[Iron Warrior.]

From the days of Striker, Battle Dress has been vulnerable to surprisingly low-tech anti-tank weapons.

It provides you with great protection against fragmentation, however, and thats enough to make it worth using at a mere single digits of MCr a suit (some of the people in this long-dead thread have issues with just how much military kit a mere 4 billion taxpayers can pay for - remember, one of the very early supplements was called Trillion Credit Squadron. A rounding error in such a squadron can easily put several thousand-strong battallions of Imperial Marines into vaguely-more-useful-than-not-wearing-it Battle Dress at MCr 10 per suit).

I'd be looking for a copy of Doug Berry's Gurps Traveller Ground Forces for the definitive on all this.

http://www.amazon.com/Gurps-Traveller-Ground-Douglas-Berry/dp/1556344449

Also remember that armour and military organisations have a funky history on Terra. For example, nineteeth century cavalry planned to fight with swords, carbines and revolvers, but only elite cavalry, Cuirassier, were issued with a breastplate and an open armoured helmet. Line cavalry - dragoons, hussars and so on - had no armour at all. A mass produced breastplate and light metal helmet, costing perhaps a weeks feed for a troopers horse, will protect against shell splinters quite effectively.

Dont assume the Imperium is any more sensible.

Heh heh, if you want to see a sensible military you have to focus on Israel, probably the most professional and competent military on earth today.

I think I have GTGF, will look it up. Wasn't there one GT book that grossly, and I mean GROSSLY over armored battledress?

 

[IanW]

Heh heh, if you want to see a sensible military you have to focus on Israel, probably the most professional and competent military on earth today.

I think I have GTGF, will look it up. Wasn't there one GT book that grossly, and I mean GROSSLY over armored battledress?

Errr, no.

If you want to see the military that has coped best with the recent changes, you need to look to Hizbollah, who kicked the crap out of the Israeli military in the recent Lebannon War.

As an example of this, they have moved to a system where most of the line grunts have AT weapons and only a percentage have slugthrowers (ie three man fire team, two RPG-7, one assault rifle), as TL6-7 slugthrowers have difficulty dropping troops in TL8 body armour, but a TL6-7 RPG round works just fine in that role.

 

[Iron Warrior.]

Heh heh, if you want to see a sensible military you have to focus on Israel, probably the most professional and competent military on earth today.

I think I have GTGF, will look it up. Wasn't there one GT book that grossly, and I mean GROSSLY over armored battledress?

Errr, no.

If you want to see the military that has coped best with the recent changes, you need to look to Hizbollah, who kicked the crap out of the Israeli military in the recent Lebannon War.

As an example of this, they have moved to a system where most of the line grunts have AT weapons and only a percentage have slugthrowers (ie three man fire team, two RPG-7, one assault rifle), as TL6-7 slugthrowers have difficulty dropping troops in TL8 body armour, but a TL6-7 RPG round works just fine in that role.

Well, we're getting a little OT here but I have to point out that hezbollah only exists because too much of the western world would be down on israel for annihilating them, which it could if the west wasn't too sensitive to allow it too.

Back on topic, should a suit of standard battledress in traveller be impervious to all assault rifle weapons and only breachable by anti vehicular weapons or should it at least possibly be damageable by a comparable era assault rifle?

Oh, the battledress in gurps traveller starmercs, which had like 1200 armor on the front, was the grossly over armored and terribly inaccurate version. The GF version is more ion line with most traveller stuff, but even then some people say it was over armored.

 

[locarno24]

First off, should battledress be immune to all 'small arms' including assault rifles of the same tech level? How about light ordnance like an anti armor grenade launched from an underbarrel grenade launcher?

I'm working to convert a traveller setting to a different set of rules and need some basic guidelines on what batteldress should be resistant to and what it should not be.

As to some comments here, in heinlein's starship troopers the power armor was not invulnerable, and a non powered trooper could kill a man in power armor, it happened a couple times in the book.

I've no problem with battledress being vulnerable to (sufficient) small arms fire.
It's still the heaviest personal protection available, and (more importantly) between the tactical computer giving a probable +1 initiative and the (as a minimum) +1 DEX DM, it'd be verging on worth it considering compared to (say) augmentations even if it didn't provide armour protection!

 

[IanW]

Well, we're getting a little OT here but I have to point out that hezbollah only exists because too much of the western world would be down on israel for annihilating them, which it could if the west wasn't too sensitive to allow it too.

Back on topic, should a suit of standard battledress in traveller be impervious to all assault rifle weapons and only breachable by anti vehicular weapons or should it at least possibly be damageable by a comparable era assault rifle?

Oh, the battledress in gurps traveller starmercs, which had like 1200 armor on the front, was the grossly over armored and terribly inaccurate version. The GF version is more ion line with most traveller stuff, but even then some people say it was over armored.

You're missing the point.

When faced with the problem of contemporary body armour stopping contemporary assault rifle rounds, Hizbollah have largely *abandoned* the assault rifle of the equivalent era, in favour of light anti-armour weapons.

Traditional TL7-8 militaries had burst-fire slugthrowers as standard issue weapons, and light anti-armour weapons as tools for specialists. Hizbollah, faced with TL8 body armour that makes burst-fire slugthrowers ineffective, have reversed this proportion of slugthrowers and anti-armour weapons.

My feeling is that Battledress is assault armour, and most infantry will be in lighter combat armour, in which is it easier to hide evidence of yourself being there, while you do your role, which is to observe and report for heavier units (in all Traveller design systems, its very easy to build a weapon an infantryman can carry to punch through battledress. Its very very very difficult to build a weapon an infantryman can carry that can punch equivalent-tech grav tank armour).

Bluntly, Battledress is too heavy to be stealthy, and not heavy enough to be protective. In my opinion, it is as useful on a battlefield in the Third Imperium as the cutlasses the Marines carry and train with.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Another point to add here.

Battledress is not just about protection.

Firstly what you have is a sealed unit, environmentally contained. Need to deploy the troops in space, a poisonous atmosphere, NBC environment. The battledress covers it all. Battledress troops are protfor, a protected force able to be deployed in a wide variety of environments from the get go.

Yes the battledress doesn't make them invulnerable, thats what cover, tactics, ecm, AICVs etc are for. The Battledress means you can deploy your Marines anywhere, a marine detachment can operate in almost any environment the navy can deploy them to.

That is what the Marines are, a quick reaction force, ready to go. It can take weeks for a ship to carry a request for specialist infantry units to operate against an insurgency on a hostile environment world and more weeks for a troop ship to jump to the world with army units trained and equipped to operate in that environment. Those troops will be equipped with armour, clothing, survival gear and equipment for that environment and that environment alone.

Breathers, sealed suits or vacc suits to suit the types of environment the army are expected to operate in. Body armour that can be worn over a vacc suit or over a thin sealed suit or over normal clothing. You could end up with a lot of inventory to handle such a range on environments if your army units are trained and equipped to handle them all. Or you have troops for certain environments and not others to keep the training and equipment budget down.

Or just drop in the marines who are trained to use a single type of suit that handles all these environments.

Secondly Battledress is an Exo skeleton, its servos and a power pack. Battledress troops can carry more, go faster and further and get there fit to fight. The strength enhancements, computers and armour combine to produce a force that can carry heavier weapons and more ammo and keep moving without needing transport vehicles or constant supply. Army units in unpowered armour have limits on how much they can carry and still fight, packing your infantry down like mules, sending them to march 10 miles at a fast walk and then putting them into a fight as soon as they arrive is going to drop combat efficiency a lot. Marines on the other hand with exo skeletons taking much of that load can carry as much or more, jog past the army units and then get to the battle at 90%+ combat efficiency.
A Marine unit on a naval ship can deploy into a wide variety of environments and situations and function in them. Marine platoons and companies carried by task groups or larger ships are good to go as is. Army infantry units come with a lot more firepower but that takes a lot of vehicles, a lot of support ships and a lot more delay.

Battledress stops shrapnel and light weapons fire, it doesn’t stop anti tank fire but then I don’t think its intended to. Want to be resistant to anti tank weapons, build one person tanks or those combat pods from a previous version.

But that is just one part of what battledress does, its protection extends to hostile environments. It has comms and computers, force multiplying technology, the ability to carry and fight under heavier loads than flesh and blood troops. Bouncing bullets off the chest plate is a minor part of what Battledress is good for.

Side note. Military units train and equip for current or expected threat. Your insurgents and guerrillas carry RPGs because spray and pray with an AK just doesn't work that well against tech 8 body armour. Short burst tech 8 assault rifles work very well against people in tee shirts.

Miss with that RPG and it takes long seconds to reload, miss with the assault rifle and you still have 27 rounds in the mag, fire again. Having half your troops armed with relatively slow firing, inaccurate, low tech anti tank weapons reflects the fact that your troops have no other way of facing up to tech 8 troops. It indicates that your logistics, equipment, training etc are two tech levels lower than a modern western force and doesn’t support sustained combats but rather is built around ambushes and shoot and scoot tactics.

If the reluctance to cause civilian damage is removed from the situation those tech level 6 forces will be wiped out or driven off very quickly.

 

[IanW]

Captain Jonah,

If infantry, battledress or not, run into modern armour they get run over. There was a very brief window in TL6-8 when armoured vehicles did not mount point defense systems and infantry could manpack missile systems when infantry could face armour on somewhat even terms, but those days disappeared with the first true tank-mounted point defense systems of TL9.

The best Imperial weaponary carried by battledress equipped troops, the FGMP series of weapons, does not come close to scratching even a light grav tank. Freed of the limits of suspension loading and the requirement to not bog into soft ground, the amount of armour a grav tank can mount is truly impressive, rivalling that of most military starships.

Combat Environment Suits are cheaper, stealthier and easier to maintain. Troops in CE Suits can easily carry enough personal gear, and more can be moved with grav sleds of various descriptions. Yes, they no longer use unguided rockets as counter-armour weapons, preferring various pintle-mount laser and one-shot fusion weapons, but the principle still stands - if rapid fire isnt working, use fewer rounds of larger calibre.

The power packs and whatnot on Battledress throw off heat that can be detected, and once detected the battledress-armoured troops are too slow to move away from incoming armour or artillery fire, and lacking organic point defense and anti-armour weapons, completely unable to defeat those threats. The operational mobility of Battledress troops is also limited by the more-complex equipment's need for repair and maintainence facilities.

That said, Battledress does look impressive on a parade ground, and when you fight as few wars as the Imperium does, between that and tradition, the Imperial Marines keep ordering it.

Finally, if you are relying on large scale violations of the Imperial Rules of War to win a war, I'd suggest your training, tactics and doctrine need re-assessment.

 

[Iron Warrior.]

Ever consider that battledress is useful for in ship fighting where you likely don't encounter many tanks?

And I refuse to get dragged into a terrorist vs israeli soldier debate as such is likely too politically charged to be anything but flamebait and get some bannings issues. If I wanted to get hit with a banhammer I'd go to (ugh) rpg.net (SPIT!)

 

[IanW]

IronWarrior,

In order to conduct a ship-to-ship boarding action, the defeated ship needs to be both completely and utterly helpless, and unwilling to self-destruct.

If they'll fight to the last, then they will simply self-destruct to prevent capture.

If they arent willing to fight to the last, then surrender terms can and will be negotiated without the need for a boarding action.

On the other hand, I do see powered armour as having it's uses when the enemy is completely lacking in heavy weapons.

 

[Hopeless]

When I think Battle Dress I think Imperial Stormtroopers!

Wow I still haven't read all of the messages in this thread but hopefully soon as I know I'll be running the next session of Traveller I'll definitely give it a go!

As far as I was concerned unless you're part of a nation's military or belonging to a rich and powerful mercenary outfit you are not going to be using Battle Dress but I did allow Combat Armour which is how I rule in my game.

You go running around in Battle Dress and not within your own nation or within spitting distance of your mercenary barracks then you're going to get hunted down and your opponents are not going to take chances as in my setting the Empire will glass the planet if you pose a threat, the Sword Worlds will willingly set off a portable nuke as close as possible to you, the Theocrats having the only official fully trained military psions will take you out faster than an ice cream melting in the sahara desert and as for the Aryans... think Dark Troopers or Battle Girlz (graphic novel and see how the villain dealt with the power armour/mecha in that!) and it won't be pretty!

Still this is going to be an interesting read!

 

[zozotroll]

IanW, your arguments against PA are also valid against Infantry in general. You dont need super sensors to pick up troops today. Sure, PA will have extra emisions that can be detected, but you only need to detect somebody once.

Many of the advantages of Infantry in general, and PA in particular dont really translate well to an RPG... In a lot of ways it is like longbows vs muskets. In a game where you use RW stats for guns vs LB, the bow wins every time. It didnt happen that way because of a lot of thing gamers dont take into consideration.

Also, in the RW identifying and tagertint targets is much more complex than we can make it in a game.mansized PA can hide just about anywhere a man can. Even advanced sensors are going to have a hard time picking out a lot of those places.

As for infantry being vulnerable to tanks, sure they are, unless they have heavy weapons along. Which PA can help a lot with.

Ultimatly Traveller is an RPG, not a combat simulater. things are rated more for playability, or supposed playability than theier likely combat effectiveness. Remember, this is the system that has Energy morters. And shirkin shooters, because they are cool, not because they would work at all.

 

[IanW]

Zozotroll,

Power armour simply throws off more watts than a human, and is therefore easier to detect - anything you do to make power armour stealthy is easier to do to unpowered armour.

With contragrav, armour gets a lot thicker. With tank-mounted point defense, shaped charges on missiles become ineffective. Put those two things together, and infantry need to work on being stealthy observers, because the weapons that can punch armour get impossibly large, so the roel of infantry is to stay stealthy and call in support.

Im not saying battledress has no role - its assault armour.

I am saying that as body armour starts being used again at TL8 and up, infantry move away from the autofire weapons of TL5-7 and start trading rate of fire for penetration with hand weapons.

Im also agreeing with Hopeless that governments get twitchy when it's around, as it is pretty useful against light forces that arent prepared for it.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Advanced sensors detect Battledress. Yep.

High energy battlefields and EMP/ECM make a mush of advenaced sensors.


Infantry cannot survive being fired at by tanks secondary weapons. Yep.

Cover, ambush, tactics, keeping out of the line of fire. Battledress or combat armour has enough armour to survive shrapnel and area bursts meaning you need to line of sight them with something big enough to kill them. So they stay out of line of sight.


Infantry weapons cannot damage tanks. Yep

FGMPs are not for shooting the front armour of a tank, thats what man pack missiles/rockets/fusion bazookas are for. Hit the flanks, hit the rear, hit the engine deck. Only a soon to be dead infantryman of any kind attacks the massive front armour of a vehicle. Plus Battledress with its enhanced strength can carry bigger and heavier anti tank weapons than the grunts in kevlar can.
Tanks mounting anti missile point defences are immune to missiles, not if you fire them from close in or volley then or spoof the tanks sensors and fire control. Tank/Anti Tank is a see saw constantly going one way or the other. Tech 15 tanks in a city are still in the worst possible area for a tank to be in and thats where infantry are a real threat.
If you are firing warheads that use some form of self forming shot that is able to penetrate side armour from 20m and you fire that missile from 50m and the missile is smart enough to fly through the windows of a building the missile warhead fires before the tank has time to even detect it. Remote weapon platforms, directional anti tank charges and more besides will exist in the infantry ToE. Battledress troops can carry more of them. Tactics will continue to evolve in the man verses machine war.


Governments should be concerned about combat armour and battle dress and FGMPs and lots of other things. Personally I would be more concerned about the rebels getting combat armour or carapace which they could buy in large numbers, need no special training to use and make them very resilient against police and local security. Battledress supply and maintenance makes them an unlikely buy for iregulars or small mercenaries. If your security and police are armed with 3D weapons an 8 or 10 point armour set is very effective, unless your police are packing guass rifles that is.

A lot of this debate is highlighting the fact that Battledress and Marines are as obsolete as the cutlass. Fluff aside no one uses the cutlass.

If your enemy needs to deploy slow firing and inaccurate anti tank weapons against you, if your marines can pack enough ammo and supplies to operate for days on a raid away from supplies, when your battledress troops not only have the ability to carrier heavier weapons but also have enhanced speed and targeting/squad co-ordination that allow them to run rings around a defender, when your marines can operate in just about every environment without needing to stop and put on breathers or environment suits or can move through those burning buildings, then you just need to have them to win.

An imperial squadron can deploy several companies of them. Against them a normal force of a few tech levels below needs to deploy tens of thousands of troops to cover the possible targets in enough force to hold off the Marine strike. If the navy can secure orbit then those tanks that are so hard for the infantry are killed from orbit as soon as they are detected on the marine data nets.

Troops in battledress are hard hitting, fast hitting and very intimidating. They are not super soldiers, they are an elite who should be considered to have the skills, training and tactics that comes with that. You don’t put new recruits or militia in battledress. You put some of your best troops in battledress and it acts as a force multiplier to turn small elite units into something very scary to your enemies. Mess with the Imperium and within days you could have battledress equipped marines tearing you a new bodily orifice.


IanW. In relation to a few of your specific comments.

Battledress boarding a ship. Few people are going to self destruct a ship, unless they are facing being tortured to death. What they will be doing is destroying the illegal cargo, purging the computer core to hide the location of the secret base etc. Aside from the Ine Gavar even pirates are not going to self destruct, it depends on YTU of course but there are trials, prisons to escape from, judges to buy off etc.

Finally, if you are relying on large scale violations of the Imperial Rules of War to win a war, I'd suggest your training, tactics and doctrine need re-assessment.

I don’t get where this came from unless you are referring to my comment about removing civilian casualties from the equation in the tech 8 vs tech 6 situation which was started by the middle east comments.

What I meant was when your higher tech infantry operates in an environment where they don’t need to worry about civilians (rural battlefields, industrial districts, areas evacuated of non combatants etc) then unless the lower tech insurgence type troops have a huge advantage in numbers they will lose to a higher tech force that is properly trained and equipped to face them.

Resorting to slow firing, inaccurate, ammo limited anti tank weapons to fight against a better defended, well trained higher tech force is an act of desperation. It is the acceptance that you cannot face them, cannot build or buy weapons that are effective against them and cannot train your troops well enough to level the equipment imbalance. It doesn’t make the guerrilla force better, it just makes them irregular/militia/guerrillas facing a superior enemy.


As always with Traveller. If you don't want Battledress in YTU, then don't have it.

 

[zozotroll]

Certainly a set of PA throws off more signature than a person. And dropping into a hole covers most of that. Dirt is great stuff.And of course sensors can be spoofed, or overloaded.

Real warfare is dynamic. You do something that works. The other guy not being an idiot does his best to counter that. You cut the other way and do in his counter, so he zgs back with something different. New tech, new tactics, or just going back to something you hope he has forgotten.

Strikers are chewing you up, so use mines to kill them. Countered by dismounting the grunts outside the mined area, and up armor the grunts. Aks dont work so good, so you go to RPG. Only they are slow fireing and not well suited to pinpoint targets. Not a good solution, so on to IEDs. Counterd by MRAP, and the optics on Strikers that can see disturbed soil. (Yes they really can. I cant, but I know a driver that did it through 2 tours). Dont now what the counter-counter to all that is yet. But be assured they are working on it.

Very early in basic I was told the mark one uniform bouse was defeatable by all known weapons systems. That has not changed. Anythng that makes you harder to kill is better. PA, if it can ever be made to work will be used because no matter what it takes about to decades to grow a new soldier.

Now if you are arguing that a guy in a 500 pound suit cant really go nose to nose with a many ton tank, sure totaly agree with that. but that is true now, and yet Infantry are still a viable force. As long as Infantry can exist at all, some form of up armoring will be worth while.

As for suiciding, history is agaist that arguent. Sure, from time to time select individuals do go out that way. But not even much of a percentage do that. The ones that I know of that did the most where the Japanese in WWII. And yet only a small percentage of thier total was willing to do it. And of course it sucks to be the troop that finds you have the one, but hey if you cant take a joke you should not have volonteered.

Owen

 

[Egil Skallagrimsson]

A lot of heat here, not so much light. My take on this is straightforward;
1. Battledress makes infanty better, but doesn't make them invulnerable, or into TL13 grav tanks.
2. The list prices in CRB are much to high, the 2MCr is only justified if it is a black market price reflecting great difficulties in a working set on the black market, I reduce the price of battledress and combat armour by a factor of 10.
3. High tech grav tanks are very heavily armoured, and even something like a plasma disposable rocket launcher from CSC is going to stuggle to inflict much damage, however, infantry in broken ground, field defences etc are still going to present a problem to a tank force, even more so is they have some AT weapons on grav sleds etc, especially a tank force that has left it's infantry at home. Only infantry can hold ground.
4. The new Vehicles book has some excellent rules for designing battle dress, and good ideas about add ons, options etc. The prices have been reduced somewhat for the equivelent to the CRB suits, though I still think they are too expensive and have modified the constrution rules to bring the suits down to the 250,000+ area.
5. OT, somehow hizbollah have made an appearence, do not be mislead into thinking that the rpg is somehow their main weapon to use against infantry, that remained the AK47. In the same way that western armies carry LAWs, LADs, MAWs and G/Ls, a method of projecting HE is useful in a firefight and threatening specific targets, but rifles and LMGs remain the essential weapon. During the conflict two years ago hizbollah was able to carry out a rolling retreat from defensive positions they had spent years preparing, in broken terrain, in the face of an IDF which had to limit it's use of overwhealming firepower to avoid upsetting the Americans, while trying to limit their own casualties so as to not damage the rather fragile internal support for the war, and probably did not deploy enough infantry initially. The big missile surprise was not the rpg, but the number of modern ATGWs that hezbollah had, that clearly caused the Israeli tanks significant problems, reducing their ability to shoot the infantry in, so everything slowed down.

Egil

 

[Jacqual]

OK I have scanned the last 8 pages of this topic and I did not spot anyone stating this. Yes battle dress cost's 2,000,000 to 3,500,000 Cr. but you think the Imperium pays that much. That is the price that is for a near black market item, and for what the Imperium says they spend on the suits. It's like you really think the government pays 600.00 dollors for a hammer or 1,000.00 on a toilet no. The Imperium needs some place to say they spend money on something so it can go to some secret research into the ancients or some new type of computer virus (Hope they don't do that again). Yes battle drees makes you faster it adds to dexterity as well as strength.

 

[peelseel2]

Power Armor = Predator Armor. Really advanced stuff, but can still be effected by lower tech weapons.

 

[far-trader]

Power Armor = Predator Armor.

In my opinion and game historically, no.

Pred armour is not strength enhanced, nor does it support heavy high-power energy weapons.

Pred armour does have enhanced sensors, stealth, and low power light weapons. It is probably best modelled in Traveller by Combat Armour with stealth option.

Battle Dress is heavier with a larger power signature. Both should make it harder to damage and more difficult to stealth but Traveller usually lumps it in as identical to Combat Armour except for the added strength and weapon support. Same effective armour and identical stealth option.

Agreed on the advanced but still subject to some personal weapons though.

 

[locarno24]

Re the 'can't hurt armour' part of the debate; regardless of what designs someone may cook up with the vehicle design manuals, the G/Carrier is a primary combat vehicles:

A grav carrier is effectively a flying tank, and is the standard fighting vehicle of many military forces.

And it takes multiple damage rolls from a single hit from an equivalent tech FGMP, which is the standard arm for Imperial Marine battle dress (avg damage 40, armour 25) - nor is that a weapon vulnerable to interception by point defence.