[UT] Tactical & Operational Ground Combat

[Luke Bunyip]

Been thinking about Traveller and Striker. Especially the Traveller TL9-12 combat.

Has anyone had any thoughts on similar high tech combat in GURPS? Not just PC combat, more military formation vs military formation combat. What could MBT, air support, and artillery look like? Mass drivers vs beam energy weapons, OGRES and GEVs....

Pyramid articles? Forum threads? Musing on personal blogs?

And yes, I've got and read Mass Combat. That is sort of what got me thinking about this.

[lexington]

There's a bunch of good stuff about this in Martial Arts: 2100. Military styles have discussions of how they are applied and why.

[Joseph Paul]

It might be interesting to do a UT:Billion Dollar Regiment rules set and see what shakes out.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by lexington

There's a bunch of good stuff about this in Martial Arts: 2100. Military styles have discussions of how they are applied and why.

There is a load of good stuff in there. But that is not what I meant. I not thinking of one-on-one tactical combat, of a type that most PC will engage in during the course of a game. I am thinking about the sort of combat that is best modelled in Mass Combat. How would you respond to counter battery fire? What would combat involving swarms of UAVs look like? Asymmetric combat?

I mentioned Striker above. That is the model I am working off. It has been a long time since I've played Striker*, but it still defines the way I consider UT conventional combat.


*Not sure if this means I need a virtual lawn, and a virtual walking frame.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

It might be interesting to do a UT:Billion Dollar Regiment rules set and see what shakes out.

Mmmn. This could be interesting.

The costing and capablities of UT miltary vehicles might be a challenge. Do I need to look at something in the Transhuman cannon?

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

There is a load of good stuff in there. But that is not what I meant. I not thinking of one-on-one tactical combat, of a type that most PC will engage in during the course of a game. I am thinking about the sort of combat that is best modelled in Mass Combat. How would you respond to counter battery fire? What would combat involving swarms of UAVs look like? Asymmetric combat?

I mentioned Striker above. That is the model I am working off. It has been a long time since I've played Striker*, but it still defines the way I consider UT conventional combat.


*Not sure if this means I need a virtual lawn, and a virtual walking frame.

We have likely passed the point, at least for now, where bigger is better. Additionally, we are currently at a point in time where the sword (offense) is substantially stronger than the shield (defense) and all indications are that this will be the case for a long time. Expect to see much greater dispersal of forces, massing forces just makes you a target. Fortunately, you won't have to mass forces given the increased capabilities of the soldiers.

Counter Battery is a huge issue, any artillery must be capable of displacing quickly or it's dead. C3I and Anti-C3I will probably rule the battlefield. With the greater dispersal of forces, coordinating those troops is essential. Honestly, traditional arty will probably be replaced by UAVs and CAS. Those two are more responsive, more survivable, and less deadly-to-user (as in, fewer people die when you shoot down a UAV as die when you CBF an artillery position).

In any timeline with battlesuits, MBTs experience a drop-off. The rate of drop-off depends on how many suits it takes to generate an equivalent amount of firepower. If an infantry squad can do the same amount of hurt to the enemy as a 65 ton MBT (on a TO&E, those two formations are equivalent), then most MBTs will be replaced. If it takes a platoon, MBTs would still have a purpose, but it'd be in situations where you have limited lift or support capacity. If it takes a company or higher, I'd expect MBTs to still basically rule the battlefield outside of cities.

It really depends on what you want it to look like as a GM. If you're going hyper-realism, put them in VR cubes miles away and let them remote control bots. If you want hyper-action, go Starship troopers style.

[Michele]

Originally Posted by doulos05

We have likely passed the point, at least for now, where bigger is better. (...)

Interesting analysis. A couple of things:

1. I'm not sure that if you have limited strategic lift and/or limited logistics, choosing a 100-ton MBT in place of an augmented infantry platoon is a good idea, even assuming the firepower is equivalent.

2. Very effective anti-C3I, which includes ECM, might make the remote virtual warrior option less effective, and, thus, the alternative (actual humans on the battlefield) less unrealistic. It's fine to deploy remote-controlled combat shells against less-advanced enemies who can't interfere with your comms. But if they can... This is, BTW, the option chosen by SF authors who did want humans on the battlefields; the two sides' interference with the other sides' computers, sensors and hi-tech communications left the armies having to rely on human brains and eyeballs on the spot.

[Mailanka]

I think a lot of it depends on setting assumptions and what technology you bring in. I've run some military sci-fi games set in my G-verse, which is a TL 10^ setting that's specifically meant to look like a modern Action movie, only with TL 10^ toys, so you'd expect the wars to look a lot like modern wars, and they do, but even so some things popped out.

Shrapnel is basically useless against even modest ultra-tech armor. Most of my soldiers were in tacsuits, and I simply stopped bothering to roll for shrapnel at damage. At best, you'd expect to see 1 point of blunt trauma. Most shots (we used gauss) will shoot through most armor like it isn't there. Armor will give you a little more survivability, but generally in the sense of "Oh, the medic will almost certainly be able to save me" rather than "It's just a scratch, I can keep fighting."

Power armor, on the other hand, can shrug off most infantry-level small arms fire, but that doesn't mean that it's safe. Most soldiers can carry weapons that will penetrate power armor (a portable railgun or underbarrel EMGL loaded with HEMP will generally punch through power armor pretty quickly, and any infantryman can carry these). Power armor's real advantage is not invulnerability, but the ability to shrug off things that tend to be dangerous to light infantry and, more importantly, to carry lots of gear and heavy weapons into combat. The lack of encumbrance, in particular, is a big boost.

What I find works best in these situations is combined arms. Much like modern tanks tend to be too vulnerable without accompanying infantry, you'll want to sprinkle powered infantry among your light infantry. That way the sorts of tactics that would defeat one tend to leave you vulnerable to the other. This, of course, assumes that your infantry fights a lot like 20th century infantry. And, of course, powered armor isn't the same as a tank. Heavy infantry + light infantry looks more like infantry than it looks like infantry + tank.

I agree with the guy who said that C3I is a big deal. Computers, targeting systems, radar, other sensors and radios can be ubiquitous, stitching your soldiers together into a single network that's trading off locks and combining everyone's input together to give you a complete view of the battlefield. The result is 100% combat capability in situations that would be difficult for modern soldiers, like night combat, and amazing levels of accuracy (we tended to play on small maps, due to physical limitations, and accuracy was practically assured in such situations). Then a specop begins to jam your systems, and you're suddenly blind and confused. There was nothing more deadly and scary for my players than the alien infiltrator/snipers, who tended to be cloaked (you can't see them) armed with deception jammers (so you can't pick them up) and would start to jam your signals while taking potshots at you with portable railguns (meaning that your only real way to track them was to follow the trajectory of the bullets back to their source... possible, but it tended to take time and rolls most people weren't experts at, and so I could generally put a few targets down before they could return fire).

I often combined these snipers with power-armored assault troops. Because of their alien physiology, the assaulters could cover ground very quickly (move 14 or so in Scout Power Armor), and when you combined that with the "small map" artifact (or the constraints of urban combat), you'd find yourself stuck in choosing between hunting the snipers who were jamming your systems and taking potshots at your officers or shooting the giant, powered infantry that was RUNNING STRAIGHT AT YOU! I suspect the heavily armored, in-your face force combined with the delicate, ranged, disruptive force will be tactically effective in most UT campaigns.

I tended to focus on small-unit tactics rather than really large scale battles, so I don't have much data on vehicular combat, other than to note that mobility seems very high. I don't think you'd see really large scale "stand up and fight" battles much, but smaller, more mobile forces. In particular, the amount of damage a single soldier or vehicle can do seems much enhanced in a UT settings, so you don't need vast armies of soldiers. I expect this is even more true when you start getting into warsuits with disintegrators and fusion jet packs.

Again, disclaimer, these were the results of a single TL 10^ Space Action campaign. Different people use different assumptions. Ulzgoroth, for example, uses tacsuits + clamshells + exoskeletons to get some very tough infantry. Other people just go straight for ETK and make power armor obsolete before it even hits the battlefield. The tactics that evolve will depend a lot on the technologies you choose to use.

[vicky_molokh]

There's a long thread touching upon some of the aspects of Ultra-Tech warfare.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There's a long thread touching upon some of the aspects of Ultra-Tech warfare.

Thanks Molokh. I suspect that there would be <waves arms around> somewhere around here.