01-04-2018, 08:33 PM | #31 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
The chief advantage of the smoothbore musket was that it could make effective an army of fungible soldiers. People who did not catch that point and treated them like crossbows just ran out of men to soon.
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01-05-2018, 12:32 AM | #32 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
My point is that a small number of highly experienced troops will win against a superior number even if their equipment is inferior if they are deployed properly. In a AtE scenario they will have even more of an advantage because pretty much any force they face are likely to have little to no discipline at all.
Put all of your resources towards finding the right men and giving them the right training. Then make sure that they have the best logistical support - transportation, food, communication, medical, etc. If they have all of this, their weapons will be irrelevant - they could take over the world with sticks and stones.
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01-05-2018, 03:50 AM | #33 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
As to TL6 riflemen being defeated by cold steel - okay, it's not pikemen, but I seem to recall numerous accounts from the Russian Civil War and Polish-Bolshevik Wars of infantry being cut to pieces by lance or sabre armed cavalry in the open field. You may even be able to find this happening as late as WW2, especially on the southern flank of Barbarossa where the Soviets were still using a lot of cavalry and the Axis forces contained a lot of second and third rate infantry.
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01-05-2018, 03:56 AM | #34 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
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So what is "Crude" here? How inferior is "inferior" here, moreover inferior in what way*? Because I can think of examples of well disciplined troops with inferior weapons compared to the crude example of the higher tech weapons of their opponent winning, but I can think of examples of them losing as well! Perhaps more importantly the former seem to be more isolated and the latter more long term and decisive (ts hard to really say though as having access to higher tech tends to also come with having access to other advantages that help you win long term) As has already been stated your three examples are not actually correct in terms of not using guns but beating those with guns . *the example of paratroopers was given earlier. Yeah they might have a disadvantage in certain equipment compared to say a regular formation being fielded in their usual situation. So you could describe that as inferior, but it's not like those paratroopers get into fire fights with sticks and stones and come out winners either! i.e agin what does "inferior" mean Quote:
Another problem with fighters like you describe is that being so resource intensive to create, maintain and support you tend not to have very many of them. So unless you can take over the world with sticks and stones and also not take losses while doing so, attrition will still hit you. Now in a stereotypical resource tight ATE scenario its mean they're not likely to face numberless hordes, but the resource tightness will also limit them. Last edited by Tomsdad; 01-05-2018 at 07:28 AM. |
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01-05-2018, 04:10 AM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
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Yeah caught unaware TL6 rifle men could get cut down by TL4-5 horsemen. And yes if your TL6 riflemen aren't the best they're possibly more likely to get themselves into a situation where that is more likely, and yes if your TL4/5 horsemen are great they may well be more likely to engineer and capitalise on such an advantageous situation. Combine both and yep you're even more likely to get that outcome. But it is inherently against the odds, and the greater the disparity in other areas the greater the odds fall out of balance. Ultimately even with the above examples neither sets of wars were won by horsemen with sabres and lances beating TL6 riflemen in the field. Moreover being against the odds it's high risk in that if you don't get it exactly right you end up with your elite horsemen being bullet riddled corpses (something that also happened in the first half of the C20th, as well as the C19th**). And well elite horsemen don't grow on trees. It's a bit like the conversation about bayonets still being battle winning modern day weapons in the hands of disciplined and committed users. In that yes in certain circumstances thay can be and in fact there are a couple of oft quoted examples in recent history where they were (context being again v.important). But generally speaking you end up shot dead if you try and melee-charge riflemen in the C20th. *it's like that famous photo of Polish Uhlans charging German panzers that got used as propaganda at the time. Only of course they didn't charge panzers with lances, they fought like everyone else with rifles, machine guns and anti tank guns etc. It's just being a cavalry unit they were fast, agile and mobile compared to infantry (even sometimes infantry in trucks). To me that's the cavalry advantage in the first half of the C20th, and yeah that can be a good one when you are moving over large areas of eastern europe or russia that doesn't have lots of nice roads etc, etc more so when your fighting a pretty fragmented affair with lots of localised action over a huge area like the Russian civil war. **and actually I guess cavalry use in the C19th kind of tells the story, the battlefield role of cavalry got further and further truncated and the situations were you could charge at an enemy without getting shot to pieces got increasingly limited. And how elite a lancer you are will only go so far in countering bullets. Last edited by Tomsdad; 01-05-2018 at 08:04 AM. |
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01-05-2018, 04:24 AM | #36 | |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
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That way you have a gun and a reach 1-2 spear in one. And sometimes a spear is all you'll need so conserve the bullets, (and yes at some points a spear might even be better than a rifle) I don't imagine that if you're already making a carbine length barrel a full rifle length barrel is that much harder. You might get another point of acc out of the rifle. A longer barrel might well be more forgiving of substandard ammunition in terms of performance as well. Generally speaking carbine length kind of become a widespread thing because you had troops being moved around en mass in ways that full length rifles got in the way off, and better tech came along meaning that carbine length wan't the performance tradeoff it had previously been (and then combat ethos changed as well moving away from in GURPS terms firing 7d of damage past 1000m) . This may not be in effect in an ATE setting? Although I know you said you weren't keen on it being too good (or rather having room for improvement)? Last edited by Tomsdad; 01-05-2018 at 07:17 AM. |
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01-05-2018, 07:31 AM | #37 |
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Kenai, Alaska
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
Ever had one of those moments where you write two pages of text in response to a half dozen posts and when you click submit you get logged out?
Sigh.... Long Story short the end result of this Rifles evolution would look a lot like a Enfield SMLE Mk III. My big questions 1.) What supplementary weapons should be used in conjunction with the Rifle. Assuming It's matured into it's Enfield form. 2.) On the continuum from crude Flintlock to Refined Bolt-action War Winner Should the PCs enter on. (The answer is highly circumstantial I know) 3.) Should this Rifle ultimately make the transformation to semi/fully-automatic or stay bolt-action? |
01-05-2018, 07:49 AM | #38 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
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In RL even when the SMLE Mk III was in it's heyday Tommy Atkins who held it was part of a much larger and diverse armed force. But if you don't have all that (and in ATE you may well not) that bunch of rifleman can get a lot done by themselves. However one other weapon comes to mind, mortars might be pretty doable and useful at doing stuff rifles can't! Quote:
A balance that's further effected by Semi automatic rifles being easier to manufacture than fully automatic ones (I assume). I can't really answer 2). beyond what do you want them doing and on which side of the development do you want them? Last edited by Tomsdad; 01-05-2018 at 08:53 AM. |
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01-05-2018, 09:09 AM | #39 | ||||||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
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And any tool can be used wrong. And as stated, cavalry was used to great and decisive effect all over the eastern front of WWI. This wasn't just dragoon style fighting. It was charges. Not it every case, but it happened a lot. The weapon that stopped the charge as a tactic in WWI was the machine gun. And the machine gun requires excellent logistics. On the western front, everyone had lots of ammo and a dense front. On the eastern front and in the chaos at the end of the war, logistics were strained, bullets got scarce, and there were huge distances to cover. A situation very similar to the wasteland. Quote:
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My personal armament would probably be 12 gauge shotguns. Don't bother to maintain them much. Just use a very common gun you can replace by scrounging. The hard part is the ammo train. certainly add a long sword or pole-arm that can be manufactured from old automobile sheet metal. This force will have its downsides, but that's what specialty troops are for.
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01-05-2018, 10:27 AM | #40 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Logistically Viable Weapons AtE
There are trillions of bullets, all of which are more resistant to the end of the world than the billions of people. Worrying about running out of ammo quickly seems to be solving the wrong problem.
Last edited by sir_pudding; 01-05-2018 at 10:34 AM. |
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