Forever Starship Troopers War

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?