Tunguska's got something that can be better than a drop troop - the Spektr in Hidden Deployment ᵂᵃʳⁿᶦⁿᵍ: ˢᵖᵉᵏᵗʳ ᵐᵃʸ ᵃˡˢᵒ ᵇᵉ ᵃ ʰᵉˡˡ ᵒᶠ ᵃ ˡᵒᵗ ʷᵒʳˢᵉ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ᵃ ᵈʳᵒᵖ ᵗʳᵒᵒᵖ
Pardon me, lots of stuff I'm catching up on. No kidding. I mean, we know that the Taskmasters are basically there for when a Praxis Black Lab goes all Resident Evil. But what kind of full-on shenanigans does it take for a bank heist to require that kind of firepower?!? I must admit, I really like the new Securitate sculpts, with heavy armor thrown over the top of a suit. Love it! Got that as a separate image, or do I need to make them myself? No, Brawlers are the undisciplined dregs of humanity that make up the stereotypical mercenary troops. The folks who could not hack it in the military. The folks looking for a way to kill people legally. That's what a Brawler is. I don't want to pay another 15-20 points for a Gecko. Not if you look at the Yan Huo's HRMC. Aerodynamics won't change, so they will likely be similar. Probably more optimized for getting there, so losing as little velocity as possible (because that makes it easier to get hits). Sandia Labs demonstrated a laser-guided bullet a couple years ago. Schlock Mercenary uses "G/G" pistols: Gauss/Gunfoam. Gauss (ie, railguns) for simple kinetics, but gunfoam chemical propellant for projectiles that wouldn't like the strong EM fields of a railgun. Like explosive projectiles. Seems a bit over-complicated to me, but the Gauss launcher is almost silent as long as the projectile is subsonic. Gunfoam, on the other hand, is as loud as modern firearms. Unless there's some weirdness going down like what happened with the JSA this year. I think Army got updated before Adepticon (where there were some early copies of the JSA Army pack and Uprising Book to be bought). You always need to have someone in charge at the scene. People will die if you don't. Firefighters deal with this, so do police and paramedics. With the Submarine Force, we actually shout out, "My name is _____, I am the Man In Charge" if we are the highest-ranking person there. And this holds until someone higher-ranking arrives, and then they shout out once they hear from you what has already been ordered. That's actually very close to how the Submarine Fleet operates. I mean, you have ~180 people living and working in something about the size of a 3600sqft house, so there's very little distance between different paygrades. A lot of the more formal military types (like the Surface Fleet) absolutely get hives around Submariners. Many years ago now, when USS Ticonderoga was undergoing Sea Trials as a brand-new ship (sometime in 1982, IIRC), she and a Submarine had pulled into Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. This submarine was what we call a "Projects boat", which means she did interesting things like sneak into harbors she had no charts for. Anyway, the submarine crew was letting off a lot of steam after something like 3 months underwater. The crew of the Tico (spoken like Tyco the toy company) was hand-picked for the first-in-class, and had a bit of a stick up their collective ass about it. The Tico's crew was upset about the "fraternization" of the submarine crew (the different paygrades all hanging out together and drinking), and got the submarine crew kicked out of the only bar on the island. The submarine crew was not happy about this (understatement). One very junior petty officer came up with an idea to get back at the Tico, and told that idea to his Chief. Chief says, "I love it, let's talk to the AWEPS" (Assistant Weapons Officer). Chief drags our young STS3(SU) (I'll get to what that means in a bit) over to his immediate boss and says, "Sir, STS3 here has an idea for what to do about the Tico." After hearing the idea, AWEPS says, "Awesome! Let's go talk to the WEPS" (Weapons Officer). So the AWEPS drags the Sonar Chief and STS3 in front of the WEPS, and says, "Hey, Weps? STS3 has an idea for getting back at the Tico." WEPS hears the idea, and says, "Out-fucking-standing, let's talk to the Captain." WEPS drags the whole troop of them over to the Old Man's cabin, and says, "Captain, I have an idea for getting back at the Tico." Captain hears it, and says one thing: "Don't do anything I can't get you back out of." However, this was the most senior full bird captain on the entire East Coast at the time, so the only thing he couldn't get you out of was probably screwing the Admiral's daughter. So the WEPS, AWEPS, and our poor STS3 wake up the Supply Officer to get some Submarine Black epoxy hull paint, and the First Lieutenant to get ahold of a Zodiac inflatable. You see, Roosevelt Roads was a Navy shooting range, and it had some old WW2 rustbucket that was painted red and yellow, with "TARGET SHIP" painted in 6ft tall black letters. (I think you can see where this is going...) And yes, the submarine crew did paint "TARGET SHIP" down the side of the Tico in 6ft tall scraggly-drunk letters. Three times, and the middle "TARGET + SHIP" had a crosshair between the words. vengeance was at hand! There's a bit of a close call, because the Submariners got greedy and wanted to tag a couple more ships, then got chased out to sea by the bigass searchlights, and finally talked to by the guys from the Shore Patrol. Who only wanted names to fill out the paperwork, and didn't even look twice at the Submariners (or their excuse for swimming at 0200). I suspect that the crew of the Tico had pissed off the Seabees that were working as Shore Patrol that night. Next morning, STS3 is attempting to remember how to tie his boots when the Captain walks past his rack in Full Dress. About 45 minutes later, the Captain comes back to the ship, and tells our STS3 (who is still attempting to remember how to tie his boots, it was one hell of a party before they got thrown out of the bar) that he is to report to the Wardroom in coveralls with crows (rank insignia) and dolphins (Submarine Warfare qualification pin). "But Captain, I'm not qualified yet!" "STS3. Coveralls, crows, dolphins. Wardroom, 15 minutes." "Uh, Yes SIR!" After some mad scrambling (and insisting that the Captain directly ordered him to wear dolphins even though he's not entitled to wear them yet!), our Sonar Technician (Submarines), 3rd Class (SUbmarine Designated), a lowly E4 (that's a Corporal in the land forces), shows up with quite a bit of fear in his heart at the door to the Wardroom, the Officer's dining room. He reports in, and is immediately thankful that there's no green tablecloth (formal indication that this is not a Captain's Mast proceeding). The WEPS and AWEPS are also there, and are just as paint-spattered as he is. "Gentlemen. The Commander of Cruiser-Destroyer Group 2" (a 2-star Admiral!) "is not happy with you. He has flown home to Norfolk with his baggage to follow him. I have been able to convince the Base Commander and the Captain of the Tico that you will clean up your mess. So as soon as you are done here, you three will report to the Tico." At this point the Captain leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on the table, with the biggest grin any of them have ever seen. "Very well done!" So our intrepid Sailors had to sit over the side in Bosun's Chairs and paint over the black letters with Haze Gray. Don't believe me? It made the front page of the local newspaper, headline "Sub Sinks Navy's Newest" with a picture of the Tico showing the 'target ship' tag! I've called a Weapons Officer a jackass to his face, even, though I was requested to at least include the word "sir" when I said that. No-one disagreed with my description, just my delivery. I think the only place that happens in the modern military is Special Ops. One order is really only about 15 seconds, and may be as little as 5 seconds (or even less). So you need a group that has worked together so much that they know what to do even if there's no-one giving orders.
Another wishlist: Fitting with Tunguska theme would be just a slight points decrease of the Securitate (Losing Shotgun and Sixth Sense, perhaps also Repeater exept for a single Repeater-profile) and adding some special equipment/abilities like X-Visor/dogged (anyone noticed that the male Securitate of the dossier seems to have a Cyborg-Body? Take a close look at his neck - pure Carbon like the arms)/Biometric sensor/Metachemistry/something like this to keep points like 17+ depending on weapon loadout. Adding to that Tunguska then gets CSU AVA 4-5 for getting some non-linkable but rather cheap orders (11+ pts). So we have expensive Elite Light Infantry-Link (pointswise like Wildcats but faster and a bit more squishy) backed by some cheap orders from the CSU lurking in the DZ.
Metachem securitate would be awesome! Also basically WIP14 CSU. Which I'm OK with. Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk
Metachem feels like it would be really hard to balance for a link team like that. Personally, I hope they keep SSL2, or replace it with Biometric Visor L2, as in the background Tunguska is the Sphere leader in Security Biometrics and it makes sense that their internal police force would have top grade identification tech as standard. I think it's what SSL2 on them was probably always supposed to kind of representat anyway. I'd also like them to keep Repeaters, as I feel they're really strong and thematic, but lose the hacker. Any Securitate is an infowar combatant in a sense, because an Interventor could reach through them! If they had BioVisorL2 and Repeater, same statline, and lost the LSG, I feel like they'd be really good and cool. And not that expensive either, like 16-17pts maybe?
Biometric visor is very situational. Only Haqqislam and combined army have acess to impersonation so you will pay the cost for (most of time) no use
On the new white noise podcast during the interview with HellLois he says “we can expect more bikes like the zond nautical”
It also works against Cybermask and Holoprojectors, which are considerably more common. It's also pretty inexpensive so not a big loss.
N1 would only remove Surprise Attack/Shot from them. N2... well, ok, but as far as I understand it is about 2-3 points cheaper than a MSV2. The problem is that Impersonators works in 3 options: Dictate the enemy's deployment Suicide missile Lock an enemy unit in place for fear of a shotgun blast. #2 tends to mean "I place the IMP troop so it can reach a target in a move+CC order", and relates to #1 or #3... IF biometric prevented IMP troopers to be deployed on their ZoC I would say they are ok, as they are... pfff As for Cybermask, there are few troops you will use this against, since usually KHD have Camo anyway (interventors, Danavas, Bit&Kiss, Kerr-Nau, Umbra Legate, etc...).
First thought: Cool, my Interventors get Camo!! Second thought; hey, wait.... Perhaps I missed the line with the *irony off* Third thought: I messed it up completely....
On the note of Nomad background, there's definitely a number of great sources you could draw from, and the cramped, isolated, socially extremely close community of submariners on their boat is absolutely one of them. I should definitely read more about real world submariner experience before I run my Nomad Nation based RPG campaign. In a very real sense, every Nomad is a submariner, their natural environment being Spaaaaace and that.
Realistically I doubt we'll ever change much from a bullet. Maybe slightly different materials or propellant. But that doesn't stop scifi worlds like Mass Effect having them be a lot different.
Wow, if the Nautical Zond is 8-4 and Hollow Men are 6-2, Nomads are getting quite the speed upgrade from Tunguska.
If they’re bike rems along the lines of sideways from transformers or the terminator bike robots from.....terminator something or other; I’ll be extremely excited!
If you like military sci-fi Passage at Arms by Glen Cook is pretty good. Technically book 4 of a trilogy but it's a fine stand alone, a journalist boards a claustrophobic and heavily armed stealth ship as it begins it's tour. So basically space submarines. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/140668.Passage_at_Arms Onto the nautical zond: Spoiler: Leaked concept art They're not going to give us the Rambo piece of our dreams, so it's either going to have mediocre stats or 2/3 on speed/armor/weapons. We've already got some heavy REMs with the Tsyklon and Lunokhod and now a heavy S2 REM in the Hollow Men. I'd love to see a heavy armored S3 REM to fit the fluff of Naval use, referring again to Gecko's fluff here with heavy armor in tight corridors. Something like the Su-Jian could be awesome, but it would probably need to lose armor/weapons to: A) Step down from Kriza's price point B) Prevent the remaining Yu-Jing players from storming the CB office.
