I guess I was introduced to powered
armour by the concept of battledress in Traveller (like a lot of
gamers). It fascinated me enough to read more about it. Difficult
during the 1980's. It lead me to buying Starship Troopers and later
(and more importantly) to The Forever War. When I am talking about
Starship Troopers I refer to the book and not to the films, the
cartoons or the tabletop game. I repeat, it is about the book.
I have been planning to run another
Tomorrow's War game and I thought I would pit a force of the best
power armour I could produce under the game.
In the rulebook PA is already quite
groovy(did I just use the word groovy? Sorry I must be having an
Austin Powers moment). They have double optimum range, grant their
users High Confidence and they can intimidate non-power armoured
troops.I worked on what else they would be equipped with.
They are well trained so I would put
them at a Troop Quality D10 with any special force being a D12 but
these would be rare indeed.
In the books the men inside the suits
are just men. They may have a lot of training but they retain their
human foibles. Their morale could be anywhere between D6 to D10 with
D8 and D10 being more typical.
Again the books show some variation in
confidence but they would be Confident or Highly Confident as the
rulebook suggests.
Supply would probably be High but could
be lower if the situation dictated it. Troopers have weapons built
into the suit which seem to have a pretty much unlimited ammunition.
In terms of Tech Level it is the
ultimate armour so it would be TL3 and it follows that they would be
On Grid. I would imagine that they would be trained to fight without
being On Grid as required so may be Old School as well.
In The Forever War the suits have
Active Trauma Treatment systems built into the suits. It might need a
different casualty treatment system as the system described is pretty
brutal but at least you will live through the battle. It would
probably mean that any casualty would be out of the right for the
duration.
Obviously they are heavy power armour
giving them a 3D defence dice. I would also argue that the suit would
make them Hard to Kill. I could make an argument for the armour
having Skeletal Augmentation to make them even tougher.
Suits seem to have low light/thermal
vision (NVG) so would be considered to have Augmented Sense. To
counter the other peoples senses they have suits with either
adaptable camouflage or a chameleon function.
There is even an argument to give each
trooper light support weapon status upping their fire power.
Inspiring is something in the book that
I would chose not to put in. In the books everyone wears PA so they
couldn't really inspire each other.
Now this may look a little like a
panzer pixies wet dream but I ask you to bear with me whilst I
justify myself. In both books and in particular Starship Troopers,
humanity faces massive numbers of aliens. Human soldiers arrive in
small numbers ad tend to be spread fairly thinly. I cannot imagine
that there are many of them being on the tabletop. The bigger the PA
force the bigger the required enemy force. This means that forces
heavily invested in PA will generally loose the initiative. A squad
of high tech PA could be taking on a platoon or even a company of low
tech poorly equipped troopers and still be looking at giving them a
bloody nose.
Anyone got any thoughts?
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