On the Fragility of Life

[AlexanderHowl]

Let us assume TL5-, as TL6+ defenders would have better lighting to detect intruders. An assassin does not need to necessarily kill them all to have a military effect. Killing the sentries and then people as they get up to use the latrines would be a good strategy (proping up the sentries and lowering the other unfortunate's into the latrine would be ideal). While some people would survive, I imagine that half a company would be dead under those conditions within four hours, which would be more than enough time for the assassin to retreat safely after contaminating any centralized food and water supplies with human feces from the latrines.

If I was the commander of the company, I would immediately order a retreat as soon as I discovered that half of my command had been murdered quietly in the middle of the night. Abandoning the dead would be a hard choice, but I would want to preserve the rest of my command against such a threat. Of course, if the assassin was able to contaminate our food and water with human feces, we might have a hard time getting to safety before sickness overwhelmed us, but some chance is better than no chance.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Let us assume TL5-, as TL6+ defenders would have better lighting to detect intruders. An assassin does not need to necessarily kill them all to have a military effect. Killing the sentries and then people as they get up to use the latrines would be a good strategy (proping up the sentries and lowering the other unfortunate's into the latrine would be ideal). While some people would survive, I imagine that half a company would be dead under those conditions within four hours, which would be more than enough time for the assassin to retreat safely after contaminating any centralized food and water supplies with human feces from the latrines.

If I was the commander of the company, I would immediately order a retreat as soon as I discovered that half of my command had been murdered quietly in the middle of the night. Abandoning the dead would be a hard choice, but I would want to preserve the rest of my command against such a threat. Of course, if the assassin was able to contaminate our food and water with human feces, we might have a hard time getting to safety before sickness overwhelmed us, but some chance is better than no chance.

I've played out scenarios with characters with skill 18-20 in Stealth and combat skills against ordinary soldiers very often. Granted, if there are no supernatural powers in play, it's usually TL7-8, but I recall some campaigns at TL2-5 where no PC had fantastic powers.

In my experience, killing sentries is an act of desperation, not a reasonable part of a plan, even when the PCs are effectively highly skilled commandos against much less capable individual combatants. You kill a sentry who would otherwise raise the alarm immediately, but you accept that after you do so, things go kinetic very soon unless the other side is competely incompetent and you are very lucky.

Even when the PCs succeed at every single skill check they roll, the sentries and other soldiers still have to fail a lot of rolls not to raise the alarm long before half their number are dead. Patrols are supposed to check in, sentries rotate and an officer or NCO is supposed to be in charge of the security of the camp.

There is no level of skill that can prevent a sentry positioned to watch another sentry from noticing if someone kills him. Nor can a very capable PC prevent a good Perception check from a sentry or even just a fidgety or nervous sleeper, who can see, hear or smell the disturbance that a dying person can cause even after they fail a death ckeck.

[AlexanderHowl]

Let us consider an alternative scenario then. Imagine a WW I TL6 sniper (substituting Guns (Rifle) for Knife), attacking a company at night from a distance with a properly modified Mauser Gew98 (with a 32x magnification scope). How many soldiers could fall before the sniper was forced to withdraw to safety? Could the soldiers actually engage the sniper if the sniper moved after every shot?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Let us consider an alternative scenario then. Imagine a WW I TL6 sniper (substituting Guns (Rifle) for Knife), attacking a company at night from a distance with a properly modified Mauser Gew98 (with a 32x magnification scope). How many soldiers could fall before the sniper was forced to withdraw to safety? Could the soldiers actually engage the sniper if the sniper moved after every shot?

I wonder if anyone recalls the source, but there was an awesome anecdote written by a famous WWII German officer, Rommel if I'm not mistaken, but I guess it could theoretically have been someone else, where he recounts an encounter with some French in the early days of the war (WWI, where he was a junior officer commanding a small patrol that ran into a large force of marching infantry), before doctrine caught up with the range and accuracy of the infantry rifles. Unscoped rifles in that case, but note that nobody uses fixed magnification 32x scopes for combat sniping. Historically, around 2x would have been fairly reasonable.

Short story is a lot. Realistically, you want to pair the sniper with an observer, mostly because very few people are confident enough in their situational awareness to be able to concentrate on aiming and shooting without having the reassurance of someone to backstop them if they've failed to register a closer threat. But if you've got that, plenty of real snipers have pinned down units of up to company size until artillery support was brought up.

[Bengt]

I guess Simo Häyhä is relevant to a discussion of upper realistic effectiveness of snipers. :) WW2 rather than WW1, but close enough.

[AlexanderHowl]

The White Death of the Winter War is always relevant to a discussion on snipers. If a modern military could make 100 snipers like him, the USA would never invade the nation because it would not want to explain the deaths of 50,000 American soldiers. Thankfully, such people are so notable because they are so rare.

Just out of idle speculation, how effective would a military be if they could field multiple people with equivalent performance to the White Death? If we assume deployment in four person sniper teams (sniper, spotter, leader, and flanker), two such teams in a ten person squad (plus a squad leader and assistant squad leader), eight such squads in a hundred person company (plus a command squad and a support squad), eight such companies in a battalion (plus one command company and one support company), and eight such battalions in a division (plus one command battalion and one support battalion), a sniper division could have over 1,000 snipers. If they had equivalent performance as the White Death, would a nation need more than one such division for its defense?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The White Death of the Winter War is always relevant to a discussion on snipers. If a modern military could make 100 snipers like him, the USA would never invade the nation because it would not want to explain the deaths of 50,000 American soldiers. Thankfully, such people are so notable because they are so rare.

Just out of idle speculation, how effective would a military be if they could field multiple people with equivalent performance to the White Death? If we assume deployment in four person sniper teams (sniper, spotter, leader, and flanker), two such teams in a ten person squad (plus a squad leader and assistant squad leader), eight such squads in a hundred person company (plus a command squad and a support squad), eight such companies in a battalion (plus one command company and one support company), and eight such battalions in a division (plus one command battalion and one support battalion), a sniper division could have over 1,000 snipers. If they had equivalent performance as the White Death, would a nation need more than one such division for its defense?

Depends on what 'defence' means to you. The sniper division is excellently prepared to form the nucleus of a murderous partisan movement that makes occupation pure hell, but with no anti-air, no tanks and no artillery, your sniper army doesn't really have the ability to stand against any kind of modern force on a battlefield.

Any enemy with an air force can destroy targets at will, including your center of government and military HQ. Attack helicopters with longer effective stand-off range than snipers can hunt and kill your command elements in the field, destroy your logistics and ensure that your marvellous sniper units travel on foot with only what supplies they can carry.

And you can't stop even a single armoured unit from rolling into any part of your country they want to. In fact, you probably can't stop mechanized units, because they'll have vehicle-mounted guns and towed artillery that out-range your snipers and don't care about relative skill. You'll take out forward scout elements with precise fire, but while their artillery barrages that answer won't be as elegant, they'll still kill or disable your sniper units.

Theoretically, you might cause an enemy occupation force no end of suffering and even eventually force any foe that cares about public opinion and sensitivity for casualties to seek a negotiated settlement. But as this only happens long after your nation has been overrun, it's questionable if this counts as enoung defence. At least, a lot of people would rather have an army that aims to prevent total destruction of everything the enemy wants to target, complete defeat in the field and occupation by a hostile force, not just an army that tries to make the eventual occcupation really hard on the foe.

Finland was facing a really poor TL6 army, in horrible terrain for offensive operations, and even they had some elements of anti-air and anti-tank. And they absolutely had artillery. Pure infantry armies are a lot less viable at TL8 than TL6 and they weren't really practical even then.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Let us consider an alternative scenario then. Imagine a WW I TL6 sniper (substituting Guns (Rifle) for Knife), attacking a company at night from a distance with a properly modified Mauser Gew98 (with a 32x magnification scope). How many soldiers could fall before the sniper was forced to withdraw to safety? Could the soldiers actually engage the sniper if the sniper moved after every shot?

The soldiers would probably open up with every weapons at their disposal in the general direction of the sniper's shot. They'd probably call in some artillery as well. With all that ordinance flying in the general direction of the sniper they only have to get lucky once, while he has to get lucky all the time.

Oh, and show me a WWI era 32x scope that is mountable on a rifle.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The best way with the GURPS combat system seems to be a grapple to the jaw and a stab to the vitals.

Having Luck, to re-roll critical failures, will help a lot.

From behind, a swing at the skull (-5 from behind) is pretty effective. A very fine long knife is Sw+1, so at ST 12 it's 1d+3, so worse case is 8 to the brain. All out double makes this pretty lethal.

As for crits, in a crazy situation like this where regular failures are ok and CFs are terrible, Daredevil is the way to go.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by martinl

From behind, a swing at the skull (-5 from behind) is pretty effective. A very fine long knife is Sw+1, so at ST 12 it's 1d+3, so worse case is 8 to the brain. All out double makes this pretty lethal.

Well, sure, but note that chopping at someone while making no attempt to control whether they scream or where they fall will probably alert anyone nearby. High Stealth doesn't help when the opposition doesn't have to detect you sneaking, they can detect the noise of skull breaking, screams and a dying sentry falling down.

The problem with stealthy sentry removal isn't that a very skilled character has a hard time inflicting a lethal wound before a surprised sentry can act. It's that both in reality and GURPS rules, a lethal wound doesn't necessarily translate into a complete lack of detectable disturbance. Even after failing a consciousness or death check, a mortally wounded character can scream or pull a trigger (not as an effective attack, just a reflex that makes noise). And even someone with an instantly destroyed cerebellum can make a racket as they fall.

This is why inflicting enough HPs of damage to ensure a lethal wound is only part of the process. The rest is about controlling the sentry as he bleeds out (which can be quite a while, even if he's already failed a death check in GURPS, nothing in the rules prevents a mortally wounded character from making noise), preventing a scream and him falling down, dropping his weapon or pulling a trigger. And this will usually still make noise, just less than not trying a grapple.

Realistically, wounds are unpredictable and people are weird when they die, just as they are weird while they live. Someone can drop soundlessly from a single blow or they can scream for hours even after an obviously lethal wound. And in a realistic setting, even the most highly skilled commandos don't have total control over how any given victim will die.

What the most experienced professionals do know is that the more often you chance it, the better your odds of someone who makes a lot of noise, even if you execute your sentry removal technique perfectly. Which is why no one relies on being able to take out multiple sentries or sleeping foes without anyone noticing.

Actual plans for night raids have more than one attacker, assume that the alarm will be quickly raised and rely on the rapid application of focused firepower or other force against an ill-prepared adversary. No one expects to kill a significant fraction of a much larger unit, but they can be demoralized, deprived of rest and forced to adopt defensive measures that degrade their performance as an offensive formation.

Originally Posted by martinl

As for crits, in a crazy situation like this where regular failures are ok and CFs are terrible, Daredevil is the way to go.

Regular failures aren't okay. A failed attack roll will alert a sentry and probably also wake up a sleeper. It's a full force slash or stab that fails to effectively wound or kill. It still probably involves some part of the body contacting the target, especially if made in Close Combat.

But failed attack rolls will rarely be the problem for high skill commandos attacking unaware targets. The problem will be successful attack rolls that do less than HPx6 injury and/or successful Per checks by anyone other than the target.