Year 1914 AC (After Colonization) Hot Season, Combat Phase
Salviosi Successes
Over the course of the season we have been able to begin extraction of a substantial deposit of
Ore in the Desert. Due to the influx of refugees capable and willing to work, we have also seen fit to begin mining some
Caelium recently discovered near the capital of Salvios. Our troops have also begun to dig into the South Peaks and set up checkpoints in the passes,
raising Entrenchment in South Peaks to One(1).
As a result of our expanded industrial operations, we have seen changes to our armory as follows:
The
GGG-12 becomes
(EXPENSIVE).
The
LFG-13 becomes
(CHEAP).
The
Perahudara becomes
(CHEAP).
The
Kerata becomes
(CHEAP).
The
Avalanche becomes
(CHEAP).
Thanks to the efforts of the Merchant Lords the people have begun to apply themselves even more, and we have earned
one Research Credit. Crudely drawn recruitment fliers have begun to appear across the island on both sides of the conflict. Although not museum-worthy art, the amount of effort that went into the propaganda is in itself inspiring and has even seen some Abberans turn coat! As a result we have gained
one Espionage Credit.
Abberan Advancements
Proposal: ARA-1914ARM "Nike" Shocktrooper Armor
The Nike, named after the greek goddess of victory, is a set of Armour design for normal soldiers and squires in the military.
The Nike is made of a Leather overcoat overtop of a Set of metal armour. Normally in warfare, this form of armoring would be far from sufficient due to the realities of a modern battlefield. However, underneath the metal armour and the overcoat, providing a third layer of clothing, is a “Tunic” made from K-Wool. The K-wool “Tunic” in combination with the armour and overcoat make it actually very difficult to kill a soldier wearing Nike. The metal armoring Helps to protect the K-wool while the Tunic in turn robs any blows against the armour of most of their killing force, absorbing the kinetic energy.
The Nike pants, are similar, made with K-Wools strands in the weave, as well as metal plates that are sown on. This provides similar protection to the chest armoring, albeit lesser in scale.
The Nikes comes with head protection in addition. The Helmet is K-Wool lined, rather simple, with an Attachable face mask made of cealium steel with K-wool padding to help protect the soldier skin from chaffing, freezing, burning, shrapnel, shockwaves, and rifle bullets.
The mask is fully face sealing, with the air flow coming in from a threaded hole protruding past the chin of the mask, which is pointing downward parallel to the face. This threaded hole can be Connected to an air filter that is screwed into the hole. This air filter protects from harmful substances in the air, filtering them out. This includes a thin citric filter to deal with Rime particles in the air as well.
The masks eye have been made from clear resin with a very small strand of K-wool suspended within. This makes it very hard to break the resin, requiring significant force such as a bullet.
The mask takes a form similar to a skull featureless, without a bottom jaw. The Front teeth of the jaw hang over the Chin of the wearer by just a little bit.
The Nikes also posses a rather experimental system, based on the results of the Halberd project.
If deemed necessary, the Nike Shock troopers can be equipped with a small backpack that contains a Sparkpack inside, pushes off to one side. Our of thi back pack, made with a solid pack to create the inside pocket for such, is a pair of Small wings.
These wings are rather simple. Connected to the spark pack inside of the backpack, the wings Contain 2 small rods of grain alighted cealium. These grain aligned cealium pieces are rather small, only the size of a pinky finger inside the wings structure, with each capped with a tiny piece of C-Null steel, The minimal amount of capping materiel is used so as to keep the cost down, with the Grain alighted metal being similar to a needle, with the capped end being significantly smaller.
When a button on the belt straps of the backpack is pressed, the Sparkpack begin to feed the Grain alighted metal power, creating gravity fields at the back of the wings that allow the user to make large jumps, pushed into the Sky. A second press turns it off, cutting the power from the sparkpack.
A common maneuver is pressing the button to Enhance their jump, springing into the air, turning it off to fall back down, and is needed pressing it again to soften any landing.
When the wings are no longer in use, they can easily be folded up into the solid back of the backpack, while the backpack is on. They can then be released via a botton placed on the bottom right side of the pack, which unlocks the latch and the wings fall back into place. A similar bottom on the other side is responsible for unlocking them from their deployed postion.
This wingpack is solely optimally for the nike, with the nike fully capable of operating without it.
Difficulty: Theoretical
Result: 4 (5+2-3) 8 (6+5-3) = Average
The Nike, named for a goddess in some fantasy novel, is our latest military advancement.
The bottom-most layer consists of a K-Wool tunic and pants, followed by metal armor all covered by a leather overcoat. While a little cumbersome, the amount of protection provided by the Nike cannot be understated. Soldiers protected by the 6-10mm Nike armor also have helmets lined with K-Wool, with an attachable mask that seals against the face and provides air through a downward-facing threaded hole. Air flow is somewhat restricted, which becomes a problem over time as long as the mask is on. The eyes on the mask are covered with resin lenses containing a couple very small strands of K-Wool.
On top of everything else though, we've also constructed the Nike's optional JumpPack. The JumpPack attaches to the back of the armor and houses a SparkPack as well as two small wings housing rods of Aligned Caelium capped by C-Null Steel. The rods are turned on and off via a button on the belt strap. This will propel the wearer upwards in a short burst, allowing them to leap great distances. The only issue is the lack of fine control. The Aligned Caelium will propel the Nike in whatever direction the capped end is facing, not necessarily up. As a result this feature is generally used only when the wearer can focus and concentrate on the jump, or else risk tumbling through the air. The wings are fixed, but small enough that they don't really impede movement.
The Nike base armor costs 4 Ore, 3 Kinetic Sheep, 1 Chemical Compounds, making it (EXPENSIVE) and [complex], while the JumpPack will bring it to 5 Ore, 2 Gavrillium, 2 Caelium, 3 Kinetic Sheep, 2 Chemical Compounds, making it (VERY EXPENSIVE) and [complex] for the time being.
Proposal: Kingmaker Made - ARA-1912MP-APC-B "Caliburn"
Kingmaker Made
The Kingmaker is a fine infantry transport, but is out date with our newest technology. The protection in the driver compartment has its vision slits widened somewhat and replaced with k-wool infused clear resin. The promethium power system is upgraded to work with the power control systems of the sparkpack, and a magnetic induction coil is wrapped around the power core to capture any emitted magnetic fields. The propulsion system is converted from turbines into null steel capped grain aligned caelium, one on each side of the back of the kingmaker, and two on either side of the front. The armor on the bottom is thickened, as is the rest of the armor. In addition to the thicker steel, small layers of k-wool are added underneath the armor to absorb impacts, especially in the driver compartment.
Difficulty: Very Hard
Result: 6 (6+2-2) = Average
The Caliburn provides some minor improvements to our Kingmaker, but one thing needs to be made clear first.
Any time we've added coils to our engines in an effort to capture energy and improve efficiency the circuitry and wiring overloads, burns out, or melts down in rapid order. Turns out that this is due to the Gavrillium generating an electromagnetic field of it's own when placed in a strong enough electromagnetic field. While there are obviously many ways to implement this, for now we have focused on the Caliburn and as such further augmentation to engines and motors will have to be done another time.
Despite the setbacks involved with the project in regards to Gavrillium, things still managed to go fairly well. A K-Wool infused resin set behind the vision slits now provides the driver protection from wind, rain, and the occasional bullet. The propulsion system is completely redone, utilizing the newfound powers of Aligned Caelium and and C-Null Steel. Armor is thickened to 8-10mm in many locations, and a layer of K-Wool is sandwiched underneath it for further protection from enemy fire.
The gravitational propulsion of the Caliburn provides more precise controls and maneuvering than the Kingmaker's turbines as well as a bringing top speed to a possible 40km/h. It also draws more power, which is why each Caliburn carries spare SparkPacks to use as an auxiliary power supply.
Adding this much to the Caliburn without making cutbacks elsewhere winds up costing 5 Ore, 4 Gavrillium, 4 Caelium, 3 Kinetic Sheep, 2 Wood and 1 Chemical Compounds, making it a (NATIONAL EFFORT) and [complex] until we get a workable supply of Chemical Compounds.
Also of note, it was brought up that the only thing restricting the
Sickle to
Paladin deployment was the requirement of a portable power source. Due to the invention of the
SparkPack it is now man-portable and deployment tied to the availability of the
SparkPack instead.
----------------
CHAPTER ONE: DUTY AND HONOR
It was one thing to fight an enemy cut off from their homeland, stranded and outnumbered, facing an opponent with a new technological ace up it's sleeve. It's another story entirely when you're fighting someone on your level...
The initial skirmishes between Abbera and Salvios saw battle lines drawn east to west across the city, with fighting happening in the tightly-packed residential and industrial areas of the Lower District as well as the more open, lavish Upper District. We had seen our forces capture the walled Upper District early on thanks to our
Perahudara assault transports, and as a result the city became the victim of a siege within the two-pronged assault as the Abberans attempted to breach the position. A thirty-foot gated wall provided, initially, a substantial barrier against Abberan probing. Salviosi sharpshooters wielding the Sniper-variant
Senapang manned the wall alongside the
GGG-13s and
LGG-13s that had quickly earned reputations as highly effective and efficient man-killers. Abberan forces were lit up by gunfire as soon as they showed themselves, and so we had bought time to turn the whole of the Upper District into a staging ground.
However fighting in the Lower District was not going in our favor. The
Kerata is nowhere near as effective as the
Kingmaker or
Caliburn, or even the
Faithful at, well, functioning, and the
Perahudaras have a difficult time finding places to land when not being harassed by
Orleans. Their biggest saving grace here is the fact that the
Perahudara can outpace the
Orleans, and with the help of our
LEA-13s acting as observers, so long as someone on the ship is paying attention to the tiny metal balloons raising tiny flags in the distance, they can find safe areas to look to sit down, or at least get a head-start running away.
Initially, combat between the armies here was sporadic and bloody, but consisted only of infantry. As battle lines developed, we were able to bring our armored, slow-moving
Roofed Sleds and their mounted gatling guns to the front, creating artificial chokepoints in a city already riddled with them. This almost, but not quite, counteracted the increased numbers of Abberans they were able to field. Unluckily for us the Abberan soldiers suffer critical and debilitating battle wounds at a much lower rate than originally predicted thanks to the introduction of kinetic energy-absorbing K-Wool into the standard infantry uniform. The
FMJ/G Munitions we have in abundance has two effects: at longer ranges for the round and weapon the bullet becomes a molten glob that splatters and sticks itself to the target, and closer in the round mushrooms as it hits targets, firing the molten interior forward through the weakened tip. The K-Wool, being wool, resists burning to a point - long enough for those hit by the globs to douse it if they're quick enough. The K-Wool, while it only rarely completely stops a bullet, will also absorb the impact of the rounds enough to keep the tips of the
FMJ/Gs from mushrooming when it does. Still, the best defense against those rounds is not to get hit.
----------------
Antero Sahay had been taken off the lines for a while while he trained to use the
Avalanche ALS and came back in time to be deployed to the Upper District in anticipation of a full-on assault. He'd taken to the suit very well, and couldn't wait to see it perform in-field, even if there wasn't any equipment designed to utilize the suit's strengths.
Antero stood watch atop the wall and looked out over the half-kilometer of damaged buildings, roads, and paths that made up No-Man's Land.
"Movement," a sniper close to Sahay said as he peered through his scope, "I think I see big guys in the buildings."
Confirming his suspicions, a high pitched whistle screamed from across the landscape. The noise barely reached the wall, interrupted by the single blast of a gunshot closer than the rest of the fighting going on in the city. It was an officer's command whistle, but nobody had orders to go into let alone cross No-Man's Land at this time. After a few moments and nothing else happened, the sniper said aloud, "I think I could tag a few."
"Don't," Sahay said flatly as he pointed to the sky. The enemy
Orleans Sky Corvettes drifted above the city and dominated the air, and they had the biggest guns available in the engagement currently (as indirect fire is highly inaccurate, and this city is meant to be captured, not flattened, so artillery from both sides is not yet in play). The enemy had avoided the area for a while now, and if an engagement were started prematurely, Antero knew they wouldn't be prepared for it.
"Run to Major Bagus and fill him in instead," Sahay suggested.
As night fell the enemy did not advance, giving the forces within the walls time to organize and plan an effective defense. When the sun rose again a spotter on the wall called out - a single enemy decked out in
Crusader armor but otherwise unarmed was walking across No-Man's Land waving a flag of parley. Major Bagus left the lavish house he'd found best to his liking and mounted up on a
Roofed Sled.
"Sahay, Kechik, get this thing moving," he ordered, and so Sahay had the illustrious duty of pushing a sled into No-Man's Land. When they got to the Crusader the sled settled and Sahay leaned against it and relaxed. The Crusader came aboard with his helmet in his arm, white hair and a white beard only partially concealing the scars of a man who'd seen a lot of fighting.
"Do you speak Endicarian?" the Crusader asked asked.
"I do," replied Bagus, extending a hand.
"My name is Aren Wagner von Blankenbruck, Captain of the Order of the Iron Hand," the Crusader said as he took Bagus' hand for a brief moment, "I've been sent by the Abberan High Command to negotiate on their behalf as well as that of the Central Alliance. Our forces have pushed past south into the city enough to cut the Upper District off from relief from the ground, and we have skyships," Aren gestured to a half-dozen
Orleans that had begun to loiter above the nearby Abberan forces, "Capable of severing your connection to any external aid. We request your total and unconditional surrender. You and all your men within those walls will be held as prisoners of war until the end of the conflict or release is otherwise negotiated for."
"You seem certain that the city will fall to your people," Bagus spoke, "But you cannot predict the tides of war. I appreciate that you and your higher-ups have enough honor to make the offer, but it would be dishonorable for
us, men and women fully capable of fighting, to surrender. I must respectfully decline."
Bagus stood and extended his hand again, "We're not so different, Abberan," he said as Aren also stood and once again in this brief time shook his hand, "May we both survive what is about to pass."
Aren departed and Sahay and Kechik made their way back to the Upper District.
----------------
The Assault on the Upper District was a devastating slog for both sides. The Abberans used the cover of darkness to get a number
JumpPack Nikes close to the wall and managed to infiltrate the barrier. The zipper-like noise of the
JumpPacks drew the attention of a pair of sentries, but they were silently dispatched thanks to the
Draco spikes they had handy. Their main goal was to sabotage our defenses, but without any dedicated equipment, their mission devolved into them fighting from emplaced weapon to emplaced weapon along the wall. It didn't take long for them to get found out and, as they tried to flee across No-Man's Land, get cut down. Notably, the use of
FMJ/J against the
Nike was
extremely effective, as the metal armor atop the k-wool allowed the round to spray inwards and prevented the wearer from effectively dousing the burning material. With the gates intact come morning, the attached
Orleans began to fire shells at the gatehouses and hardened locations. When our gatling guns had begun to look skyward in an attempt to deter the bombarding
Orleans the first horn sounded from the Abberan lines, followed rapidly by countless other command horns.
Sickles,
Scythes, a couple old
Halberds and a handful of
Halberd-bs began to pepper whatever Salviosi were atop the wall. They made easy targets for the Salviosi marksmen using scopes though, and so a number of gatling guns remained intact and in use.
Crusaders and
Paladins charged among the infantry, a portion of whom were using
Nikes with JumpPacks to propel themselves upwards and ahead and, occasionally, out of the way of bullets. While the forces in powered armor were more than capable of surviving a few concentrated rounds of basic fire before the armor would give, the
FMJ/G munitions inflicted a large number of casualties. Once the gate was destroyed the gap was filled with a large force of
Avalanche soldiers led by Sahay. They used SMG-12as and Senapangs not unlike standard infantry and were taking losses from the
Halberd-bs and
Sickles, but showed their strength quite literally as the two forces met. Fighting with fervor as they had nowhere to retreat to,
Avalanche soldiers went hand-to-hand with
Paladins and
Crusaders and, thanks to the synthetic muscle within the suits, were able to quite literally lift and throw their opponents. Infantry flowed around these fights as the charge continued, few wanting to interfere in clashes with people far outclassing themselves. They couldn't always avoid it when a
Paladin or
Crusader landed on them, but with the gunfire from the walls there was more incentive to just push. Unfortunately they have the
Draco buttspike to utilize as well as specifically-designed equipment for our armored soldiers, which is better than nothing, even if the fist hitting you feels like a truck. It gave them the edge, but only by the thinnest hair.
A number of
Roofed Sleds blocked up the holes in the wall. An
Orleans, smoking and burning from concentrated
FMJ/G fire, turned to retreat as the other ships began to strafe the our forces trying to build up behind the wall. Now that they were moving and not sitting facing their targets they were much harder to hit with small arms, and even so without the ability to accurately and consistently land
FMJ/J shots on them, the
Orleans could act practically unopposed.
Perahudaras occasionally harassed them, but were outclassed in both armor and arms.
As Abberan forces began to breach the wall, thanks largely to the actions of the supporting
Orleans, we began to open fire on the incoming armored soldiers with our 40mm field gun, the LFG-13. Their 40mm shells, in both HE and FMJ/G, made paste of a number of their armored soldiers and left holes in the approaching swarm of infantry. Bodies had to be pulled from the breach in order for the Abberan forces to progress inward, but the ruined gate became a meatgrinder.
Grenades flew from both sides. The
M2 was highly effective at setting their troops on fire or cooking them alive and the
M3's fragments inflicted a significant amount of injuries. Their Wickerman burned as well though, and provided a dense smokescreen, allowing their soldiers the opportunity to press inward.
Once the wall was breached the fighting devolved and our forces pulled further back to the Hilltop Estate and Cemetery within the Upper District.
----------------
Combat this season has resulted in a
SALVIOSI DEFEAT! Salvios now controls
25% of Harren City.
We must inform you that our radios have picked up strange transmissions coming from somewhere within Harren City. This turn's Design Phase will be as normal, however
this Revision Phase you can decide to use your Revision to Investigate the Signal. You do not need to make the decision immediately, but we may not be the only ones detecting it.
Fighting is intense, and it is only by the grace of their
Orleans and ground transports that the Abberans were able to fight as hard and effective as we have. There's a lot to think about, so get to it!
IT IS NOW THE DESIGN PHASE.
Poll
2 (14.3%)
Author
Topic: Industrialized Warfare: Salvios Thread / 1917 A.C. Cold Season (COMPLETE) (Read 101417 times)