War in the Future! - Anvil Discussion

Burning Empires General Questions
21

P.S.:

Anyway, whether your logistics base is one large “grav carrier” or a slew of smaller vehicles, I think the best form of mobile defense is a “flying hedgehog.” In World War II, as it became clear that continuous linear defenses were too easy for armored blitzkrieg to penetrate (“he who defends everything defends nothing”), as early as France 1940, defenders began improvizing small, self-sufficient strongpoints, with each dug-in in a village, wooded area, or other terrain easily defended by infantry, and with enough longer-ranged artillery and anti-tank weapons that any enemy passing between two “hedgehogs” would be caught in a crossfire. That forces the enemy to choose between assaulting directly against one hedgehog to break it and blow a hole in the defensive belt – which takes time and casualties – or charging ahead through the gap and penetrating at the price of being cut off – which happened repeatedly to the Germans in France in the latter months of the 1940 campaign: They’d have Panzers that “broke through” the French defenses but then ran out of fuel and ammunition because their soft-skinned supply columns were stuck on the either side of the crossfire, unable to follow. If the French had had proper mobile reserves to counterattack, they might have repelled the invasion altogether.

In the Iron Empires, a stationary hedgehog wouldn’t last long: someone would drop enough Missiles on it to get through the area defense system. So what you want are hedgehogs that suddenly pick themselves up and redeploy from place to place. The logistical trick is having the whole defensive force grav-mobile and self-sufficient in supply, maintenance, medical, etc. The planning trick is making sure that each time you reposition your hedgehogs to avoid bombardment, their new arrangement still covers the whole area you’re worried about with interlocking fields of fire.

22

'Tis Andrew (it’s in the signature), and thank you!

Ooo! A Landship or Skyship! I may try to Burn one up later when I have a moment. Base it off a Hammer Cruiser, but without the Space speed. The question is: is the Hammer Cruiser in the book large enough to be a Carrier? I imaging a true Carrier-type to be maybe a bit bigger.

23

The Hammer Cruiser may well be too large – if not in game-mechanical terms, at least in setting-logic terms: You’re talking about something that has to find hiding places on a planetary surface, rather than having the whole of space to hide in. Even a well-armed “grav barge” might be restricted to operations where friendly forces have space superiority.

24

Okay. So we’re talking about a support vehicle capable of transporting, sheltering and servicing Anvil vehicles and crew. After all, every once and a while those Anvil pilots will need to get out and stretch their legs, take a nap, get a hot meal, and maybe shower. As a center for force-projection, we’re talking about a mobile base at least the size of a modern aircraft carrier.

I think there can be both scales: The ‘Grav-Mobile Support Barge’ which is big enough for a couple of Anvil sleds to land on, with a machine shop, supply store and bunkrooms. The GMSBV could support maybe a company of armor. EDIT: Make that: A Detatchment (3 to 6?) of GMSBV’s could support an Anvil Company.

Then you have the monsterous ‘Grav-Mobile Theatre Command’ vehicle, which supports and entire Anvil command (maybe the Anvil Lords’ home base). The GMTCV would be big enough that it would take another Anvil (or Hammer-) Lords’ force to destroy it. A mobile fortress, really. Oh, and if you want to hide one? On a predominantly-water world, make it submersible! So far I have seen nothing to imply that Grav/Pressor tech can’t work underwater.

25

Yeah, but water is transparent – not as transparent as air, of course, but against an observer directly overhead (i.e. Hammer or high-altitude Anvil recon) you can only put so many kilometers of water between you and the enemy’s eyes. (The problem sonar has historically is that it’s coming from the side, from surface ships or helicopters, and has to push through miles and miles of water before it makes a contact). That said, hiding on the sea floor is probably better than hiding on the ground. It just may not be better enough to save you.

26

I agree it depends on the circumstances, but not that much. If you intend your land-carrier to be able to hide, it will be designed with stealth in mind: sheilded grav/suppressor drives and supercapacitors so you can turn off your fusion plant and still have ‘battery’ power long enough to go-to-ground.

On a water-world (90%+ surface is water), paint the top of your carrier to look like underwater formations (or if you’re really high-tech, make it a ‘smart’ chameleon-surface). On a predominantly desert-world, you’ve got sand dunes to hide under.

In a setting with anti-grav, fusion power and FTL, who are we to say: “nah, that can’t be done”? Burn up some technology that lets you make effective cover! I can see some sort large-scale of infrasonic disruptor that churns up a patch of sand so it has the density-equivalent of water, dive your ship into it, and let the sand settle over you. Or if you’re low-tech: blasting charges.

Another idea for smaller Firefights: Burn-up some ‘insta-crete’ charges that battlefield engineers can use to make (almost-) instant cover. Take a Specialist Action, roll for it, and add +1 Cover to your current position…

27

Ok, I JUST read Faith Conquers, and I’d like to point out that what happens to the heretic armoured column is exactly what I was preaching about. They came in hot and high, and got bushwacked by hull-down armour.

I like the flying hedgehog idea quite a bit, but I don’t think mobility is going to save you from hammer bombardment. I see a maginot line style defense, personally. Lots of mutually supporting, heavily armoured firebases that the anvil units can manouver about. Simply because of the weight of fire that can be called down from hammer or anvil artillery assets, any concentration that is spotted will get smashed. Which is why I’m so against anvil units operating at high altitude. They get the Groundhog trait for a reason.

Abzu, yes grav armour is maneuverable, but like sydney said, any vehicular scale weaponry is going to blast them out of the sky. Their only defense is not being seen. Therefore, they’ll need to pick concealed routes, which gives you a better chance of determining where to place your tank traps. Combine that with artillery scatterable sensors, FASCAM (one shot fusor turrets that automatically target grav emissions), and you can make the more attractive routes into deathtraps, forcing the enemy armour to expose itself to your hull down armour.

Sydney, yes force concentrations might be lower, but the concentrations around objectives will be as high. Sure, you might be able to take control of that continent. Who cares, there’s no one on it! No one to hull, nothing to capture. The fighting may be more fluid, but the increased range of the weaponry means that every infantry fireteam can control much more battlespace, and the fact that the attackers must eventually engage the defenders means that concentrations where there is actual fighting will still be quite high. Yes, Trevor Faith only commanded a battalion, but that was only the Mundus Humanitus forces. Who knows how many regiments of Imperial troops were garrisoning that planet.

Edit: Cratering charges? Already done =)

28

Mike, I’m going to quote at you one of the most original books of military theory I’ve ever read, Lt. Col. Robert Leonhard’s (US Army ret.) Fighting by Minutes: Time and the Art of War (p. 135-136):

It is important to understand the most pervasive and yet frequently ignored axiom of warfare: military forces are perpetually unready for combat. That is, the natural state for a military unit – from an infantry squad to a contingency corps – is unpreparedness.

Most of the time, a soldier is not at maximum alert, weapons ready, focusing his attention in the exact right direction to see the enemy coming: He’s trying to get some sleep on the cold, hard ground, or trying to warm up his unpalatable rations, or taking a leak, or daydreaming about how nice it’ll be to go home, or cleaning his weapon, or digging his foxhole – or even weapon at the ready, eyes wide open, raring to go, and looking in the wrong direction. If it weren’t so, there would be no need to post sentries and change them regularly, since the whole point of a sentry is to have a tiny fraction of your force trying to be alert to danger so it can warn the rest of you to get ready.

What’s more, the higher the level of technology, the greater the degree of unreadiness. A Stone Age warrior just has to wake up, grab his pointy stick, and go. A modern combatant has to keep his vehicle, his sensors, and a whole host of complex weapons maintained, fueled/loaded, and ready, and to stay in communications (through more complex technology that has to be maintained) with other units.

Why is this relevant? Because, Mike, when you picture the deadliness of Iron Empires defenses, and the degree of caution required in movement to avoid being wiped out, you’re implicitly assuming that everyone is perpetually ready, with their fingers on the triggers of those terrifying high-tech weapons. But most of the time, given the fog of war, the maintenance needs of technology, and the limits of human stamina, mental and physical alike, most of the combatants aren’t going to be ready, as Leonhard says.

Simplistic example: A platoon of grav armor blows past at treetop height, about 10 meters, at 480 kilometers an hour. They’re going to traverse from one horizon to another – about 12 kilometers – in NINETY SECONDS. That’s the maximum amount of time you’ll have them in line of sight, assuming completely flat terrain with no obstructions for them to take advance of. There’s no way anyone on the ground is going to engage them successfully without advance warning before they come over the horizon, which means the battle becomes one of reconaissance, counter-reconaissance, signals, sensors, and countermeasures. That’s a battle the maneuvering force has a real chance to win, which means high-speed maneuver is military possible.

Now, Hammer gunships in orbit can cover much wider areas than one guy with an MPIML, and they presumably have a lot more automation to keep them ready a higher percentage of the time. But they’re trying to cover all this ground from hundreds of kilometers up (low Earth orbit being at least 200 km). What’s worse, they’re looking down, not sideways, which makes it much harder to detect an object moving over the surface. So in practice their windows of visibility, in which they have eyes-on a definitive target worth shooting at (and expending energy/ammunition, and making your own position more obvious to anyone watching you) may not be much longer than the 90 second window for that anti-tank rocket specialist in his hole, who is with ten km of his target and probably looking up at it silhouetted against the sky.

So “their only defense is not being seen” for long enough for the enemy to ready, aim, and fire. And that qualifier makes the job of avoiding destruction dramatically easier. You don’t have to make yourself impossible to find (and you can’t); you just have to make the enemy’s job of finding you a bit harder, because it’s already hard enough.

To quote Carl von Clausewitz, “everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” The fog and friction of war are the reason that armies throughout history have consistently failed to annihilate each other, even in such extremely constrained circumstances as the trench warfare of the Western Front. There’s no reason it’ll be any different in the Iron Empires.

29

Hey Sydney, if it’s not too much trouble, can you (and anybody else posting here) give us more “references for further reading” like in that last post (#28)?

I know you already put up lots 'o links in this thread:
http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3536
but maybe if you have more specific writers/books/articles in mind when discussing, oh say, Soviet doctrine, if you could throw that in too, I’d totally appreciate it. You don’t need to get too elaborate or anything.

Thanks.

30

Sydney, we both are guilty of simplifying the situation. Yes, everything in warfare is hard; yes the rocketeer has about 90 seconds to respond assuming he is at ground level and the terrain is flat… But we’re hardly talking about one man facing off against a single tank screaming across the ground. Any defender is going to have a tripline of sensors and elevated observation posts. And the fact that lasers strike at the speed of light means that as soon as you are seen, you can be hit. And you yourself pointed out that when a BE tank is hit by a heavy weapon, its chances of remaining operational are not terribly high.

True, blanketing an area with ECM will slow reactions and sow confusion. True, a high speed, low level attack surprise attack has a chance of penetrating defenses. Surprise is a wonderful force multiplier. I’m not arguing against any of those points.

That’s not what we were discussing earlier. We were discussing how grav tanks could traverse great tracts of land at high speed and therefore were a strategically potent force. THAT I disagree with. Any gains you make with a small force of fast moving tanks against a well equipped foe are going to be tactical. If you travel a long distance at high speed, as you would to make this option strategically viable as opposed to tactically, you likely will be detected. Engine emissions, your active sensors, communications… the longer you travel at high speeds, the smaller the chance of gaining surprise will be. But I’m not going to argue that a short, violent armoured thrust can’t gain short term success against unprepared defenders. For all the elegance of the lightning strike, its the El Alameins, Stalingrads, and Kursks that win wars.

31

Gentlemen,
Let’s try not to speak in axioms. Let’s try to continue to pose questions and propose solutions.

I’d like to through a few things out there: I don’t buy that static defense will be valuable in any form in the Iron Empires. MAYBE a fortress world might provide momentary defense for its much oppressed occupants, but Maginot Line would either be destroyed from orbit or maneuvered around. And a fortress world that proved to tough to bombard would either be planet-killed or bypassed, right? Weapons and maneuverability come pretty cheap in the Iron Empires.

Anyway, as the game is written: Sensors work, vehicle stealth tech doesn’t; grav mobile vehicles are faster than land/water bound vehicles by an order of magnitude; infantry have a plethora of anti-vehicular weaponry at their disposal.

I feel like there are two directions that this discussion can go. I think we’re dangerously close to creating a whole new paradigm of warfare that looks nothing like what we have in our pretty pictures. I actually think this is the most likely “real” solution. Given those statements above, war would be a very different affair. Or we can figure out some “solutions” to the problems posed and burn some tech so we can keep our visible, lightly armored, flying tanks and guys in power armor.

Hammer Flies, Anvil Dies,
-Luke

32

Cool discussion. I feel like I’m in a room with two Anvil Lords, one a proponant of maneuver, the other a proponant of positional defense yelling and pounding the table, with Luke, the Forged Lord sitting in the big chair watching them through narrowed eyes and smoking a giant cigar.

I’m going to deploy my “canon” cannon and give you a sense of how I visualize the IE battlefield. Tanks can be very, very heavily armored. As Sydney points out, antigravity makes tonnage a non-issue. Very, very heavily armored. Able to take hits and not go down (unless hit from below). Everything we’ve seen in the comics are weak IFV’s, not MBT’s.

Very, very heavily armored and very, very fast.

I think both fortress worlds and battles of maneuver are going to occur, depending on circumstance. There are going to be imbalances in the orders of battle: Faith’s Grey Rats vs. Sheva’s Landwehr. The landwehr deploy with excruciating slowness only to find themselves being rolled up by a half-dozen guys in Iron who can fly off in their IFV’s when things get too hot, and reapproach to mow down another couple hundred troopers.

I can visualize two mobile armies, both grav-equipped, in a swirling, planetwide fight, with no front lines, and hedgehogs around vital targets (cities, power plants, etc…).

Fortress worlds are unique in a sense… they are armored and armed specifically to deny orbital superiority to an enemy Hammer force, and provide shelter to friendly Hammer forces. As Luke suggests, they will be bypassed or destroyed completely (at great cost).

I’ve been “modeling” in my own very crude way how the technologies in the IE interact, and the primary characteristic is mobility. In the naval sphere, invading squadrons can blow right past a Fortress world without engaging it at all. There’s no way to block starships from going where they want to go except by denying them fuel (and the longer their logistical tails become, the more problematic any sort of planetary assault becomes, so that they quickly change from invader to raiding nuisance). On the ground, orbital control is of tremendous importance, and planets are very hard to “hold”. The best a defender can do is protect vital points, engage in running fights to destroy the attackers’ bases, and give over the bulk of the planet to the invader. God help the innocent civilians who get caught up in such a thing.

-Chris

33

I think you can either go about extrapolating how “real” warfare would work given certain technological and sociopolitical developments, or you can envision a style of warfare and fit the facts to it so it makes sense.

Which way did you go in the IE stories, Chris? I get the sense that you had some strong visuals you wanted to work around: Iron of course, low-flying hovertank/hoverAPC formations, Anvil as medieval/Middle Kingdom style ground troops. Obviously there’s some Warhammer 40,000 in the Iron; the piece in the rulebook with the big banner on the back sealed the deal.

What are some of your other visual inspirations? Maybe we should be aiming for look/feel instead of raw realism. Because I’m thinking war is going to be brutally awful in any “realistic” scenario.

p.

34

And there you and I stand at the point of “agree to disagree,” since I’m not going to convince you at this point. (Throws up black-gloved hands, shrugs armored shoulders, looks at Forged Luke Abzu in mute appeal). As a student of history and as a reporter who writes on defense, I’m a firm believer in the vital importance of both maneuver and attrition, the yin and yang of warfare that no less an ancient than Sun Tzu identified as complementary and alternating elements: kill to move, move to kill. As a reader of comics and a player of games (excellent Ian Banks novel by that title, by the way), I find maneuver a lot more fun.

Actually (m’lord), I’d disagree with you on one point: stealth. Certainly, you can’t get stealth as in “magical total invisibility,” but real-world 21st century stealth doesn’t work that way anyway: very often it’s entirely possible for the enemy to figure out your general position, but damned hard for them to lock onto you for an actual kill shot. And that kind of stealth is pretty easy to replicate in the Tech Burner, simply because “Skill Advantage” to make it easier to hit costs 2 points per +1D after the first die, but “Device: Obstacle” to make it harder to hit costs only 1 point per +1 Ob after the first point of obstacle – and +1 Ob cancels out not +1D advantage, but +2D, statistically speaking. So it’s four times as easy to make yourself hard to hit as it is to make your shots likely to hit.

Looking at it another way, Low Index technology can give you only +2D, but up to +3 Ob – and +3 Ob is plenty. When I was designing active protection systems, I actually had to tone the Obstacles down because +3 Ob was too easy to get.

I have two questions I’d really, really like to see the answer to:

  1. How high can you “stack” advantage dice (or obstacle dice) from different technologies? For example, if I’m at Low Index, and I’ve got Iron (+1D to hit) and a 4-point targeting scope (+2D to shot opportunities, 5 points; categorical limitation, only with that specific weapon, -1 point), do I get +3D? Or does the “Low Index technology can provide up to 2D” rule kick in and cap me at 2D for all my tech put together?

  2. What would a heavy grav tank look like in game terms? If the Assault Sled, at Integrity 6 and Structural Tolerances: Surface, H8. Breach, V1. Damaged, V7. Destroyed, V14, is a medium-weight vehicle (equivalent to a Bradley or a BMP, not an M1), then what would the Integrity and Tolerances be on a grav Main Battle Tank? I’ve tried to reverse-engineer a formula for Tolerances from the examples in the book, but without success, so I can’t Burn the darned thing without help from HQ.

35

Reverse engineering is actually an important point here, Paul. The fundamental idea “future = past” is the underpinning of the Iron Empires. When you think of something in the IE, imagine how it would work in the past and determine how it would translate forward. Example: Who builds cars? Now: big companies. In the past: guilds. So guilds build cars in the IE. That’s a crude idea of it, but my love of history comes from its alien-ness, and the flavor of the IE comes from projecting that alien-ness forward.

The banners in my sketchbook were inspired by the same thing that 40K was inspired by, I imagine: the war films of Kurosawa. What’s cooler than 2000 samurai charging over a hill with those bamboo back-banners waving? I tend to visualize my armor the same way I do everything else in the Iron Empires… it’s culturally back-engineered: The Karsan are “samurai” influenced. So their helmets are vaguely samurai-ish. They have loose-fitting pants and their leg armor is “bound” on with bands. The Darikahn are medieval France, with lots of decorative heraldry and a serious cult of the aristocracy. The Dunedin are a blend of Vikings and Tolkien-Dwarves (oops, the secret’s out!). If you look through the sketches in the brick, the Dunedin Iron has beard-icons moulded onto the front, their anvil has a “draped” chin covering that is vaguely beard-like, the Dunedin being into facial hair. It’s all like that.

My fundamental inspiration for the Iron Empires, the thing it sprang directly from, was Traveller. Iron is my visualization of Traveller’s Battledress. Beyond that, boiled down, my core visual theme is future = past.

I’m actually fine with raw realism. The Iron Empires (and beyond them, the endless Void) has room for it all. The Iron Empires themselves are going to follow canon more or less. Outside of them, the sky’s the limit.

Chris

36

My lord, the Maginot Line style defenses I am advocating would be a network of small forts that would dot a continent, or even the entire world. They would be equipped with sufficient anti-hammer weaponry and point defense to make the task of reducing them from orbit extremely tricky, enough intercontinental ranged artillery to be mutually supporting, and enough armour to survive friendly artillery fire being called down directly ontop of it to discourage direct assault by hostile anvil. Examples of such fortresses can be found in Sydney’s excellent Burning Hotok thread. An network of such mutually supporting forts would be extremely difficult to deal with, especially when friendly anvil units could maneuver with relative impunity under the umbrella of their defensive fire.

I second Sydney’s request to see what an IE MBT would look like.

One vital objective I can see major battles being fought over is high ground. Given the prevalence of long ranged line-of-sight weaponry, firing from above is advantageous because it allows you to not only fire into weak dorsal armour, but denies the enemy protection from terrain features and increases your unit’s LOS. It is hard to find hull-down positions against plunging fire. Unfortunately, the simplest way to gain the altitude advantage, flying high, is suicidal because it silhouettes your vehicle against the sky, reveals light ventrical armour, and denies you the use of ANY terrain features as cover. Thus, mountains and large hills will become vital objectives, since a tank platoon on a mountain top should be able to find plenty of cover, can fire down at hostiles at a steep, cover denying angle, and increases the distance to the horizon from 12km to well over 100km.

37

::The Forged Lord suddenly wishes the Primarch was more forthcoming when he was allocating his logistical assets::

38

I love the approach to the visuals, Chris – I’m strongly reminded of all the crazy-deep design work Jackson et al did for the LOTR movies. The making-of documentaries that come with one of the DVDs (Two Towers?) is packed full of stuff like this: how the horse-centered society makes all their armor have a horse theme, how the orcs’ weapons are vaguely organic, etc.

The super-duper cool thing about the style-first approach to warfare is, you can rationalize all kinds of crazy shit and write it off as tradition. I mean, why on Earth did European warlords insist on lining their dudes up in squares and march them into each other? Why was it such a revelation that you could hide in trees and pop your enemies from deep cover?

The future=past aesthetic makes my head spin thinking about how you square high formalism with the tools of the high-tech battlefield. Are there rules of engagement among the peers that one simply does not break? Do you have Anvil Lords breaking for tea mid-battle? What happens when they engage the Vaylen, who may not understand such niceties?

(More likely: the Vaylen have an overdeveloped sense of battlefield formality, and are saddened and disenchanted to discover the humans are a bit more practical in their war-waging than the propaganda holos suggested…)

I’d suspect this old-world formalism of war must have been modified by the available technology. There are probably not tea breaks per se, nor awkward or impractical formations. Many Anvil Lords probably appreciate an aesthetically pleasing battlefield. Whatever formal rules of engagement they’ve agreed on probably arose from some aspects of profound mutual unpleasantness that ultra-high-tech warfare brought about. If they don’t deploy Ogre-style AI tanks, they probably also elect to not deploy all kinds of stuff they could: NBC weapons that ruin the value of the target, time travel (via FTL communication and causality loops), deep space payloads that produce extinction-level events, etc.

And certainly some forms of warfare-based tech would be developed because of that old-world formality. All that comes to mind at this moment is a sigint equivalent of the fancy heraldry, units proudly broadcasting their leadership and lineage so the blazon shows up correctly on the enemy’s sitrep computers. Possibly entire battles fought Lord-to-Lord with very realistic, but completely non-lethal, weapons (a la Player of Games) – no point in all those nobles dying!

Just thinking a bunch out loud while I can’t sleep at 2 a.m. Thanks again for the awesome world, Chris.

p.

39

Because until technology reaches a certain level of deadliness, the Minutemen shooting from behind trees and walls can disrupt an enemy force, but they can’t control territory. Remember the British made it to Lexington and Concord just fine, and in fact got back to their bases in Boston as intact units. Likewise US troops in Iraq can go anywhere they want: Any insurgents that stand and fight will get overwhelmed sooner or later, usually sooner. The problem for both occupying forces is that the guerrillas could keep slipping away to make trouble somewhere else. The problem for both sets of guerrillas is that they couldn’t stake a permanent claim on territory without develop their own conventional force able to stand and fight, or without the occupier losing his political will to keep occupying: Both things happened in the American Revolution (in large part thanks to French intervention), neither has happened in Iraq, yet.

I would imagine Iron Empires forces are very much oriented towards occupying terrain and controlling populations, rather than guerrilla warfare to disrupt someone else’s control. In fact, when Anvil Lords aren’t fighting each other – which is probably 90% of the time or more – their primary focus is on occupation: They’re ruling their worlds by force, not by consent of the governed. That in turn means that, when the big wars do come, a typical Anvil Lord’s force may be mis-optimized, with lots of military police and light armored vehicles for riot suppression, and relatively little Iron, heavy armor, and long-range artillery.

This idea I love. Throughout history, we humans have usually found ways to be practical about killing each other and still project an image of honor. The Vaylen are just the types to idealize us.

40

The single most important “historical” factor on the IE battlefield is baronialism. Anvil Lords are permitted by custom and law to field a Battalion of troops. Which kind of Battalion… armor, cavalry, Iron, whatever, is up to the lord (and his income). Hammer Lords are permitted by custom and law to field a Squadron (the definition of which is loose, but basically = a half-dozen frigates, a couple of destroyers or a capital ship with escorts, something like that). Forged Lords get a squadron + battalion. Logistical supports are extra.

The upshot of this system is that Duke Alpha is only as powerful as the lesser lords pledged to him. Duke Beta might lure a couple of those over to his side, swinging the balance of power in his favor. Forming an army (or more accurately a “horde”), would consist of gathering, say, a hundred forged-lords, hammer lords and anvil lords together under one command. Each of those lords would have their own, private logistical tail (grouped into an ad-hoc supply “camp”), providing their own unit’s distinct needs for fuel, ammo, support, etc…

Can you imagine the bedlam? Can you see why the much more streamlined clan structure of the Vaylen can run rings around them? Why human armies are so subject to infiltration, betrayal and confusion?

That’s the Hundred Years War in space.

-Chris