What I want from a campaign

[Leitz]

You can also have large organizations, division or larger, but on multiple contracts. That lets the PCs come with a variety of skills. Again, atpollards game does this well and mine attempts it.

 

[Whipsnade]

There are several sources that do give what seems their table of organization.

There's a Hammers TO&E in the 1979 book. It's one of the essays that separate the short stories.

I'll take a position and speculate that a regimental combat team is about as large as you can get independently, as there may be political and internal security reasons not to expand beyond that.

Political, security, and equipment issues. In the Hammers' case, Friesland raised and equipped the regiment to put down a colonial revolt. After successfully putting down the revolt, the regiment then mutinies when Friesland sends national forces to disarm and, presumably, kill them.

The idea that only governments can afford to raise and equipment certain forces is repeated throughout the Hammers series. The Hammers exist because Friesland initially equipped them and then keeps some sort of quasi-official, plausibly deniable relationship with the regiment even after the mutiny. Dutch is the unit's lingua franca, many recruits still come from Friesland, and Hammer officers even attend military academies there.

In both the 1979 essays and other stories in the series several other units are said to have been raised, equipped, and hired out by national governments following the Hessian model. Even the Hammers themselves end up in that role after the Colonel becomes president of Friesland.

The Slammers are armour heavy, Falkenberg's Legion is primarily light infantry, but later revisions give it a more balanced force.

Falkenberg's merc unit initially exists solely through sleight of hand by the CoDo Navy. An entire regiment of marines and their officers are either demobbed or retired and their equipment "lost". The navy then uses the unit to tackle problems the Grand Senate won't allow actual CoDo forces to intervene in. Again, the mercs only exist at the size and capability they do because of official, if secret, support.

Condottieri, probably under a different title, will accept contracts for large scale deployments of disparate mercenary units, and try to create some cohesive field force out of them, whether brigade or close to divisional size. They'll be responsible to their paymaster for the behaviour of troops under their command, and to the troops for working conditions and wages.

You'll see hints and outright references to that in the Hammers series with the Slammers only sometimes acting as the coordinating body. In Paying the Piper the war is slowly being lost because there isn't a coordinating authority.

 

[Condottiere]

I can't speak for the Slammers, but the Legion was originally hand picked cadre from Falkenberg's demobilized regiment, with a severe lack of heavy infantry and support weapons on their first deployment; they made up the numbers with local volunteers, and involuntary survivors of the third Schutzstaffel battalion.

By the time they left Tanith, they seemed fully equipped and overstrength; I'm going to guess that Lermontov would have arranged that surplus military equipment would have found it's way cheaply to the Legion, though an interlude indicates that he's run out of funds to subsidize them.

 

[Timerover51]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I was mainly considering the various editions of Traveller. There is a gap in scale between CT Mercenary and Striker, which go up to battalion-sized units, and T4's Pocket Empires (and the successors thereof). The much-maligned economic rules in Striker don't (to my recollection) cover the full support and logistics requirements ("Lawyers, Guns, and Money") necessary for regimental and larger formations, while Pocket Empires, etc. cover a larger economic scale and do not explicitly scale down that far.

It is a niche campaign format. I'm not all that surprised that it was never explicitly covered in any Traveller edition.

Any decent Table of Organization and Equipment for the World War 2 period would make a good starting place, and those can be found online. TO&Es from the Korean War and a bit later can also be found. A division slice, that is a division with necessary supporting troops, both combat support and combat service support, would run 40,000 men, with 15,000 in the division and 25,000 in support. If you are looking at overall number for troops, then a division in combat in World War 2 would represent about a total of 65,000 men in uniform. That would not count the civilian production base supplying them. That also does not include any transportation service to get them to the combat area.

 

[aramis]

I take it that you're reading the original short story collection? The one with short essays explaining the setting, technology, and so forth? Drake did pattern the arc of Hammer's career after the same condotierre you use as a forum name.

Drake's a lawyer. His undergrad degree with in the classics. He served in Vietnam between college and law school, specifically around the "Parrot's Beak" during the invasion of Cambodia. From the first, his Hammer stories have borrowed events and incidents from classical history. In the later Hammer novels and in the RCN series Drake has stated in his forwards which bits of classical history sparked his imagination.

Drake also started out as a horror writer, quite a well regarded one too. In many ways, I think he still is one. I do now his work is much more than the "gun pron" label many apply to it.



A particularly poor one sadly.

The Hammers have been portrayed in both mini and board wargames. IIRC, there have been a few RPG attempts too. None were satisfactory.

Mongoose's version fails for many reasons, the primary being that it changes the Hammers to fit Traveller rather than changing Traveller to fit the Hammers.

The board games at least abstract out enough (generally) to not so obviously mess up the Powergun...

Which is, itself, an interesting bit of tech...
It can blow up a tank, but is stopped by even a leaf... mind you, that leaf becomes a white hot ball of plasma.