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Old 03-03-2019, 06:32 PM   #21
tshiggins
 
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

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Originally Posted by Bengt View Post
Seems quite unlikely if the assumption is that all the soldiers are up and about since our attacker will have to succeed well enough on each encounter to stop the victim from raising the alarm. He only have to fail once to fail the entire challenge. I.e. even if he have 95% chance to take out one guy silently the chance is only .95^100 ~ 0.0059 to succeed 100 times in a row.

If he have to hide bodies along the way the odds are even worse since that will be more rolls.

If most soldiers are sleeping and he only have to take out a couple of sentries he will have much better chances of course.
I'm old enough to have known some people who served in Vietnam, including a few special ops guys. One guy did operations for the CIA.

Nobody tries to do this. The one guy I knew who was capable of doing something like this would get a target identified by intelligence, and then get dropped in a couple of miles from the location.

He'd move through the jungle, infiltrate the location, kill one or two people, and then exfiltrate.

Generally, he'd pop amphetamines as soon as he exfiltrated, because he figured he had to move through the jungle fast to his pickup point, because he was gonna be pursued.

He was an awesomely competent guy, but even he would only go after one or two people -- at most -- in a guarded camp, and he assumed the kills would get discovered before he made it to the chopper.
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Old 03-03-2019, 10:38 PM   #22
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

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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?
I'm afraid such a nation would get overrun. Such units can't stop tanks, can't hold ground against a serious assult properly supported by artillery and armour, lacks mobility, etc. Once you start adding in all the supporting arms and logistics units, your snipers are quite diluted. Besides, you need boring old normal infantry to garrison places, provide security and man checkpoints and so on, and it's a waste putting those snipers in such roles.

Now, more really good snipers than any military has would be something just about any army would welcome, but not too many more - just having all the snipers and marksmen they already have be that good would be more than sufficient.
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Old 03-03-2019, 11:43 PM   #23
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

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Now, more really good snipers than any military has would be something just about any army would welcome, but not too many more - just having all the snipers and marksmen they already have be that good would be more than sufficient.
The best option would be to have an army where everyone was as good at their jobs as Häyhä was at his. Snipers that are amazingly good snipers. Infantry that are amazingly good infantry. Supply depot clerks that are amazingly good supply depot clerks. Etc.
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Old 03-04-2019, 10:08 AM   #24
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

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I guess Simo Häyhä is relevant to a discussion of upper realistic effectiveness of snipers. :) WW2 rather than WW1, but close enough.
However only about half of his kills were with a rifle. And his side still lost.

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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.
I believe there's a wall in the capital city of your country with the names of more than 50k dead American soldiers. I think people are still debating that war and issues related to that.
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Old 03-04-2019, 02:27 PM   #25
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100 guys is too much unpredictability to kill with being badass with a knife and above average strength. You're going to lean Kou De Gras and hope you don't roll a 1 for damage fighting the guys who are awake. I think they'd get through a fairly small number of them. An enemy camp implies that there would be people on guard. With Master Stealth you're going to take out all of the posted guards, but the guy wandering out of the gambling tent to take a **** is going to see nobody at any of the guard posts and he'll freak out. Then it's 73 awake guys with weapons.
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Old 03-04-2019, 03:35 PM   #26
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100 sleeping campers, Mr Stealthy Knife would cause havok.

100 soldiers at night...not so much, since sentries, patrols and night owls are a thing. Assuming they are in active deployment, they would have to have criminally incompetent leadership to all fall to one implausibly competent but not superhuman knife-wielding assassin.

Note that various US units during the Vietnam War did have leadership/morale problems which resulted in criminal incompetence and even then, the Vietnamese weren't able to simply put on their sneaky shoes and knife murder multiple platoons with impunity.
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Old 03-04-2019, 04:24 PM   #27
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Could such an individual plausibly poison/contaminate the food/water supply though (as well as fun things like assassinating the senior enlisted)? Depending on the military force, killing the senior enlisted effectively kills a company, as you have one inexperienced officer leading dozens of inexperienced enlisted.
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Old 03-04-2019, 04:34 PM   #28
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

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Could such an individual plausibly poison/contaminate the food/water supply though (as well as fun things like assassinating the senior enlisted)? Depending on the military force, killing the senior enlisted effectively kills a company, as you have one inexperienced officer leading dozens of inexperienced enlisted.
Yes, of course he can, but I'd think that skill levels of Intelligence Analysis, Observation and Tactics are going to be important as well as the purely physical and technical proficiency.

The character needs to identify targets, evaluate defences, plan how to circumvent them, etc.

I note that real snipers are trained to identify leaders and target them to disable enemy units. There is nothing unrealistic about this, it's one of the reasons Observation skill is among the primary skills for a sniper. Many military units actively avoid obvious rank insignia, saluting or other ceremony in the field to make it harder to target officers and senior NCOs.
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Old 03-04-2019, 05:58 PM   #29
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Default Re: On the Fragility of Life

The guy shouting orders, the guy with the radio, the guy(s) with the support weapons(s), and anybody who tries to take over those tasks. That's the rough kill order, though it's unusual that a sniper would get very far down that list before deciding that they should quietly fade away and go bother some other unit.
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Old 03-04-2019, 07:19 PM   #30
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Generally why I think that sniper teams should have four people in them. The leader identifies the targets while the flanker protects the team while the sniper and spotter take out the targets. Of course, the larger the force, the more intelligence the force has.

Just out of curiousity, what would you think of the effectiveness of a mixed weapon corps of four divisions? I was thinking that two sniper divisions supported by an anti-armor divisor and an anti-air division would be quite effective. What do you think?
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