Hiya. I'm arriving late to the party, but I'd like to jump into the discussion on a few points and revisit some of the things said in previous pages.
BOOM GUNS AND TANKS
Firstly,
Jub wanted to know why the Boom Gun was a Glitter Boy weapon rather than putting it on, say, a traditional tank. While the Boom Gun is at the upper end of mobile, direct-fire weapon damage, the "Boom" that gives it its name isn't an inherent property of weapons of that class. There are lots of weapons, some of them also rail guns, that have the same or even slightly higher impact, but lack the localized blast effect from firing. The Boom Gun is actually *engineered* to amplify and project that shockwave when it fires.
In contrariwise example, Shemarrian
* rail guns use a compensator/suppressor device to dampen-out any blast and recoil, allowing them to be cyborg-portable and fired from-the-shoulder while still providing around 7/10ths the average damage of the Glitter Boy weapon.
(
*The Shemarrians are cybernetic-barbarian Warrior Women who wield rampant penis-envy rail cannons.
Yes,
Really...
To give some sense of scale, the Shemarrian in the foreground is about 9 ft tall (2.7 m?), and the weapon she's carrying is the "short" version that only weighs about 90 pounds. The one in the background mounted on her full-conversion "Monst-rex" riding beast has the more traditional "long" variant Shemarrian rail gun.
And that's about all I intend to say about the Shemarrians.)
*cough* Anyway, basically what the Glitter Boy designers did was build the toughest suit of walking armor they possibly could and gave it the biggest cannon it could carry, then tried to mitigate the mobility problem by making it next to impossible for any infantry
lighter than the Glitter Boy to operate in close proximity to it. The Boom Gun will stun *everything* near it that isn't another Glitter Boy, giant robot, or a tank, making it harder for someone to run up behind it and slap a satchel charge on its back. But that's something they made that specific gun do for a specific purpose, and one that benefits a non-humanoid tank comparatively less at greater expense than a conventional armament.
THE ABRHAMS IN RIFTS
Speaking of tanks, while I also don't know of any listing for the contemporary main battle tank design from the time of The Cataclysm, they have published the stats for the current
M1 Abrhams tank in Rifts. I think it would make for a very useful comparison metric in this discussion.
It appears in the Rifts Merc Ops book and comes courtesy of
Gold Age Weaponsmiths corporation (aka, "lets stat up all the contemporary battlefield hardware and throw it into our game!"). In-narrative, GAW is a company/township out of Alabama that specializes in refitting old, recovered weapons systems and manufacturing cheaper pre-Rifts-but-not-state-of-the-art-at-the-Cataclysm designs. They are less capable than their equivalent, contemporary-design from Northern Gun or such, but cost less and have a unique cachet. They became a real player in North American manufacturing when they discovered a sunken dry-dock facility with old USN vessels in it right when the Coalition was gearing up to procure a navy. The tank GAW offers is essentially the same as the historic design, except that GAW sells some optional, proprietary ramjet-round ammunition to increase the damage from the machine guns, and they slapped a couple of mini-missile launchers on the sides.
Anyway, the frontal armor on the M1 main battle tank, as a contemporary equivalent to compare other things in Rifts with, provides near-as-makes-no-difference the same protection as a suit of
Coalition SAMAS power armor (like 6% more stopping power than the SAMAS). Alternatively, it's about two-and-a-half times the protection of the newest CA-4 standard issue Coalition environmental armor, or about 1/3rd the armor of a Glitter Boy.
The
120mm main cannon of the M1, when fired with an antipersonnel round, does the exact same amount of damage as the new
Coaltion CP-40 standard issue pulse rifle (at the top end of rifle damage), but does it to an area. However, there is also a variant of the CP-40 (CP-50) that has an underslung grenade launcher, which with the latest Coalition manufactured plasma grenades can do the equivalent amount of damage to a slightly larger area than the tank shell. When loaded with an anti-armor HEAT round, the tank does about entry-level damage for a Rifts man-portable heavy weapon - specifically it has the same net effect as a burst from a
SAMAS C-40R rail gun. The new, 12 pound, 8-shot, C-29 "Hellfire" plasma gun handily out damages it, but with much shorter range than even the pulse rifle. There is no information for APFSDS rounds, which is probably smart of them.
The main gun has the same effective range as the fabled Boom Gun, or about three times the effective range of the CP-40 pulse rifle. However, the 120mm cannon can fire at a maximal rate of one shot every five seconds. Most small arms in Rifts can be fired as quickly as the user can aim and pull the trigger accurately, which in practice means about once every three seconds or faster. The CP-40 pulse rifle's optics also have the same targeting bonus and usage environments (passive night vision, etc) as the main battle tank.
The coaxial .50 caliber heavy machine gun, the much-storied
Ma Deuce, has the exact same damage equivalent on a 10-round burst as your basic, standard, get-it-everywhere, Leonardo DiCaprio throws it on the counter and says
"Five bucks" Wilks Laser Pistol. In other words, it will instantly kill an unprotected human beyond all hope of medical restoration and will cause someone wearing even a basic suit of Rifts armor to merely take notice of you.
NORTHERN GUN AND A.R.C.H.I.E. 3
This is a little pedantic, but if I end up going into the Unity War against Tolkeen and Free Quebec it will matter somewhat.
Ahriman mentioned in passing that ARCHIE 3 was the man-behind-the-man of Northern Gun. That's actually not correct at all. Northern Gun is a small Rifts nation in the western half of the upper Michigan peninsula centered around the township of Ishpeming (which is an actual place). They manufacture everything from pots and pans to giant robots and if you've got good-quality equipment that you didn't steal from the Coalition, you probably bought it from Northern Gun. The
eastern half of the upper Michigan peninsula is home to the Manistique Imperium, also known as Wellington Armaments, and junior competitor to Northern Gun. Manistique Imperium is more a confederation of independent townships and baronies, while Northern Gun is dominated by a central authority in Ishpeming. Both of them are independent of the Coalition States.
ARCHIE 3 runs the Cyberworks corporation (not to be confused with Mindwerks in Poland) which is actually the name of the company that originally built ARCHIE before the Rifts Cataclysm. Cyberworks manufactures the TITAN line of robot vehicles and power armor, but no one knows where they are actually headquartered; ARCHIE has left hints that it is "somewhere out West". Recently though, Cyberworks has started trying to build a factory/showroom/maintenance depot in the Manistique Imperium, not Northern Gun. The decentralized government means ARCHIE can exert local influence more easily.
While Northern Gun hates Cyberworks as a serious competitor in the giant robot arms market, they can't seem to learn anything about them and they can't act directly against the incipient facility without interfering with their neighbor (who provides lots of raw materials for NG manufacturing). ARCHIE, in his usual fashion, believes he has neutralized and outsmarted Northern Gun by signing a corporate non-interference agreement with them. It has not and will never occur to him that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was and that NG just smiled at the Cyberworks representative, signed, and is currently launching covert sabotage-operation after sabotage-operation. It's taken years longer than it was supposed to to finish the Manistique facility and ARCHIE
cannot figure out why.
I really don't want to get into ARCHIE and his stuff too much. The narrative reason ARCHIE and the Cyberworks facility has been hidden for as long as it has is so insane, so over-the-top, so laugh out loud ridiculous that it completely loops back around and becomes
Awesome. But unfortunately since it was one of the first things written for Rifts, it's basically instantly spoiled without any attempt to hide it every single time it's mentioned. Pretty much everyone who's played Rifts knows what this "secret" is even if they never encountered it in play. I hate that, so I don't want to contribute to it, even though it's pretty much a lost cause...
COALITION SLAVERY
Early on,
Ahriman listed "slavery" amongst the rest of the Coalition's sins, but I would have to say that's one of the things the Coalition is explicitly *not* guilty of. They don't use forced labor of any of their citizens. Nor, despite the desperation of non-citizen residents of the 'Burbs, do they exploit them for cheap labor; they maintain their "non-entity" policy towards status-less applicants. They even object to slave-labor treatment for D-Bees by Northern Gun and the New German Republic.
Granted, they don't want the D-Bees there in the first place, but that their trading partners are "getting something" from that policy doesn't earn it a pass.
Furthermore, they don't even actively enforce military conscription (also differing from the NGR with their "Vollstandig Militarisierung" policy of Full Militarization) despite having 10% of the total citizen-population under arms. There are military draft laws on the books, but they haven't had to be used for the last 35-40 years; not even during the war, and certainly not afterwards (when other nations are presuming the Coalition army is tired and depleted, but it has actually seen a massive recruitment surge.)
About the only thing you might posit as slavery for the Coalition is the use of Dogboys, but I'd argue against that too. The Psi-hounds are smart enough to talk, follow orders, and have opposable thumbs, but at base they're still *dogs*. They think like dogs, emote like dogs, and have the same desires as dogs. Moreover the Psi-hounds are born loving humanity the same way you don't have to train sheepdogs to guard livestock. They are happy being where they are and doing what they are doing.
The percentage of Dogboys that go "rogue" is very small, and from the revised Vampire Kingdoms, Free Quebec, and Psyscape books you find out that of the ones that do, only a very tiny percentage of *those* left because they were mistreated. Most of them quit because the orders they were given "confused" them or made no sense...
The majority of Rogue Dogboys end up traveling south and drift into the Southwest or near Lone Star. Most people presume this is because the majority of them were born in that region and they feel most "at home" there. It's true that there are lots of *other* mutant animals in the region, many of them released by Lone Star's
Dr Bradshaw (because, to use Ahriman's description, he's just an asshole like that), but that's not why the Dogboys gravitate there. The Psi-hounds end up drawn to the southwest because they feel they *need* to be there. Subconsciously, they can feel the presence of the Vampiric Intelligences in Mexico, even if they don't consciously know it's there or what the feeling comes from. They were created and trained to hunt the supernatural and protect people, so when they are ordered to do something mundane like "stand here and guard this fence" while *something* is out there, to the south, if just feels wrong to them and they don't understand. So they leave and head south to go
Kill Fucking Vampires...like they're supposed to.
Up north: when Free Quebec split from the Coalition, they expelled every Dogboy in the State - over 11,000 of them - from their borders. Most of them joined up with the Coalition and participated in the subsequent war, but a bit over 10% went Rogue. They were made and trained to kill monsters and protect people; they couldn't understand being told to fight
humans who were oriented
against D-Bees and the supernatural - being told to do that was a Wrong Thing that just made no sense. So most of the ones that went Rogue joined up with bandit gangs and raiders; attacking mixed D-Bee villages and the human-traitors who lived with them -
that made sense. The rest went off to fight the Xiticix...and often were never seen again. When the war against Quebec ended, many of the Rogues came back to the Coalition with their tails between their legs, and because of *how* it ended, were let back in.
In the east: a number of Dogboys have disappeared while on recon patrol in the Magic Zone. These vanishings though ultimately coincide with the appearance of Darkhounds - starving, bestial, anthropoid canines that are tougher than a suit of environmental armor and possess a demonic strength. The Darkhounds have all the psychic sensitivities of the Dogboys and there is a rumor that
Alistair Dunscon had Psi-hounds captured and twisted with magic into monsters; a rumor he denies. Of course he would though, because if he intended them to be a weapon against the Coalition he failed
miserably. Darkhounds will attack any supernatural monster or sorceror from the Federation of Magic and show them absolutely
no mercy, but will never lift a paw against Coalition soldiers. They just follow along behind Coalition patrols in the shadows, never approaching them, and never speaking to them. They were Psi-hounds once, but now they've been "contaminated"...and they feel they can never go home again.
Officially, Darkhounds are on the Coalition's blanket kill-on-sight monster list, but no Coalition soldier who has spent any time in the Magic Zone will shoot at one.
Quality of their service-life has gone up for Dogboys in the last few years too. Not only have they been issued rifles, but prior to the war the Coalition started taking some of the old-version Dead Boy armor suits and remanufacturing them to fit Dogboy physiology. Originally they kept the old brain-pan-and-gas-mask headgear, but later the Coalition started making custom helmets for them as well so they could have full environmental protection; despite the headache in logistics that producing and stocking all the different head-shapes of helmet they needed to protect the Dogboys.
Furthermore, service in the war reinforced the already positive image that Psi-hounds had with soldiers. After the Tolkeen war, well, you could beat up some soldier in a bar brawl and you might have to deal with his buddies he went drinking with, but other than that it was all fun and games. If you messed with a Dogboy though, you just picked a fight with his entire Platoon, maybe his whole Company if it's in residence, and certainly any other Coalition soldier who saw it happen. The Deadboys take care of their Psi-hounds because the Psi-hounds take care of them.
While some of the Chi-Town brass may be nervous about the image Dogboys have though, it's not a concern of the Prosek family itself. Why? Because that public perception, pretty much all public perceptions of the military and government, are engineered by the Department of Propaganda...which is run by Joseph Prosek II.
So I don't think Psi-hounds are slaves. They're where they want to be, doing what they want to do.
To Be continued...
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Will do better with-
