HeySeuss

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

Eyes on the Prize

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Robson was getting his first good shot in on a Plashi conglomerate-manufactured drone in the hands of the Salvesh. Intelligence doubted that the Salvesh had much patience for or reason to pilot drones the way Humans did, but acknowledged the possibility that other races might well be willing to do so. That was perhaps done for political reasons by the Plashi to keep their mercenaries from being too dangerous to their overseers.

But it was alien, unfamiliar tech. As he prepared to fire, he could feel the drizzle in the area, seconds after Park reported the contact, that heralded nanites being sprayed into the air. A couple of the drones melted as nanites hacked their way through their counterparts and fried some drones, but there were still some coming for them.

Simmons and Robson had worked out sectors ahead of time, and were able to communicate pretty well to call support to one another. Their light fifties were suppressed, which was a relative thing when it came to such large rounds, and they were covered in netting that would help disrupt their visual signatures and prevent detection by the drones. It wasn't perfect, nothing was. The point was to make it very hard for the enemy to figure out where the fire was coming from, to maintain concealment as long as possible and to keep them tied down to give other elements time to maneuver.

Also, their job was to neutralize the heavier stuff, which tended to be drone-mounted.

"Three eyes, six shooters left," Robson heard one of the others, Edwards, report.

"Roger that." Go for the eyes, Boo! was what Vogel, a total nerd, said in training and now it was a saying among them.

Along with the surveillance drones were the gun drones, but the surveillance drones were the eyes, the sophisticated emissions/heat/sound/pattern detection machines that flitted through. They moved a lot more than their heavier counterparts and were very capable when it came to directing fire and otherwise coordinating the fire support.

It was like shooting the observer, officer and radioman all in one. Robson took a shot, then Simmons took a shot. It took a second to catch the last eye, as it started to dart around defensively, at the expense of doing any observation at all. If the drones had a limitation, it was that they were not particularly adept at doing two jobs at once, and forcing one into evasive maneuvers meant that it was going to be less effective as a controller unit. All the same, while Simmons went to work on a "shooter" drone, Robson took a couple seconds of compensating for the movement of the drone and took his shot.

First one missed, but a fast followup second shot got the bastard.

Fire support came in the form of a missile fired from a friendly drone that broke up like an old chemical warhead from the 1960's, dispersing a payload of nanites and their aerosol solution, creating the feeling of a misty morning rain over a rather wide area. The nanites managed to find their way past enemy nanite countermeasures, like a weakened immune system with the death of their "eyes", and added power surges and other disruptions to critical systems. It felt cool on Robson's cheek, but the same stuff caused more enemy drones to melt in midair as they crashed down.

He got one more survivor along the way. Simmons had the lead in total drones, but Robson got two eyes.

It was the start of their war.

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

Working on a post. I fleshed out the squad...

Squad Leader: Brian Park, 34, SFC, USA, SF, Korean American
Asst. Squad Leader: Dieter Vogel, 31, Feldwebel, GER, KSK, German
Machine Gunner: Jeremiah Edwards, 29, Sergeant, USA, MARSOC, African American
Machine Gunner: Robert Browne, 26, Specialist, US 82nd Airborne, American of Mixed descent
Rifleman/Sniper: Jake Robson, 28, Corporal, UK, SAS, British
Rifleman/Sniper: Preston Simmons, 28, Sergeant, USMC Scout-Sniper, African American
Grenadier: Diego Velez, 27, Specialist, US, US Army Rangers, Mexican American
Grenadier: Frans Madsen, 26, Korporal, Royal Danish Jaeger Corps, Danish
Medic/AT Specialist: Guy Fournier, 28, Corporal, Canada, CSOR, French Canadian

Our Brigade Commander:
Brigade Commander: Guy Strafford, 54, BG, US, Infantry, Ranger, (Virginia), British/Native American descent

I'm going to separate all those officers in the TO and put them and these guys in an NPC post in the characters tab.

@Gunther

Awesome deal. I should do the same with tech, as there is definitely a lot to unpack with the potentials of augmented reality overlays that assist with aiming, communication and target acquisition. Integrating an aiming reticule to the display onto the visors of troops is an aim assist, but there are probably limitations to how well the tech works -- a trained rifleman aiming will still have an advantage here. Their optics probably are enhanced in this fashion as well.

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

I'm also talking about smaller drone units. There's a whole ecosystem out there with the nanotech included. While drones have automatic functions, they can be taken over by drone pilots on manual control. Some of them also convert to emplaced weapons that can be used manually or work on automatic protocols.

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

I will do up a Brigade Task Organization and where they deploy their units on a battlefield. I'll say we are conducting a "Movement to Contact" which is a battle drill intended to do what it suggests, make contact with the enemy. I've given the FA Battalion four batteries instead of the usual three. This is 24 guns versus 18.

@Gunther

We might want to consider that a lot of the fire support is drone-based and VI-assisted. So a virtual intelligence is like a highly advanced Siri that can probably easily follow the sort of call for fire protocols that all of Centurion are able to do. The Grathik are assisting heavily in enhancing human systems for fire control, but are trying to keep humans in the driver seat with equipment built to suit them ergonomically and in terms of doctrine. They're programmed to understand tactical communications among humans and follow those directions.

Basically, drones providing direct fire support with missiles and some sort of heavy automatic weapons seem totally viable. Keeping the humans directing them safe and undetected also seems like a plus. The downside of drones is that they can be hacked, rendered inoperable with countermeasures and they can be destroyed in a number of different ways and that having organic units in charge helps ameliorate the concerns that come with fully automated but somewhat dumb drone support units or, worse, kill-units with sophisticated AI's that are not reliable in combat.

That all leaves it back to organic infantry who still have an advantage with drone support. But right now, their drones are in 'contested' space and aren't identifying the enemy very well. So it's back down to the eyes of infantry units, though they can designate targets for the drones in turn, I would say.

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

Task Force COX. If only because we have Brits and Aussies in the units that would continually bring that up, including unit patches.

I feel like the Long Range Surveillance unit might be there, but battalions might be fielding their own assets of that nature, or are at least special operations capable.

Foreign Legion - First Contact is First Contract

The inoculations were after they packed all their belongings and loaded them onto transport in French Guyana. It was strange, since vaccines usually took time to work, and the time to do it was weeks earlier, instead of the day before they were set to fly out to Nigeria. New tropical diseases in Africa was not an unknown thing, so a last minute inoculation was not unwarranted.

All the same, Centurion's contractors lined up for the shots. It was not an unknown phenomenon in service, and the whole three months in Guyana was a refresher course for the people hired for this job. There was a line leading to a room, and people went through the door. They exited out another door. Orderly, that.

Jake Robson woke from the shot in an unfamiliar setting, but surrounded by familiar faces, all coming awake in a combination of cot and crib, some sort of high-walled bed. The room around them was sterile white with equipment all around, which made him think of any number of sci-fi movies where the thing burst out of your fucking chest and started killing willy-nilly.

Then they found out that they were being offered an even better gig than fucking Nigeria. A few bowed out at this point and took the cooler home. The rest got on with the job.

Talra station was a mega-structure on the outskirts of the solar system of Qadah, the star around which Saina, their employers' planet, orbited. This station was the gateway to the system, and the enemy will be trying to take it intact as a staging point for their supplies and troops. With Talra, they had a strategic advantage for staging operations in the system. Without it, all they could do was slip in fast craft to land small groups of raiders, too fast for defenses designed to handle the large scale spacecraft that did the real fighting in this part of space. Talra was designed to defend against those and was fine while the Grathik were fighting the Plashi, who were not adept on the ground.

But they started losing other stations like it when the Salvesh came on, to the brink where they took the risk of uplifting parts of Humanity as their Janissaries.

There was a lot of training and familiarization on new gear; they'd woken up on Talra, and inside it was like a large, continual city with a few nice, very manicured, but alien, parks. It had buildings which were more like warrens for the Pilavians and designed largely for the convenience of the Grathik and client races, none of whom were combatants. Because they were in a ring on a space station, the altitude only went so high, and so there were not skyscrapers, though those existed in other places.

They watched the humans undergo exercises in their urbanized rings, which rotated around a core for gravity, with apprehension, but also with speculation. The station was on security blackout, only certain lines of communication in and out for security, but everyone expected that word of some sort of Grathik force would be ready to defend the interior of the station, in gravity, as infantry. Robson studied the history here, of attempts to turn the Pilavians into guerrilla fighters, except they evolved from prey animals and were not fighters by nature. There were the attempts to create sophisticated AI to augment the drone equipment currently modified for human use, and that was a disaster as the killbots turned on their owners.

It was down to some Grathik brain's idea to use a violent tool-user species, some tentacle beast studying humanity since World War II. The other tentacle horrors finally signed on with the idea, despite the perceived risks.

There was familiarization with the antigrav and propulsion systems built into the Universal Combat Pattern-colored suits, with pixelated grey-green blobs for urban warfare, they were issued as a base layer, uniforms with systems for emergency situations in space, such as loss of gravity, pressure, of biological or chemical contamination. The ability to magnetize parts of the suit and latch onto surfaces, an emergency fall-protection protocol that was immediately used by human forces for tactical reasons, such as egressing from an elevated position quickly.

They were armed with human designed, Grathik-improved weaponry, with a variety of different modifications that expanded upon human tactical concepts. All sorts of infantry support weapons were mounted on smaller drones that could be converted, on command, into emplaced weapons like a transformer, allowing a human to fire the weapon in manual mode, and smaller drones were used for recon, counter-drone warfare, and to purge nanites that were sprayed into the air. They fought in a literal cloud of nanites designed to deliver the troops safely to the fight so they could kill other troops, though the nanites themselves were trying to, ultimately, find the right combination of countermeasures that would allow them to break through and kill live infantry troops, the main combatants.

Luckily, the Grathik capabilities here were well-honed. They had good nano-tech and nanite-control protocols. They had sophisticated Virtual Interfaces. They had drones and other information sources providing them with an Augmented Reality overlay goggles for their human troops that was seamless and very useful for identifying targets even when behind cover or at a distance -- when the nanites or drones could break through countermeasures and acquire the targets. In a real combat situation, this would be rival sides, swarms of nanites, drones and fixed systems adapted to defender use vying to establish sensor superiority and relaying what telemetry they could back to the killers in the field, the infantry. \

And, Robson noted, in a real combat situation, these nanites were felt like the occasional spray of mist on a breeze as enemy and friendly nanites fought their war. It wasn't just the mist; they were smeared in nanite gel on their exposed body parts, and the stuff was sprayed onto their equipment. The effect was that it felt like a misty drizzle in the orbital habitat.

Practice with the system, guided by the Grathik and then adopted wholly by human officers, a number of them Air Force types with drone warfare experience, was a relevation. They simulated the total superiority scenario where they could track the enemy and then varying degrees of successful interference, which helped train everyone on how to compensate. In the end, if the enemy was good enough, they'd be down to the old standard of eyesight and field craft.

Luckily, that's what Humanity was used to. Technology was great, but it did not replace good training and effective doctrine.

Squad Park, with its special operators/airborne/ranger/marine types, moved into place atop a designated over watch position in the Gala neighborhood, near the spaceport, when the sensors fired off an impact warning that was different from the others that had been rocking the station. For several days, they'd endured a duel of large-scale weaponry as the enemy's naval forces tried to soften up the station with fire as a first gambit, but then settled for firing off small, agile landers with bore-drills that held enemy infantry, others that were nanite/drone-delivery platforms and some that were total decoys, designed to ensure the survival of the others by drawing fire. One could hear the hum of the weaponry as the power systems worked overtime for their various needs and, toward the end, the crashing and rumbling of things hitting the hull of the station and boring into it. Breachers.

The waiting was over, and they were on a roof spotting for the rest of the company as it started to make its way through the streets in response to information coming in on potential enemy presence, a blob of action that slowly started to shrink as time wore on and the Grathik systems took the upper hand. But then the blob, in their visors' field of vision, expanded again as the Salvesh gained advantage. Robson noted to Park, "So much for the easy way."

They were already on watch. In a MOUT setting Earthside, they'd perhaps go with anti-materiel rifles, GPMG's and bring some LAWS'. Here, they brought their gear, requested resupply by drones and emplaced a couple more drones to provide grenade launching capability and a pair of Ma Deuces at their position, giving their nine men significantly more firepower than a SEAL overwatch element in Ramadi, Iraq, in the efforts to screen. For now, it was the two snipers, Robson and Simmons, a former US Marine Scout-Sniper, providing anti-drone overwatch with Grathik-modified light fifties. Doctrine took hold early in specifying that they did not rely upon the drones for spotting or for security, but to augment. So they were on watch for anything they could report or engage, even if it was redundant. No one trusted a drone that wasn't under manual control, but were happy when they worked.

The Chief Operations Officer of Centurion, an American General named Guy Strafford with significant armor, cavalry and doctrine development experience was the commander, and he wanted squads out there making the contact, not the drones.

"Visual contact, 10 o'clock. Not one of ours," ("noot one-a oors.") Robson muttered into his commo gear with that distinctive Geordie accent. That report would generate a VI-assist report into the data systems, though there were provisions for manual override if it were hacked or corrupted, that then could focus more assets in the area on a pre-determined sweep, subject to override. There were an awful lot of cyber-warfare types, sharp Air Force lads, on top of that side of the fight, monitoring the equipment and ready to step in if the AI decided to kill all organics rather than just the organics it was supposed to.

His finger inched toward the trigger, but did not take the slack up quite yet as he started to track it. Other eyes swept other sectors, because it was expected that one would lead to more. But Robson was disciplined, and knew how to regulate his breathing. It wasn't like killing ISIS types in Syria, or fighting Taliban in Afghanistan. They didn't even have a fucking live enemy out there...yet.

But maybe they'd be able to draw them in. Thankfully, Stafford, in deciding that squads would make contact, also dictated that squad leaders had the initiative in deciding how to engage, at least in most circumstances. "Unless Otherwise Directed" or UNODIR, was his favorite saying, to the point where his men were wearing tabs on velcro that said it.

"Waiting on you, Riddler."
("Waitin oonya")

@Gunther

War is hell, a possible realistic Vietnam War roleplay? (+18)

I think I'll definitely work on the concept of playing an advisor to the ARVN or the VNAF. Early or late war, this is a going concern. Mid-war, it's much more of an American-focus on the ground combat because US forces did the heavy lifting. The VNAF is sidelined late war, as the USN and USAF bring heavier and heavier support options. Depending on the region, the mix of airpower can get very interesting, especially in battles like Ia Drang Valley, where everything was routed over to dump down on the Main Force Viet Cong positions.

I always liked the movie "Bat 21" because it impressed on me just how brave it is to rescue a downed pilot in enemy territory and what utter heroes those crews are and I want to take my writing in that direction for this. Same thing with the kind of guys that made resupply runs for the Air Cav or at Khe Sanh.

So I might play a mix of Forward Observer officers, pilots of airlift, resupply and combat aircraft and, depending on the region, this could involve naval gunfire as well.

Assuming this all works for you @Jaredthefox92, I am just brainstorming my thoughts here.

War is hell, a possible realistic Vietnam War roleplay? (+18)

Advisors and liaisons are pretty common fare for Vietnam. Advising the ARVN airborne division was a big deal, SF raised Montagnard troops in the Central Highlands/Laotian border, there were other ethnic minority (Hmong, Nung, Khmer, etc) forces similarly raised by SF, the Marines were working with CIDG's to pump up regional/local security in the I Corps region and the SEALs, later on, were working with the LDNN's.

That doesn't even encompass SOG operations in Cambodia and Laos where the on-the-ground recon was conducted by mixed teams in places where they weren't supposed to be or the Phoenix Program, which had advisors directing Vietnamese 'mercenaries' to eliminate VC infiltration of the RVN government.

There was a similar degree of fluidity between where the advising stops and the operational control starts in the VNAF as well.

Here's a thought in determining things; work out the region of Vietnam and the time period. The border with the North is a very different animal than the Mekong Delta, which is different from the Central Highlands and so forth. From there, we have a much better idea of what the force mix might look like, since ROK and ANZAC forces, for example, operated in two very different spheres.

War is hell, a possible realistic Vietnam War roleplay? (+18)

Depending on the time period, SOG is still running Shining Brass, and getting more blatant about the air campaign in Laos. Could also play an LDNN or Montagnard Mike Force advisor in addition to one of the RT's.

I'm not sure that Vietnam was ever a 'fair' fight in terms of firepower parity, but it was a very frustrating fight in that the enemy dictated the operational tempo in many cases. But if you're looking for a different perspective, I'd argue for the early 1960's before the US massively deployed combat troops there. You had a very different war where the capability of the enemy led to that deployment in the first place.

I'm good with whatever path it takes though.

War is hell, a possible realistic Vietnam War roleplay? (+18)

What timeframe within the Vietnam War?

@Gunther @Byrd Man