The Friesland colony
16-09-2006, 20:39
OOC: This is primarily a military referance, but will also contain history, and is open to comments. And kudos to David Drake for almost all the following, and the South London Warlords for the rest.
History
Backdrop to Chaos
The mercenary companies of the late Third Millennium were both a result of and a response to a spurt of empire-building among the new industrial giants of the human galaxy. Earth's first flash of colonization had been explosive. Transit was an expensive proposition for trade or tourism; but on a national scale, a star colony was just as possible as the high-rise Palace of Government which even most of the underdeveloped countries had built for the sake of prestige.
And colonies were definitely a matter of prestige. The major powers had them. So, just as Third World countries had squandered their resources on jet fighters in the twentieth century (and on ironclads in the nineteenth), they bought or leased or even built starships in the twenty-first. These colonies were almost invariably mono-national, under-capitalized, and stratified by class even more rigidly than were their mother countries. All of those factors affected later galactic history. There was a plethora of suitable words on which to plant colonies, however, so that even the most ineptly-handled groups of settlers generally managed to survive. Theirs was a hand-to-mouth survival of farming and barter, though, not of spaceports shipping vast quantities of minerals and protein back to Earth.
A few of the better-backed colonies did become very successful. Most of them had been spawned by the larger nations, though a few were private ventures (including that of the Dutch consortium which founded Friesland). Success left their backers in the same situation of those whose colonies were barely surviving, however, since the first result of planetary self-sufficiency was invariably to cut ties and find the best prices available for manufactures on the open market.
There followed a spate of secondary colonization from the successful colony worlds. These new colonies were planted with a specific product in mind: a mineral; a drug; sometimes simply agriculture, freeing more valuable real estate on the homeworlds. Even a planet could be filled in a few centuries by the asymptotic population growth which empty spaces seem to engender in human beings. Secondary colonies were frequently joint efforts, combining settlers and capital from several worlds. They were a business proposition, after all, not matters of national honor.
Unfortunately for the concept, the newly-mixed national and racial groups got along just as badly as their ancestors had a few centuries earlier on Earth. The planetary governments of Hiroseke and Stewart, for instance, conferred placidly with each other; but in the iridium-mining colony they had founded together on Kalan, Japanese and Scotsmen were shooting at each other within five years.
The new colonizers had thought they would be able to control their colonies without military force. Their own experience had taught them to control space transport to the new colonies. Without the ability to sell its produce in markets of its own choice, a colony could not strike off on its own—as the homeworlds had themselves done.
But a colony could be forced into a pattern of logical subservience only if its populace was willing to be logical. If instead the settlers decided to eat their own guts out through internal warfare, the colony would become as commercially valueless as Germany in 1648. Inevitably, homeworlds attempted through military force to control and unify their colonies; also inevitably, they increased the disruption by their activities.
And even if some sort of a military solution was imposed, there remained the question of how to deal with the defeated troublemakers—however they were defined—to avoid a new outbreak of fighting. Ideally, they could be used as expendables in battles elsewhere. It was a course which had been followed with success often in the past—Germans in French Indo-China in 1948, and Scots borderers in Ulster in 1605, for two examples. The course required that there be other battles to fight—but there were other unruly colonies as well as backwater worlds whose produce would be useful if it could be controlled at acceptable cost. Perhaps the first case of this occurred in 2414 when Monument equipped four thousand Sikh rebels from Ramadan and shipped them to Portales to take over that planet's tobacco trade, but there were many other examples later.
And in any case, there was always someone willing to hire soldiers, somewhere. World after world armed its misfits and sent them off to someone else's backyard, to attack or defend, to kill or die—so long as they were not doing it at home. Because of the pattern of colonization, there were only a few planets that were not so tense that they might snap into bloody war if mercenaries from across the galaxy were available.
Even for the stable elite of worlds, Friesland and Kronstad, Ssu-ma and Wylie, the system was a losing proposition. Wars and the warriors they spawned were short-term solutions, binding the industrial worlds into a fabric of short-term solutions. In the long run, off-world markets were destroyed, internal investment was channeled into what were basically non-productive uses, and the civil populace became restive in the omnipresence of violence and a foreign policy directed toward its continuance.
On rural worlds, the result was nothing so subtle as decay. It was life and society shattered forever by the sledge of war.
The Bonding Authority
Wars result when one side either misjudges its chances or wishes to commit suicide; and not even Masada began as a suicide attempt. In general, both warring parties expect to win. In the event, they are wrong more than half the time.
Employing mercenaries adds new levels of uncertainty to the already risky business of war. Too often in history a mercenary force has disappeared a moment before the battle; switched sides for a well-timed bribe; or even conquered its employer and brought about the very disasters it was hired to prevent.
Mercenaries, for their part, face the chances common to every soldier of being killed by the enemy. In addition, however, they must reckon with the possibility of being bilked of their pay or massacred to avoid its payment; of being used as cannon fodder by an employer whose distaste for "money-grubbing aliens" may exceed the enemy's; or of being abandoned far from home when defeat or political change erases their employer or his good will. As Xenophon and the Ten Thousand learned, in such circumstances the road home may be long—or as short as a shallow grave.
A solution to both sets of special problems was made possible by the complexity of galactic commerce. The recorded beginnings came early in the twenty-seventh century when several planets caught up in the Confederation Wars used the Terran firm of Felchow und Sohn as an escrow agent for their mercenarys' pay. Felchow was a commercial banking house which had retained its preeminence even after Terran industry had been in some measure supplanted by that of newer worlds. Neither Felchow nor Terra herself had any personal stake in the chaotic rise and fall of the Barnard Confederation; thus the house was the perfect neutral to hold the pay of the condottieri being hired by all parties. Payment was scrupulously made to mercenaries who performed according to their contracts. This included the survivors of the Dalhousie debacle who were able to buy passage off that ravaged world, despite the fact that less than ten percent of the populace which had hired them was still alive. Conversely, the pay of Wrangel's Legion, which had refused to assault the Confederation drop zone on Montauk, was forfeited to the Montauk government. The Third Armistice intervened and Wrangel's troops were hunted across the face of the planet by both sides, too faithless to use and too dangerous to ignore.
Felchow und Sohn had performed to the satisfaction of all honest parties when first used as an intermediary. Over the next three decades the house was similarly involved in other conflicts, a passive escrow agent and paymaster. It was only after the Ariete Incident of 2662 that the concept coalesced into the one stable feature of a galaxy at war.
The Ariete, a division recruited mostly from among the militias of the Aldoni System, was hired by the rebels on Paley. Their pay was banked with Felchow, since the rebels very reasonably doubted that anyone would take on the well-trained troops of the Republic of Paley if they had already been handed the carrot. But the Ariete fought very well indeed, losing an estimated thirty percent of its effectives before surrendering in the final collapse of the rebellion. The combat losses have to be estimated because the Republican forces, in defiance of the "Laws of War" and their own promises before the surrender, butchered all their fifteen or so thousand mercenary prisoners.
Felchow und Sohn, seeing an excuse for an action which would raise it to incredible power, reduced Paley to Stone Age savagery.
An industrialized world (as Paley was) is an interlocking whole. Off-planet trade may amount to no more than five percent of its GDP; but when that trade is suddenly cut off, the remainder of the economy resembles a car lacking two pistons. It may make whirring sounds for a time, but it isn't going anywhere.
Huge as Felchow was, a single banking house could not have cut Paley off from the rest of the galaxy. When Felchow, however, offered other commercial banks membership in a cartel and a share of the lucrative escrow business, the others joined gladly and without exception. No one would underwrite cargoes to or from Paley; and Paley, already wracked by a war and its aftermath, shuddered down into the slag heap of history.
Lucrative was indeed a mild word for the mercenary business. The escrowed money itself could be put to work, and the escrowing bank was an obvious agent for the other commercial transactions needed to run a war. Mercenaries replaced equipment, recruited men, and shipped themselves by the thousands across the galaxy. The new banking cartel served those needs smoothly—and maximized its own profits.
With the banks' new power came a new organization. The expanded escrow operations were made the responsibility of a Bonding Authority, still based in Bremen but managed independently of the cartel itself. The Authority's fees were high. In return, its Contracts Department was expert in preventing expensive misunderstandings from arising, and its investigative staff could neither be bribed nor deluded by a violator. Under the Authority's ruthless nurture, the business of war became as regular as any other commercial endeavor, and more profitable than most.
The Slammers
The armoured regiment usually known by its nickname of The Slammers started as the Friesland Auxiliary Regiment, raised to fight on Melpomone, an agricultural colony under the control of Friesland. Friesland had originally been a speculative colony set up by Dutch entrepreneurs. When its GNP matched that of Holland, it declared UDI and bought out the shares of the original cartel at 2 cents on the Euro. Like most colonies, Friesland was heavily class-stratified with the ruling families of the Great Houses drawn from the ranks of those that had owned key resources in the original colony.
Friesland was stable and prosperous, so it could afford the finest military equipment from the arms industry on Earth. However, its military suffered from the twin disadvantages of a severe lack of combat experience and the fact that entry to the military academy and promotion in the officer corps depended to a great degree on family connections. These problems proved critical when Melpomone rebelled.
Melpomone produced a cash crop, the bluebright plants whose biochemistry was the source of a popular stim-drug. Bluebright farmers got wheat-prices for a crop that made the owners of Friesland shipping and chemical companies very rich. Twelve regiments of regulars failed to put down the inevitable rebellion.
Colonel Hammer was Executive Officer of the prestigious Guards Of The Republic, one of the handful of men who had achieved rank in the regiment on professional merit rather than aristocratic lineage. To his contemporaries' horror, he volunteered to leave the Guard to outfit and command a regiment of foederati recruited from soldiers with combat experience from all over human space. The Slammers did what the regulars could not do, crushed the rebellion and incidentally earned themselves a reputation for ruthless efficiency in the process.
It was always understood that the Auxiliary Regiment would be disbanded when the rebellion was over and its troopers granted Friesland citizenship as a reward. However Secretary to the Council of State Tromp, who ran Friesland, regarded promises made to foreign mercenaries as worthless and resolved to execute the Slammers now their usefulness had ended. To this end, he landed a full armoured regiment of Guards on Melpomone to control the Starport and disarm the mercenaries.
The Slammers launched a lethal set piece attack on the Starport, annihilating the Guards in 13 terror-filled minutes of firepower. The next day the Slammers lifted in rented freighters and began their career as a high-end mercenary unit. They were perhaps the first but they were not to be the last.
A well-deserved reputation for pitiless competence followed Colonel Hammer's Slammers over nearly three decades of near continuous warfare. Friesland itself was not immune to the political instability that dogged human space. President Smol of the Council had been little more than Secretary Tromp's puppet and after the Secretary's unfortunate death at Melpomone various factions manoeuvred for control. Van Vorn finally assumed the Presidency arousing simmering hostility from a faction led by Counsellor Theismann.
Thiessman eventually rebelled when Van Vorn declared himself President-For–Life and the Counsellor hired the Slammer's to make him Dictator. Van Vorn poisoned himself after the Slammer's broke the Iron Guard at New Wageningen. Unfortunately, Thiessman walked into a stray round leaving Hammer to assume the Presidency. He legitimised his position by marrying Lady Anneke Tromp, daughter of the late Secretary Tromp, and the Slammers were out of the mercenary business. The regiment was now officially the 1st Armoured Cavalry of the Friesland Defence Force.
But our story does not stop here. Hammer immediately set about improving the military to the prestigious standards of his personal regiment. While the majority of the Friedland military is land-bound, three new armoured cavalry regiments based on the Slammers succesful TOE have been equipped for expeditionary operations with a satellite interface capability, armoured battalion landers, and an FTL capable troop transport ship.
And now, these have been deployed as mercenaries once again, as training and to supplement Friesland's income for more ambitious operations...
The military
Supertanks
Tanks were born in the muck and wire of World War One. Less than sixty years later, there were many who believed that technology had made the behemoths as obsolete as horse cavalry. Individual infantrymen of 1970 carried missiles whose warheads burned through the armor of any tank. Slightly larger missiles ranged kilometers to blast with pinpoint accuracy vehicles costing a thousand times as much. Similar weaponry was mounted on helicopters which skimmed battlefields in the nape of the earth, protected by terrain irregularities. At the last instant the birds could pop up to rip tanks with their missiles. The future of armored vehicles looked bleak and brief.
Technology had dragged the tank to the brink of abandonment. Not surprisingly, it was technology again which brought the panzers back. The primary breakthrough was the development of portable fusion power plants. Just as the gasoline engine with its high horsepower-to-weight ratio had been necessary before the first tanks could take the field, so the fusion unit's almost limitless output was required to move the mass which made the new supertanks viable. Fusion units were bulky and moderately heavy themselves, but loads could be increased on a fusion-powered chassis with almost no degradation of performance. Armor became thick—and thicker. With the whole galaxy available as a source of ores, iridium replaced the less effective steels and ceramics without regard for weight.
Armor alone is not adequate protection. Stationary fortresses can always be battered down—as the French learned in 1940, having forgotten the lesson Caesar taught their ancestors at Alesia two millennia before. Caterpillar treads had given the first tanks cross-country ability; but at the cost of slow speed, frequent breakage, and great vulnerability to attack. Now that power was no longer a factor, even the armored bulk of a tank could be mounted on an air cushion.
The air cushion principle is a very simple one. Fans fill the plenum chamber, a solid-skirted box under a vehicle, with air under pressure. To escape, the air must lift the edges of the skirts off the ground—and with the skirts, the whole vehicle rises. Fans tilt with the velocity and angle of attack of the blades determining the amount and direction of thrust. The vehicle skims over surfaces it does not touch.
On tanks and combat cars, the lift was provided by batteries of fans mounted on the roof of the plenum chamber. Each fan had its own armored nacelle. Mines could still do considerable damage; but while a single broken track block would deadline a tracked vehicle, a wrecked fan only made a blower a little more sluggish.
Successful protection for the supertanks went beyond armor and speed. Wire-guided missiles are still faster, and their sharp-charge warheads can burn holes in any practical thickness of any conceivable material—if they are allowed to hit. Reconnaissance satellites, computer fire control, and powerguns combined to claw missiles out of the air before they were dangerous. The satellites spotted missile launchers usually before they fired and never later than the moment of ignition. Fire control computers, using data from the satellites, locked defensive weaponry on the missiles in microseconds. And a single light-swift tribarrel could hose any missile with enough fire in its seconds of flight to disintegrate it.
Hand-launched, unguided rockets—buzzbombs—were another problem, and in some ways a more dangerous one despite their short range and small bursting charges. Individual infantrymen fired them from such short ranges that not even a computer had time enough to lay a gun on the little rockets. But even here there was an answer—beyond the impossible one of killing every enemy before he came within two hundred meters.
Many armored vehicles were already fitted with a band of anti-personnel directional mines just above the skirts. Radar detonated the mines when an object came within a set distance. Their blast of shrapnel was designed to stop infantry at close quarters. With only slight modification, the system could be adapted against buzzbombs. It was not perfect, since the pellets were far less destructive than powergun bolts, and the mines could not be used in close terrain which would itself set them off. Still, buzzbombs were apt to be ill-aimed in the chaos of battle, and a tank's armor could shrug off all but a direct hit by the small warheads.
So tanks roamed again as lords of battle, gray-gleaming phoenixes on air cushions. Their guns could defeat the thickest armor, their armor could blunt all but the most powerful attacks. They were fast enough to range continents in days, big enough to carry a battery of sensors and weaponry which made them impossible to escape when they hunted. The only real drawback to the supertanks was their price.
A tank's fire control, its precisely metered lift fans, the huge iridium casting that formed its turret—all were constructs of the highest sophistication. In all the human galaxy there were probably no more than a dozen worlds capable of manufacturing war tools as perfect as the panzers of Hammer's tank companies.
But Hammer paid for the best, man and tank alike; and out of them he forged the cutting edge of a weapon no enemy seemed able to stop.
Powerguns
By the 21st century, missile-firing small arms appeared to have reached the pinnacle of their development, and there was nothing on hand to replace them. The mass and velocity of projectiles could be juggled but they could not be increased in sum without a corresponding increase in recoil or backblast. Explosive bullets were very destructive on impact, but they had no penetration beyond the immediate blast radius. An explosive bullet might vaporize a leaf it hit near the muzzle as easily as the intended target down-range, and using explosives in heavy brush was worse than useless because it endangered the shooter.
Lasers, though they had air-defense applications, were not the infantryman's answer either. The problem with lasers was the power source. Guns store energy in the powder charge. A machinegun with one cartridge is just as effective—once—as it is with a thousand-round belt, so the ammunition load can be tailored to circumstances. Man-killing lasers required a four-hundred-kilo fusion unit to drive them. Hooking a laser on line with any less bulky energy source was of zero military effectiveness rather than lesser effectiveness.
Science lent Death a hand in this impasse—as Science has always done, since the day the first wedge became the first knife. Thirty thousand residents of St. Pierre, Martinique, had been killed on May 8, 1902. The agent of their destruction was a "burning cloud" released during an eruption of Mt. Pelee. Popular myth had attributed the deaths to normal volcanic phenomena, hot gases or ash like that which buried Pompeii; but even the most cursory examination of the evidence indicated that direct energy release had done the lethal damage. In 2073, Dr. Marie Weygand, heading a team under contract to Olin-Amerika, managed to duplicate the phenomenon.
The key had come from spectroscopic examination of pre-1902 lavas from Pelee's crater. The older rocks had shown inexplicable gaps among the metallic elements expected there. A year and a half of empirical research followed, guided more by Dr. Weygand's intuition than by the battery of scientific instrumentation her employers had rushed out at the first signs of success. The principle ultimately discovered was of little utility as a general power source—but then, Olin-Amerika had not been looking for a way to heat homes.
Weygand determined that metallic atoms of a fixed magnetic orientation could be converted directly into energy by the proper combination of heat, pressure, and intersecting magnetic fields. Old lava locks its rich metallic burden in a pattern dictated by the magnetic ambiance at the time the flow cools. At Pelee in 1902, the heavy Gauss loads of the new eruption made a chance alignment with the restressed lava of the crater's rim. Matter flashed into energy in a line dictated by the intersection, ripping other atoms free of the basalt matrix and converting them in turn. Below in St. Pierre, humans burned.
When the principle had been discovered, it remained only to refine its destructiveness. Experiments were held with different fuel elements and matrix materials. A copper-cobalt charge in a wafer of microporous polyurethane became the standard, since it appeared to give maximum energy release with the least tendency to scatter. Because the discharge was linear, there was no need of a tube to channel the force as a rifle's barrel does; but some immediate protection from air-induced scatter was necessary for a hand-held weapon. The best barrel material was iridium. Tungsten and osmium were even more refractory, but those elements absorbed a large component of the discharge instead of reflecting it as the iridium did.
To function in service, the new weapons needed to be cooled. Even if a white-hot barrel did not melt, the next charge certainly would vaporize before it could be fired. Liquified gas, generally nitrogen or one of the noble gases which would not themselves erode the metal, was therefore released into the bore after every shot. Multiple barrels, either rotating like those of a Gatling gun or fixed like those of the mitrailleuse, the Gatling's French contemporary, were used to achieve high rates of fire or to fire very high-intensity charges. Personal weapons were generally semi-automatic to keep weight and bulk within manageable limits. Sub-machineguns with large gas reservoirs to fire pistol charges had their uses and advocates, as their bullet-firing predecessors had.
Powerguns—the first usage of the term is as uncertain as that of "gun" itself, though the derivation is obvious—greatly increased the range and destructiveness of the individual soldier. The weapons were so destructive, in fact, that even on most frontier planets their use was limited to homicide. Despite that limited usefulness, factories for the manufacture of powerguns and their ammunition would probably have been early priority items on most worlds—had not that manufacture been utterly beyond the capacity of all but the most highly industrialized planets.
Precision forming of metal as hard as iridium is an incredible task. Gas reservoirs required a nul-conductive sheath if they were not to bleed empty before they even reached the field. If ammunition wafers were rolled out in a fluctuating electronic field, they were as likely to blow out the breech of a weapon or gang-fire in the loading tube as they were to injure a foe. All the planetary pride in the cosmos would not change laws of physics.
Of course, some human cultures preferred alternate weaponry. The seven worlds of the Gorgon Cluster equipped their armies—and a number of mercenary units—with flechette guns for instance. Their hypervelocity osmium projectiles had better short-range penetration than 2 cm powerguns, and they cycled at a very high rate. But the barrels of flechette guns were of synthetic diamond, making them at least as difficult to manufacture as the more common energy weapons.
Because of the expense of modern weapons, would-be combatants on rural worlds often delayed purchasing guns until fighting was inevitable. Then it became natural to consider buying not only the guns but men who were used to them—for powerguns were no luxury to the mercenaries whose lives and pay depended on their skill with the best possible equipment. The gap between a citizen-soldier holding a powergun he had been issued a week before, and the professional who had trained daily for years with the weapon, was a wide one.
Thus if only one side on a poor world hired mercenaries, its victory was assured—numbers and ideology be damned. That meant, of course, that both sides had to make the investment even if it meant mortgaging the planetary income for a decade. Poverty was preferable to what came with defeat.
All over the galaxy, men with the best gifts of Science and no skills but those of murder looked for patrons who would hire them to bring down civilization. Business was good.
The Regiments
First (Presidential Guard) Armoured Cavalry (Hammer's Slammers)
The Slammers utilise a unique organisation where permenant squadrons (battalions) are purely administrative units with an HQ and several identicle companies. In practice, each of the four HQs (combat cars, tanks, infantry, and artillery) commands a composite task force, a generic model being two CC comapnies, one tank company, one infantry company, an artillery battery, plus an engineer platoon, intel team, ARV, AM&S and various signal and medical personell from the HQ squadron. While not technically a part of it, a column of trucks, also from the HQ squadron, invariably brings up the rear.
Table of Organization and Equipment
Sec I: Headquarters Battalion
Except for artillery, all the support elements were grouped for administrative convenience in HQ Battalion. In practice, a large percentage of the strength of these units was parceled out to line squadrons according to need.
a) Headquarters Company—Colonel Hammer and his personal staff, including battalion officers; finance; and a security element. Total: 153 effectives.
b) Maintenance—Capable of handling anything short of full hull rebuilds and internal work on fusion units. Company included nine ARVs, stretched-chassis vehicles with fans at either end; ACVs cannot, of course, be towed. Total: 212 effectives.
c) Communications—Includes not only the staff of Command Central, but the staffs of local headquarters with area responsibilities. Total: 143 effectives.
d) Medical—Twenty-four first line medics with medicomps linked to Central, and a field hospital with full life-support capability. Total: 60 effectives.
e) Supply—455 men and 288 air cushion trucks for local unit supply from spaceport or planetary logistics centers. True aircraft, flying above the nape of the earth, would be suicidally vulnerable to powerguns. Also includes mess and quartermaster functions for task forces.
f) Intelligence—Order of Battle is performed mostly by computer. Imagery Interpretation, study of satellite recce, is in large measure still a human function. There are three mechanical interrogation (i.e., mind probe) teams. Total: 84 effectives.
g) Combat Engineers—Carried out bridging, clearing, mine-sweeping, and very frequently fighting tasks. Formed in three 16-man platoons, each mounted on a pair of tank-chassis Engineer Vehicles. Total: 50 effectives.
Sec II: Combat Cars
Eight combat car troops, each of a command section (one car) and four line platoons. Each platoon contains a command car and five combat cars. Troop total: 100 effectives.
Sec III: Tanks
Four tank troops, each of a command tank and four line platoons. Each line platoon contains four tanks. Troop total: 56 effectives.
Sec IV: Infantry
Four troops, each of four platoons. Each platoon contains four 10-man line squads; two 2-man tribarrel teams (jeep-mounted); one 2-man 100 mm mortar team (jeep-mounted); and a command element. All but Heavy Weapons are on 1-man skimmers. Infantry typically carry 20mm assault powerguns, altough each squad had one buzz-bomb and one grenade launcher. Troop total: 220 effectives.
Sec V: Artillery
Four batteries of self-propelled 200 mm rocket howitzers. Each battery contains six tubes; one command car; and three munitions haulers. Battery total: 46 effectives.
Sec VI: Squadron HQs
All squadrons have an identicle HQ with a four command cars and two command tanks. Total: 22 efectives.
Sec VII: Space support
The regiment is transported by an almost unarmed FTL merchantman, which also carries four Obadiah II armoured task force insertion boats and an Obadiah armoured command command boat. These are effectively droppable buildings: they have no atmospheric manouvre capability. In addition, the ship carries small missiles to disable sattelite networks, some satellites of its own, and a few nuclear support weapons.
Second Armoured Cavalry Regiment (Hell's Dragoons)
The second ACR commisionedby President Hammer is identicle to the Slammers up to company level, where, as a tactical experimant, squadrons are full battle units as outlined above, although HQ elemants remain available for re-assignment.
Third Armoured Cavalry Regiment (Iron Demons)
This unit is completely identicle to the Slammers
Fourth Armoured Cavalry (Thunderwolves)
This unit is identicle to the slammers except that the infantry use CC based IFVs rather than skimmers, another tactical experiment.
Modular Strike Division
The majority of contracts taken out by Friesland suit the ACR perfectly: a tactically flexible, mobile force that packs a punch and can also be used in guerilla and counter-guerilla operations. But after first contact, it was decided to form a larger, more hard-hitting formation in case war with an equal foe became the norm. The MSD is "Modular" because it functions like the ACRs, but a step up, with squadrons and support elements organised under regimental HQs with no permenant organic units. It is "Strike" because all elements are equipped for a full-scale armoured engagment. And it is a "Division" becaus it is considerably larger then the ACRs.
There are nine main assets: three armoured, three infantry, and three artillery squadrons. The fomraer two are designed with maximum interchangability in mind, with the HQ elements and support train identicle. The HQ consists of a battalion command section with two CCs and four jeeps, an HQ company command section with a CC and jeep, a maintanence section with a CC and jeep, a mess section with a truck and trailer, two tanks for the use of officers, a light recon platoon with a CC and five gatling jeeps, a mortar platoon with four CCs, three carrying 200mm mortars, and an assault gun unit with two CCs, three tanks fitted with gauss assault guns, and four trailers. The supply train has an HQ jeep, a maintenance section with jeep and CC, mess and ministration secions with a truck and trailer each, a squadron maintenace platoon with a command jeep, a CC, a light truck, two trucks, two trailers, two ARVs, and two wrecking trucks, and a column with a jeep, light truck, 28 trailers, and 29 trucks. Each tank squadron has either three tank troops (Hq with jeep, two tanks, and an asault gun, mess with truck and trailer, maintenance with jeep, CC, and ARV, and three platoons each with five tanks) and a light troop (identicle, but with light tanks and assault gun), or three infantry troops (Hq with jeep and CC, maintenance with jeep, CC, and trailer, mess with two trucks and two trailers, and three platoons each with HQ squad in CCAPC, two squads in CCACPs, a pair of light mortars in a single heavy jeep intended for a medium mortar, and another heavy jeep with two 30mm tribarrels, and a tank-destroyer platton with a jeep and three CCTDs). Artillery squadrons are identicel too those in the ACR.
In addition to these primary elements there is a medical squadron, usually farmed out into detachments at battalion level, an armoured engineer squadron, and an armoured recon squadron with four armoured recon troops (each HQ with squadron HQ, two jeeps and a CC, maintenance, two CCs, a jeep, and a trailer, and a mess section with a jeep, CC, truck, and two trailers plus three platoons, each three CCs, three gatling jeeps, and three mortar jeeps), a light tank troop as in armoured squadrons, and an artillery support (regimental units usually being occupied or out of range) with an HQ and four platoons, each twoo CCs, two CC based 150mm howitzers, and three trailers.
(Yes, this is a 1944-5 US armoured division with Slammerverse vehicles. Sue me if you must, but I'll take very non-original tech player down with me)
History
Backdrop to Chaos
The mercenary companies of the late Third Millennium were both a result of and a response to a spurt of empire-building among the new industrial giants of the human galaxy. Earth's first flash of colonization had been explosive. Transit was an expensive proposition for trade or tourism; but on a national scale, a star colony was just as possible as the high-rise Palace of Government which even most of the underdeveloped countries had built for the sake of prestige.
And colonies were definitely a matter of prestige. The major powers had them. So, just as Third World countries had squandered their resources on jet fighters in the twentieth century (and on ironclads in the nineteenth), they bought or leased or even built starships in the twenty-first. These colonies were almost invariably mono-national, under-capitalized, and stratified by class even more rigidly than were their mother countries. All of those factors affected later galactic history. There was a plethora of suitable words on which to plant colonies, however, so that even the most ineptly-handled groups of settlers generally managed to survive. Theirs was a hand-to-mouth survival of farming and barter, though, not of spaceports shipping vast quantities of minerals and protein back to Earth.
A few of the better-backed colonies did become very successful. Most of them had been spawned by the larger nations, though a few were private ventures (including that of the Dutch consortium which founded Friesland). Success left their backers in the same situation of those whose colonies were barely surviving, however, since the first result of planetary self-sufficiency was invariably to cut ties and find the best prices available for manufactures on the open market.
There followed a spate of secondary colonization from the successful colony worlds. These new colonies were planted with a specific product in mind: a mineral; a drug; sometimes simply agriculture, freeing more valuable real estate on the homeworlds. Even a planet could be filled in a few centuries by the asymptotic population growth which empty spaces seem to engender in human beings. Secondary colonies were frequently joint efforts, combining settlers and capital from several worlds. They were a business proposition, after all, not matters of national honor.
Unfortunately for the concept, the newly-mixed national and racial groups got along just as badly as their ancestors had a few centuries earlier on Earth. The planetary governments of Hiroseke and Stewart, for instance, conferred placidly with each other; but in the iridium-mining colony they had founded together on Kalan, Japanese and Scotsmen were shooting at each other within five years.
The new colonizers had thought they would be able to control their colonies without military force. Their own experience had taught them to control space transport to the new colonies. Without the ability to sell its produce in markets of its own choice, a colony could not strike off on its own—as the homeworlds had themselves done.
But a colony could be forced into a pattern of logical subservience only if its populace was willing to be logical. If instead the settlers decided to eat their own guts out through internal warfare, the colony would become as commercially valueless as Germany in 1648. Inevitably, homeworlds attempted through military force to control and unify their colonies; also inevitably, they increased the disruption by their activities.
And even if some sort of a military solution was imposed, there remained the question of how to deal with the defeated troublemakers—however they were defined—to avoid a new outbreak of fighting. Ideally, they could be used as expendables in battles elsewhere. It was a course which had been followed with success often in the past—Germans in French Indo-China in 1948, and Scots borderers in Ulster in 1605, for two examples. The course required that there be other battles to fight—but there were other unruly colonies as well as backwater worlds whose produce would be useful if it could be controlled at acceptable cost. Perhaps the first case of this occurred in 2414 when Monument equipped four thousand Sikh rebels from Ramadan and shipped them to Portales to take over that planet's tobacco trade, but there were many other examples later.
And in any case, there was always someone willing to hire soldiers, somewhere. World after world armed its misfits and sent them off to someone else's backyard, to attack or defend, to kill or die—so long as they were not doing it at home. Because of the pattern of colonization, there were only a few planets that were not so tense that they might snap into bloody war if mercenaries from across the galaxy were available.
Even for the stable elite of worlds, Friesland and Kronstad, Ssu-ma and Wylie, the system was a losing proposition. Wars and the warriors they spawned were short-term solutions, binding the industrial worlds into a fabric of short-term solutions. In the long run, off-world markets were destroyed, internal investment was channeled into what were basically non-productive uses, and the civil populace became restive in the omnipresence of violence and a foreign policy directed toward its continuance.
On rural worlds, the result was nothing so subtle as decay. It was life and society shattered forever by the sledge of war.
The Bonding Authority
Wars result when one side either misjudges its chances or wishes to commit suicide; and not even Masada began as a suicide attempt. In general, both warring parties expect to win. In the event, they are wrong more than half the time.
Employing mercenaries adds new levels of uncertainty to the already risky business of war. Too often in history a mercenary force has disappeared a moment before the battle; switched sides for a well-timed bribe; or even conquered its employer and brought about the very disasters it was hired to prevent.
Mercenaries, for their part, face the chances common to every soldier of being killed by the enemy. In addition, however, they must reckon with the possibility of being bilked of their pay or massacred to avoid its payment; of being used as cannon fodder by an employer whose distaste for "money-grubbing aliens" may exceed the enemy's; or of being abandoned far from home when defeat or political change erases their employer or his good will. As Xenophon and the Ten Thousand learned, in such circumstances the road home may be long—or as short as a shallow grave.
A solution to both sets of special problems was made possible by the complexity of galactic commerce. The recorded beginnings came early in the twenty-seventh century when several planets caught up in the Confederation Wars used the Terran firm of Felchow und Sohn as an escrow agent for their mercenarys' pay. Felchow was a commercial banking house which had retained its preeminence even after Terran industry had been in some measure supplanted by that of newer worlds. Neither Felchow nor Terra herself had any personal stake in the chaotic rise and fall of the Barnard Confederation; thus the house was the perfect neutral to hold the pay of the condottieri being hired by all parties. Payment was scrupulously made to mercenaries who performed according to their contracts. This included the survivors of the Dalhousie debacle who were able to buy passage off that ravaged world, despite the fact that less than ten percent of the populace which had hired them was still alive. Conversely, the pay of Wrangel's Legion, which had refused to assault the Confederation drop zone on Montauk, was forfeited to the Montauk government. The Third Armistice intervened and Wrangel's troops were hunted across the face of the planet by both sides, too faithless to use and too dangerous to ignore.
Felchow und Sohn had performed to the satisfaction of all honest parties when first used as an intermediary. Over the next three decades the house was similarly involved in other conflicts, a passive escrow agent and paymaster. It was only after the Ariete Incident of 2662 that the concept coalesced into the one stable feature of a galaxy at war.
The Ariete, a division recruited mostly from among the militias of the Aldoni System, was hired by the rebels on Paley. Their pay was banked with Felchow, since the rebels very reasonably doubted that anyone would take on the well-trained troops of the Republic of Paley if they had already been handed the carrot. But the Ariete fought very well indeed, losing an estimated thirty percent of its effectives before surrendering in the final collapse of the rebellion. The combat losses have to be estimated because the Republican forces, in defiance of the "Laws of War" and their own promises before the surrender, butchered all their fifteen or so thousand mercenary prisoners.
Felchow und Sohn, seeing an excuse for an action which would raise it to incredible power, reduced Paley to Stone Age savagery.
An industrialized world (as Paley was) is an interlocking whole. Off-planet trade may amount to no more than five percent of its GDP; but when that trade is suddenly cut off, the remainder of the economy resembles a car lacking two pistons. It may make whirring sounds for a time, but it isn't going anywhere.
Huge as Felchow was, a single banking house could not have cut Paley off from the rest of the galaxy. When Felchow, however, offered other commercial banks membership in a cartel and a share of the lucrative escrow business, the others joined gladly and without exception. No one would underwrite cargoes to or from Paley; and Paley, already wracked by a war and its aftermath, shuddered down into the slag heap of history.
Lucrative was indeed a mild word for the mercenary business. The escrowed money itself could be put to work, and the escrowing bank was an obvious agent for the other commercial transactions needed to run a war. Mercenaries replaced equipment, recruited men, and shipped themselves by the thousands across the galaxy. The new banking cartel served those needs smoothly—and maximized its own profits.
With the banks' new power came a new organization. The expanded escrow operations were made the responsibility of a Bonding Authority, still based in Bremen but managed independently of the cartel itself. The Authority's fees were high. In return, its Contracts Department was expert in preventing expensive misunderstandings from arising, and its investigative staff could neither be bribed nor deluded by a violator. Under the Authority's ruthless nurture, the business of war became as regular as any other commercial endeavor, and more profitable than most.
The Slammers
The armoured regiment usually known by its nickname of The Slammers started as the Friesland Auxiliary Regiment, raised to fight on Melpomone, an agricultural colony under the control of Friesland. Friesland had originally been a speculative colony set up by Dutch entrepreneurs. When its GNP matched that of Holland, it declared UDI and bought out the shares of the original cartel at 2 cents on the Euro. Like most colonies, Friesland was heavily class-stratified with the ruling families of the Great Houses drawn from the ranks of those that had owned key resources in the original colony.
Friesland was stable and prosperous, so it could afford the finest military equipment from the arms industry on Earth. However, its military suffered from the twin disadvantages of a severe lack of combat experience and the fact that entry to the military academy and promotion in the officer corps depended to a great degree on family connections. These problems proved critical when Melpomone rebelled.
Melpomone produced a cash crop, the bluebright plants whose biochemistry was the source of a popular stim-drug. Bluebright farmers got wheat-prices for a crop that made the owners of Friesland shipping and chemical companies very rich. Twelve regiments of regulars failed to put down the inevitable rebellion.
Colonel Hammer was Executive Officer of the prestigious Guards Of The Republic, one of the handful of men who had achieved rank in the regiment on professional merit rather than aristocratic lineage. To his contemporaries' horror, he volunteered to leave the Guard to outfit and command a regiment of foederati recruited from soldiers with combat experience from all over human space. The Slammers did what the regulars could not do, crushed the rebellion and incidentally earned themselves a reputation for ruthless efficiency in the process.
It was always understood that the Auxiliary Regiment would be disbanded when the rebellion was over and its troopers granted Friesland citizenship as a reward. However Secretary to the Council of State Tromp, who ran Friesland, regarded promises made to foreign mercenaries as worthless and resolved to execute the Slammers now their usefulness had ended. To this end, he landed a full armoured regiment of Guards on Melpomone to control the Starport and disarm the mercenaries.
The Slammers launched a lethal set piece attack on the Starport, annihilating the Guards in 13 terror-filled minutes of firepower. The next day the Slammers lifted in rented freighters and began their career as a high-end mercenary unit. They were perhaps the first but they were not to be the last.
A well-deserved reputation for pitiless competence followed Colonel Hammer's Slammers over nearly three decades of near continuous warfare. Friesland itself was not immune to the political instability that dogged human space. President Smol of the Council had been little more than Secretary Tromp's puppet and after the Secretary's unfortunate death at Melpomone various factions manoeuvred for control. Van Vorn finally assumed the Presidency arousing simmering hostility from a faction led by Counsellor Theismann.
Thiessman eventually rebelled when Van Vorn declared himself President-For–Life and the Counsellor hired the Slammer's to make him Dictator. Van Vorn poisoned himself after the Slammer's broke the Iron Guard at New Wageningen. Unfortunately, Thiessman walked into a stray round leaving Hammer to assume the Presidency. He legitimised his position by marrying Lady Anneke Tromp, daughter of the late Secretary Tromp, and the Slammers were out of the mercenary business. The regiment was now officially the 1st Armoured Cavalry of the Friesland Defence Force.
But our story does not stop here. Hammer immediately set about improving the military to the prestigious standards of his personal regiment. While the majority of the Friedland military is land-bound, three new armoured cavalry regiments based on the Slammers succesful TOE have been equipped for expeditionary operations with a satellite interface capability, armoured battalion landers, and an FTL capable troop transport ship.
And now, these have been deployed as mercenaries once again, as training and to supplement Friesland's income for more ambitious operations...
The military
Supertanks
Tanks were born in the muck and wire of World War One. Less than sixty years later, there were many who believed that technology had made the behemoths as obsolete as horse cavalry. Individual infantrymen of 1970 carried missiles whose warheads burned through the armor of any tank. Slightly larger missiles ranged kilometers to blast with pinpoint accuracy vehicles costing a thousand times as much. Similar weaponry was mounted on helicopters which skimmed battlefields in the nape of the earth, protected by terrain irregularities. At the last instant the birds could pop up to rip tanks with their missiles. The future of armored vehicles looked bleak and brief.
Technology had dragged the tank to the brink of abandonment. Not surprisingly, it was technology again which brought the panzers back. The primary breakthrough was the development of portable fusion power plants. Just as the gasoline engine with its high horsepower-to-weight ratio had been necessary before the first tanks could take the field, so the fusion unit's almost limitless output was required to move the mass which made the new supertanks viable. Fusion units were bulky and moderately heavy themselves, but loads could be increased on a fusion-powered chassis with almost no degradation of performance. Armor became thick—and thicker. With the whole galaxy available as a source of ores, iridium replaced the less effective steels and ceramics without regard for weight.
Armor alone is not adequate protection. Stationary fortresses can always be battered down—as the French learned in 1940, having forgotten the lesson Caesar taught their ancestors at Alesia two millennia before. Caterpillar treads had given the first tanks cross-country ability; but at the cost of slow speed, frequent breakage, and great vulnerability to attack. Now that power was no longer a factor, even the armored bulk of a tank could be mounted on an air cushion.
The air cushion principle is a very simple one. Fans fill the plenum chamber, a solid-skirted box under a vehicle, with air under pressure. To escape, the air must lift the edges of the skirts off the ground—and with the skirts, the whole vehicle rises. Fans tilt with the velocity and angle of attack of the blades determining the amount and direction of thrust. The vehicle skims over surfaces it does not touch.
On tanks and combat cars, the lift was provided by batteries of fans mounted on the roof of the plenum chamber. Each fan had its own armored nacelle. Mines could still do considerable damage; but while a single broken track block would deadline a tracked vehicle, a wrecked fan only made a blower a little more sluggish.
Successful protection for the supertanks went beyond armor and speed. Wire-guided missiles are still faster, and their sharp-charge warheads can burn holes in any practical thickness of any conceivable material—if they are allowed to hit. Reconnaissance satellites, computer fire control, and powerguns combined to claw missiles out of the air before they were dangerous. The satellites spotted missile launchers usually before they fired and never later than the moment of ignition. Fire control computers, using data from the satellites, locked defensive weaponry on the missiles in microseconds. And a single light-swift tribarrel could hose any missile with enough fire in its seconds of flight to disintegrate it.
Hand-launched, unguided rockets—buzzbombs—were another problem, and in some ways a more dangerous one despite their short range and small bursting charges. Individual infantrymen fired them from such short ranges that not even a computer had time enough to lay a gun on the little rockets. But even here there was an answer—beyond the impossible one of killing every enemy before he came within two hundred meters.
Many armored vehicles were already fitted with a band of anti-personnel directional mines just above the skirts. Radar detonated the mines when an object came within a set distance. Their blast of shrapnel was designed to stop infantry at close quarters. With only slight modification, the system could be adapted against buzzbombs. It was not perfect, since the pellets were far less destructive than powergun bolts, and the mines could not be used in close terrain which would itself set them off. Still, buzzbombs were apt to be ill-aimed in the chaos of battle, and a tank's armor could shrug off all but a direct hit by the small warheads.
So tanks roamed again as lords of battle, gray-gleaming phoenixes on air cushions. Their guns could defeat the thickest armor, their armor could blunt all but the most powerful attacks. They were fast enough to range continents in days, big enough to carry a battery of sensors and weaponry which made them impossible to escape when they hunted. The only real drawback to the supertanks was their price.
A tank's fire control, its precisely metered lift fans, the huge iridium casting that formed its turret—all were constructs of the highest sophistication. In all the human galaxy there were probably no more than a dozen worlds capable of manufacturing war tools as perfect as the panzers of Hammer's tank companies.
But Hammer paid for the best, man and tank alike; and out of them he forged the cutting edge of a weapon no enemy seemed able to stop.
Powerguns
By the 21st century, missile-firing small arms appeared to have reached the pinnacle of their development, and there was nothing on hand to replace them. The mass and velocity of projectiles could be juggled but they could not be increased in sum without a corresponding increase in recoil or backblast. Explosive bullets were very destructive on impact, but they had no penetration beyond the immediate blast radius. An explosive bullet might vaporize a leaf it hit near the muzzle as easily as the intended target down-range, and using explosives in heavy brush was worse than useless because it endangered the shooter.
Lasers, though they had air-defense applications, were not the infantryman's answer either. The problem with lasers was the power source. Guns store energy in the powder charge. A machinegun with one cartridge is just as effective—once—as it is with a thousand-round belt, so the ammunition load can be tailored to circumstances. Man-killing lasers required a four-hundred-kilo fusion unit to drive them. Hooking a laser on line with any less bulky energy source was of zero military effectiveness rather than lesser effectiveness.
Science lent Death a hand in this impasse—as Science has always done, since the day the first wedge became the first knife. Thirty thousand residents of St. Pierre, Martinique, had been killed on May 8, 1902. The agent of their destruction was a "burning cloud" released during an eruption of Mt. Pelee. Popular myth had attributed the deaths to normal volcanic phenomena, hot gases or ash like that which buried Pompeii; but even the most cursory examination of the evidence indicated that direct energy release had done the lethal damage. In 2073, Dr. Marie Weygand, heading a team under contract to Olin-Amerika, managed to duplicate the phenomenon.
The key had come from spectroscopic examination of pre-1902 lavas from Pelee's crater. The older rocks had shown inexplicable gaps among the metallic elements expected there. A year and a half of empirical research followed, guided more by Dr. Weygand's intuition than by the battery of scientific instrumentation her employers had rushed out at the first signs of success. The principle ultimately discovered was of little utility as a general power source—but then, Olin-Amerika had not been looking for a way to heat homes.
Weygand determined that metallic atoms of a fixed magnetic orientation could be converted directly into energy by the proper combination of heat, pressure, and intersecting magnetic fields. Old lava locks its rich metallic burden in a pattern dictated by the magnetic ambiance at the time the flow cools. At Pelee in 1902, the heavy Gauss loads of the new eruption made a chance alignment with the restressed lava of the crater's rim. Matter flashed into energy in a line dictated by the intersection, ripping other atoms free of the basalt matrix and converting them in turn. Below in St. Pierre, humans burned.
When the principle had been discovered, it remained only to refine its destructiveness. Experiments were held with different fuel elements and matrix materials. A copper-cobalt charge in a wafer of microporous polyurethane became the standard, since it appeared to give maximum energy release with the least tendency to scatter. Because the discharge was linear, there was no need of a tube to channel the force as a rifle's barrel does; but some immediate protection from air-induced scatter was necessary for a hand-held weapon. The best barrel material was iridium. Tungsten and osmium were even more refractory, but those elements absorbed a large component of the discharge instead of reflecting it as the iridium did.
To function in service, the new weapons needed to be cooled. Even if a white-hot barrel did not melt, the next charge certainly would vaporize before it could be fired. Liquified gas, generally nitrogen or one of the noble gases which would not themselves erode the metal, was therefore released into the bore after every shot. Multiple barrels, either rotating like those of a Gatling gun or fixed like those of the mitrailleuse, the Gatling's French contemporary, were used to achieve high rates of fire or to fire very high-intensity charges. Personal weapons were generally semi-automatic to keep weight and bulk within manageable limits. Sub-machineguns with large gas reservoirs to fire pistol charges had their uses and advocates, as their bullet-firing predecessors had.
Powerguns—the first usage of the term is as uncertain as that of "gun" itself, though the derivation is obvious—greatly increased the range and destructiveness of the individual soldier. The weapons were so destructive, in fact, that even on most frontier planets their use was limited to homicide. Despite that limited usefulness, factories for the manufacture of powerguns and their ammunition would probably have been early priority items on most worlds—had not that manufacture been utterly beyond the capacity of all but the most highly industrialized planets.
Precision forming of metal as hard as iridium is an incredible task. Gas reservoirs required a nul-conductive sheath if they were not to bleed empty before they even reached the field. If ammunition wafers were rolled out in a fluctuating electronic field, they were as likely to blow out the breech of a weapon or gang-fire in the loading tube as they were to injure a foe. All the planetary pride in the cosmos would not change laws of physics.
Of course, some human cultures preferred alternate weaponry. The seven worlds of the Gorgon Cluster equipped their armies—and a number of mercenary units—with flechette guns for instance. Their hypervelocity osmium projectiles had better short-range penetration than 2 cm powerguns, and they cycled at a very high rate. But the barrels of flechette guns were of synthetic diamond, making them at least as difficult to manufacture as the more common energy weapons.
Because of the expense of modern weapons, would-be combatants on rural worlds often delayed purchasing guns until fighting was inevitable. Then it became natural to consider buying not only the guns but men who were used to them—for powerguns were no luxury to the mercenaries whose lives and pay depended on their skill with the best possible equipment. The gap between a citizen-soldier holding a powergun he had been issued a week before, and the professional who had trained daily for years with the weapon, was a wide one.
Thus if only one side on a poor world hired mercenaries, its victory was assured—numbers and ideology be damned. That meant, of course, that both sides had to make the investment even if it meant mortgaging the planetary income for a decade. Poverty was preferable to what came with defeat.
All over the galaxy, men with the best gifts of Science and no skills but those of murder looked for patrons who would hire them to bring down civilization. Business was good.
The Regiments
First (Presidential Guard) Armoured Cavalry (Hammer's Slammers)
The Slammers utilise a unique organisation where permenant squadrons (battalions) are purely administrative units with an HQ and several identicle companies. In practice, each of the four HQs (combat cars, tanks, infantry, and artillery) commands a composite task force, a generic model being two CC comapnies, one tank company, one infantry company, an artillery battery, plus an engineer platoon, intel team, ARV, AM&S and various signal and medical personell from the HQ squadron. While not technically a part of it, a column of trucks, also from the HQ squadron, invariably brings up the rear.
Table of Organization and Equipment
Sec I: Headquarters Battalion
Except for artillery, all the support elements were grouped for administrative convenience in HQ Battalion. In practice, a large percentage of the strength of these units was parceled out to line squadrons according to need.
a) Headquarters Company—Colonel Hammer and his personal staff, including battalion officers; finance; and a security element. Total: 153 effectives.
b) Maintenance—Capable of handling anything short of full hull rebuilds and internal work on fusion units. Company included nine ARVs, stretched-chassis vehicles with fans at either end; ACVs cannot, of course, be towed. Total: 212 effectives.
c) Communications—Includes not only the staff of Command Central, but the staffs of local headquarters with area responsibilities. Total: 143 effectives.
d) Medical—Twenty-four first line medics with medicomps linked to Central, and a field hospital with full life-support capability. Total: 60 effectives.
e) Supply—455 men and 288 air cushion trucks for local unit supply from spaceport or planetary logistics centers. True aircraft, flying above the nape of the earth, would be suicidally vulnerable to powerguns. Also includes mess and quartermaster functions for task forces.
f) Intelligence—Order of Battle is performed mostly by computer. Imagery Interpretation, study of satellite recce, is in large measure still a human function. There are three mechanical interrogation (i.e., mind probe) teams. Total: 84 effectives.
g) Combat Engineers—Carried out bridging, clearing, mine-sweeping, and very frequently fighting tasks. Formed in three 16-man platoons, each mounted on a pair of tank-chassis Engineer Vehicles. Total: 50 effectives.
Sec II: Combat Cars
Eight combat car troops, each of a command section (one car) and four line platoons. Each platoon contains a command car and five combat cars. Troop total: 100 effectives.
Sec III: Tanks
Four tank troops, each of a command tank and four line platoons. Each line platoon contains four tanks. Troop total: 56 effectives.
Sec IV: Infantry
Four troops, each of four platoons. Each platoon contains four 10-man line squads; two 2-man tribarrel teams (jeep-mounted); one 2-man 100 mm mortar team (jeep-mounted); and a command element. All but Heavy Weapons are on 1-man skimmers. Infantry typically carry 20mm assault powerguns, altough each squad had one buzz-bomb and one grenade launcher. Troop total: 220 effectives.
Sec V: Artillery
Four batteries of self-propelled 200 mm rocket howitzers. Each battery contains six tubes; one command car; and three munitions haulers. Battery total: 46 effectives.
Sec VI: Squadron HQs
All squadrons have an identicle HQ with a four command cars and two command tanks. Total: 22 efectives.
Sec VII: Space support
The regiment is transported by an almost unarmed FTL merchantman, which also carries four Obadiah II armoured task force insertion boats and an Obadiah armoured command command boat. These are effectively droppable buildings: they have no atmospheric manouvre capability. In addition, the ship carries small missiles to disable sattelite networks, some satellites of its own, and a few nuclear support weapons.
Second Armoured Cavalry Regiment (Hell's Dragoons)
The second ACR commisionedby President Hammer is identicle to the Slammers up to company level, where, as a tactical experimant, squadrons are full battle units as outlined above, although HQ elemants remain available for re-assignment.
Third Armoured Cavalry Regiment (Iron Demons)
This unit is completely identicle to the Slammers
Fourth Armoured Cavalry (Thunderwolves)
This unit is identicle to the slammers except that the infantry use CC based IFVs rather than skimmers, another tactical experiment.
Modular Strike Division
The majority of contracts taken out by Friesland suit the ACR perfectly: a tactically flexible, mobile force that packs a punch and can also be used in guerilla and counter-guerilla operations. But after first contact, it was decided to form a larger, more hard-hitting formation in case war with an equal foe became the norm. The MSD is "Modular" because it functions like the ACRs, but a step up, with squadrons and support elements organised under regimental HQs with no permenant organic units. It is "Strike" because all elements are equipped for a full-scale armoured engagment. And it is a "Division" becaus it is considerably larger then the ACRs.
There are nine main assets: three armoured, three infantry, and three artillery squadrons. The fomraer two are designed with maximum interchangability in mind, with the HQ elements and support train identicle. The HQ consists of a battalion command section with two CCs and four jeeps, an HQ company command section with a CC and jeep, a maintanence section with a CC and jeep, a mess section with a truck and trailer, two tanks for the use of officers, a light recon platoon with a CC and five gatling jeeps, a mortar platoon with four CCs, three carrying 200mm mortars, and an assault gun unit with two CCs, three tanks fitted with gauss assault guns, and four trailers. The supply train has an HQ jeep, a maintenance section with jeep and CC, mess and ministration secions with a truck and trailer each, a squadron maintenace platoon with a command jeep, a CC, a light truck, two trucks, two trailers, two ARVs, and two wrecking trucks, and a column with a jeep, light truck, 28 trailers, and 29 trucks. Each tank squadron has either three tank troops (Hq with jeep, two tanks, and an asault gun, mess with truck and trailer, maintenance with jeep, CC, and ARV, and three platoons each with five tanks) and a light troop (identicle, but with light tanks and assault gun), or three infantry troops (Hq with jeep and CC, maintenance with jeep, CC, and trailer, mess with two trucks and two trailers, and three platoons each with HQ squad in CCAPC, two squads in CCACPs, a pair of light mortars in a single heavy jeep intended for a medium mortar, and another heavy jeep with two 30mm tribarrels, and a tank-destroyer platton with a jeep and three CCTDs). Artillery squadrons are identicel too those in the ACR.
In addition to these primary elements there is a medical squadron, usually farmed out into detachments at battalion level, an armoured engineer squadron, and an armoured recon squadron with four armoured recon troops (each HQ with squadron HQ, two jeeps and a CC, maintenance, two CCs, a jeep, and a trailer, and a mess section with a jeep, CC, truck, and two trailers plus three platoons, each three CCs, three gatling jeeps, and three mortar jeeps), a light tank troop as in armoured squadrons, and an artillery support (regimental units usually being occupied or out of range) with an HQ and four platoons, each twoo CCs, two CC based 150mm howitzers, and three trailers.
(Yes, this is a 1944-5 US armoured division with Slammerverse vehicles. Sue me if you must, but I'll take very non-original tech player down with me)