The Eldraeverse

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Tag Archives: Imperial Military Service

Trope-a-Day: Drinking on Duty

Leave a Comment Posted by on October 30, 2012

Drinking On Duty: Averted inasmuch as neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions, nor indeed any other part of the Imperial Military Service is dry, even on duty.  Drinking enough to render yourself unfit for duty, on the other hand, and the punishment for same, is played very straight indeed.

On the third hand, between the biotech upgrades you start out with and the ones which you acquire mid-way through boot camp for your shiny new military-basic body, you would have to drink truly heroic quantities of booze – enough that you’re unlikely to be able to have it with you on post, unless your duty station is engineering and you’re slurping the reactor coolant directly – in order to render yourself unfit anyway.  (This does mean that you can’t drink to forget the horrors of war, but since you can visit a memory redactor for that, it’s probably not so bad a trade-off.)

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Trope-a-Day: Bling of War

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 19, 2012

Bling of War: Except for the brief chunk of time that matched our Industrial Age, played mostly straight by the Imperial Legions.  Beforehand, for much the same regions as Napoleonic (and previous) armies were quite dressy – well, that, and the giant steam clanks stomping around on the battlefield – and afterwards because big stompy Powered Armor with both noise and the ensuring thermal and neutrino emissions tends to make stealth something that happens to other people anyway, so you might as well go back to looking gorgeous on the battlefield if you’re anything other than scouts or special ops (who sneakily enough do have their own “field drab” armor which somehow never shows up on parade).  And, of course, so long as the bling of war is on top of the fully functional deadliness of war and doesn’t interfere with its functionality.

This is, of course, completely unnecessary and not done by most people who advance past Industrial Age warfare – it’s just a local aesthetic preference.  (The trope – which is still generally true in their universe – that the side with the shiniest uniforms tends to lose therefore has at least one qualification to it.  That some people haven’t heard of said qualification and will fall right into the wrong assumptions isn’t strictly intended by the Admiralty, but they certainly don’t mind that it happens.)

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By Their Own Words

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 4, 2012

“Order, Progress, Liberty”

- official, Charter-enshrined motto of the Empire

“Secure against Eternity.”

- corporate motto, Crystal Flame, ICC

“All debts must be paid.”

- official motto of the Curia

“Because enough… is never enough.”

- corporate motto, Decadence, ICC

“Through reason alone, we ascend.”

- motto of the Eupraxic Collegium

“Every coin Our given word.”

- carved above the main doors of the Exchequer

“Knowledge is its own justification.”

- official motto of the Fellowship of Natural Philosophy

“We do what we can, because we must.”

- very unofficial motto of the Fellowship of Natural Philosophy

“Between the Flame and the Fire.”

- official motto of the Imperial Military Service

“Civilization has enemies; we kill the bastards.”

- barrack-room paraphrase of the motto of the Imperial Military Service

“Until no man dares command another.”

- motto of the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic

“The truth that sears away the Darkness.”

- corporate motto, Telememe, ICC news division

“When all else fails, we stand ready.”

- corporate motto, Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC

“[redacted for reasons of state security]“

- motto of Imperial State Security, Fifth Directorate

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Trope-a-Day: Badass Army

1 Comment Posted by on March 9, 2012

Badass Army: The Imperial Legions try very hard to play this one straight when they have to.  Because of the low-growth, low-manpower demographics of a long-lived species, they generally prefer to eschew most army-type fights in favor of the Sneaky Bastard special-ops method of warfare, or better yet, the the-leaders-of-our-enemies-all-dropped-dead-in-totally-unrelated-accidents-that-cannot-be-connected-to-us-three-years-before-the-war-would-have-happened method of not-warfare.  But sometimes you have to have a real war anyway…

…which is where they figure they need to make the most of the limited number of sophont resources available, by virtue of equipping them all with genetic and cybernetic enhancements (see: Super Soldier), training them rigorously in their own version of The Spartan Way, including in the incredible coordination and discipline that comes from fighting as a conflux (temporary group-mind), and then equipping them lavishly, which means power armor even for regular infantry and combat exoskeletons amounting to walking tanks for the heavy kind, a plethora of Mecha Mooks and Attack Drones attached to each individual soldier, and liberal use of heavy weapons up to and including nuclear/antimatter hand grenades.

After all, when you don’t have numbers, you might as well plow that budget into extended training and capital equipment, right?  The Legions themselves may be small in number, but they work hard to make facing them like facing an army made up entirely of elite troops, with a weight of metal on the field a couple of dozen times higher than should be reasonable for that number of people.

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Trope-a-Day: Warrior Poet

2 Comments Posted by on March 8, 2012

Warrior Poet: Where, in the Imperial opinion, Cultured Warrior and The Spartan Way meet; or the intended product of the latter.  What a sentinel is supposed to be; not merely someone who can fight, but someone who understands the philosophy of fighting, and the art of fighting, and the principles by and for which one should fight.  (And would understand perfectly where the Vikings and the Irish and the “pen and sword in accord” samurai were coming from.)

And the ability to quip, or better yet toss off a perfectly formed chelír, mid-battle certainly also doesn’t hurt.

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Trope-a-Day: Mildly Military

1 Comment Posted by on March 5, 2012

Mildly Military: Played… somewhat, due to a combination of the personality traits mentioned in various places (see, primarily, Blue and Orange Morality) which make regular boot-camp disindividuation/personality reformation, ah, less than productive, and the structure of the Imperial Military Service itself (the not-enough-forces-to-have-non-elite-forces model described under Badass Army).  It is the general opinion of their strategoi that when you have a military service composed of ubercompetent technical experts and Warrior Poets highly trained in inner discipline according to the local Spartan Way, a more collegial atmosphere is to be preferred.

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Trope-a-Day: Cultured Warrior

3 Comments Posted by on March 4, 2012

Cultured Warrior: A very important aspect of training and institutional culture, not just for the Imperial Military Service, but for the entire sentinel darëssef, which includes the police, emergency services, paramedics, etc.  The argument runs, essentially, that it has dangerous and unpleasant side effects to have people running around trained to fight who know nothing else but fighting, be it fighting wars, fighting crime, fighting disease, or fighting entropy, and are thus disconnected from the finer things in life and the gentler, civilized virtues.

Thus, in addition to everything else, sentinel training (including even the seriously harsh kind used by the Imperial Legions) works hard to cultivate a taste for high culture and an appreciation for the finer things in life as a contrast to and counterpart for the gritty side of life.  In action, the institutions of the darëssef, from the IMS, the ISS, the Watch Constabulary, etc., on down have traditions to encourage this, including specific cultural leave in which their membership is encouraged to immerse themselves in this side of life on the institutional dime, in the interest of keeping them collectively healthy, functional, and complete.

Even many mercenary outfits do this, on the grounds that a sane mercenary is a more profitable mercenary.

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Trope-a-Day: Super Soldier

2 Comments Posted by on March 3, 2012

Super Soldier: Most successful galactic militaries and mercenary organizations tend to have a favorite package of military-specialized genetic enhancements, nanoviruses, and implants; these days, receiving at least the “military-basic” upgrade package (a whole shopping list of enhancements on top of the already impressive alpha baseline, for the Empire’s version) – usually sometime around the midpoint of basic training, once they’re reasonably sure you’re not going to snap on them and quit – is more or less necessary to compete on the battlefield, especially as regular not-in-the-combat-exoskeletons infantry.  (Although, commonly enough, those troops have their own upgrade requirements.)

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