Imperial Legions

The Emperor’s Sword: Heavy Cavalry

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“Bash, bash, bash, bash, bash our way to glory…”

Making up the remaining one of every sixteen legions (i.e., one per three light cavalry or heavy infantry, and one per nine light infantry), we have the heavy cavalry. Direct-fire death on very large treads, which is to say, main battle tanks. The biggest of all the big sticks. Putting the “brute” into “brute force”.

For additional flexibility, the majority of Imperial MBTs are built off a common base platform, with a selection of swappable modules to provide specific functionality for specific cases. (Unlike many modular vehicle systems in this ‘verse, however, these aren’t hot-swappable; the need to remove and replace and integrate large and complex chunks of armor plate, etc., when doing it means that this requires some pretty major machine-shop type facilities. It’s not something you can do in the field.) Due to these functionality differences, MBTs are usually classified by the module.

So first we’ll talk about the capabilities of the base platform, and then we’ll talk about some of the more commonly seen modules:

Base Platform: Armor

The armor of Imperial MBTs is relatively standard: there’s just a lot of it. A honeycomb-patterned diamondoid-composite structural frame, covered with multiple slabs of interlinked refractory cerametal, electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, more cerametal, reactive-armor sections, and an outer anti-energetic ablative coating sprayed on top of it all, with additional side plating to shield the rollagons (see below), and an inbuilt nanopaste-based self-repair system. The survivability specifications on all this armor is that the vehicle should be able to survive a near-miss with a tactical-range nuclear weapon or equivalent orbital k-kill strike.

The entire vehicle is itself low-slung, to minimize its target profile, and keep the center of gravity low. Much like the heavy infantry, though, they don’t bother with significant chameleonic or stealth features, since there is absolutely no way to render one remotely stealthy.

Base Platform: Command and Control

An Imperial MBT nominally crews three: semi-specialized commander, driver, and gunner positions; of course, this is a mite fuzzy inasmuch as they’re both ably assisted by the vehicle’s internal synnoetic AI, and indeed linked to each other and the AI by internal conflux hardware, functioning as a loose, mesh-topology group mind for maximal efficiency. Primary control is routed through the AI and direct neural links – the vehicle seats are virtuality chairs, connecting to the crew’s implanted laser-ports – but auxiliary/backup manual controls are also available.

Core sensors and communications include all the standard options: radio and whisker laser communications, access to the OTP-encrypted military mesh, threat identification systems, teamware and C3I systems integration, thermal imaging, remote sensor access, 360 degree sensing, pulsed-usage radar and lidar, T-ray high frequency snoopers, ground-penetrating radar, target-painter detection – and, of course, plain old electronic visual and sound transmission, since the interior of the MBT is fully sealed and includes no portholes.

The MBT also includes a major-node-grade battle computer, and a full ECM suite.

Base Platform: Internal Environment

To the delight of those legionaries who like a little comfort in their soldiering, the internal spaces of an Imperial MBT are a comfortable – albeit confined – shirt-sleeve operating environment. (With climate control! And leather seats!)

This is partly because given the expense of building one of these things anyway, throwing in a few civilized comforts is barely a blip on the budget, and partly because – well, anything that successfully penetrates the armor tends to leave the crew as a hundred-yard long red/blue/silver-white/etc. (delete as applicable) smear on the ground behind the exit hole anyway, so there’s not much point in having them sit around in full combat gear.

This is also fully sealed and environment-controlled for NBCN protection and exotic atmosphere/vacuum use. It also renders all tanks amphibious tanks by default: once you’ve covered all the various atmospheres and pressures you might need to operate in, and obviously discarded air-breathing engines, you’ve built a vehicle that can shrug off submergence, too. You could drive a modern Imperial MBT from continent to continent across the ocean floor, given a case of rat bars and a good reason to try it.

Base Platform: Loadout

The base platform loadout includes a pair of bilateral cheek-mounted ortillery target designators, heavy mass-drivers, and slugguns/micromissile launchers at the front, on either side of the module mount and the armored prow (used for ramming/demolition), and a pair of rear-facing cheek-mounted medium mass-drivers at the rear for local defense. Completing the mix, a center-top-mounted “backscratcher” (a projector for downward-firing flechette shells) permits the vehicle to rid itself of pesky close-in infantry.

(Along with, of course, full-coverage point-defense lasers and autocannon, independently and automatically targeting all incoming fire.)

At the far rear of the tank, an externally-opening compartment can be used to hold resupply, infantry needing transport, or a thermal-thruster fuel pod to increase vehicle endurance.

Base Platform: Power

It seems a little inappropriate to say that the MBT is also powered by a micro-fission “hot soup” reactor, inasmuch as, well, it ain’t that micro. It is “mini”, perhaps, compared to standard-sized fission reactors, but it’s as large as the thorium molten-salt kind gets. The bigger ones all tend to be the safer “pebble-bed” design.

Naturally, this is buffered through a large set of superconducting-loop accumulators to handle immediate power draws and provide backup power in the event that you lose the power reactor – enough to withdraw, anyway, although probably not enough to fight with.

Base Platform: Propulsion

The Imperial MBT moves on neither wheels nor treads; rather, it sits atop eight semi-squishy rollagons, near-spheres rotated electromagnetically from within the sealed main hull, enabling it to move with equal facility in any direction, at speeds of up to 150 mph. The propulsion system also has considerable electromagnetic control over the shape of the rollagons; while they don’t have them normally, if you need spiked wheels or some other shape-variation to cross some tricky terrain, it can provide them on demand.

The base tank platform also includes a limited – by power availability and overheating, given the high mass of the vehicle – vector-control/nuclear-thermal thruster flight capability. This is typically used for skipping over tank traps, scaling vertical obstacles, and short ground skims, as well as being used in reverse to keep the vehicle on the ground with sufficient ground-pressure for the rollagons in low-gravity environments; since the vehicle has the approximate maneuverability of a lead brick in the air, it is strongly advised not to try to use it for anything more, lest you suffer from a fatal encounter with a real aircraft.

It does, however, greatly ease deployment from transport aircraft or shuttles, when used, since it lets you kick the tank out the back of the aircraft and ride their vectors safely to the ground.

And now, the modules:

Modules: Tactical Assault Tank (HV-10 Basher-class)

As close as it comes to a “standard” MBT design, the HV-10 Basher-class module loadout is similar to the V40 Ralihú IFV, scaled up; the Basher-class comes with a turreted heavy mass driver, but substitutes dual independently turreted quadbarrels for the Ralihú’s coaxial quadbarrel. (The heavy mass driver is also designed to function as a heavy sluggun, if required, and as such is entirely capable of delivering large-diameter canister shot for anti-infantry work.)

Modules: Long-Range Assault Tank (HV-12 Stormfall-class; also HV-12i Longeye-class)

The HV-12 Stormfall-class LRAT module is equipped with a super-heavy mass driver intended to be capable of long-range indirect as well as direct fire, and bilateral missile pods on either side of it, each capable of doing a simultaneous launch of up to 16 minimissiles with a short cycle time from internal magazines. Just perfect for those days when you want to fight in the shade.

By changing the missile loadout of the Stormfall, it can also serve as an active air-defense platform.

Rarely seen is the HV-12i Longeye variant, which trades in both super-heavy mass driver and missile pods for a graser installation, suitable for direct fire only but capable of punching out even more heavily protected targets. Also, notably, the Longeye graser is often capable of penetrating the atmosphere and reaching targets in low planetary orbit.

Modules: Drone Tank (HVC-14h Thunderbolt-class; also HVC-14l Stinger-class)

A drone tank, in legionary parlance, is the land-based miniature equivalent of an aircraft carrier. The HVC-14h Thunderbolt module contains nanoslurry and miniature drone components, which it uses to construct and deploy ad-hoc micro-AKVs to suit the requirements of the current battlespace, launching them into action as a centrally coordinated wing, for defense, reconnaissance, attack, or other functions.

The HVC-14l Stinger functions similarly, but substitutes swarm hives for the micro-AKV factory, and is thus able to saturate the local battlespace with microbot/nanobot swarms, be they the standard eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, or balefire, or more specialized models.

Modules: Tactical Arsonier (HV-10a Flammifer-class)

Used for area denial, reducing bunkers and dug-outs, and to clean up nanoswarms, the Flammifer-class replaces the heavy mass driver of the Basher-class with a scaled-up nuclear-thermal flamer, while retaining the quadbarrels as-is.

Modules: Command Tank (HV-10c Strategos-class)

The Strategos-class is a specialized vehicle for coordinating tank-squadron activities and close air support. The Strategos module doesn’t add any weapons systems; rather, it adds two more crew positions for squadron command, a specialized tactical/logistics C3I AI, and a nodal communications suite and its antennae.

A pair or triplet of Strategoi are usually assigned to a tank squadron made up of other classes for command/control functions.

Modules: Pummel (HV-11 Pugnacious-class)

The pummel tank is a highly specialized variant, designed to rip apart buildings and fortifications. It carries sappers in its rear compartment, and is equipped with specialized demolitions equipment up front.

Modules: Wrecker (HV-10w Trison-class)

Another highly specialized variant, the HV-10w Trison and other wreckers are logistics units, used to recover wrecked tanks and other heavy equipment off the battlefield for repair or for scrap.

Drones

As with all other units of the Imperial Legions, the heavy cavalry too has its drone accompaniments, with each MBT usually having a pair of WMH-12 Skyorca drones attached to it for close air support, along with a pair of heavy ground drones matching its own tactical function.

Transportation

The Flapjacks were made for this. Apart from that, they mostly drive to wherever they’re going, because only the biggest transport aircraft can manage to carry them.

The Emperor’s Sword: Light Cavalry

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Today, we return to this series once again…

Making up a further three of every sixteen legions (equal in number to the heavy infantry, and one for every three light infantry legions), and again not counting the specialists built off their platform, are the light infantry legions – swift-moving scouts, raiders, flankers, and skirmishers.

The personal equipment of a light cavalryman greatly resembles that of the light infantry legionary; their armor is merely another variant of the N45 Garrex, the N45v Hasédár cavalry armor. In addition to the standard features, the N45v Hasédár includes electromechanical “saddle clamps” (to hold you to the vehicle), superior inertial compensation, and plug-in vehicle interface hardware (for C3I, HUD functionality, and life-support longevity). They even are outfitted with the same weapons as the light infantry legionary, including not only the sidearms but also the IL-15i Battlesystem – since it is often useful to be able to fight “dismounted”.

The vehicles of the light infantry are stubby-winged ground-effect “chariots”, or “skimmers”, which can sustain a hover of a few to a few dozen meters off the ground – in terrain-following mode –, turn and flip on a dime thanks to high-speed gyros and auxiliary propulsion taps, all while being propelled at up to several hundred miles per hour by a bimodal (to enable their use in vacuum) thermal rocket/ramjet. A “hot soup” micro-fission reactor powers this and other vehicle systems. The single pilot rides the vehicle in a semi-prone position, protected by a non-fully-sealed enclosed forward/flanking armored canopy; to save mass and increase flexibility, the pilot is required to wear their own environmental armor, as described above.

(A jettisonable anti-radiation fairing can be mounted on top of the canopy to permit the ready deployment of such chariots by Flapjack­-class dropship.)

Vehicle sensors and communication equipment include all the usual standbys, including the active systems, T-ray snoopers, and full ECM suite used by the heavy infantry, again powered by the platform’s greater reactor capacity.

Loadout

A typical chariot loadout includes three target-linked heavy mass drivers (for’ard, and on each wingtip), an underslung heavy sluggun/micromissile launcher, and full-coverage point-defense/automated-return-fire lasers and autocannon. A small undermounted cargo bay aft can be used to contain additional supplies/ammunition, or be replaced with a fuel pod, for greater endurance, a medevac pod, or a minelaying pod; above it, a swarm hive contains close-air support supplies of eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, and balefire – which, as for the heavy legionary, constitute expendable recon assets, counter-swarm swarms, anti-machinery swarms, and anti-personnel/area-denial carbon-devourer swarms.

Drones

The light cavalry legionary is usually accompanied, as his counterparts, by AI combat drones, usually a mixed set of the WML-7 Skycat and its bigger brother, the WMH-17 Skyorca, depending on mission parameters.

When fighting dismounted, the chariot itself software-reconfigures to act as an autonomous AI combat drone for the legionary.

Transportation

The light cavalry  can be transported by the G5-TT Corveé tactical transport, with the appropriate module, but on the battlefield – and often also to the battlefield, it’s simplest just to let them transport themselves…

Trope-a-Day: We Have Reserves

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We Have Reserves: Heavily averted thanks to the quality-over-quantity philosophy of the Imperial Legions.  Even the most kill-crazy of the Empire’s historical generals (which is to say, the House of Sargas, for the most part) have been very determined indeed that the death should all, so far as is possible, happen on the other side, and very protective of the lives of their own men.  Of course, if it’s possible to deceive someone else on the enemy side, or even on a different enemy side, into being your reserves… well, that’s just shiny.  (See: Enemy Civil War).

(The people who have noted the disparity in quantity and tried this against the Empire have discovered that they thought of that: that’s what massive orbital bombardments and the Nuclear Option are for. It’s the only way to be sure.)

Trope-a-Day: Le Parkour / Combat Parkour

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Le Parkour / Combat Parkour: Something of a standard part of the skillset, even for getting around normally, in the modern era. This tends to come from three places: one, common exposure to how one gets around in microgravity; two, lots of habitats and inhabited planets/moons having less than “standard” gravity anyway, making it easier; and three, lots and lots of biotech work pushing the baseline on agility, reflexes and stamina well above where they used to be. Couple that with the circular feedback effect of architectural adaptation, and there you go.

In its combat form, a specialty of light legionaries. (Not so much one of heavy legionaries, since the problem with trying this while running around in three tonnes of combat exoskeleton isn’t that you can’t do it, it’s that the walls can’t take it.) It did not take much exposure to space-based infantry combat for people to figure out that – especially when fighting people used to operating in two dimensions, but hardly limited to that scenario – a chap who can run on walls, change orientation and vector in mid-air, and make use of all the bits of the environment, not just the floor-based ones, and so forth, has a distinct advantage. Enter, then, the trainers and armor designers figuring out how to do all that stuff down t’well, too.

Trope-a-Day: “Join the Army”, They Said

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“Join The Army,” They Said: While it’s never as yet been shown on screen, I am pretty certain both that the advertising is pretty realistic about the nature of war, but also that the recruitment slogan for the Imperial Military Service is along the lines of:

CIVILIZATION HAS ENEMIES.

KILL THE BASTARDS.

They’re very forthright people in the Empire, really (see also: Deadly Euphemism)…

(I mean, sure, it’s nice to have a bunch of big guys in power armor around post-natural-disasters, etc., and the IMS has a lot more tail than teeth, just like all modern militaries, so it’s not like most of them ever will kill anyone, even in wartime. But the reason it exists is nonetheless finding things that are looking to trouble the citizen-shareholders and then shooting the ever-loving crap out of them.)

Trope-a-Day: Improbable Aiming Skills

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Improbable Aiming Skills: Training for the various sentinel occupations, including the Imperial Legions and, yes, also the Watch Constabulary tries its best to achieve these, or at least to avert Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy really hard.  In these modern days in which you can have a top-flight ballistics software package running in your head and arbitrary amounts of computer power, locally networked sensors, etc., etc., in your gun – well, let’s just say that the standards for improbable have been raised a tad.

The Emperor’s Sword: Heavy Infantry

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“Heavies! What is your profession?”

“Bein’ the chewy meat center in a vanadium-plated god of war, SIR!!”

– apocryphal

Making up three of every sixteen legions (i.e., one for every three light infantry legions) – again, not counting the various specialized legions built off a heavy infantry platform – are the heavy infantry legions. They’re the tip of the spear, the claw on the paw, the hard-strikin’ leading edge of the attack – if the light infantry are the backbone of the Imperial Legions, one might say that the heavy infantry is the bloody great horn on the end that the animal’s charge rams into its enemy with great force and vigor. But the important thing to understand about the heavy legionaries is the nature of their combat environment, and how it makes them infantry – at least partially – by courtesy alone. They’re not just big, tough legionaries in armor; the light infantry have that covered.

So let’s talk about the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton, the current standard wear of the Heavy Legions. (Which is a combat exoskeleton because it’s descended from a long line of ancestors including, up front, civilian models used for construction, rescue, and so forth. It’s also fully-sealed powered armor, but then, so’s the N45 Garrex.)

Well, it’s big. It looks like a giant, stocky, barrel-bodied, dome-headed, no-necked humanoid with a back-sized hump, with weapons to match strapped to it. (And sort of as if it might overbalance backwards; it won’t, the gearing is much better than that and the armor is heavier in front to counterbalance, but the size of the powerplant and the auxiliary systems it’s carrying back there do create that impression, somewhat.) What it is, is basically a walking tank with interchangeable modular heavy-weapon packs that let it blast away on the battlefield, punch out small buildings, throw respectably-sized vehicles, dance a merry jig amid venting plasma, and toss around nuclear grenades at close range.

Size

If you take your nominal average wearer as being, oh, 7′ x 2′ x 1′, then while light infantry armor makes ’em bigger, it doesn’t make ’em so much bigger that they can no longer fit through doors, and so forth. The Havoc, contrariwise, makes its wearer more like 12′ x 4′ x 4′, and weighing something close to, maybe even on the far side of, a ton. There’s a reason military bases aren’t built to normal scale, and indeed, why you usually use the light infantry if you need to do the kind of building-clearing where it’s important that you’re left with an intact building afterward. Chap in a Havoc runs into your average suburban house hereabouts, he comes out the other side without noticing much of a stop, and it basically implodes. So it goes.

Operator

The wearer/operator goes in the front. The whole body opens up at the front, hydraulically, forward and up; the legionary climbs in backwards, then sticks his head up into the helmet and arms into the sleeves; then it closes again. The sleeves are internal to the body, not inside the arms of the suit; you can’t wear a suit that much bigger than you without risking tearing your arms off with every maneuver. Technically, when you’re fighting in a Havoc, you’re doing so with your arms at your sides, slightly bent, resting on the emergency hand controllers and keypads.

Those are only for emergency backup control, though. For primary control – if you’re wearing the suit right, the command torc built into the base of the helmet is resting right up against the back of your neck and the virtuality laser-port they installed in there, if you didn’t have one already, about halfway through basic, and has already established a high-bandwidth data connection with your brain. The moment you go active, you’re no longer wearing the suit and moving it about like a marionette; you are the suit, and moving it like your own body.

(Given its radically different capabilities, of course, this can be tricky to learn. That’s why they spend months teaching you Piston-Driven Fist Style martial arts, designed for these things, before letting you get anywhere near a combat exoskeleton for real; it’s also why an active-service heavy legionary is easy to spot on the street, because his gait will always be that little bit off.)

What they’re wearing in there is a very similar silk organza-type body glove to the one worn under regular combat armor; and exactly like its counterpart, it’s woven through with internal networking and environmental control and medical systems, capable of self-sealing, closing wounds, dispensing emergency pharmaceuticals, and covering everything in NBCN decontamination foam if penetrations are detected. The main difference here is that it can get hot in there; the Havoc bodysuit includes sweat-removal facilities (which filter water removed for the drinking reservoir) and Peltier cooling, run off the main power systems. This, and the legionary wearing it, fit tightly into the suit’s internal gel-filled padded sleeve that cushions them against acceleration and shock.

Power

Naturally, all of this uses a lot of power. A lot of power. This is buffered through distributed superconducting-loop accumulators throughout the exoskeleton, but while they do provide enough power to let you keep moving for a while if you lose the main power plant, they aren’t really enough to actually fight it. For that, you need something that can generate the necessary power.

Ordinarily, they might solve that problem with an antimatter (except that’s not good stuff to keep around where people might be shooting at it) or fusion reactor (except they involve lots of auxiliary machinery to keep the reaction sustained, which also makes it stop working fairly readily when people shoot at it). To bypass those problems, they reached back a little in history, and what’s under the small of this suit’s back is a good old-fashioned micro-fission reactor, of the thorium molten-salt design (which is to say, tasty “hot soup”). This is much more resilient under fire – although if someone does manage to penetrate the armor and crack the flask, it does have the minor disadvantage of spraying highly radioactive heavy-metal fluoride vapor over the landscape. But you can’t have everything.

Sensors and Communications

Core sensors and communications are essentially identical to light-legionary combat armor; radio and whisker laser communications, access to the OTP-encrypted military mesh, threat identification systems, teamware and C3I systems integration, thermal imaging, remote sensor access, 360 degree sensing, etc., etc. It also incorporates the sound transmission and imaging systems, which are even more important in the case of the Havoc, since its “helmet” is a sealed armor-dome with no direct vision possible; all internal displays are produced by the battle computer. The internal computer is rather more powerful than that included in, say, the N45 Garrex, both to run the more complicated systems and to act as a more major node in the battle ‘mesh.

On top of this, the Havoc adds pulsed-usage radar and lidar systems, plus integral T-ray high-frequency snoopers, powered by its greater reactor capacity, and a full ECM suite.

Structure, Strength and Armor

In construction terms, outside the padded sleeve is the diamondoid-composite skeleton of the suit, a honeycomb-patterned framework to provide the basic structural strength of the armor. This includes the attachment points and channels for the “muscles” – pseudo-organic structures capable of changing length on electrical signal – which power the suit. (In conjunction, yes, with the stabilization gyros.) They’re calibrated for high strength, speed, and flexibility; a Havoc is designed to let its wearer run at 54 mph and lift over a ton within safe tolerances – while still being able to dance a jig and pick up an egg without breaking it.

This skeleton is environmentally sealed and environment-controlled, for NBCN protection and exotic atmosphere/vacuum use, able to withstand and operate within several hundred atmospheres of pressure and extreme temperatures. Also at this level, all the working portions of suit equipment (computers, sensors, life support, medical support, power distribution, etc.) are located and secured in place. All of these systems are spread out throughout the skeleton, constructed from highly redundant circuitry with automatic re-routing, so that even with heavy damage, it can still function. It also includes mounting voids for heavier subsystems, such as the power reactor, external hives, and modular weapons pack.

The armor on top of this is qualitatively similar to light infantry armor – a sandwich of interlinked, highly corrosion-resistant and refractory cerametal composite armor plates around electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, with an outer anti-energetic ablative layer sprayed atop it. There’s just a lot more of it, quantitatively speaking, in thick, overlapping slabs. Likewise, the Havoc comes with rather more kinetic barrier emitters than light legionary armor, and thanks to its thorium reactor, has a lot more power available to back them up with. Finally, some portions of the armor include reactive sections, capable of exploding outward to neutralize force from external explosions or impacting projectiles (or, occasionally, long drops), in deference to the fact that large anti-materiel weapons are fired at heavy legionaries with depressing regularity.

There are, generally, no chameleonic or “stealth” features included – and the heavy legionary exoskeleton does not come in any “scout” variants – since the thermal – heat has to be radiated! –  et. al., signature produced by the reactor and other exoskeletal systems are more than enough to vitiate attempts at stealth. On the other hand, it is equipped with the abovementioned ECM and signature-scrambling systems to confuse incoming guided missiles out of perfect target locks.

Flight

The Havoc can also fly, at up to several hundred mph depending on local conditions, using a combination of the same vector-control trickery used in standard combat armor, and of using its power reactor to provide the working heat to nuclear-thermal thrusters. (This is normally only an option in atmosphere, which functions as the supply of working fluid; in vacuum, it requires carting a big clip-on tank of remass around with you, which is less than convenient most of the time.) As in the former case, using this for extended flight is discouraged since it makes you an easy kill for air vehicles; on the other hand, it’s great for attaining position, making short skips, and so forth, not to mention extended low ground-skims. Attempting combat parkour with it is possible, but do bear in mind the strength of whatever it is you plan to bounce off of in the process; smashing right through it is often tactically awkward in combat situations.

Integral Weapons & Point Defense

In addition to weapons supplied by the modular pack, the Havoc possesses four integral weapons systems. Two of these are inbuilt to the arms of the suit: on the right, a heavy carbine equivalent to a tribarrel version of the IL-15i Battlesystem‘s carbine section, for routine anti-personnel and light anti-materiel use, and on the left, the KF-15 Dragonspume anti-nanitic/area-denial flamer, serving essentially the same purposes as they do for the light legionary only more so. The EI-12d Valkyrie target designator is built into the helmet section of the Havoc, for use in designating targets for the tactical net and ortillery, etc.

The fourth is a collection of defensive weaponry: each shoulder bears a point-defense pack, consisting of a pair of short-range lasers (designed to cause spontaneous explosion or vaporization-induced deflection) and a pair of short-range autocannon, independently and automatically targeting incoming fire for destruction.

The Havoc also carries an exoskeleton combat knife, which resembles a large hanrian – too heavy for unaugmented sophonts to use – scaled to the exoskeleton, which can be picked up and wielded by its manipulators for use primarily as a utility blade, although melee combat usage isn’t entirely unknown.

Swarms and their Hives

The Havoc also comes with swarm hives, both internal and external, housing microbot/nanobot swarms. The internal hive(s) are integrated into the structural honeycomb, housing repair and medical ‘bots whose purpose is to crawl around the interior of the suit ensuring that it self-repairs, and even more importantly, it keeps its operator in good repair.

The external hives, on the other hand, are a reflection of the Legions’ belief in really close air support. The exact mix can be varied by pre-mission module swap-outs, but a typical default mix for the external hives (the M-823 Horde) is a roughly equal mix of eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, and balefire – which is to say, of expendable recon assets, counter-swarm swarms, anti-machinery swarms, and anti-personnel/area-denial carbon-devourer swarms.

Modular Weapons Pack

The primary weapons of the heavy legionary, however, are those supplied by the modular weapons pack: again, selected according to mission. The modular weapons pack fits onto the upper rear of the exoskeleton, beneath the armor and behind the helmet, with hardened lines running to extended firing packages which clamp onto the suit’s arms. A typical “mixed-mission” modular weapons pack would be the BP-400 Conflagration, which adds to the integrated loadout the following:

  • An arm-mounted heavy tribarrel sluggun, a larger-bore version of that included in the IL-15i Battlesystem, capable of firing larger (1.5″) versions of all its different ammo types: anti-materiel spikes, flechette canister shot, bore-compatible grenades, or gyroc micromissiles, the latter of which can include as their payload exploding shells, incendiaries and napalm, cryoburn shells, nanoweapons (if someone’s set up a microwave power system for them), chemical/gas dispensers, cyberswarm dispensers, network node – or spy dust – dispensers, injector needles (at low power), restraint nanoglop, electroshock “stunner” shells, acid globs, anti-electronic fiberdust, mollynet, antimatter nuke-in-a-bullets, etc., etc. Naturally, the weapons pack can store plentiful supplies of multiple types, and switch between them on the fly. (One that they’re particularly fond of is the infamous “backscratcher”, which travels a short distance and then blasts flechettes back down at the firer, rattling harmlessly off the heavy armor but making a real mess out of any lighter infantry trying to attack it close up.)
  • A chemical/nanoweapons dispensing system, with storage tanks for same.
  • A backpack vertical-launch system for a half-dozen minimissiles, usually supplied with 0.1 kt microfusion warheads.

Drones

Like the light legionary, the heavy legionary is accompanied by and acting as the command nexus for a half-dozen AI combat drones, in this case usually mixed from the WMH-4 Octoscorp, the WMH-7 Grizzly, and the WMH-12 Skyorca, depending on mission parameters, each heavily armed in its own right. When not commanded otherwise, these too default to acting as defense platforms – but the best defense is a good offense, right?

Transportation?

Like the light infantry, the heavy infantry is usually delivered to the field by the G5-TT Corvee tactical transport, fulfilling its multipurpose role. The module used for heavy legionary transport, however, is somewhat different – it’s an open frame, and the legionaries ride on the outside, held in by suit-controlled magnetic clamps, the Havoc already being heavily armored enough. The weight savings permit systems to let them refuel and rearm in flight to be added instead of all that wasteful hull.

They don’t generally use IFVs/APCs to get around on the battlefield. A platform like this doesn’t need ’em.

“I’M THE JUGGERNAUT!!!”

– rookie heavy-legionary

“Heh. Heheheheh. Here’s a taltis, kid…”

– commander of Basher-class heavy armored vehicle

Shoot First, Stab Later

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“As you have been told, it is not Legion policy to require you to carry swords in anything but dress uniform, nor is it Legion policy to use them in combat.”

“As you will soon find out, many creative souls before you have decided to use them anyway as personal weapons, and have left many designs for accessories such as molecular edges, setting the blades on fire, or running 45,000 volts through them in the Legion mesh.”

” As I am now telling you, if you decide to join those ranks, all well and good, if it works. But if your fancy bladework fails to efficiently kill the enemy and enhance the mission, you’ll get the chance to prove its worth against Lucy and me when we get back to base. She’ll enjoy that. You won’t. Am I making myself clear, legionaries?”

– Master Sergeant Serril Rysakar (and her very favorite sluggun),
mission briefing to a new crop of legionary-apprentices

The Emperors’ Sword: Light Infantry

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Making up nine of every sixteen legions – even when we don’t count the various specialized legions which are mostly built off a light infantry platform – the light infantry are the backbone of the Imperial Legions. Which, in another sense, means they get all the dirty jobs that no-one more specialized is specially equipped for. This is by no means to underrate them; the Legions have long been a service that concentrates on quality over quantity, and your basic light infantry legionary is a highly trained professional equipped and competent to fight in a multitude of different operations – from basic raiding and ground-taking on up – in a bewildering array of different environments.

It’s also from the light infantry that most of the espatiers, or “ship’s troops” – those legionaries posted to provide muscle aboard the starships of the Imperial Navy permanently, as opposed to those who are just transported on troop transports to somewhere where fighting is needed – are drawn, although larger ships will also carry some heavy legionaries for stiffening.

Actually, for all you Mass Effect fans out there, it probably looks something like this...

Actually, for all you Mass Effect fans out there, it probably does look something like this…

So just what is the fashionable light legionary wearing these days?

In the Empire, although similar suits are in fairly common use by other advanced militaries and mercenary units, the answer is the N45 Garrex field combat armor. In some cases, it may instead mean one of its more specialized variants, of which the most common are the N45e Réyneri scout armor (originally built for the Imperial Exploratory Service rather than the legions, it includes extra long-term survival gear and stealth/infiltration capabilities, commonly used in covert ops), the N45a Qasel sea combat armor (includes kinetic barriers optimized for underwater use, specialized sensors like sonar, and the ability to replenish internal environmental supplies from compatible liquid media), the N45r Callérás high-rad field combat armor (includes a lot more radiation protection), and the N45s Merra microgravity combat armor (includes extended environmental supplies, a microgravity maneuvering unit, and magnetic grips – this is what’s issued to espatiers), but these are all variants on the same basic theme.

This armor is a multilayer protection system. Down right at the bottom next to the skin, there’s a silk organza-type body-glove. This is woven through with internal networking and tens of thousands of nodes for the environmental control and medical systems; these nodes and nodules are capable of sealing holes, stopping bleeding, closing wounds, dispensing emergency pharmaceuticals, and covering everything in decontamination foam if penetrations are detected in the presence of NBCN weapons.

On top of that, comes the armor-plating itself; a sandwich of interlinked, highly corrosion-resistant and refractory cerametal composite armor plates around electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, affixed on top of a flexible core suit of non-porous arachnoweave ballistic fabric. An outer ablative layer is sprayed atop the plating, which boils away to protect the wearer from directed energy weapons. (This is, of course, rather heavy – while not power-enhanced, like the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton, the N45 Garrex is power-assisted, rendering it feather-light in normal use so that it doesn’t impair the legionary’s movements or cause fatigue.)

The outermost layer of protection consists of kinetic barriers generated by the suit’s hardware – essentially, a much smaller version of the same hardware used to protect starships – to “slap aside” incoming projectiles – at least so long as suit power holds out.

The whole suit is fully sealed, with internal climate control and self-contained air reprocessing, such that the Legions can fight anywhere from the chill of outer system moons to inner-system hothouses, come rain, shine, hostile atmospheres, high pressure, vacuum, being underwater, chemical, biological, and nanotechnological weapons, and/or radioactive fallout. For that purpose, the characteristic “teardrop” helmet of the IMS joins seamlessly to the suit body. An electronic sound transmission system allows the wearer to hear and speak, while filtering out sound-based attacks or sounds capable of causing sensory stun; likewise, the integrated imaging system in the helmet filters out basilisk attacks and similarly stunning visual stimuli.

Standard optronic equipment for the N45 Garrex includes an onboard microframe computer to run the suit’s management software and act as a hub for a personal-area dataweave “battle weave”, and a full communications, navigation, and sensor suite. The communications suite includes simple radio and whisker laser communicators, as well as access to the one-time pad encrypted military communications mesh. The sensor suite provides a full head-up display of sensor data incoming from a variety of sources, including teamware, tactical and strategic C3I systems, threat identification systems, weapon status data including “gun’s-eye view” projections, and other such information.

And finally, it has a very limited thruster/vector-control based flight capability. Doctrine strongly discourages using this for extended periods of actual flight, since a flying target is an easy kill; it is, however, useful for attaining a superior position, clearing obstacles, making quick “skips” between cover, running on walls, changing orientation and vector in mid-leap, and generally hurling oneself about the place like a god of parkour wherever no-one expects you to be right now.

And what’s she carrying?

Something like this:

  • The IL-15i Battlesystem battle carbine. This is the light legionary’s primary weapon – combining in a single unit a standard carbine and an underslung sluggun. The former does the main job of propelling tiny flechettes downrange at mind-croggling speeds, which do appropriately gory damage by sheer kinetic energy to whatever they hit. The latter, well, can fire any number of things depending on the mission – anti-materiel spikes, flechette canister shot, bore-compatible grenades, or gyroc micromissiles, the latter of which can include as their payload exploding shells, incendiaries and napalm, cryoburn shells, nanoweapons (if someone’s set up a microwave power system for them), chemical/gas dispensers, cyberswarm dispensers, network node – or spy dust – dispensers, injector needles (at low power), restraint nanoglop, electroshock “stunner” shells, acid globs, anti-electronic fiberdust, mollynet, antimatter nuke-in-a-bullets, and on and on and on. Some of these loads are, obviously, more commonly issued and used than others.
  • The KF-5 Wyvernspit anti-nanitic/area-denial flamer – basically, a weaponized plasma torch (to avoid the need to cart around huge quantities of fuel) capable of creating intense heat at point-blank range. Used for anti-nanoswarm defense, area denial, threatening people, and incidental arson.
  • The EI-12d Valkyrie target designator. Tied into the tactical net, this permits the legionary to call down ortillery strikes and missiles from UAVs to deal with bigger targets than she has time to deal with personally.
  • The IS-5 Stinger pistol, a sidearm used for close up personal defense.
  • A military-grade nanolathe, to permit them to perform field repairs and to manufacture any other small items of equipment they might need on the fly, using recipes stored in the suit computers and/or downloaded ad-hoc off the military mesh.
  • A hanrian, which is to say the second of the Two Swords (1). In its modern military recension, it resembles a cross between a Roman gladius and the USMC combat knife, and serves both as a melee weapon and a general-purpose tool. It’s not a mollyblade or any such fancy device, inasmuch as it’s expected to be used much more often as a utility knife than in combat, but it is made of much better metals for purpose than just about any sword of history. Damn things never get blunt.
  • A bandolier containing replacement powercells, replacement heat sinks, replacement sluggun magazines, nanobricks, and pouches for any other miscellaneous supplies she feels might be particularly useful today. (Grenades come in the sluggun magazines; if you need fixed explosives, you can pull one out and program it manually.)
  • Possibly some components of/ammunition for a heavy fireteam support weapon – missile launcher, heavy semi-portable, etc., although such are usually transported by the IFV and/or robot logistics drones.
  • An emergency survival kit. In the interests of maximizing mobility – especially since high-speed maneuver is such a large part of their doctrine – and combat effectiveness, Legionary doctrine prefers not to burden troops with all the rations and resupply and such they might need; again that’s what the IFV and robot logistics drones are for. But just in case the shit hits the fan, they do get one of these.

She’s also accompanied by, and acting as the command nexus for, half a dozen AI combat drones, usually a mixed set of the WML-12 Warhound (“wolves”), WML-14 Slitherslay (“serpents”), WMH-4 Octoscorp (“spiders”), and the WML-17 Skycat (“raptors”), depending on mission parameters – each of which is quite capably and similarly armed in its own right. When not specifically commanded otherwise, these default to acting as automated return fire platforms, tracking incoming fire and returning it automatically.

Note: these, however, are the officially issued general purpose weapons. On the one hand, the Legions have access to a wide variety of specialized weapons which they’ll hand out as required (if your mission spec calls for house-clearing on a world inhabited by tough guys with natural armor, for example, it’s time to break out the S-11i Mamabear heavy slugguns all around; for riot control, break out the algetic whips, that sort of thing); on the other hand, individually qualified specialists also get the weapons appropriate to their specialty – sniper rifles, etc., say; and on the gripping hand, they also encourage and even subsidize legionaries carrying any personal auxiliary weapons they fancy, know how to use, and which are compatible, on the grounds that it (a) adds flexibility in a pinch, and (b) confuses the enemy’s attempts to figure out what their capabilities actually are, and more confusion to the enemy is always a good thing.

Transportation?

The light infantry is usually delivered to the field, and between fields, by the G5-TT Corvee tactical transport, of which more has been said earlier.

On the field, however, the light legions are usually transported around the battlefield by the V40 Ralihú, an armored personnel carrier/infantry fighting vehicle with full environmental support and sealing, all-directions all terrain-drive, brief hop-jump capability, and a modular swap-out enhancement system with modules permitting it to perform in the roles of IFV, squad transport, ambulance, etc., with equal facility. It also comes equipped, in all its modular roles, with a turreted heavy mass driver and coaxial quadbarrel mass-driver machine-gun.

(Yes, even the medical ones. While the Empire will ostentatiously disable them when fighting people who do abide by the Ley Accords, they spend enough time fighting people who don’t think that the rules of civilized warfare apply to them that they didn’t feel that spending money and logistic capacity on an unarmed military ambulance was a good idea.)

Footnotes:

1. The first-sword, the teirian, is not carried by most units outside dress uniform and is rarely used on the modern battlefield by even those who do carry it, it being mostly a matter of tradition and intimidation for them. A modern teirian is a damnably effective sword under many circumstances, mind you, but not effective enough against equally modern combat armor unless you spend ridiculous amounts of money on it – and, of course, requires closing to within reach.

Interlude: Things That Go Bang

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Since in the ongoing series about the Legions I’m obviously going to be talking about their guns, seems to me that I ought to maybe describe the terminology used for those just a bit so that you know what I’m talking about.

That is, inasmuch as terminology has changed from what could reasonably be translated into our firearms terminology, inasmuch in turn as these guns technically aren’t firearms – they’re powered by mass drivers rather than chemical explosions – so while some of the words are familiar, the definitions have changed.

Let me sum up:

There are four basic classes of guns (in the slugthrower sense, that is, and ignoring needlers which no-one counts as slugthrowers even though they technically are) used in the Empire. These are referred to as pistols, carbines, snipers, and slugguns.

The first three of these all work by firing tiny flechettes at HOLY CRAP speed.

A pistol is, basically, any flechette-firing mass-driver handgun.

A carbine is the common flechette-firing mass-driver long gun. The original definition as “shorter-barrelled than a rifle” has more or less gone away, since there are no more rifles – the mass drivers spin their projectiles purely through EM fields – but it translates to the vast number of general-use longarms intended for use in pretty much all combat situations from close-up defense to long-range suppressive, essentially filling both the PDW and assault rifle role.

A modal example has a bullpup configuration and probably has a form factor not dissimilar to the FN P90, the weapon I would expect to play them on television if any of this were ever to be made into television. The barrels, in general, are not significantly longer than the main body.

A sniper is the only really long longarm, long-barreled and equipped with specialist software and sensors for even more accuracy than you’ll get out of an already accurate carbine. They’re the descendants of sniper rifles, only shortened in name because, well, they’re not rifles.

The sluggun isn’t a flechette weapon; it fires macroscopic metal slugs in an anti-material role, or canisters which you can put just about anything in, up to and including using it as a launcher for bore-compatible grenades and gyroc micromissiles.

A battle carbine isn’t a special class of its own; it’s what you get when you mount a regular carbine and an underslung sluggun in the same case for maximal versatility, usually sharing their redundant components.

Of our other common firearm types, this can be said:

There aren’t shotguns, because a simple software change to a carbine can emulate them by firing a burst and oscillating the final stage of the mass driver to produce a spreading cone of flechettes, with all the stopping power and spread of the real thing. You can do the same thing with a pistol to emulate a sawed-off shotgun. Alternatively, you can fire canister shot out of a sluggun to much the same effect.

There aren’t submachine guns, because you just configure your carbine to fully automatic rapid fire, and you have exactly the same effect. Likewise, the machine pistol and the pistol.

Any questions?

The Emperors’ Sword: Some Notes

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(I also want to note that I could equally well title this series “The Empresses’ Sword” – the word, after all, is identical and gender-affix free in the original Eldraeic. Not my fault that English is an annoyingly inflexible and imprecise language…

…but alternating would probably confuse folks and make it harder to search for.)

Before we get on to the actual details of the bulk of the forces in question, some assorted notes on other topics:

Artillery

The Legions, by and large, do not take artillery with them to the battlefield, despite their love of big guns and heavy firepower. The reasoning is as follows:

  1. Either you control the orbitals above the battlespace (even in an over-horizon sense), or the enemy does.
  2. If you do, you don’t need ground artillery, because you can simply drop KEWs from orbit.
  3. If they do, and you still need more gun than your heavy tanks can give you, you’re just providing the enemy with a big, fat, slow target (in the shape of your towed/self-propelled guns) that they can drop KEWs on from orbit.
  4. Either way, it ain’t going to help you.

Policy in this area, therefore, is to be generous in handing out the EI-12D Valkyrie target designator to ground forces, and let them call down all the “rods from god” and other ortillery weapons that they need.

(There are mortar-equivalents, of a sort; as we’ll see later, the IL-15i Battlesystem battle carbine includes an underslung sluggun capable of firing anti-materiel spikes, bore-compatible grenades, and gyroc micromissiles – and since its mass driver is quite powerful and its targeting software is entirely capable of handling an arching trajectory shot, one of these with the right ammunition is quite capable of functioning as an effective mortar.)

Close Air Support

Close air support is most commonly provided by the G7-BU Sunhawk, badass tilt-turbine/hybrid-rocket and (from an authorial perspective) shameless homage to the A-10 Thunderbolt II (“Warthog”), a wing or two of which is organically attached to most legions. It flies low, it hovers, it delivers untold quantities of messy death via a gun so large the whole airframe is built around it with the able assistance of a fine collection of auxiliary missiles and bombs. It is ably accompanied by the G12-BU Falcon, a smaller air-support vehicle built along similar lines, with a chin-mounted mass driver and cheek-mounted short-range missile launchers.

Much like the dedicated air-to-air interceptors (which, as a side note, are usually operated by the Navy as the irritating orbit-to-atmosphere subset of space operations), these are designed to be able to sortie from aerospace cruisers in low forced orbit, as well as from ground airfields should the campaign run long enough for you to have any ground airfields.

Closer air support comes from the Legions’ fine selection of UAVs fielded as support weapons – special attention here should go to the LD-116 Ravager variant of the modular battle tank platform, whose entire function is to dispatch and coordinate wings of ad-hoc micro-UAVs as needed in the current battlespace – and the occasional wide-area nanoswarm “death cloud” used for area-denial or line-breaking.

Even closer air support comes from some of the half-dozen combat drones slaved to every legionary as a matter of course, and also – for the heavy infantry and the cavalry – from the microbot/nanite cyberswarms they’re toting with them as expendable recon assets and balefire eaters.

Delivery

The most usual means of delivering legionaries about the place is the G5-TT Corvee, a quad-engined tilt-turbine/hybrid rocket vehicle with a modular changeout system which allows it to serve as – among others – a troop transport – for legionaries and their IFVs – medevac ship, gunship, or missile platform as desired, although these latter are rare as close air support role is usually left to the Sunhawk. These serve the purpose of transporting the legionaries around planetside, and also – since like the Sunhawk, their hybrid-rocket capabilities let them reach and return from starships in low orbit – from orbit down to the orbithead.

Establishing an orbithead in the first place when you don’t have a landing zone, on the other hand, is the hard part, for which there are multiple varieties of ways to drop from orbit fast and lithobrake, depending on exactly who you are. For this, light legionaries get the Sledgehammer-class drop shuttle (to drop entire companies at one go) and the Fist-class triple-drop pod, used to insert a three-legionary fireteam and their drones. (The Fist is primarily, but not exclusively, used for special forces ops.) Heavy legionaries, by contrast, get the Piton-class single-legionary drop pod, which is essentially a disposable shell with braking rockets, ECM, and decoys that fits around the outside of the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton and lets you fire it out of a missile tube.

The cavalry get the Flapjack-class cavalry dropship, of which more has been said elsewhere.

The other exceptional transit mechanism is used by legionary espatiers/ship’s troops when attempting hostile boarding actions. Usually a starship to be boarded has already surrendered, and as such legionaries can board it through its normal docks and locks, carried by their parent vessel’s pinnace and safely under its guns; but rarely, it is necessary to board and take a starship that is still resisting, or more commonly a habitat. For this, what is formally known as the microgravity assault vehicle (MAV) but more commonly referred to as the boarding torpedo exists, the most common being the Marlinspike-class. The job of a MAV is to avoid fire on the way to boarding, ram the target, cut through the hull, and crawl forward to wedge itself into a position suitable for discharging troops directly into the inner spaces of said target. This is what you might call a high-risk, low-survivability operation, which is why it’s very rarely done.

Enhancements

Given who we’re talking about here, there really shouldn’t be any need to say that everyone in the Legions is enhanced to the eyeballs with milspec bio-, nano-, and cybertechnology. Baselines don’t cut it on the modern battlefield; much too slow, fragile, and suchlike. So it doesn’t matter what species you were: eldrae, kaeth, etc., once you join the Legions – and you’ve made it through the first half of the Anvil so they can be pretty sure you’re not going to wash out – it’s into the healing vats to be stripped down and put back together with a full set of military-basic upgrades: faster reflexes, better senses, less need for sleep, skin, muscle, and bone weaves for extra resilience and strength, an auxiliary heart if you didn’t already have one, faster healing, immunity to fear (in the proper sense that means you still receive warning signals when you ought to be cautious, but it can never overpower your volition), and so on and so forth…

Logistics

Which I will mention here simply to point out that yes, they have logistics. Lots and lots of logistics, although most of the logistic chain is the Navy’s business, and only the part involving getting it planetside and to the right people at the end belongs to the Legions. The teeth need the tail – but in these posts, I’m mostly examining the teeth, so the tail will not be mentioned much. A detailed look at it may happen in the indefinite future.

Special Forces

The Imperial military is actually rather heavy on special forces, by most standards, given the Empire’s general preference for subtlety, indirection, and outright deviousness whenever possible and strong dispreference for anything resembling mass attritional warfare. Which makes it a rather complicated subject, and something that I’ll deal with, by and large, also later.

Sophonts on the Battlefield?

Why do they even have sophonts on the battlefield, and not just field vast armies of nothing but drones, possibly remote-controlled?

Because:

(a) Tactical networks aren’t totally reliable; and

Because there are such things as signal jamming, and EMP, and plain old interference, and people knocking out intermediate network nodes, and having someone sophont and able to make decisions down there in the battlespace means no-one ends up in the embarrassing position of playing the Trade Federation in The Phantom Menace. Which is good, ’cause those guys should have won awards for sheer logistical dumbassery.

(b) Light-lag is a bitch; and

If you want to stay inside the enemy’s OODA loop, adding a whole bunch of signal delay is not a good way to do it. Milliseconds count on the modern battlefield. Hell, sometimes, microseconds count.

(c) More minds equals more flexibility.

An ecology of thousands of interacting minds responds much better to stresses and the unexpected than a single or small number of central controllers. A giant peer-to-peer network made up of nodes with initiative is much less likely to screw up and stay screwed up – which is especially valuable when said screw-ups involve getting killed and/or losing the war.

Specialized Legions

What we’re going to be talking about in later parts of this series are the four basic types of legion: light infantry, heavy infantry, light cavalry, and heavy cavalry, maintained at an approximate 9:3:3:1 ratio.

The legions, of course, also have innumerable slightly-specialized variants on these basic themes, along with outright specialist legions: guards/peacekeepers, communications specialists, combat engineers, super-heavies, military police, siege specialists, logistics specialists, undersea legions, first-strike specialists, reconnaissance specialists, saboteurs, experimental technology legions, battle theater prep specialists, automaton legions, hunter legions, special weapons legions, medical specialists, underground specialists, even terror legions. I don’t plan on detailing all these specialized variants here, though, just the basic types they vary from.

The Legions don’t have a separate military intelligence section, however: Admiralty Intelligence performs that function for the entire Imperial Military Service.

Next time: the light infantry in all their glory…

Trope-a-Day: Hollywood Tactics

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Hollywood Tactics: Very much averted (disclaimer: future screw-ups not covered, but I shall at least try to take proper tactical advice).  The Legions are very keen on, among other things, formations, combined arms tactics, avoiding open-field battles, flanking, suppressing and covering fire, using all the available dimensions (even if #4 is tricky), destroying the enemy from well beyond visual range, commanding the battle from well behind the lines and preferably from orbit, etc., etc.

And while their training program is, in many ways, The Spartan Way, it is tempered with very advanced medicine (the sort of thing that makes Valhalla-style deadly live-fire exercises survivable) and the expertise of a great many psychedesigners in ensuring that it goes right up to the point at which tempering stops and snapping begins, and no further.

See also: Combat Pragmatist.

The Emperors’ Sword: Introduction

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This is the first – in what turns out will be several – posts on the Imperial Legions, how they’re equipped and how they work in practice.

But before getting into the details of how the Imperial Legions are equipped, it’s important to understand what they are. The Legions are a force optimized for heavy striking and raiding – ideally, to jump in, sucker-punch the enemy, and bug out again – rather than to hold ground, or to act as occupying forces (much more analogous to the Marines than the Army, in other words). They are trained to excel at local strongpoint defense, but that’s a separate issue from trying to occupy or hold large areas.

This is for three reasons:

  1. In the minds of everyone but the very-minority Imperium Bellipotent, and some of its political allies, the Empire is out of the conquering business, and has been for a very long time. Mass forcible conquests are out of fashion, seeing as they don’t work very well, and very unlikely to ever come back into fashion. The Empire is very firm on not wanting anyone in it who doesn’t want to be there.
  2. When planning to occupy lots of ground, it helps to have lots of quantity. The Empire has rarely had that advantage, and so prefers to optimize its military forces for quality – and picks a strategic posture that works well for having the best, not necessarily the most, troops. (Also, for that matter, the kaeth – of whom there are many in the Legions – are temperamentally very unsuited for occupation duties, since they get bored really, really fast if no-one’s putting up a proper fight. And no-one wants them going out and looking for someone who’ll give them one…)
  3. Mass interplanetary warfare is, in any case, impractical in the extreme. It takes a ridiculously large number of troops to keep your boot firmly on the neck of an entire planet, up close and personal-like, and while you can build a fleet of troop transports fit to blacken the sky, etc., etc., if you don’t wreck your economy and bankrupt yourself doing so, you’ll certainly spend far, far more than you could ever possibly gain by doing it. This is a move generally reserved for the less sane members of the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms, like the lovely space-fascists of the Iltine Union.

(In practice, I say aside, the Empire makes up for this doctrinal deficiency on the rare occasions – nth-generational future-warfare is usually long past the requirement for, as well as the habit of, mass warfare – it’s required to in one of two ways:

First up, and preferably, the practice of nexus warfare combined with orbital supremacy. This is one of the reasons the Legions are trained to excel at local strongpoint defense; because on any halfway civilized world/habitat, when you’ve got them by the data network, and the power grid, and the transportation hubs, and on many planets the life support, their hearts and minds tend to follow. This is then backed up by the Navy sitting in orbit ready to drop some KEWs on anyone who causes too much trouble. And together, these keep things stable long enough for concessions to be extracted or for the meme-wranglers to do their work.

Second, on the less friendly side reserved for the extreme cases, orbital supremacy combined with ruthlessness. If you’re fighting people who aren’t civilized, unlikely to become civilized, and likely to go on causing trouble, it’s time to dig out the old C/C strategy –Containment/Curtailment.

The former covers, after achieving orbital supremacy and dropping a few raids to take out possible countermeasures and existing facilities, placing a whole mess of interdiction satellites in orbit and a picket to supervise them, with instructions to shoot up anything that looks like a launch facility and shoot down anything they manage to launch anyway. Conquering and civilizing them may be out (which it almost certainly was anyway – see the Hopeless War trope, when its turn comes up for posting), but at least you can guarantee that whatever they’re going to do, at least they’re only going to be doing it to each other. And it’s a damn sight cheaper in money as well as blood than trying to occupy the place would be.

The latter covers that, well, once you have orbital supremacy, you do always have the option of shelling the planet back into the Stone Age with your KEWs. (You can actually do a lot worse, obviously, but that would violate a dozen or so solemn treaties on the Proper Treatment of Garden Worlds.) And in particularly intransigent cases, exercising this option and trusting that the civilization of the descendants of the survivors won’t be quite such a bunch of egregious assholes next time sometimes does look like the best solution.

In the event that neither of these actually works in a given situation and they absolutely have to run an occupation – something that has not yet occurred – the Board of Admiralty’s wargamed-and-filed plan is to take along a couple of nanofactories, have them churn out cheap automated milspec police-drones by the million, and put them in charge of the routine matters. They don’t get bored, it’s never personal for them, and people care a lot less that a hunk of non-sophont combat electronics just got blown up by an IED. It’s also rather discouraging for the opposition. No resistance/revolutionary movement was ever inspired by “Happy news, comrades! We finally made the hated Imperials equipment losses rise out of the statistical noise! Er, locally, at least.”)

(The other reason, aside again, for the local strongpoint defense training is on defense against large invasions, in which they are intended to hold strongpoints in the defense-in-depth battlespace, providing stiffening for the Home Guard, who act as raiding companies and partisans; against small ones, they counter-raid.)

But, exceptional and theoretical digressions aside, the Emperors’ Sword is built on speed, maneuver, force, and cunning. Pick your target, strike hard, strike fast, subvert, shock, disrupt, hit ‘em right in the vulnerable spot, and don’t get pinned down doing it or try to hold anything that’ll only slow you down. Then get out, regroup, resupply, and do it again. Repeat until you’ve won.

And so they equip accordingly.

Trope-a-Day: Highly Conspicuous Uniform

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Highly Conspicuous Uniform: Most notably, the Watch Constabulary’s fluorescent/illuminated bright-yellow trim on their black-and-shiny-white armor, but that’s because – in their multiple roles as law enforcement, paramedics, and disaster-response crew – they’re supposed to stand out because when you need one, you want to be able to spot him easily.

Not quite played straight by the actual Imperial Legions and other military forces, but in many parts of them outside special operations, recon, and such, there is quite a bit of Bling of War going on; given how very, very difficult it is to hide the thermodynamic and in many cases neutrino signature of modern battlefield equipment, especially when that includes combat exoskeletons, a lot of forces trade in the de minimis increase in stealth passive camouflage gets you in exchange for looking properly gorgeous on the battlefield.  The loss is rarely noticeable in the statistics.

The Breakfast Of Champions

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DROPSHIPS: EMPIRE OF THE STAR

The final entry in this section, affectionately known to the Imperial Legions as the “Big Ugly Breakfast 1” – and less affectionately known to almost everyone else as “Good gods, what is that thing?” – is the Flapjack-class cavalry dropship (Eye-in-the-Flame Arms/Artifice Armaments). Uniquely among Imperial starship designs, the Flapjack has adopted the rare “disk” or “saucer” hull form. It does this because the Flapjack-class is equipped with not merely a single, but a pair of nuclear-pulse drives, using the relatively environmentally friendly laser-fusion or (in the Flapjack II) antimatter options, the descent and deceleration drives; the dorsal and ventral hulls of these ships are in effect simply the pusher plates for these drives. The main body of the vessel, suspended between these on hydraulic dampers, is a short, wide cylinder, heavily structurally reinforced and itself surrounded by  “sidewall” armor as thick and refractory as the pusher plates.

The intended usage of the Flapjack is orbital insertion of armored vehicles, en masse, into hot zones. To enable this, after being decoupled from a carrier in the high orbitals of a planet under attack, the Flapjack uses its descent drive to accelerate downwards through the atmosphere, minimizing dwell time within range of orbital and anti-air defenses. In addition, while the descent of a Flapjack obviously has far too bright a sensor signature to be concealed, the combination of the radiation hash from the descent drive’s thrust bombs and the plasma sheath formed by its hypersonic atmospheric transit together render it extremely difficult for weapons systems to attain successful guidance lock, and terminal guidance (especially to the fine degree necessary to insert a weapon into the narrow window of vulnerability between the pusher plates and the sidewall armor, even if the weapon is capable of surviving and maneuvering in the immediate environment of an active nuclear-pulse drive) virtually impossible.

At the end of its descent trajectory, the Flapjack uses the more powerful thrust bombs of its deceleration drive to perform a “suicide burn”; i.e., maximal deceleration at minimum altitude, compatible with lithobraking in a manner which preserves the integrity of the ventral pusher plate. This deceleration burn serves the additional functions of preparing the drop zone for the arrival of the dropship by flattening any structures or prepared defenses, and eliminating any but the most heavily armored, secured, and radiation-proofed resistance in the immediate area. Once the ground is reached, multiple armored cargo access doors with integral ramps and excavation drones permit the Flapjack to be actively discharging combat vehicles within minutes of a successful landing.

A proposal for an infantry dropship along the lines of the Flapjack, tentatively designated the Pancake-class, has been advanced by Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, but at the present time the high-radiation aftermath of such a vessel’s landing is not considered viable for personnel wearing M-70 Havoc combat exoskeletons or N45 Garrex field combat armor, the current legionary standards. While this would not be a problem for troops equipped with the specialized N45r Callérás high-rad field combat armor, its associated disadvantages and the expense of refit ensure that, for the foreseeable future, infantry will continue to be landed via drop shuttle (q.v.)

– Naval Starships of the Associated Worlds, INI Press, Palaxias, 421st ed.

1. A statistically improbable number of combat drops take place at planet dawn.

Trope-a-Day: Space Is An Ocean

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Space Is An Ocean: Partially played straight, partially (and in all the scientific ways) averted.  In rough order of examples:

The Imperial Navy does use some wet-naval terminology and protocol – but then, that’s only logical, because it was the wet navy that had all the experience in running small-town-sized vessels in hostile environments for extended periods of time, with little direction from home – just like starships.  But if you were to examine this matter in detail, IN terminology and routines are probably about one-third wet navy, one-third air force, and one-third unique to their new environment.

(Also, while there are some class analogies to be made… and while there may not be schooners and canoes, there are clippers among the lighthuggers, and there are Space Junks, of exactly that kind, among the free traders… there are no lifeboats, escape pods, etc.  Since Space Does Not Work That Way.)

Space is definitely not two-dimensional.  In fact, one of the major impetuses for even fairly backward and morphological-freedom-hating species (of non-aquatic or non-avian heritage, anyway) to get with some of the transsophont program is that splicing the ability to handle the third dimension, at least, into your brain is one of the things most useful in preventing your fleet from losing horribly to anyone with a better head for strategy.

Space, obviously, does not have friction.

The IN does use naval ranks (except in the Flight Ops department, which uses air force ranks – translated British-style), but doesn’t use naval command structure (see here).  And the IN’s ship’s troops aren’t marines, because the Empire doesn’t have a separate service for such; they’re just that portion of the Imperial Legions that happens to serve on starships, and as such, they’re still just called “legionaries”.

The Bridge is always located as close to the center of the vessel as possible, with the only proviso being the need to keep it a decent distance from the backup bridges.  And has no windows.  Only an idiot puts their bridge somewhere it’s likely to get shot off.

And since most military vessels are in inertially-damped microgravity, internally, the decks are in whatever layout is most convenient, whether tail-lander, belly-lander, or more outré, with no particular need to match each other, never mind a consistent orientation to the direction of flight.  Likewise, there is no distinction between “top”, “bottom”, or indeed “sides” on anything that doesn’t do planet landings – shipboard directions such as “port”, “starboard”, “dorsal” and “ventral” are defined by angle around the thrust axis – and indeed, radial symmetry is probably more common than bilateral in ship designs.

While there are some (artificially engineered) Space Whales, space is definitely not chock full of them.  And there is also a distinct shortage of Negative Space Wedgies like ion storms, etc., hanging around.  Mostly, space is full of empty.  That’s why it’s called space.

Trope-a-Day: Government Drug Enforcement

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No, the other kind….

Government Drug Enforcement: Well, it’s not unknown.  The Equality Concord – you see what I meant under Generican Empire? – used to use a variety of interesting pharmaceutical cocktails before they figured out that the right kind of neuroprosthesis worked even better for enforcing the requisite egalitarianism, and it’s not like they’re the only obnoxious pharmacrats out there.

The Empire, of course, doesn’t touch this any more than it does anything else unpleasantly mandate-y.  On subvariants of the trope, while it’s not Super Serum, it is true that the members of the Imperial Military Service use a variety of combat drugs [1]; but seriously, it’s not like every other profession doesn’t, quite voluntarily (nootropics, mnemotropins, a few hundred other specific combinations by way of neurochemistry, etc., management… mostly manufactured by technocytes right there in the brain and body, just like regular neurotransmitters and hormones), since after all, proper management of brain and body is important.  Better living through chemistry, folks!

[1] While it doesn’t work nearly so well with citizen-soldiers when you don’t have, y’know, off-site immortality backups, when you do have those things, it is really awfully nice to be able to field legions who are functionally immune to pain, fear, fatigue, and combat stress – at least long enough to get the mission done.

Trope-a-Day: Military Moonshiner

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Military Moonshiner: Played straight for some reason, despite the fact that neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions is a dry organization.

(Also in the Imperial Exploratory Service, which contains the expected number of people who consider “can we make booze out of it?” to be one of the mandatory tests worth performing on alien plant life.)

Civilized Warfare

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From Storm-General Galen Claves-ith-Lelad, Warmain of the Dawn, Strategos of the 33rd Imperial Legion, the Fists of Lightning, to Ironlord Qorran Cieng, commanding the Third Army of Ochale, greeting.

I have the honor to command the forces of my Empress, which even now approach the strongpoint you have made of the city of Echiran from the south, as your scouting parties will doubtless have confirmed for you. I regret that I must further inform you that we have successfully secured the outlying villages to the south, and our five-furnace dragons have taken up position along the Chiran Ridge, from which they are able to successfully range upon your position.

Despite the regrettable necessities of war, I wish to assure you that neither I nor Her Divine Majesty have any desire for the devastation of cities, the deaths of your people, or any unnecessary effusion of blood.

To that end, it is my wish to offer to you an alternative to bombardment, house-to-house fighting, and other such barbarities. If you will vacate the city, we will meet you in the valley to its west. In deference to your current superior defensive position, I give you my personal assurance that we will permit you one day beforehand to establish your positions in the valley, and will refrain from engaging you there with our five-furnace dragons.

In the event of our victory, we would require that you withdraw from the city of Echiran, without sabotage, pillage, or further engagement, a minimum of three days’ march; likewise, in the event of your victory, we will undertake that neither we nor the 55th Imperial Legion, the Doom Hammers, currently approaching from the west, will attempt further engagement nor pass north beyond the city of Echiran for the three days following the battle.

In surety of our good faith, I pledge you my personal word, my word as Warmain of the Dawn, and in the voice of my Empress. May I have your response before daybreak?

Given under my hand and seal this day, 11 Cálith,

Galen Claves-ith-Lelad

Military Uniforms

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Among the things I have finalized recently in my notes are the details of the field dress uniforms for the Imperial Legions and Imperial Navy, and since I have them all finalized and polished up as of now, I present them for your envisioning pleasure:

Field dress (Imperial Legions & Home Guard)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Legions consists of the following elements:

Beret: The velvet beret is worn in branch colors (dark crimson and gold for the Legions, emerald and silver for the Home Guard), with the serviceman’s unit crest in front. Non-commissioned and warrant officers add a silver oak-leaf cockade, and officers a gold oak-leaf cockade, around the unit crest.

Tunic: The thigh-length tunic, belted at the waist, is also worn in the branch colors (dark crimson with gold trim, or emerald with silver trim), single-breasted, with a high stand-up collar to protect the wearer’s neck[1] and five brass buttons impressed with the Imperial crown-and-star. The front of the tunic actually overlaps completely – the inner layer fastens at the opposite shoulder to the outer layer’s buttons, thus doubling the protection over the wearer’s vitals, and making it impossible to slip a blade through the seam. It is worn over a double-layered silk shirt.

For rankers, brass collar-pins on the gorget patches also show the crown-and-star, whereas for officers they hold rank insignia, in silver for non-commissioned and warrant officers, and in gold for higher ranks. Rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

Detachable shoulder-boards are added to the tunic to show unit affiliation, on a black background for regular units, a crimson background for units designated as Guards units, and a gold background for units designated as Coronal’s Guards. The design on the shoulder-boards is the battle flag of the unit to which the legionary belongs, or the ship’s crest in the case of ship’s troops.

Sword-Baldric: The legionary sword (a teirian) is worn on a wire-reinforced braided synthetic leather baldric hung over the right shoulder to hold the sword at the left hip. The hanrian and sidearm, conversely, are worn on the tunic belt, at the right hip. The baldric also contains attachment points for grenades, replacement heat sinks, and powercells.

Breeches: The breeches, black regardless of branch, are worn tucked into the boots, and have piping to match the tunic’s trim, bordered with silver braid for officers, or gold braid for flag officers.

Boots: The high (mid-calf), glossy black boots have no buckles or snaps, and are made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather.

Cloak: In wintry conditions, a heavy wool cloak may be worn over the field dress uniform.

Special note: Heavy legionaries who do not wear the uniform when in the field wear instead a surcoat[2] over their combat exoskeleton in circumstances that would ordinarily call for field dress, bearing rank insignia, battle honors, etc., as the tunic does for conventionally dressed legionaries.

Field dress (Imperial Navy)

The basic field dress uniform of the Imperial Navy consists of the following elements:

Hat: Imperial Navy officers wear tricorne hats in the Navy’s silver-trimmed midnight black, a tradition inherited directly from its wet navy precursors. Naval tricornes bear the ship’s crest at front right, surrounded by a silver cockade, or a gold cockade for flag officers.

Unofficially, naval officers who are members of various IN internal societies and clubs may wear a variety of feathers in their hats to denote this, according to their own internal traditions, something broadly tolerated even on formal occasions.

Non-commissioned officers and men do not wear hats.

Shirt & Jacket: The single-breasted naval jacket, of black wool and leather trimmed with silver, is worn over a simple black silk shirt. Rather than buttons, it seals to itself along its edge, in a similar manner to many vacuum suits.

Since the naval jacket has a down-turned rather than a high collar, rank is indicated not by collar pins but rather by the arabesque-embroidered cuffs of the jacket, including either silver or gold rings to indicate basic rank, and colored rings to indicate departmental specialty. As with the legionary uniform, rank insignia is also worn as a knot in matching cord on the left breast; in the case of enlisted ranks, this knot surrounds the symbol of their rating. Qualified pilots (in the Flight Ops department) wear their wings above the rank knot. Ribbons and knots for medals and other awards are worn on the right.

Runér, exultants, and praetors may wear certain insignia related to their associated rank and office on their tunics in accordance with service regulations; most typically, their family or personal arms may be worn on the left breast, adjacent to the rank-knot.

The ship’s crest is worn as an embroidered badge at each shoulder.

Trousers: The trousers of the naval uniform are of heavy black wool. For officers, they have silver braid piping, or gold braid piping for flag officers. Sidearms are worn on the belt, as is the naval sword on formal occasions.

Boots: The naval boots are low, black boots, without buckles or snaps, made of internally-reinforced synthetic leather. They include soles designed to interlock with the gratings used in starship engineering sections, and magnetizable clamps for use elsewhere.

[1] A communication transceiver is often woven directly into the collar, into which a visor can be connected.

[2] A huge, long-sleeved tunic that fits over the armor and hangs to the knees.