Coolness survey: Corps or Regimental traditions

[Anaraxes]

Regimental insignia and histories of some elements of the US 1st Marine Division.

http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/div/1mar/default.asp
http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/div/5mar/history.asp
http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/div/7mar/history.asp
http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/div/11mar/
http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/external/1...y_insignia.jsp

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by smurf

Gets placed in the regitmental museum. Saying that all the war medals should have been returned to the regitment instead of being sold to private collecters.

Always used to be the garrison chapel or an appropriate church in the depot town - that's why you'll occasionally go into an old parish church or town minster and notice moth-eaten flags hanging in the rafters. They're normally the colours of dissolved regiments, or old colours of an existing regiment that have been replaced and/or superseded. Although sometimes they may be enemy colours taken as trophies ... didn't the Talavera Eagle spend quite a long time in a parish church somewhere?

The officers mess is the other place to look for war trophies - the Sapper's Corps Mess at Chatham has a magnificent tapestry they nicked from a government building in Germany during WW2 and, IIRC, a piano of much the same provenance.
The 14/20 Hussars have a (silver?) chamber pot they captured at Vittoria from Joseph Bonaparte's state coach and now use as a punchbowl.

The older the regiment the more phat l3wt and quirks they are likely to accumulate, although being in the right place at the right time helps.

[SuedodeuS]

I love the concept, and particularly the ability to track a regiment's lineage through its insignia and traditions. For example, the 263rd might have 3 stars on its insignia, have the index and middle finger cut off of their right rifle glove, refer to the head as the "Jack," and always eat at least one barbecued chicken wing on Tuesdays. The 3 stars goes back to their grandsire regiment, the 105th, which had a single star to represent a significant victory early in their history (a solar-energy collection station in orbit around a star under their jurisdiction had been taken over by a small group of pirates; the 105th managed to kill or subdue all the pirates with no friendly casualties and minimal structural damage). Every regiment split from it adds a star (there are four 2-stars, but the 263rd is the only 3-star). The rifle glove quirk marks them as descending from the 190th, a 2-star that had an inordinate number of recreational archers in its founding battalion. The "Jack" is unique to the 263rd, and is a result of an unfortunate private (one Jack Horn) accidentally referring to the head as the "John" while within earshot of the battalion commander (Jonathan "John" Starck). Individuals named Jack are advised to change their name (frequently to Jim or John) upon joining the 263rd. Finally, the chicken wings date all the way back to the 52nd (the sire regiment of the 105th), which is stationed on a planet that has a shockingly-high concentration of BW-3 restaurants (for readers outside the US, BW-3 is a restaurant that serves buffalo wings [barbecued chicken wings that get their name from Buffalo, New York] and happens to give significant discounts on Tuesdays; the possibility of it still being around in the time of Flat Black doesn't seem all that great, of course, but I thought it might make for a good quirk - replace with seafood for a great-grandsire regiment posted on a particularly watery planet, for example).

Unfortunately, I don't think the concept is neat enough to justify the amount of work - and potential continuity problems - that it would result in. If you can get people to come up with basic regimental histories for you (like what I have above for the 52nd, 105th, 190th, and 263rd, but more in-depth), you may want to go for it and actually list out all 263. Otherwise, uniform is probably a much better way to go.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Icelander

'Farmed fur' are born and bred Imperials, which is to say that the terms 'Mink' and 'farmed fur' are effectively synonymous

D'oh.

Some other thoughts then:

Weasels like Mink, but connotations of being duplicitous for "changing sides." (Used by folks who don't like mink much.)

Rats As above, but even more pejorative. (Note that FB ecologies are generally much better controlled than ours, so the pejorative implication of "rat" may no longer exist.)

Dogs Implication they are loyal but not too bright "domesticated" dupes. Perhaps suffers from overuse in the real world.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by smurf

However the USMC is huge compared to the British Army.

USMC, active+reserve= 243,000
British Army, active+reserve = 271,000

Care to revise your statement?

Originally Posted by smurf

The Gloucesters wear 2 cap badges front and back, as they had fought a last stand in Korea...

The cap badge tradition is considerably older than from Korea. It comes from the 28th Regiment of Foot, and the Battle of Alexandria in 1801.

[smurf]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

USMC, active+reserve= 243,000
British Army, active+reserve = 271,000

Care to revise your statement?




The cap badge tradition is considerably older than from Korea. It comes from the 28th Regiment of Foot, and the Battle of Alexandria in 1801.

1. no... one branch of the US military is comparatively nearly the same size... so what, the money to fund the USMC is much larger than the total budget of the Britisth Army. The US spent $680 billion on their military budget last year and I don't think the UK can ever match that.

2. Thank you for the correction, I claim to be no great military historian.

[Langy]

1. no... one branch of the US military is comparatively nearly the same size... so what, the money to fund the USMC is much larger than the total budget of the Britisth Army. The US spent $680 billion on their military budget last year and I don't think the UK can ever match that.

You said that the USMC is huge compared to the British Army.

UK Army Budget: 40.4 Billion Pounds - this is equivalent to about $58B

US Marine Corps budget: Approximately $34B - this is what the Marines requested for 2011, including supplemental war funding. It's difficult to get exact figures for the Marine Corps's budget, because it's funding comes through the massively bigger and more expensive Department of the Navy.

The US Marine Corps is both smaller and less well-funded than the British Army.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by smurf

1. no... one branch of the US military is comparatively nearly the same size... so what, the money to fund the USMC is much larger than the total budget of the Britisth Army. The US spent $680 billion on their military budget last year and I don't think the UK can ever match that.

2. Thank you for the correction, I claim to be no great military historian.

smurf, it's good that you admit that you're not military historian. How about if you were to admit that your neither a military theorist nor an economist either?

Then you could simply avoid making sweeping and incorrect statements that have little to do with the thread and thereby avoid having people spend their valuable time on correcting your misapprehensions and enable them to actually do something useful.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Langy

You said that the USMC is huge compared to the British Army.

UK Army Budget: 40.4 Billion Pounds - this is equivalent to about $58B

US Marine Corps budget: Approximately $34B - this is what the Marines requested for 2011, including supplemental war funding. It's difficult to get exact figures for the Marine Corps's budget, because it's funding comes through the massively bigger and more expensive Department of the Navy.

The US Marine Corps is both smaller and less well-funded than the British Army.

If you wonder how this could be when the Americans always have the best (or at least the most expensive) toys the answer is probably that the USMC by doctrine and history is the force with the highest percentage of riflemen as opposed to mechanized vehicle, artillery or whatever troops.

They've got plenty of toys but not an equal percentage to either the US or British Army.

As noted, a lot of their logistic support gets farmed out to the Navy too.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by martinl

The Empire can clearly effectively use whatever system it wants, thanks to Todos Santos psychology.

True. However I am free (to the extent that I can make it plausible) to posit that Todos Santos psychology told the Empire that (in the situation it was in when the psychological engineers were consulted) one of the two was more suited to its needs.

I personally find the weird set of individual customs cooler, from a gaming perspective. Cruft like that allows for cheap and easy characterization. Noting a vast quantity of undefined cultural peculiarities is also just asking for wacky player creativity, which is a good thing IMO.

Okey doke. That's the sort of feedback I'm fishing for.

OTOH, my internal mental model of how the higher ups in the the Empire think (necessarily much vaguer than yours) has them thinking, roughly, "That's cute, and normally harmless, but of the solid waste hits the rotary impeller and we need to mix and match random IMs quickly, it might save lives if this was fast. Therefore, we will require uniformity if that makes it faster."

On the third hand, they are good enough at psych that they could simply use a system that gives each regiment rich traditions including strong identity as "Marines."

I think I can make it plausible either way, given that both the rather uniform USMC (and RM) and the riotously patchwork British Army have excellent military reputations. The questions I face are "which better supports the Empire's motif?", "which is cooler?", and "how much space do I have in the manuscript?"

As for non-mink mink, what's wrong with "Farmed fur?" Too awkward? If so, allow me to suggest "Chinchillas," a form of farmed fur that has (to me at least) faint associations with harmlessness, cuteness, and ridiculousness, which is thus great backwards slang for the scarily resolute colonials the Mink use so often on the cutting end.

It's "non-mink Impies" rather than "non-mink mink". And "farmed fur" is already in use for new recruits and young Imperial servants who were raised to be mink by the psychological engineers in the Home Office school system.

"Mink" is a slightly derogatory, slightly envious non-mink Impie's slang for Imperial servants who are strongly compliant with the social norm of Imperial Direct Jurisdiction (farmed fur and assimilated recruits). It was coined in particular circumstances by a PC (ie. a player) in the first campaign, and stuck because it was apt. It's in no way the sort of slang that the mink would coin for themselves (they don't see themselves that way, naturally) or that non-Imperials would coin (because they mostly never see on of the aspects of mink behaviour that makes it apt).

In coining a slang term for non-farmed Imperials I would start be thinking who would coin it and in what circumstances. The difference between the two kinds of Imperial is not salient to colonials, even the demi-monde. So we're considering either a mink term or a non-mink term, either an "us" label or an "other" label. I like (as you may have noticed from the political-faction labels) using contrastive "other" labels (this is inspired by "tory" and "whig", which meant originally something like "rebel" and "rustler"). That is, I like to set up situations in which each faction's factional identification is one that was attached to it by others, i.e. non-supporters. That's why the political factions in FLAT BLACK have names like "League of Repressive Autocracies", "Levellers", and "Jackals".

The thing is that the mink don't conceive of themselves as a separate class within Imperial society. They're a bit like Australians from New South Wales, who just identify as "Australians" (to the annoyance of Victorians and Queenslanders). And Imperials recruited from the colonies aren't anything like uniform in attitude or behaviour, so there is no obvious behavioural metaphor the way there was for "mink".

So it becomes a question of what coinage would likely resonate with non-mink Imperial social self-perception. In that context a conscious contrast with the spontaneous "mink" is possible: perhaps another mustelid, or a "better" animal, or something otherwise quite different chosen as a symbol of sexual modesty and professional circumspection. On the other hand slang need not be so neat and symmetrical. I am inclined to prefer the idea of some quite other aspect of the Volunteer experience.

One aspect of that experience that seems promising is that Volunteers share the experience of self-imposed exile. They leave their home worlds to enter an utterly different society, and going home is an event that terminates the experience: i.e. the people who have gone home are no longer members of the group we're talking about.

Another aspect of the shared experience which seems promising is that Volunteers have all had a drastic change of standing and perspective. A person joining the Imperial Service usually comes from a background of thinking of himself or herself as distinctly above average and finds himself or herself utterly ordinary. He or she has at least some thoughts of adventure and doing grand things, but discovers that being an Imperial is mostly work rather than adventure, that he won't be allowed to save worlds until he makes O-3 (and not without supervision until O-4), and even the grand deeds that he dreamed of are just pieces of the huge tapestry that the Empire is working on. It's like being a prefect in primary school one year and being a First Former the next. There must be some subconscious disappointment. Also, though non-Mink can check the figures and do the maths on promotions, the contrast with having been outstanding at home and getting very slow promotions has got to produce a feeling of disappointment and a subconscious feeling that someone else it getting 'your' promotion while you labour in obscurity.

So the possibilities include

• a construction based on self-conscious contrast with the previous spontaneous coining of "mink". i.e. suggesting sexual modesty and professional circumspection
• a spontaneous coining suggesting having been harvested from the wilds, perhaps with a suggestion that they were unexpected or out-of-place there
• something suggesting exile, forsakenness, or being cut off from one's roots
• Something (probably with double-layered irony) suggesting disappointment of ambition, the step down from middle-school seniority to high-school freshmanship, slogging at base-grade tasks, or being overlooked and unappreciated.

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Something worth bearing in mind is that quite a big part of the British Regimental System was designed around the requirements of policing an Empire and having units that would be stationed far from home for long periods of time - it provides them with internal cohesion and links to the area from which they were recruited.

Good point. The Empire in FLAT BLACK is meant to remind players of the British Empire, and particularly the Raj in India. But the analogy is not exact. And in particular the Empire doesn't have a populous and prosperous United Kingdom at its core that forms a basis of its power. The Marines are mostly sepoys and askaris. In this respect Imperial Marines units have to be more like late Roman legions than like British regiments.

Normally a Regiment had one (or sometimes more) battalions on overseas service and one at home at its Depot (home base) recruiting and training replacements. The idea is that a draft of replacements can then transition easily from one part of the regiment to another, retaining a sense of unit and espirit de corps.

The Empire in FLAT BLACK is not going to be able to copy that system because it has no "home". There would certainly be colonies that provided enough recruits over time that several whole regiments could be staffed by them. But that would be a bad idea from the divided-loyalties point of view, since those planets are politically and socially distinct from the Empire. That's one reason for the long slow shuffling of regiments around the Empire.

The corps system is almost certainly more efficient if you have a regular turnover of troops and good transport and communications.

Yep. I have very slow turnover of troops (partly because of longevity, partly because of slow transport and poor communications) and slow transport and poor communications. Which is one of the things that made me go with a British Army model rather than a USMC or Royal Marines model to begin with. But the Empire can't make the Marines loyal to itself by emphasising their places of origin.

Plus your players get more use out of their points in Savoire Faire (Military) and related knowledge skills ("Never wear a hat in the 93rd's mess bar and remember to salute the stuffed goat as you enter - even though you're not wearing a hat")

... The XIII Regiment is the "Handcart". The CO of the IX should be addressed a "Doctor", not "Colonel", and the RMO takes precedence ahead of the company commanders, not after the Recovery Company commander....