lest we forget

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old, Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

[One of the reasons I like Anzac Day so much, and which makes it a rather unique celebration, is that we are actually celebrating a defeat, and have chosen to celebrate a defeat as our principle military holiday. I've known a lot of foreigners who can't really understand that. They point with pride at their national military holidays which commemorate their victory (especially if it resulted in the foundation of their nation), and ask how can we celebrate a defeat. Some (and that regrettably includes some Australians and New Zealanders), think it is stupid to do so. But we are commemorating the soldiers, especially the ones that have fallen, lamenting the high cost of war, and celebrating the bravery of those who did fight, not for a nation or principality or power, but for their mates. And in the end we are acknowledging how horrible war is. Anzac Day serves to remind us that we forget this at our peril.]

repurposing battletech

Just thinking about my old Battletech campaign. Well, truth to tell, it wasn't actually a Battletech campaign. It was more of a Living Steel game, although it did use a lot of elements of Cyberpunk's Maximum Metal supplement. You see I liked the fact that battlemechs did increase player survivability, but I found that they were really rather silly from a real-world weapon system point of view unless you hypothesised some sort of technological reason for their existence that just wasn't apparent. In addition I also particularly liked the Technical Readouts, which not only described the 'mech, but usually added a little vignette describing a famous (or infamous) 'mech pilot, and the "history" of the design. Nice background colour. [I also have to admit that I did like the original background (which soon disappeared from the official universe, that the 'mechs were the "knightly steeds" of the nobles in a feudal society, maintained by tech-priests (actually more of a trained clergy than priests, and definitely not as priestly or ignorant as those in Warhammer 40,000). I believe that David Drake's Northworld series was also a strong influence here.] However with a little jiggery-pokery it was simplicity itself to convert the 'mechs in the game into powered armour for infantry. And it worked quite well. Autocannons became high-calibre rifles (an AC/2 was 20mm, I believe). Missiles became grenade launchers, capable of either direct fire or automatic suppression fire. Lasers remained lasers. I'd already been using an experimental non-ablative armour system. The power systems were essentially shifted to a armoured backpack. Instead of using heat build-up as a limiting factor, I used power drain (again, probably courtesy of the Northworld series). Drawing too much power meant that the servos controlling the armour movement didn't operate as rapidly, and could even result in the armour shutting down until the power levels regenerated. It did mean that the nature of heatsinks had changed, and there needed to be some rearrangement of the structure of the 'mech designs, but it all flowed seamlessly together. I could even keep the original vehicle designs as vehicles, but effectively upgrading them (so they were roughly ten times more powerful than before). They were also not as adapt at using terrain to their advantage (especially since powered infantry could be quite mobile), and relatively easily dealt with. [The picture on page 53 of Maximum Metal of an ACPA ripping the hatch off a tank and threatening the crew captured the spirit of anti-vehicle operations. And on the battlefield they generally just made a bigger target, worth expending a one-shot one-kill missile on (which could be easily fired by your PBI in PA). It all worked well together in actual play.] Unfortunately not a great deal was actually done with it as that game group soon broke up (graduating from uni will do that).