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Old 09-08-2013, 09:05 AM   #161
Langy
 
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

That looks like it's almost all, basically, infantry training. Do the Imperial Marines have any non-infantrymen - mechanics, intelligence analysts, technical support staff, medics, etc? If so, when and where do they get the specialized skills needed for those jobs?
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Old 09-08-2013, 10:20 AM   #162
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

Also, are Marine officers all promoted from the ranks, or do they have a separate training pipeline?
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Old 09-08-2013, 10:31 AM   #163
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

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Originally Posted by Langy View Post
That looks like it's almost all, basically, infantry training. Do the Imperial Marines have any non-infantrymen - mechanics, intelligence analysts, technical support staff, medics, etc? If so, when and where do they get the specialized skills needed for those jobs?
I'm glad you asked!

They don't have armour or artillery worth speaking of, for a variety of reasons: shipping the heavy iron in spaceships is too expensive; the Senate doesn't want the Empire to be able to fight an important colony on the ground; naval ortillery lasers make up in part for a lack of artillery, etc. And logistic support is nearly all carried out by robots. But they do have medics, anti-tank rocketeers, aviation, combat engineers, E&M engineers, regimental police, signallers, EW techs, paymasters and quartermasters, hospital orderlies, etc. And I'm dying to tell you how they get them.

Every Imperial Marine is a commando first. And by that I mean two years of commando training followed by 11 to 15 years deployed as a commando in a commando unit. And then most of them start either advancing as NCOs or get re-trained in a series of specialities, or a combination of both.


As I outlined in a previous post, there are three schools that provide finishing commando operations training, and there are three corresponding types of deployment for a regiment.

Fleet Operations School ("Drop School") trains marines for boarding actions in spaceships, commando operations on low-gravity airless moons and moonlets, for inspection duties, and for "meteoric insertion" in drop capsules. It ends with three actual training drops: one onto an inhabited planet under training conditions, one onto an inhabited planet under simulated combat conditions, and one onto an airless moon. It prepares marines for "Fleet Protection" deployments, their regiment broken up to make marines detachments for warships and orbital facilities.

Security Operations School ("Riot School") trains marines for parades and ceremonial guard duty, and for riot-suppression and crowd control, and brushes up their hostage-rescue skills. It prepares marines for "Public Duties" deployments, their regiment broken up to make marines details for Imperial Residences on scattered colonies.

Infantry Operations School ("Battle School") trains not marines but fireteams for field and urban major combat operations and for peacekeeping duties. It includes weapon and tactics refreshers and lots and lots of exercises. It prepares a regiment to be assigned to the Sector reserve (an important opportunity for re-organising, renewing regimental ties etc. but all to often cut short by deployment to an intervention or to reinforce or relieve an regiment in peacekeeping.

The regiments are rotated through the three kinds of deployment. Ideally they ought to spend 54 months in Fleet, then six months rest and re-training, then 54 months in Residence Guard, then six months in rest and re-training, then 54 months in Sector Reserve, then six months in rest and re-training, then move to a new sector and start over. But in practice it's never that neat, and in particular interventions and peace-keeping deployments from the Sector reserve always run long and screw up the schedules.

But anyway, ideally a young private (trained) finishes his initial training with one of the three operations schools and is deployed to or with a regiment that is in the corresponding deployment. He or she serves in the the appropriate type of operations for anywhere from three to 54 months (perhaps being advanced to private (trained)). Then s/his regiment is rotated. S/he does the ops school for the next type of deployment, then 4.5 years of the deployment, then the third ops school and the third type of deployment, and then starts doing specialist schools (such as Section Leader School and Sergeant's Course!) between deployments.
  • For the sake of an example, let's assume that Pvte Doe finished initial training with Drop School, and was posted to a regiment on Fleet Protection. Doe is assigned to a platoon on a light cruiser, and the only marines s/he sees except on shore leave are those 32 members of s/his platoon. After some years (or at least months) the Regt. is rotated to Public Duties.
  • Everyone gets about eight weeks of furlough — that's long enough to take an interstellar holiday — and then the regt. convenes at SHQ.
  • Everyone who has not done Riot School yet does Riot School together, and everyone who has done it does a specialist school. Doe hasn't done it yet, so he takes Riot School
  • That done the regt. is split up in a different way and the pieces are sent to Imperial Residences in the sector to relieve the guard details there. Doe is sent with a reinforce company to a colony where things are sticky and the Guard is busy. 54 months of parades, ceremonial guard duty, hostage rescue, counter-terrorism and maybe direct action, controlling crowds, defending the Residence and spaceport against rioters, etc. Then the regt. is rotated to Reserve.
  • Everyone gets about eight weeks of furlough — that's long enough to take an interstellar holiday — and then the regt. convenes at SHQ.
  • Everyone who has not done Battle School yet does Battle School together, and everyone who has done it does a specialist school. Doe hasn't, so he does.
  • The regiment is stationed at a nice comfy base on the planet SHQ orbits. They reorganise, get to know one another, review and renew regimental customs, etc. There are a few big formations at which the whole regiment parades together. Rugby is played between units. There are large-scale field exercises. But after a few scant months of that the Senate discovers a war has been going on and authorises an intervention. The regiment scrambles into a regimental assault carrier, falls on some world that was having a nice quiet civil war and greatly resents interference, drops troops in capsules to seize a airhead, lands more troops and gear in shuttles, engages in 45 days of kinetic operations, gets bogged down in peace-keeping operations, gets relieved by a swarm of colonial militia "donated" by one of the important colonies, extricates itself from the deployment six months late, translates to an adjacent sector, and rotates to Fleet.
  • Everyone gets about eight weeks of furlough — that's long enough to take an interstellar holiday — and then the regt. convenes at SHQ.
  • Everyone who has not done Drop School yet does Drop School together. But Doe has done Drop School. So he does a specialist school instead: Medic school, shall we say. Doe becomes Pvte (proficient) Doe, on the same pay as a lance-corporal. He is assigned as platoon medic in the platoon on a light cruiser, and the only marines s/he sees except on shore leave are those 32 members of s/his platoon. After 54 months the Regt. is rotated to Public Duties.
  • Everyone gets about eight weeks of furlough — that's long enough to take an interstellar holiday — and then the regt. convenes at SHQ.
  • Everyone who has not done Riot School yet does Riot School together. But Doe has done Riot School. He does another specialist school. Let's suppose it is Electrician School. Pvte Doe becomes Fitter Doe, and is assigned to the Recovery Company (E&M engineering) of the Regiment. Recovery companies are not used in Residence Guard: Doe's platoon is sent to some colony to provide technical expertise for some sort of development project, perhaps fitting out a hydroelectic plant; then to another for getting the power back on after an earthquake and so on. After 54 months the Regt. is rotated to Reserve.
  • Everyone gets about eight weeks of furlough — that's long enough to take an interstellar holiday — and then the regt. convenes at SHQ.
  • Everyone who has not done Battle School yet does Battle School together. But Doe has done Battle School. He does another specialist school. Let's suppose it is Section Leader School. Doe is promoted corporal and assigned back to his old platoon as an infantry section leader.

And so forth.
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Old 09-08-2013, 10:51 AM   #164
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Also, are Marine officers all promoted from the ranks, or do they have a separate training pipeline?
Separate pipeline. It's a four-year course, taught at a single Academy rather than at the sector HQs. The academic content covers strategy, tactics, logistics, military history etc., but also emphasises the social sciences, in particular the causes and effects of war and revolution. (Rather than engineering as I gather military training emphasises these days.) As well as the equivalent of a three-year degree with no long summer vacations, the course includes equivalents of Induction, Basic Military, and Commando School, but not Extension and Integration training. The graduate does Drop, Riot, or Battle school at the appropriate SHQ before joining his or her unit.

Training for Engineering and Electrical & Mechanical Engineering officers has a technical degree instead of the Arts (military science) degree. The Induction/Military/Commando component is the same and is taken together with the line officer candidates. Engineers are limited-duty officers who must do a graduate diploma before they are qualified for line command billets. Medical and legal officers are mostly equipped with only a sketchy military training, but sometimes you get burned-out line officers re-training as lawyers, medicos etc., and sometimes a medical or legal officer will cross-train as a genuine proper officer.

Experienced NCOs are sometimes sent to a one-year Officer Candidate School, then are commissioned as ensigns.

Warrant officers (i.e. equivalent to US senior NCOs) are offered commissions when they reach retirement age (eighty). If they accept they tend to be employed in staff and logistical billets, not line commands. Usually.
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Old 09-08-2013, 11:35 AM   #165
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

That looks to take an extremely long time to get any kind of specialists. What's the breakdown for how long people stay in the Marines? Earlier you mentioned a non-retention rate (barring medical discharge or death) of 1% - that'd imply that 50% of people stay for 70 years if they can choose to do so (and over 35% stay for over 100 years), which seems extreme.

Are the Marines really that full of senior citizens?

I suppose it would explain the extremely long time between training deployments and the fifteen-year period it takes before anyone has any specialist skills aside from 'poor bloody infantry'.

EDIT: Just checked the source of that post (rather than the quote I was looking at) and it looks to say that retirement occurs at 80 years of age, which is a little better. Still, a lot more people serve to retirement than I'd expect.

EDIT2: Current US retirement rates in the military make it so 17% of people make it all the way to the 20 year mark and can retire. I find that much more believable than 45% retiring after 60 years.

Do people not join the marines to get access to training, education funds, medical care, etc? Or can they only claim that stuff if they stay in the marines for the duration?

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Old 09-08-2013, 12:02 PM   #166
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Default Re: Imperial Marines

Some real-world-to-gaming thing that interests me, and I figure I'll ask if you've included it here. :-)

Are there separate training colleges for Company (i.e., O-1), Field (i.e., O-4), and Flag/Staff (i.e., O-7) officers, as they advance in their career? And what typical GURPS skills would you assign as likely courses for each?
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Old 09-08-2013, 04:14 PM   #167
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Are there separate training colleges for Company (i.e., O-1), Field (i.e., O-4), and Flag/Staff (i.e., O-7) officers, as they advance in their career?
Yes, inasmuch as company officers are trained at the Academy as officer cadets, then after service as an ensign and sublieutenant become eligible for Staff College while they are lieutenants (O-3). Staff College graduates serve as lieutenant-majors (O-4), majors, and colonels, usually being offered War College while they are majors or colonels. War College graduates are eligible for promotion to brigadier (O-7), though service on the general or a divisional staff at O-6 is usually also required.

I haven't put a lot of thought into the curriculum at Staff College and War College, and almost none into representing it in GURPS. I'm under some pressure to re-introduce a 3rd edition skill called "Operations" for the sort of thing they teach at Staff College.
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Old 09-08-2013, 04:36 PM   #168
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Something that I've seen, in going over the various staff colleges, is that top NCOs also seem to go to some of the staff colleges.
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Old 09-08-2013, 05:13 PM   #169
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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
I'm under some pressure to re-introduce a 3rd edition skill called "Operations" for the sort of thing they teach at Staff College.
Based on Mass Combat Operations is probably just an optional Specialty of Strategy in 4e combined with Expert: Military Science.
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Old 09-08-2013, 05:45 PM   #170
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Originally Posted by Langy View Post
That looks to take an extremely long time to get any kind of specialists.
Everything takes a long time in FLAT BLACK. Crossing the Empire in a spaceship takes four months. Dying of old age takes two hundred years.

It takes a long time to get to be an Imperial Marines specialist. But it doesn't take long for the Empire to get specialists because it already has veteran marines.

The model in which specialists are trained from among senior veterans is based on its use by the Roman army: immunes were selected from among veteran milites and given special training. That it gives a major punch to "every Imperial Marine is a commando first" is just an ironical little joke.

One of the things that runs through the setting is that few people are psychologically up for anything that lasts longer than fifteen or twenty years, be that a marriage or a career. They get stale, and if you keep them at it for long after that they burn out and you lose them. So most things — not just the marines, and not even just the Imperial Service — are designed to give people significant changes in their duties, or even re-training and a new career, after about ten or fifteen years.

So. The Empire recruits a thin stream of very rare and very valuable human talent, and then it spends a fortune on giving those people years of specialist training. It employs them in a very special job, and they accumulate a lot of priceless experience and capacity for informed judgement. It mixes up their duties as well as it can considering that redeployment is slow and its small numbers mean little scope for specialisation. But after about fifteen years its marines are going stale. They need a change. Some of them need to be in a different line of work. If it keeps them on they'll burn out, lose their nerve, perhaps even quit. As commandos, those guys are spent. At least they need five or ten years doing something else such as building electrical grids on backward worlds, to de-stress and recover their tone. So the Empire has a stream of ex-commandos aged in their thirties. These guys have still got seventy years of useful working life ahead of them. They are still dedicated to the Imperial Mission. They still love the Imperial marines. It would be silly to ship them back to their homeworlds and turn them out on the street.

So the Empire accumulates Marines veterans anyway. It doesn't have to wait to get them, because it already has a hundred thousand that it prepared earlier. It re-trains these ex-commandos as various specialists: medics and orderlies, electricians and mechanics, construction/demolition workers; keeps them in the uniforms and units that they love, employs them as civil aid and development-assistance workers, policemen, security guards etc. etc. for ten years or so—and then finds that they have recovered their mental tone and are fit for five or ten years as a sapper or whatever with a combat unit again.

The Empire isn't waiting to get specialists. It's frugally employing a resource that is at its disposal.

Quote:
What's the breakdown for how long people stay in the Marines?
I've only done very rough estimates based on a uniform wastage rate. More realistically the Empire couldn't afford the training it gives unless recruits made a convincing commitment to serve for ten years, so the wastage rate is probably low for at least that long. Then there is probably an elevated non-retention rate for a decade, but people who make it to twenty years most likely love it. The wastage rate will drop for twenty-year veterans.

It is very important to understand that the Empire, assisted by TL10 psychology, simply doesn't recruit bad marines or anyone who is mistaken when they think they are going to love it in the Corps.

Quote:
Earlier you mentioned a non-retention rate (barring medical discharge or death) of 1% - that'd imply that 50% of people stay for 70 years if they can choose to do so (and over 35% stay for over 100 years), which seems extreme.
FLAT BLACK is extreme. I try to make it a logical extreme.

Quote:
Are the Marines really that full of senior citizens?
Everything in FLAT BLACK is full of senior citizens. Standard retirement age is 110. People are still pretty vigorous at 140. I can't recover my modelling because of a software upgrade, but I think the median age of Imperial Direct Jurisdiction is in the early sixties.

Quote:
I suppose it would explain the extremely long time between training deployments and the fifteen-year period it takes before anyone has any specialist skills aside from 'poor bloody infantry'.
Imperial marines aren't poor bloody infantry. They are direct-entry special forces. MOS 18 - B/C/D/E/F rather than MOS 11 - B/C.

Quote:
EDIT: Just checked the source of that post (rather than the quote I was looking at) and it looks to say that retirement occurs at 80 years of age, which is a little better. Still, a lot more people serve to retirement than I'd expect.
If it helps, think of being an Imperial Marine not as a job, but as a religious vocation like being a Knight Hospitaller.

Quote:
EDIT2: Current US retirement rates in the military make it so 17% of people make it all the way to the 20 year mark and can retire. I find that much more believable than 45% retiring after 60 years.
The current US military is extreme and atypical. Perhaps because the US political tradition considers long-term professional armies a danger to the republic and veteran citizens a pillar of the republic, perhaps because of hangovers from its Cold War days as a mass conscript army designed to accumulate mobilisable reserves, the US armed forces rely on a large throughput of short-term, very young servicemen. I understand that the average age of the US Army and US Navy is about twenty.

Contrast this with the Australian Army, which consists of career professionals: we consider "infantry rifleman" to be a skilled trade, like "plumber" or "carpenter". The average age of the Australian Defence Force is 31. The average age of the infantry is 29. They have about twice as much training, nine times as much experience, and three times the pay of the US forces you are used to. The SASR is even older, and is paid about $120,000 per year.

Now add TL10 so that the trade of "special forces operator" is even more technically demanding and requires even more training. Add in it taking up to a month on a ship to get troops from the sector HQs to planets in the sector, so that short deployments impose crippling down-time costs. Dial it up to ten. I think this sort of thing is what you get.

The current American short-service Army with its two-year terms and its "up or out" policy is historically atypical. A standard term with the Roman legions was 25 years (starting as a miles, then becoming either an immunus (specialist) or a company officer. The standard term for the British Army in Kipling's day was twenty years, later shortened to eleven. Knights Templar and knights Hospitaller and those guys swore in for life with no possibility of resignation.

Quote:
Do people not join the marines to get access to training, education funds, medical care, etc? Or can they only claim that stuff if they stay in the marines for the duration?
It's not offered. Like Australian soldiers today, Imperial Marines are paid a fair wage, cash on the drumhead. They are not underpaid for a term and then back-paid in kind with land (like Roman soldiers) or GI Bill benefits (like American ones).

A great many people probably volunteer for the Imperial Marines for the life-extension treatments, for the interstellar travel, or because the pay and pension seem princely by their poor-world standard. But those guys aren't recruited. The recruiters only offer jobs as marines to people who (their scanners tell them) will do it because they love the work.
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