What's your favorite BattleDress?
- Thread starter Magnus von Thornwood
- Start date
Hum, Talk about a game and supplement I hadn't thought about in years. Now I am going to have to figure which box it's in.....
I have this Post Apocalyptic Salvage type game in the back of my head, where all the PCs have Powered Armour....
ThunderChilde
SOC-13
Living Steel perchance?
EXPLETIVE NO! Not that Horror show of a game. More of a odd sideways shift of Pulvers Reign of Steel written for Gurps, but using my Current offshoot of CT and MgT.
ThunderChilde
SOC-13
My pardon, I thought you were asking about a dimly remembered PA post Armageddon style game. Living Steel was the such game I know of.
Naw it's more the the odd little ducklings randomly careening around my head.
That suit is Ironmans Hulkbuster designed by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. The Hulbuster actually goes on over Ironmans standard armor, and can be rebuilt in the field during combat by a nearby flying platform. I would say in any traveller terms TL15 at least There is an online video showing it in combat with the hulk and it recieving in combat repairs.
BD not BDU.
Still, you are right it's a cool battle dress uniform.
Battle Dress Uniform is not what I meant about favorite BattleDress, I meant powered armor. ≤****≥ :devil:
Still, you are right it's a cool battle dress uniform.
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Jetrock
SOC-8
Traveller battledress drew most directly from Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", which was a gadget-laden walking tank with a wide variety of weapons, including small nuclear missiles in a shoulder mounted Y-rack, equipped with jump jets, enhanced strength and tough armor. But that fancy suit could still very easily become an expensive coffin for a trooper who didn't act like a regular soft-skinned grunt on the battlefield and duck when people are shooting at you. Especially since Traveller came out not long after the Avalon Hill "Starship Troopers" boardgame, featuring very 1970s looking battledress that looks like this: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3214.jpg
Battledress IMTU is rare and special, coveted by Marine vets and feared by most others. The squad of battledress-armored Marines is a good way to encourage PC behavior with little (or at least less) argument and discourages too-obvious forms of bad behavior. I have a soft spot for Marine battledress, and while it's totally archaic and soap-opera, the Marine-issue cutlass with battledress makes a sort of sense to me in boarding actions, where the suit's enhanced strength lets a cutlass slice through enemy crew's vacc suits without unnecessarily damaging bridge controls with superheated plasma, coherent light and HEAP rounds.
Unarmored troops fighting battledress troops work basically like infantry fighting armor: hide behind things, smoke and other obscuration techniques, control their approach, and have teams with designated anti-armor weapons. Even a TL 8-9 trooper with an ACR can crack open battledress with a 4cm RAM GL, if they can get the drop on the BD armored trooper. And you can put a lot of grunts on the field with those RAM grenades for the cost of a squad of battledress, whose high-penetration weapons are better suited to suppressing APCs than low-armored troops.
When PCs get battledress, because it's rare and hard to get it becomes a maintenance headache--and weapons that can penetrate battledress tend to have bad and permanent effects on PC survivability.
Battledress IMTU is rare and special, coveted by Marine vets and feared by most others. The squad of battledress-armored Marines is a good way to encourage PC behavior with little (or at least less) argument and discourages too-obvious forms of bad behavior. I have a soft spot for Marine battledress, and while it's totally archaic and soap-opera, the Marine-issue cutlass with battledress makes a sort of sense to me in boarding actions, where the suit's enhanced strength lets a cutlass slice through enemy crew's vacc suits without unnecessarily damaging bridge controls with superheated plasma, coherent light and HEAP rounds.
Unarmored troops fighting battledress troops work basically like infantry fighting armor: hide behind things, smoke and other obscuration techniques, control their approach, and have teams with designated anti-armor weapons. Even a TL 8-9 trooper with an ACR can crack open battledress with a 4cm RAM GL, if they can get the drop on the BD armored trooper. And you can put a lot of grunts on the field with those RAM grenades for the cost of a squad of battledress, whose high-penetration weapons are better suited to suppressing APCs than low-armored troops.
When PCs get battledress, because it's rare and hard to get it becomes a maintenance headache--and weapons that can penetrate battledress tend to have bad and permanent effects on PC survivability.
Jetrock
SOC-8
That's a ridiculously good point--the canonical anti-tank grenade is intended for launching at tank-sized objects, and even then a hit is dicey. A man-sized target is no easy feat for a GL, especially the single-shot variety.
But you can add laser guidance to any CPR round for Cr400-1000, which lets direct or indirect CPR gun rounds strike the target directly instead of being within a beaten zone. An ACR has a built-in laser rangefinder that can be used to paint targets, so I assume it's suitable for designating a laser-guided CPR round like a 4cm RAM GL. Thus, I'd assume that the squad's designated "can opener" is equipped with laser-guided RAM GL rounds. It makes taking out battledress a little more challenging, and if your designated anti-battledress trooper becomes a subject of interest for the Marines plasma and fusion guns, the rest of the squad just kind of has to "spray and pray" with their unguided GL rounds, or get very, very close to the guys with fusion weaponry, built-in sensor packages, and (depending on your Traveller universe) hyperdense cutlasses... Nobody said taking on the Imperial Marines was going to be easy!
But you can add laser guidance to any CPR round for Cr400-1000, which lets direct or indirect CPR gun rounds strike the target directly instead of being within a beaten zone. An ACR has a built-in laser rangefinder that can be used to paint targets, so I assume it's suitable for designating a laser-guided CPR round like a 4cm RAM GL. Thus, I'd assume that the squad's designated "can opener" is equipped with laser-guided RAM GL rounds. It makes taking out battledress a little more challenging, and if your designated anti-battledress trooper becomes a subject of interest for the Marines plasma and fusion guns, the rest of the squad just kind of has to "spray and pray" with their unguided GL rounds, or get very, very close to the guys with fusion weaponry, built-in sensor packages, and (depending on your Traveller universe) hyperdense cutlasses... Nobody said taking on the Imperial Marines was going to be easy!
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I do have a sick love for the BD/Cutlass Marine, yes I do.
If it's wrong, I don't wanna be right.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Shrug. I look at it as TL8+ RPGs, slimmed down and made lethal for the rifle set, rather then the crew-served support or rifle add-on for area damage/denial of the TL6-7 types.
Another way to think of it is to consider my personal low tech tincan opener, the Mercenary Light Assault Gun (TL8 antitank rifle).
In both cases they are weapons designed for penetrating light tanks, and so BD would be right in that ballpark of protection- and require similar weapon classes to defeat.
As for favorite BD, I just go CT BD, add on doohickies heisted from the aforementioned Cyberpunk armor book along with relevant 2300 kit, and otherwise use a robot chassis with Striker type add ons for the player with personal two legged light tank ambitions.
Oh, and as for game balance-
things break.
Expensive things.
<EBIL REFEREE LAUGH INSERTED>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRamB30E9mU
Jetrock
SOC-8
Thinking about the "designated squad can opener" approach to riflemen vs. battledress. Using a RAM grenade launcher for indirect fire lets the rest of the squad (using ACRs) paint battledress troops with their ACRs' integral lasers while the guy with the expensive laser-guided grenades sits behind something solid and FGMP-15 proof (and, presumably, cutlass-proof.)
I prefer having everyone with a few rifle grenades, but use your designation approach; the beams are coded, though, otherwise fire distribution gets spotty.
That being said, the time of flight of a high arc rifle grenade allows the shooter to lase his target, for a ballistic solution, launch the grenade to get into the necessary footprint, then designate in time for a dead-on hit of a moving target.
But why anyone prefers an ACR to a gauss rifle escapes me....
I prefer having everyone with a few rifle grenades, but use your designation approach; the beams are coded, though, otherwise fire distribution gets spotty.
That being said, the time of flight of a high arc rifle grenade allows the shooter to lase his target, for a ballistic solution, launch the grenade to get into the necessary footprint, then designate in time for a dead-on hit of a moving target.
But why anyone prefers an ACR to a gauss rifle escapes me....
Realistic answer: longer service duration in combat before barrel degradation results in non-fire. (Railguns tend to be useful for only a few hundred to few thousand rounds before replacement of the rails is needed. Firearms, the barrel mass is higher, but so is the service life - several hundred thousand rounds.) A worn barrel will still fire; worn rails might not, and the arcing will hasten their degradation.
A service rifle can see (if assigned to a training unit) thousands of rounds per month. (We put easily 2000 rounds downrange in one month of rifle training at Ft. Dix.)
IMTU I treat it like a sort of light armoured vehicle. It's a platform for support weapons and it's something that you deploy in a fire team with a couple of unpowered infantry to mind the operator's back.
So it's big, clunky, pretty obvious and a lacking in subtlety for anything but a frontal assault. I wouldn't say I disallow it, but it's not something you would expect to wear around every day.
I'm pretty sure that Gauss Rifles are meant to be coil guns. The description in Book 4 pretty strongly implies it anyway.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Got to thinking through the battle dress vs. LAG/RAMGL issue, and I think I have a partial 'classic solution' for our armored knights.
The body shield.
Should be at least as thick as the BD itself and since mobility is not a factor and the powered stuff allows for heavy lifting, arguably the shield could be heavier.
Don't know what mechanism you gents would prefer, perhaps having to roll success twice? -X to hit? Target rated as behind a building or vehicle to hit?
But it certainly seems logical accoutrement to people having to work in a heavy firepower environment.
The body shield.
Should be at least as thick as the BD itself and since mobility is not a factor and the powered stuff allows for heavy lifting, arguably the shield could be heavier.
Don't know what mechanism you gents would prefer, perhaps having to roll success twice? -X to hit? Target rated as behind a building or vehicle to hit?
But it certainly seems logical accoutrement to people having to work in a heavy firepower environment.
