That's been a failure far more than a success. With the exception of voluntary penal units.
disciplinary units
- Thread starter Maitrejeanthierry
- Start date
That's been a failure far more than a success. With the exception of voluntary penal units.
I just had a moderately nasty thought. What if a government were to just clean out its prisons and drop them en masse on a target world, via drop pods ahead of the primary invasion? Depending on the level of criminal a government has to deal with, dumping a few thousand hard-core murderers, rapists, kidnappers, etc somewhat covertly onto a world is definitely going to cause some level of chaos and diversion of resources. That depends a lot on the type of world being targeted, I suppose, and you have no guarantee they won't switch sides, but even so....
Enoki
SOC-14 1K
A nastier version is one I've kiddingly proposed to "fix" Afghanistan...
You give inmates in your prisons a choice: They can do their time and such OR they can immediately renounce their citizenship and agree to be "Transported." They get all their stuff and have to spend any cash money on whatever they want before "Transport." Weapons? No problem! Cars, whatever...
They are then transported with all their stuff to Afghanistan where they are dumped on the tarmac at the airport or other suitable location and told "Okay, you're here! Do whatever you want... There are only two rules: Do not mess with the NATO troops and never set foot on US soil again."
You could do something similar in Traveller to some backwards boil on somebody's postierior that needs a good lancing I'd think....
:toast:
That is how we wound up with Guyana and parts of Australia being settled. Creates some interesting political issues.A nastier version is one I've kiddingly proposed to "fix" Afghanistan...
You give inmates in your prisons a choice: They can do their time and such OR they can immediately renounce their citizenship and agree to be "Transported." They get all their stuff and have to spend any cash money on whatever they want before "Transport." Weapons? No problem! Cars, whatever...
They are then transported with all their stuff to Afghanistan where they are dumped on the tarmac at the airport or other suitable location and told "Okay, you're here! Do whatever you want... There are only two rules: Do not mess with the NATO troops and never set foot on US soil again."
You could do something similar in Traveller to some backwards boil on somebody's postierior that needs a good lancing I'd think....
Because you already spent the money on training them before they proved themselves to be less than sterling, for one, and for another, there's a certain deterrent value in not allowing folks to get away with malingering or being deliberately incompetent or committing a crime to get out out of something. There's also a certain slightly malicious satisfaction to it.
See, I'm not seeing the idea of sending criminals to the military, I'm seeing penal batallions as a useful way to get something back from military members who were later convicted of crimes. In peace, we use Leavenworth. In war, the Dirty Dozen AND Leavenworth.
epicenter00
SOC-13
I actually can imagine penal battalions in the modern Imperium.
Exactly.
The Imperium's foes aren't always superbly high-tech. The goal of sending troops down to a world usually means there's something on that world you want to capture reasonably intact or you don't have the resources to bomb it flat.
No matter which version of the Imperium you're playing in, it seems that the Imperium tends to be pretty hands-off with member worlds. So where these TL6 penal battalions fighting?
That the Imperium is dominated by large corporations that work hand-in-hand with the Imperium seems like a pretty common view. In real life, you do have large, influential corporations urging various governments to wars and "interventions" ... especially in relatively backwards third-world nations. Due to board policies, I won't list actual examples, but they're not hard to find.
Now, what if some large megacorp has convinced subsector nobles to, say, intervene on some relatively low tech world (of which there's lots of in the Imperium) because the world's local warlords or popular democratically elected government has nationalized some mines of some megacorp's local subsidiary corporation to export blood diamonds or because of appalling working conditions?
The main Imperial military doesn't want to get involved or can't because they have more pressing matters.
Using colonial or reserve fleets would probably be constrained by embarrassing questions or cost considerations (or both).
Hiring mercenaries or near-mercenaries might be one way to levee a fighting force, but it might not be enough to take on a small or medium sized nation on a balkanized world. Enter penal battalions and similar units. The mercenaries the nobles hire would be cheap TL8 mercenary armor. The nasty business of actually storming the mines, the offices, and the refineries would be handled by penal battalions who'd tank desant into combat on top of the TL8 vehicles while the armor would be used for the initial breakthrough and then for fire support. The penal battalions would be armed with strictly small arms while a sprinkling of soldiers in battle dress would follow up the first assault to keep order and maintain discipline.
Exactly.
The Imperium's foes aren't always superbly high-tech. The goal of sending troops down to a world usually means there's something on that world you want to capture reasonably intact or you don't have the resources to bomb it flat.
No matter which version of the Imperium you're playing in, it seems that the Imperium tends to be pretty hands-off with member worlds. So where these TL6 penal battalions fighting?
That the Imperium is dominated by large corporations that work hand-in-hand with the Imperium seems like a pretty common view. In real life, you do have large, influential corporations urging various governments to wars and "interventions" ... especially in relatively backwards third-world nations. Due to board policies, I won't list actual examples, but they're not hard to find.
Now, what if some large megacorp has convinced subsector nobles to, say, intervene on some relatively low tech world (of which there's lots of in the Imperium) because the world's local warlords or popular democratically elected government has nationalized some mines of some megacorp's local subsidiary corporation to export blood diamonds or because of appalling working conditions?
The main Imperial military doesn't want to get involved or can't because they have more pressing matters.
Using colonial or reserve fleets would probably be constrained by embarrassing questions or cost considerations (or both).
Hiring mercenaries or near-mercenaries might be one way to levee a fighting force, but it might not be enough to take on a small or medium sized nation on a balkanized world. Enter penal battalions and similar units. The mercenaries the nobles hire would be cheap TL8 mercenary armor. The nasty business of actually storming the mines, the offices, and the refineries would be handled by penal battalions who'd tank desant into combat on top of the TL8 vehicles while the armor would be used for the initial breakthrough and then for fire support. The penal battalions would be armed with strictly small arms while a sprinkling of soldiers in battle dress would follow up the first assault to keep order and maintain discipline.
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
Enter from where, precisely? My apologies, but I was thinking we were discussing penal battalions at the planetary military level. Most criminals and "politically undesirables" are going to be caught up at the planetary government level, since we both agree the Imperium leaves planetary matters to the planetary governments. Imperial-level convicts are those that committed crimes under Imperial jurisdiction: pirates and smugglers in space, red-zone violaters, those caught within the confines of the starport extrality, maybe someone extradited for a crime beyond the scope of planetary law enforcement (local government officials who violated some imperial edict?) and so forth. Given the despotic, high-law trend in planetary culture, planetary-military penals aren't terribly remarkable - just ineffective above a certain tech level unless you're fighting guerrillas or other poorly equipped opponents. Imperial penals are another matter.
A 4-man fireteam equipped in battledress and armed with lasers and an FGMP is as lethal as a lower-tech tank platoon and has the added advantage of being able to enter buildings to fight. Equipped with IR/LI equipment, chameleon covers, RAM grenades and grav belts, it's a good deal more lethal than the typical low-tech tank platoon since it can be much more difficult to spot and can use cover and camouflage more effectively. Any foe that's within the capability of a penal batallion is basically lambs awaiting slaughter for the well-equipped TL14-15 fireteam. They'll devastate defenders wherever they go and leave an easy task for follow-on forces intent on holding and consolidating the territory they free up. Conversely, any foe stiff enough to give trouble to that fireteam is going to flatly decimate a penal unit without that unit accomplishing anything except perhaps clearing out the odd antipersonnel mine or two - which in an era of densitometers is much more easily and cheaply accomplished by other means. Now we're envisioning that an Imperium with TL15 Marines, TL14-15 Army, space-capable Colonial units of TL10-15, space-capable mercenaries of TL10-15, and megacorp private "security" forces likely equipped to TL14-15 standards at the elite levels, finds a need to draft Imperial prisoners into penal battalions to deal with low-tech opposition when even a megacorp's security team renders the low-tech opponent as effective as a bunch of rock-throwing teenagers facing off against tanks?
A penal batallion of unbelievers backed by a platoon of Paladin enforcers on a world ruled by Xeno-pope Fillindablank and his faithful, sent in to brutally quash a rural revolt of heretics, I can see that. The Imperium drafting a penal batallion when a few well-equipped Sternmetal security men, coordinated by a cutter with a turret laser and good sensor tech hovering up around 50,000 feet, can eat TL6 infantry companies for breakfast - that one I have trouble with.
Imperial-level penal batallions aren't worth the effort. Why send them to accomplish exactly nothing when you can watch them struggle for life doing hard labor on some barren corrosive-atmosphere world? A better use for that sort would be to offer them a voluntary enlistment in the Imperial Marines where, if they don't wash out in training and get sent back, they're dispersed among and jacketed by fiercely dedicated professionals who will see to it that they too remain fiercely dedicated - or go back to their sentence on the corrosive world, or face a battlefield drumhead and summary execution. Those that wouldn't accept that deal, you probably don't want them in a penal batallion anyway.
epicenter00
SOC-13
This is probably going to prove more controversial, but the "Imperium" might not necessarily care where they come from.
There's a tendency to look at an organization like the Imperium in monolithic terms with the Emperor at the top and the people at the bottom. However, given it is a feudal society, problems that can be handled by low level nobles would stay there; the Emperor neither has the time or resources to really look into everything.
In canon, nobles have committed various excesses. Now follows MTU-style conjecture, but I think there's many other nobles who do similar things but it never mushrooms to the point where it attracts the wrong kind of attention. Provided the nobles over you are satisfied everyone sort of overlooks small things that a given noble or nobles do in their fiefs.
Now these fiefs might cover an entire planet.
The noble administration of a world may have various reasons why prisoners end up in penal battalions all based on local law and custom with reasons ranging from political agitation, being unemployed/debtors, having the 'wrong' political or religious beliefs, or whatever. They'd be relatively inexpensive to train, could be passed off as "mercenaries" when fighting on a nearby world (or in-system, or even on the same world, especially on balkanized worlds).
They reason why they're "Imperial" when the purposes they're fighting for are probably purely local is that the nobles who deployed them are part of the Imperial power structure and technically act in the Emperor's name. Penal Battalions in this case certainly would not be fighting with the Imperial Sunburst on their uniforms or claiming a nation in the "name of the Iridium Throne."
I won't argue any of that because that's true.
However, I personally don't believe that such high-tech is actually as easy to get a hold of or as common as is often presented. YMMV. I'm aware that such hardware, looking at game supplements is pretty cheap but I've always believed that's the price "players" pay for such gear, not everyone else. Players can actually visit some ideal "TL15 world with a low Law Level" or "getting cozy with the Scout supply sergeant" to get the gear they want.
A noble whose fief is a part of some TL5 world would have significantly more difficulty getting the goods in question, especially if noble doesn't have some ideal situation where he/she controls the entire world and gets "taxes" from the world's GDP. Trying to work within the constraints of the resources he or she has, perhaps calling in favors from the noble who sits next to him in the Moot who happens to have a fiefdom on a restive High-Population, High Law Level world one or two Jumps away leads to arrangements, the kind of back-room dealing that I'd think would be very common in a relatively diffuse, decentralized state like the Imperium.
The Imperium is referred to as a feudal structure on several occasions, but as its workings are described, it isn't one. It's an autocracy with pseudo-feudal trappings. The dukes are more like hereditary royal governors of Age of Sail European empires. The lesser nobles are more like a labor pool from which the high-ranking Imperial jobs are filled. Some of the nobles (the high nobles) have hereditary jobs, but the job isn't to rule anything -- many high nobles don't rule the worlds they're associated with and when they do, it is usually because they have two hats, one as planetary ruler and the other as high noble.
That said, you're right about local problems being (supposed to be) handled by low level nobles assigned to handle local problems.
The only Imperial fiefs the size of an entire world are those given to archdukes. Lesser nobles who own entire worlds (such as Leonard of Aramis who owns the world of Lewis[*] and is Baron of Lewis) are usually either nobles because they own a world or own a world because they have been in a position to acquire one with or without the clout bestowed by their title. There may be exceptions, but if there are, they are just that, exceptions to the general custom.
[*] Or would if an ancestor hadn't sold bits of it to others, who thereby acquired various rights that Leonard has had to employ shenanigans to circumvent, demonstrating his lack of de jure authority over people living on "his" world.
Hans
Depends on your definition of success. The Soviets had good success, but then their penals often only had the job of simply charging ahead of the main body, setting off mines with their feet. In that role, you either die by the hand of the commissar or by blowing up, or you're incredibly lucky - which didn't help because you'd repeat the task in the next battle and the battle after that until your luck ran out. They had other penals that they promised paroles to if the prisoner survived X number of battles, but then they'd transfer the prisoner to a mine-clearing unit when he got close, so they weren't really looking for anyone to graduate.
Worked reasonably well for the Soviets - less so for the prisoner, of course.
I don't see much controversy here. If you actually find a use for a penal batallion, the Imperium (or the lower level noble in question) could buy condemned prisoners from planetary governments and apply them to its own purposes. Great way to support the planetary governments and keep the prison population down, not to mention a dandy incentive to avoid getting the kind of sentence that gets you sold to the Imperium.
I'm just having trouble seeing combat as a use. Medical research, sure. Live-fire targets for your troops, if your Imperium is particularly ruthless, sure. Armed combat, that's a bit harder for me to see given the effort and expense of transporting people from A to B - it can be cheaper to ship a very small and expensive team from system to system than it would be to ship a very large cheaply equipped team, partly because you just don't need as much ship to do the job.
I don't think a megacorp's going to have much trouble on that front, and frankly I don't see an enfeoffed Imperial noble having much difficulty either. And, the cost of a penal battalion, its provisions and equipment, and the shipping cost for shipping the lot system to system - even at low berth rates - could just about equip a small commando team.
I'm not saying there aren't circumstances favoring establishment of a penal combat unit using local prisoners drafted from that world itself - whether by the planetary government or some level of Imperial authority. However, at that point we aren't sending penal troops down to a world from elsewhere; we're drafting local auxiliaries to supplement whatever regulars we're sending down.
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
I would have to say no on this one (in the OTU, anyway). The 3I seems to have a big problem with slavery, and that would definitely qualify. In YTU, of course, the nasty ol' Imperium can do exactly that sort of thing - but not in canon.
That one would probably trigger the Imperium's anti-slavery stance. Possibly not, as one could provide a legal fig leaf in the form of transferrable indentures. OTOH, I think trading in indentures might in itself be a trigger, since there would inevitably have been historical examples of societies that tried to circumvent the slavery ban by the use of various legal shenanigans, the trade of indentures being an obvious one.
I believe that any time money is involved in the transfer of a human being from one authority to another, red flags will be raised and Imperial do-gooders will investigate.
Hans
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
*chuckle* So, Hans, which one is it? It was the selling of the prisoners that triggered my comment (and why I quoted the portion I did - the exact same portion you did).
It's one or the other. Or both. Or neither.
The way I see it, the Imperial ban is on chattel slavery. However, Imperial judges interpret that to include any practice that is "tantamount to slavery". And that opens the door for different interpretations of similar practices. And sometimes the only formal difference can be that one practice is acceptable and the other isn't. Would the Imperium intervene in the trading of players between sports clubs? Probably not.
One concept that I like to promote is the amount of differences that can be between one duchy and another. Sure, the Imperium provides a framework that all the duchies have to work within. But within that framework, I see the duchies as having a lot of leeway. And the duchy administrations are also 'Imperial'. To the member worlds, there's probably little perceived difference between the Regular Imperial Service Of Your Choice and the corresponding Ducal service. But one duke may be in cahoots with Big Business against the Imperial Ministry of Conservation while another duke is concerned enough about conservation that he funds a Duchy of Wherever Conservation Bureau that is a lot more active than the Ministry.
So will it be (in my conception) with anti-slavery. Some duchies will accept practices that will be ruthlessly suppressed in other duchies. Though none of them will accept outright chattel slavery.
(The purpose of such ambiguity? To allow referees to select a nondescript duchy of their own and customize it.)
Hans
It's one or the other. Or both. Or neither.
One concept that I like to promote is the amount of differences that can be between one duchy and another. Sure, the Imperium provides a framework that all the duchies have to work within. But within that framework, I see the duchies as having a lot of leeway. And the duchy administrations are also 'Imperial'. To the member worlds, there's probably little perceived difference between the Regular Imperial Service Of Your Choice and the corresponding Ducal service. But one duke may be in cahoots with Big Business against the Imperial Ministry of Conservation while another duke is concerned enough about conservation that he funds a Duchy of Wherever Conservation Bureau that is a lot more active than the Ministry.
So will it be (in my conception) with anti-slavery. Some duchies will accept practices that will be ruthlessly suppressed in other duchies. Though none of them will accept outright chattel slavery.
Hans
Hi Hans,
I agree with you, if you consider Traveller as similar to the 17/19th Century communication wise you can have a situation similar to where the Governor of India invades Afghanistan in direct opposition to Central Government policy and central Government are forced to despatch more troops to save face.
Also given the high number of low tech worlds you would have tons of yokels joining up to escape their barren existence at home. Whilst not 'penal', I could see them been formed into expendable military units to use against low teach world at the edge of the Imperium.
I think this would be especially common in the Spinwards Marches with lots of independant worlds and no Sector Duke to control the Sub-Sector Dukes.
Agree the Mega Corps could play the Dukes off against each other as well.
Not so likely closer to the Imperial hub.
Regards
David
There's a sector Duke - Duchess Delphine of Mora. She's way out of the way, tho....
She's only four jumps -- call it five weeks with jump-6 couriers -- from the furthest subsector duke in the Marches. But sector dukes are not superior to their fellow dukes in their sector; they are merely first among equals. The way I interpret canon (including assuming one reference has a 'sector' misprint for 'subsector') is that the sector duke is the administrative head of all sector-wide Imperial activities but are not in authority over the other dukes in the sector.
Hans
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
While looking through Project Gutenberg, I came across an account of the first fleet to Australia in 1788. The opening to Chapter Two gives the number of convicts and the military escort as well. Might give some ideas for forced settlement in Traveller. The book is A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay by Watkin Tench, Capt. of the Marines, Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, New South Wales, 10 July, 1788.
