Norce sub TOG vs. Battletech

[The Yosemite Bear]

As a result of an FTL incident a single TOG Taskforce has found it's self in the fringe of Clan/Innersphere space.

They have 1 Dreadnaught
2 Battleship Carriers
5 Cruisers
a dozen Destroyers.

Full support craft, no infrastructure.

now by acting as the Terran Overlord Government would, concuring and trying to build up infrastructure for support, how far can they get?

[Petrosjko]

You didn't mention a ground compliment in your force selection here.

With no ground element, you end up with the whole 'do everything with a bayonet but sit on it' conundrum. They could wipe the floor with any any naval force the IS or Clans could conjure, though their sheer firepower levels would decline drastically as they expended their missile stock.

Back 'em with a ground legion, though... yeah, you're looking at the start of a new empire. The sheer firepower available to a standard strike legion combined with orbital fire support would allow them to overwhelm any given world quickly, at least to the extent of maintaining a large zone of control.

Now, as to logistics... ammunition for the mass-drivers would be fairly easy to come by. Gauss ammo would take some doing, and the missiles are totally beyond Btech's tech level.

Ammunition for the infantry should be easy to start replicating, given that it's simple polymer blocks.


However, I would think that there would be a much likelier choice... given that they are cut off from home and in new territory, they would likely pick a faction to align with.

The Clans would be out, given their disdain for a politics and insistance that officers continually prove their competence. (Not something that would go over very well with the upper echelons of the TOG, for sure.)

Ooooh... scary thought. What if they arrived on the FWL side of the Inner Sphere and ended up falling in with the Word of Blake?

[The Yosemite Bear]

I said full support craft

that includes the enough dropships and tanks to form 5 legions just between the Dreadnaught and the two carriers

[Petrosjko]

Ah. Been a long time since I went over the force structures from the books.

Five legions. FIVE LEGIONS?

Holy shit.

What sort of compliment are we talking here, then? Four strike legions, one penal legion, that sort of thing?

Wow. Five.

Five legions, full fighter and orbital support... damn, they could pretty much wipe the floor with the entire AFFC, post-Operation Revival. I have pretty much zero familiarity with Battlespace, but given the way the other RL weapons scale on the ground compared to Battletech...

I would say the most likely option is the one I mentioned before, that they ally with a local faction, but with five freaking legions on tap, that turns them into the kingmakers, because there's not a force that they couldn't overwhelm, especially if they went so far as to integrate their forces at a cohort or even century level with conventional Battletech forces.

Now, who ends up getting the best end of the deal would depend on who they allied with and how politically saavy the TOG commander is.

If they went it alone... hmm... Terra would be theirs for the taking, and having five legions at their disposal would allow them to take a significant chunk of the worlds that belonged to the old Terran Hegemony. Then it would be a matter of how fast they could adapt the infrastructure.

A huge advantage they'd have is in not having to rely on jump points, and the fact that the Btech factions would be totally ignorant of the t-space distortion that would allow them to detect the inbound TOGgies, which means they could go for max-speed insertions into t-space and not worry about the bow wave giving them away. That's a hell of a mobility advantage right there.

Conversely, though, they will be lacking VLCA stations, and neither Comstar or WoB would be very willing to share usage of the HPG network, so communications will be an issue. This will likely see your dozen destroyers being used as message relays.

Likely that would inhibit their growth more than anything, because without communication the Inner Sphere would be able to work them over using the biggest edge they have... the ability to insert covert operations groups on various worlds and fritter away the TOG via guerilla warfare.

Damn cool scenario, kinda has my mind reeling.

[The Yosemite Bear]

my mistake it's one full legion with the average task force, 5 companys=1 legion of tanks and ATTy

[Petrosjko]

Hmm... okay, let's do a rough force breakdown...

A properly supported grav century could really make mincemeat of at least a regiment of mechs, especially if backed by some artillery and a few THOR sats.

Hell, THORs by themselves would rip most formations to shreds shortly after they lit off their fusion reactors and started emitting.

Still, one Legion... if they focused on snagging some worlds in the Chaos March and made a big push to hire some merc units to round out their numbers... that could work nicely. One thing they could guarantee is total aerospace dominance.

But again, unless they reached some sort of deal with Comstar or WoB, lack of communications would seriously hamper them.

(Have no idea why I keep spelling 'complement' as 'compliment' tonight.)

[Imperial Overlord]

Don't forget the nukes. TOG freely uses nuclear artillery in even small scale battles. The first TOG/Clan battles will be a one sided bloodbath and so will the future ones unless the Clans adapt much more quickly than they did to IS tactics (Of course, they have more reason to).

[The Yosemite Bear]

why do you think we mentioned thor sats.

the combination, of nuke scale effects from a sattillite railgun, not to mention, with the one sided air/space superiority (basically killing others out side of range comparing Aerotech scale vs. Intercepter scale, IFF seekers/Shiloette seekers would open up outside of anything in Aerotech's max engagement range with hardpoint mounted missiles.

[Petrosjko]

Don't forget the nukes. TOG freely uses nuclear artillery in even small scale battles. The first TOG/Clan battles will be a one sided bloodbath and so will the future ones unless the Clans adapt much more quickly than they did to IS tactics (Of course, they have more reason to).

It's not actually nukes they're using in ground battles, but HELL rounds, which are gravitic weapons that pretty much annihilate everything in the target hex and create a distortion wave that grounds all gravs the surrounding area.

Which can be a real bitch when you have a nice platoon of Horatius' closing in on the flank of an already battered Deliverer platoon and... WHAMMO... your chariots are eating trees and rocks.

However, given their lack of concern for collateral damage and the ease with which they would be able to get nukes once they're established, I could see them happily using them. After all, it's going to take them a good long time to set up facilities for producing fresh HELL rounds and missiles.

However, using nukes on the Clans would pretty much guarantee that they would unify against the invaders, and if you gathered all the Clan naval assets out there, utilizing their superior communications, they might be able to take out the TOG naval assets piecemeal, if they're divvied up between various worlds providing support.

Assuming the TOG naval flotilla has enough technical know-how to introduce reasonably modern guidance systems, mechs become a thing of the past on the battlefield. Because hell, modern targeting systems are easily up to the task of picking out something the size of, say, a battlemech head. So they'll brew up batches up decapitation missiles and go to town.

(And therein lies the danger of applying logic to Battletech, a fun but inherently illogical game. But then I groove more on the storyline than the mechanics.)

[Petrosjko]

why do you think we mentioned thor sats.

the combination, of nuke scale effects from a sattillite railgun, not to mention, with the one sided air/space superiority (basically killing others out side of range comparing Aerotech scale vs. Intercepter scale, IFF seekers/Shiloette seekers would open up outside of anything in Aerotech's max engagement range with hardpoint mounted missiles.

Only one nitpick here. I'd question the utility value of IFF homers with such radically different IFF systems as you'd see between these two tech levels.

Damn damn damn but what I'd give for another game of RL. Any of the RL games, other than Prefect.

[The Yosemite Bear]

not to mention the siluette seekers would have to be reprogrammed too. nothing like B-tech is in the TOG target database...

[Imperial Overlord]

It's been a long time since I visited the Renegade Legion universe but I though HELL rounds were pocket fusion bombs triggered by grav tech.

[Imperial Overlord]

As for the THOR, of course they are fun. But you don't want those ground artillery boys to feel left out, do you?

[White Haven]

The question is, are they pissing off both the IS and the Clans at the same time? If they are, and especially if they start to drive from that position towards Terra, they've got a nasty little sandwich action going on. Snow Raven's 63 warships on one side, Marik's similarly-sized navy on the other, and everybody else's navies scattered about piecemeal. Main problem is time, before the slow BT-verse navies could get mobilized and into position (given two jumps before first charge (LF batteries) and average 1-week charge time) you're looking at months...so spatial position is largely irrelevant. And here I've gone and talked myself in a circle, bloody hell. One note on the nukes, during the FC Civil War, nuclear weapons were used against battlemech ground forces at least once, so the interlopers don't have a monopoly on that mindset. Hell, look back at the First and Second Succession Wars, a good chunk of the IS glowed in the dark.

[Petrosjko]

It's been a long time since I visited the Renegade Legion universe but I though HELL rounds were pocket fusion bombs triggered by grav tech.

My books are packed away right now, but I'll break 'em out sooner or later. I've got all the RL stuff except for the Capital Ship briefing... (And I would sell many many souls to have it, if anybody has an idea of where one could be found, or a scan thereof.)

But you might be right about the fusion-based nature of the weapon, what I can speak to with certainty is the gravitic pulse effect. Oh, can I ever speak to that.

On the nukes... yeah, there was one incident where nukes were used, and that led to some serious consequences for the unit in question... it was a Lyran unit that was on the verge of getting destroyed, like so many regiments did during the FedCom Civil War. Hell, Kathil burned up like eight mech regiments and god only knows how many conventional regiments. But the fact is that the houses do all have their stockpiles of such weapons, though they would be rather less effective against the highly mobile and dispersed operating pattern of TOG forces.

Y'know, if somebody had a coding bent, we could get a simple engine together to play the RL games online, but that's a topic for another forum.

[LordChaos]

There is absolutely NOTHING the IS or Clans can do millitarialy that could be seen as a threat to this TOG force.

The entire Clan navy would find it's self outgunned and outranged by this force (it's enough to do a Mike Wong style BDZ, and then some) It would be about the equivilent of all the naval forces of about 1850 vs a 1945 USN task force. Only hope for the lower force is that the upper force runs out of ammo.. and energy weapons don't have ammo.

Serriously, Btech has some nice toys (such as their HPGs), but RL tech is way out of their reach.

[frigidmagi]

I know Battle tech decently but haven't heard of Renegade Legion before and the search engines are not helping. Anyone got any links on this?

[Imperial Overlord]

Renegade Legion is another FASA game produced back in the late 80s and early 90s. A racist human empire that is heavily influenced by Roman culture controls most of the galaxy. They are oppossed by several smaller civilizations, an internal resistance movement, and the Renegade legions. The government is called the Terran Overlord Government or TOG. They have advanced gravity tech and an attitude similar to the Galactic Empire of Star Wars.

[Petrosjko]

There is absolutely NOTHING the IS or Clans can do millitarialy that could be seen as a threat to this TOG force.

The entire Clan navy would find it's self outgunned and outranged by this force (it's enough to do a Mike Wong style BDZ, and then some) It would be about the equivilent of all the naval forces of about 1850 vs a 1945 USN task force. Only hope for the lower force is that the upper force runs out of ammo.. and energy weapons don't have ammo.

Serriously, Btech has some nice toys (such as their HPGs), but RL tech is way out of their reach.

Y'know, I was just writing up a bit on how the Battletech forces could still conceivably piecemeal the task force down, then it hit me... given that Btech ships still run on sublight drives and jump drives, there's no conceivable way they could really pull off a series of ambushes on RL vessels, who would only hang around jump points in order to beat on jumpships.

Even then, a quick hop to tau-space would put them out of the danger zone and able to reengage at their leisure. Point conceded on utterly ridiculous TOG naval superiority.


Frigid, here you go...

http://www.madcoyote.com/renleg/index-g.html

http://indigo.ie/~ngilsena/renegade.htm

They're a bit skimpy on the backstory, but the game has been out of print forever and a day, and there's only a few of us graybeards left in the cult following that it formed.

[Petrosjko]

Renegade Legion is another FASA game produced back in the late 80s and early 90s. A racist human empire that is heavily influenced by Roman culture controls most of the galaxy. They are oppossed by several smaller civilizations, an internal resistance movement, and the Renegade legions. The government is called the Terran Overlord Government or TOG. They have advanced gravity tech and an attitude similar to the Galactic Empire of Star Wars.

To expand on that a bit, you have the standard 'humanity spreads out to the stars story, colonizes a gazillion worlds (roughly), meets various alien species, some of whom are friendly, some not so much, establishes itself as a force to be reckoned with...

Then the human race gets virtually wiped out by a pandemic known as the Snow Plague, that essentially kills around two-thirds of the species. A pair of non-nice alien species move in and enslave the majority of the rest.

An inspirational leader comes along and starts a revolutionary movement, drives off the not-nice aliens, forms his new government modeled on the Roman Republic (a favorite of FASA, as they also have a Roman-themed government with the Marian Hegemony in Btech.) This government is known as the Terran Overlord Government.

The TOG spreads like wildfire and totally conquers one of the not-nice alien species, while reducing the other to a vastly smaller chunk of territory than they originally possessed, and in the process makes the inevitable transition to empire, complete with a BDZ of a rebellious-type planet.

Said BDZing causes a large number of units to go rogue and defect to the only other human power in the galaxy, a much smaller nation known as the Commonwealth.

(To give you an idea of the scale, the TOG military has eight million Legions, roughly equivalent to divisions in their force structure, and around a hundred thousand battleship groups. The mass defection entailed roughly three hundred thousand legions and ten thousand battleship groups walking away... the Commonwealth, a MUCH MUCH smaller nation, had two hundred thousand divisions, so it caused quite a stir when a defecting army larger than their own standing forces showed up.)

Hence the name, Renegade Legion. The game centers on the slow, grinding conquest of the Commonwealth by vastly numerically superior TOG forces. The TOG could win fairly easily if they simply concentrated their forces and went for knockout blows, but between the fact that they have galactic responsibilities in security and the fact that the war serves as a great distraction for the public, they've settled for a protracted war of attrition.

Hell, FASA even beat the current trend of reality TV, as one sourcebook features The Death Express, a reality show featuring the exploits of a high-profile TOG fighter squadron.

If you want more info or have questions, Frigid, you can post 'em here or PM me. This is one of my pet geekeries.

[CJvR]

The Centurion intro in Renegade Legion is very amusing...

You ride in 250 tons of molecularly aligned crystaline titanium wedded to a ceramic ablative shielding.
You carry a 200mm Gauss Cannon, two massive 10 Gigawatt lasers, two SMLM fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, a Vulcan IV point defence anti-missile system and a medley of other equally lethal weapons.
Your vehicle is the ultimate product of 4.000 years of armored warfare.
Your life expectancy is less than two minutes.

[LordChaos]

They're a bit skimpy on the backstory, but the game has been out of print forever and a day, and there's only a few of us graybeards left in the cult following that it formed.

I should try harder to get the guys who are doing MegaMek to give RL a try....

[LordChaos]

One of the bits FASA did with RL that just struck me as right was when they wrote their breifings, they were done "in character". The breifing on the TOG fighters, for example, was writen from the point of view of Comonwealth officers, while the breifings on Comonwealth/Renigade Legion equipment was done from the TOG official veiwpoint. I know, it's a little thing, but it's the little things that make me love it so.

I actualy still have both fighter breifings (actual print). Somewhere, I have PDFs of most other game books and resources put out. I could even probly buy a couple Cohort packs with a 80 mile trip (will have to check next time I'm up.. might even be albe to pick up a boxed set of the basic game).

I do wish that FASA pumped RL as much as they did Btech.

[Petrosjko]

The Centurion intro in Renegade Legion is very amusing...

You ride in 250 tons of molecularly aligned crystaline titanium wedded to a ceramic ablative shielding.
You carry a 200mm Gauss Cannon, two massive 10 Gigawatt lasers, two SMLM fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, a Vulcan IV point defence anti-missile system and a medley of other equally lethal weapons.
Your vehicle is the ultimate product of 4.000 years of armored warfare.
Your life expectancy is less than two minutes.

Yeah, that was what drew me to the game, back in the day.

One of the bits FASA did with RL that just struck me as right was when they wrote their breifings, they were done "in character". The breifing on the TOG fighters, for example, was writen from the point of view of Comonwealth officers, while the breifings on Comonwealth/Renigade Legion equipment was done from the TOG official veiwpoint. I know, it's a little thing, but it's the little things that make me love it so.

I actualy still have both fighter breifings (actual print). Somewhere, I have PDFs of most other game books and resources put out. I could even probly buy a couple Cohort packs with a 80 mile trip (will have to check next time I'm up.. might even be albe to pick up a boxed set of the basic game).

I do wish that FASA pumped RL as much as they did Btech.

Yeah, FASA did that with a lot of their stuff, like the later Field Manuals for Battletech, and the shadowtalk commentary for Shadowrun products.

The Commonwealth/RL fighter briefing had a positively slimy, smarmy feel to it because of the TOG commentary.

I've got all the books hardcopy except for the Fire Eagles and the Capital Ship Briefing. I broke out the 2nd ACR sourcebook the other day 'cause a young man who is essentially my adopted son recently got his orders to ship off to Washington state to that very unit.

I even have the Circus Imperium game. "Gentlemen, whip your beasts."

On the matter of why they didn't push it so hard, I don't speak from inside knowledge, but FASA at the time had a habit of overextending, creating game lines and dumping them. They had a large Star Trek RPG collection that they just abandoned, as well as a Dr. Who RPG, and they ended up having to whittle it all back to their core lines... Battletech, Shadowrun, and eventually Earthdawn.

Que lastima. Because Renegade Legion, with Centurion and Leviathan especially, was like asking me what I wanted in science fiction wargames, and then giving me about eighty percent of it.

[Typhonis 1]

If the Legions are smart they will conquer a Periphery stae, no innner spehere or clan power would notice, and start to set up n industrial base.

Hell Grav tech gives them a nasty advantage in itself if they are forced to use local weapons.

Then once the infrastructure is up they can start to expand.