Top Secret - Not Just A Val Kilmer Movie

  I was once told I was not allowed to flash back to wars I was not in.  To be fair, there was a UH-1 slick involved, there was Creedence blasting from the speakers, we may as well have been in a 'Nam movie.  I bring this up because I am feeling increasingly nostalgic for a game I've never played.  In fact, until recently, I never even owned it.  I'm talking about TSR's Top Secret RPG.

  Don't get me wrong - I played the ever-livin' crap out of Top Secret/S.I. back in high school.  It still has one of my favorite game engines - simple, d100 skills, combat uses the ones die to determine hit location...  It was pretty damn cool.  I used it to do a M.A.S.K. game in the late '90s that was well received by the players.  The first car I ever bought was an '86 Nissan Pulsar - and I was gratified to find the stats for that car in the Top Secret/S.I. equipment list.  A great game that in my opinion is unappreciated.

  What I'm talking about, though, predates the "S.I." part by about seven years.  The original Top Secret RPG from 1980/81 was a single saddle-stapled volume like many other early TSR games.  It came in a boxed set like many other TSR games.  It dripped Golden Age awesome, like many other TSR games.  While flipping through Top Secret I started seeing all the things that I loved about D&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World and Gangbusters.  Jim Holloway artwork, for one.  Rules that were all over the place, but somehow kinda made sense.  A class-level system for espionage.  Spy missions that looked suspiciously like dungeon crawls.

  I never once played the original or marginally cleaned up second edition of Top Secret.  I wasn't even a gamer until two years before Top Secret would be replaced by S.I.  Sure, I watched Cloak & Dagger with Dabney Coleman about a zillion times on HBO as a kid, so I was aware that espionage RPGs existed, but my first real dalliance with them was the Victory Games James Bond 007 RPG and GURPS Espionage.  I still refer to both books regularly when I am in an espionage mood.  Those and the Covert Operations Sourcebooks for Top Secret/S.I. (which are top-notch collections of actual Cold War events.)

  So... if I've never played this game, why do I want to play it so badly?  Why am I suddenly hyper-interested in this ancient game line that I never actually played back when it was new?  When Top Secret was published I was 6 years old, and not yet a gamer.  Perhaps I am fascinated by it for the same reason I am fascinated by so many other things - I am preoccupied with 19, 19, 1985.  I miss the 80s.  I miss the Cold War.  I miss the world I grew up in.

  I suppose this eventually happens to everyone who reaches a certain age.  I remember rolling my eyes as the old folks insisted that Lawrence Welk represented the epitome of modern music.  At the time I was listening to Huey Lewis and the News, Cyndi Lauper and The Cars.  I remember listening to tales of America under FDR, and Truman and Ike.  Just as those older folks pined for the America they grew up with, so too do I.  At least I guess.  I wish my kids could wake up on Saturday mornings and have the same experiences I did.  Cereal, a pillow and PJs, and The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, hell, even Star Wars : Droids.  I have a lot of these shows on DVD.  My son and I watch Thundarr together, and the D&D cartoon.  My 2-yo daughter loves He-Man and She-Ra as much as her brother does.  I guess it's the experience of being excited to see the next new episode - not having them on-demand to devour entire series in an afternoon.  I dunno.  Damn kids.  Get off my lawn!

  Is it normal to reach a certain age and feel something is just missing from the world?  I look at all the technology that's been developed in my lifetime.  My smart phone and tablet rarely leave my side.  Just a few years ago a tablet was an expensive commodity, and now our family has three of them none of which we pad more than about $225 for. 

  With all of that, though, I still play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.  I can't wait to teach my kids how to play tabletop games.  I still play Atari and NES with my little ones, as well.  We watch old cartoons.  I read them the books I was read as a kid - often the very same copies thanks to my mom and grandma.  I watch Cheers, and Night Court, and SNL with Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman and John Lovitz.

  So - is my sudden interest in Merle Rasmussen's roleplaying opus rooted in a nostalgia-by-association because it was published in my own sacred decade?  Is it that leafing through Top Secret I can see the bones of the Golden Age of TSR - that it just "feels" like the games I grew up loving? 

  I dunno.  I got nothin'.  I have no idea why I suddenly want to devour these books and play this game.  I just know that at the moment, everything Top Secret is fascinating to me...

Adventures in Anaphylaxis.

   So this is a post I didn't expect to make.  My little Kaylee Jo has found out the hard way she is allergic to fire ants.  We were playing at my grandmother's home - she and Zane love visiting their great-grandma and her dog, Gizmo.  Zane was running ahead of Grandma, and Kaylee was behind.  Grandma warned Zane not to step in the ant bed she just noticed, but didn't see Kaylee behind her step right into it.  I was on my way across the yard already and I scooped her up and brushed off the ants - but they'd already done a pretty severe job of chewing up her right foot.  She started to swell immediately.  When I noticed a few moments later as we were covering her foot and leg in salve and a wet rag that she was starting to break out on her face - that's not right.
  I asked Grandma to look after Zane and I took Kaylee to the car and drove her to the urgent care facility two blocks from Grandma's house.  They took one look at her already swelling lips and eyes and told me to take her to the ER immediately.  So back into the car we went, and I ran a coupla lights and cursed more than a few other drivers rushing to get Kaylee to St. David's Round Rock.  As we drove she was crying loudly most of the way, and it seemed every time I looked back at her she was more and more red and swollen.  I reached back and held her hand - when the crying stopped, that's when I really started to worry.  The memory of finding out my JROTC classmate David Antonie had died in college of severe anaphylactic shock kept playing over and over in my head.  Smartest kid in the battalion, full ride to A&M... brought low by carrot cake.  I rushed Kaylee into the ER and to be honest, their immediate action made me even more worried.  I mean, I've seen people with bleeding wounds sit for hours in the waiting room and whoosh - they took Kaylee back without so much as asking if she had medical insurance.  She was instantly surrounded by a doctor, three nurses and two techs.  Epinephrine.  Benadryl IV.  Luckily, she never actually stopped breathing - but her eyes were nearly swollen shut at that point, and her lips looked like the wax candies we used to get as kids.
  Dr. McCusky told me I could hold her to make her feel safer, and I did.  I climbed into her bed and she fell right asleep on Daddy as the benadryl won out over the epi.  We spent five hours in the ER watching her color slowly return to something less like a killer tomato.  I'll admit it, folks, this is THE most scared I've ever been in my life.  The thought that I might lose my little girl was earthshaking.  Here it is five days later and it still sends chills down my back.  The Doc told me this was a no-shit allergy and Kaylee would need to have an epi pen with us wherever we went.  He quipped - not entirely kidding - that we should consider moving north where fire ants are much less prevalent.  Here in Texas you can't go ten feet without finding an ant mound in a field or public park.  It's like a poisonous, biting minefield.  When Mary finally got my phone message and came up to the hospital, we swapped off for a bit so I could hit the restroom - but true to form Kaylee really, really wanted Daddy.  Back into the bed I went until Kaylee was released.
  The hospital staff was uniformly awesome.  They spared no effort to make sure Kaylee was as comfortable as she could be, and one of the nurses (cute!) could tell how worried I was, and made sure to get my attention and tell me "You did good getting her here, Dad."  When we got Kaylee home, we were able to see the actual bites once the major swelling had gone down.  I counted FIFTY separate ant bites.  All in under 20 seconds.

  This was a major eye-opener for me.  When we visited our GP two days later Dr. Turner confirmed for us that this was a potentially fatal allergy if untreated, and also reiterated what Dr. McCusky had told us - if she begins to swell, hit her with the epi pen, give her children's benadryl, and then take her immediately to the nearest ER.  Don't wait and see, just go.  It's more than a bit unsettling to know that something that's as common as days ending in "Y" here in Central Texas have the potential to be life-threatening to our little girl.  Zane and I have become overly paranoid about ants and making sure Kaylee stays the hell away from them.

  Ugh.  I still shudder when I think about it.  For Kaylee's part, she's bouncing back just fine.  She's smiling and happy, snuggly and cheerful (when she's not acting like she's two) and generally an amazing little girl.  She knows how do dial my friend Bobby on my cel phone.  She can manupulate Netflix on the 360.  She's smart as well as beautiful - and oh, yeah, she apparently kissed a boy at daycare two days ago.  Now I have to find out who he is and make sure his intentions are honorable...

A couple of pictures I quite like...

Specialist Webb reporting, folks.

  Well, I screwed up and missed an on-time post - but I have had good reason to be busy.  On Friday, 17 May 2013, I was finally granted the honor of raising my right hand and swearing into the Texas State Guard as Specialist Webb.  It's quite surreal, after resigning myself to never being able to serve in uniform, to finally have an actual military status.  To be clear - the Texas Military Forces, as opposed to the federal military of the United States.  I make this distinction because as a military force organized under title 32 of the US Code, the Texas State Guard is distinct from the US Army or US Army National Guard.  While I am proud to be a soldier in the Texas State Guard, I readily acknowledge that my service is not the same as federal service - I will (most likely) not be deployed outside the CONUS to warm and friendly spots such as the ones my friends in federal service have been deployed to.  That said, I'm now just as bound by the Texas Code of Military Justice as a federal soldier is by the UCMJ, and I can be prosecuted for the same things under the TCMJ that any other soldier would be held accountable for. 

  Why bring this up?  There are those both in and out of uniform that look down on the Texas State Guard and State Defense Forces in general.  They maintain that we are not "real" soldiers.  Allow me a brief rebuttal - we are not, in and of ourselves, equivalent to active duty federal troops.  This is evident in that we cannot afford to send our non-prior service troops to a 9-week recruit training followed by AIT (or OSUT) and we receive little or no weapons training in most cases.  99% of what we are expected to do consists of disaster response, shelter operations, food and water distribution and other "civil affairs" missions.  We support National Guard troops at need, and often work with them - most especially our Air Wing.

  So if we're not trained to go downrange and engage the enemy, what kind of soldiers are we?  As you all know, I'm a student of military history.  My first response to this question would be that we are soldiers in the greatest traditions of the United States.  Citizen Soldiers.  We hear that term quite a bit in certain circles, but to the jaded and the uninitiated alike it has lost its meaning over the years.  What is a citizen soldier?  What does that imply?

  The average guardsman (or woman!) in my unit could be doing so many other things with their free time.  Many of the officers and NCOs in my battalion are prior service.  They've "done their bit for King and Country" and returned to civilian life.  They have chosen to continue serving.  We have law enforcement members, medical first responders, members of fire departments - all citizens who chose a life of service to their communities as a vocation, now serving further as a volunteer soldier.  As a member of the Texas State Guard, each soldier is responsible for their own equipment, transportation to and from drills, and training time.  We are not paid for monthly drills.  The FEMA, Red Cross and other courses taken by members of the Guard are done on our own time away from drill.  We only draw pay when deployed, or for part of the time during which we are at our Annual Training.

  The sacrifice of time, money and commitment is directly analogous to the militia of the Colonies before our great nation became a nation.  The rank of private comes from the term "private soldier" which at times in history denoted a soldier who served on the requirement that they provide their own equipment.  These militia soldiers maintained their civilian lives in the full spectrum of occupations, reserving a portion of their time to train, drill and prepare for the day their services would be needed in a military capacity.  These were not professional soldiers to the exclusion of all else - but they had a willingness to serve and make the necessary sacrifices that service required.

  I may never be fired upon in the line of service.  Indeed, I hope this is the case.  Most people assume that it goes without saying that a member of the State Guard will never be in a combat situation.  We are here to help our fellow Texans and others when floods, fires, hurricanes and other disasters occur.  We train for those sort of events, and take great pride in the earning and wear of the Military Emergency Management Systems badge.  That said, I know of more than one fellow guardsman who HAS been fired upon - sometimes during duty near the border, sometimes by looters and the like after a disaster. 

  The point is, as a cadre NCO who has earned my respect is fond of reminding is "Soldiering is inherently dangerous."  I did not sign up with the Guard with the expectation that I would be toting an M4 in a combat zone.  That is not our primary mission.  I did sign up with an understanding - the understanding that taking the oath and putting on the uniform meant that should the need occur, I might well be placed in harm's way in the line of duty.  The probability is that unlike one of my good friends who is in the US Army and has been fired upon, returned fire, and exposed to IEDs and all sorts of nastiness, I will never have to fire a shot in anger.  That does not mean my service is guaranteed to be safe.  We may not be facing the same kinds of threats, but each of us has to accept that the cautionary tale of the experienced Guard soliders might be us some day.  We're not joining a civilian organization, and we must be aware of the possible ramifications of that decision.

  You will not ever hear me saying that service in an SDF is equivalent to federal service.  Those that choose soldiering as a vocation have my utmost respect and gratitude, and I am honored to share the uniform and traditions.  At the same time I will defend vigorously the function and duties of my unit and my organization.  We of the Texas State Guard have chosen to give our time and our money in the earnest desire to help our fellow Texans in time of need.  We are, by legal definition, soldiers in the Texas Military Forces.  Period.  Does that mean we are the same kind of soldier the US Army sends overseas?  No, but we are the kind of soldier who will be there when our community needs us - training as volunteers and procuring all the gear necessary to render aid.  We are citizen soldiers in the grand traditions going back to the first colonial militias.

  I have the fortune to serve with some incredible people.  Soldiers who already served in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places.  Police, fire and EMTs looking for more ways in which to serve.  Fresh-faced young college students looking to learn something about military life while continuing in their studies.  One of the most amazing NCOs I've ever met is a former MP who is a real estate agent in civilian life.  Another was a soldier in his native Norway before coming here, earning citizenship, and deciding to continue to serve his new country.  It's incredible to watch this diverse group of citizen soldiers develop as a team in anticipation of the time when our communities will need us.

  I look forward to serving in this way - the only way I can, thanks to my OSA.

So, Specialist Webb has reported.  Hooah.

First post as "DAD" in a legal sense.

Greetings, True Believers.

  This post is a special moment for me.  Since 21 OCT 2011 I have been a father.  In the hearts of my children, I've been "dad" for a long time now, but in the eyes of the law I spent a lot of that time as a foster father, with the State of Texas being the "managing conservator" of my children's welfare.  If all of you are wondering why I broke my resolution to post once weekly last week, it was because we were coming up on a landmark day in our parenthood, Adoption Day, which occurred on 30 May 2013 just a few days ago.  There was a lot of preparation, a lot of tough decisions financially, and enough emotion to wreck the spiritual development of a thousand Vulcans. 

  To quote the much-maligned theme music from Enterprise, "It's been a long road... gettin' from there to here."  In the eyes of the courts, Mary and I were nothing more than the babysitter for the first 11 months and 29 days of our parenthood, which could have been revoked for the slightest reason at any time up to that point.  During that time, we got to watch the State do its' level best, as is required of it, to place our children with family members.  That almost occurred.  Our final court date was 17 October 2012, just days before the one year mark at which Mary and I would have been "party to the case" and finally allowed to speak in court.  At that time, all indications were that the kids would have been moved to a family who were extended relatives of the birth parents.  We walked into the courtroom with the full expectation that the judge was going to tell us to pack up the kids, they were moving.  We had seen visits with this family increase in frequency and duration, and the lawyer for the birth mom had already tried a hail-Mary play to move for immediate placement.  We were emotional wrecks.  MUCH to our surprise, our CASA worker delivered an impassioned plea for the children to be left where they were, as they were in a good home and had bonded so deeply with Mary and I that moving them would be detrimental to the well-being of the children. The Court agreed, and the birth family's rights were terminated - voluntarily to our surprise.

  Last Tuesday we appeared in court with a large number of supportive friends, family and caseworkers who arrived to see us made the legal parents of our children.  We had members of Mary's family, members of my family, members of the Royal Dragoon Guards/Starship Texas... in short, a humbling outpouring of support and love.  We had more Facebook messages from other friends, family and well-wishers who could not make it to the event.  It was, in short, amazing.

  I believe my proudest moment was watching Kaylee, as she ran from the well-populated table of stuffed animals in front of Judge Hathcock to the peanut gallery and back giving each person in the crowd a stuffed animal while statements were taken from myself, Mary, and our CASA, CPS and Arrow representatives.  When the judge asked Zane what his name was, he was initially reluctant to speak, but when I told him it was OK, he said proudly "My name is Zane Charles Xavier WEBB."  It was all I could do to hold back the tears.  The judge declared us a legal family, and the birth certificates for our children will reflect Mary and I as their by-God parents, as if they were born to us - which is fitting, since that's how we feel about them in our hearts.

  I'd like to take a moment to thank the birth parents for having the courage and presence of heart to know that Mary and I could provide a warm, loving, secure home for their children better than they could at this time.  I know it must have been a hard decision to sign those papers, voluntarily terminating their parental rights.  I could see the love in both their eyes when they visited with the children, and I wish they could know that I respect the depth of love it takes to make the admission that someone else might provide a better future and a more stable home and act on that realization.  I consider it my solemn duty to make sure that Zane and Kaylee never want for anything, and are raised to be inquisitive, loving, respectful, thoughtful, and kind.  I want my children to respect their elders and authority figures, but not be so slavishly dependent on them that they do not think for themselves.  I want them to question, to learn, and to stand up for what their hearts tell them is right regardless of anything they have been taught.  I want them to have the courage to speak their minds, and the compassion to be respectful of the beliefs of others - both qualities it has taken me thirty-seven years to develop.

  At this point in my life, everything is wonderful, and special.  I remember the feeling Wednesday night as we sat down do dinner at our kitchen table and I looked at Mary and mused "This is our first family dinner at home where our last names match!"  My heart is exploding with love, and joy, and hope for the future.  I love my children, and I hope they experience the love of many, many others as they journey through life.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I happily introduce you to Zane Charles Xavier Webb, age 3, and Kaylee Jo Webb who will be 2 this month.  They are my world, they are my children.  I had so many plans for where I would be or what I would be doing as I approached forty years of age, but to quote the song one additional time, thanks to these kids, I will be "Goin' where my heart will take me."

The Old Dragoon

Ruminations on the United Earth Army

  Part of developing the backstory for the Starship Texas and her Dragoons requires us to take a look at the United Earth Army.  According to the documents the STARFLEET Marine Corps has published, the SFMC was founded in 2161 with the birth of the Federation, and followed a "Colonial Marine Corps" that was part of the "United Nations Peace Force."  As much as I'd like to make sure my work doesn't overwrite some of the history already established for the SFMC, United Earth is established canon, there would not have been a UNPF.  As my friends and I have worked on this project, we've been asked why we don't simply go as MACOs.  Our response to that is that we feel MACOs are something between Special Forces and Marines, and like Special Forces Operators there simply aren't enough of them to fight a full-fledged war.  When United Earth needed warm bodies, they called up the United Earth Army. 
  In ENT 3x01 "The Xindi" ENS Sato has an exchange with MAJ Hayes in which she says "Military Assault Command..." and Hayes responds "Captain Archer said he wanted the best."  If the MACOs aren't the only option, then who are the other option(s)?

  So here we go, with a rough sketch of what I hope to develop into a nice document for gaming purposes, and also to be used as part of our SFMC qualifications in a historical context.

INTRODUCTION
  The United Earth Army as it exists today has been derided as a vestigal organ of a bygone time.  Earth herself has been at peace since the founding of the Federation in 2161, a fact which doves and progressives in the United Earth government use to justify semi-regular legistlative attempts to dismantle the service as antiquated an unnecessary.  As it is with many recurrent political arguments, a look at history might give insight into the direction of the present.  At the outbreak of the Romulan War, the same discussions on the necessity of a United Earth Army were taking place as the final holdouts in 2150.  While the nation-states that constituted the membership of United Earth still maintained their own militaries for traditional or security reasons, the United Earth Army had been founded in 2113 in the hopes that an official force representing all of Earth would encourage membership in the new world government.  Once this goal was accomplished, the UE Army faced immediate calls for its dismemberment on the grounds that it had never been needed as a combatant force.  United Earth had the Military Assault Command Operations (MACO) organization to serve as its military, these pundits argued, and a standing United Earth Army was a waste of resources.
  This wisdom was beginning to sway many UE lawmakers when the Xindi attack on Earth in March of 2153.  Humans in places of influence had been mildly alarmed at the reception Humanity's first forays into deep space had generated, as already the list of civilizations unfriendly to Earth had become much longer than just the Nausicaans and a few others that existed before the introduction of high-warp travel by the Starship Enterprise (NX-01.)  Starfleet had quietly begun a rapid construction program using Mars and Jupiter Station consisting of hastily uprated Intrepid- and Delta-type vessels.  The New York-class vessels, originally intended to be exploration cruisers as a follow-on and improvement to the NX-class were prioritized in a secret project to serve as Earth's power projection capability, but the ill-fated Starship New York (NY-34) would not see service, leaving her sister ship the Starship Texas (NY-35) the only vessel of the class to see completion, as production changed over to the prolific Daedalus-class vessels that would be the backbone of the Federation Starfleet after the birth of the United Federation of Planets in 2161. 
  This same spirit of defensive buildup drove the reaffirmation of the United Earth Army's mandate, as it was realized that the highly trained MACO forces would be excellent in small-unit roles but lacked the weight of numbers that would be needed if actual invasions of Earth or her colonies was to occur.  The devastating attack on Earth soil by the Xindi prototype touched off the same type of "war fever" and paranoia Humanity often experienced after events similar to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001.  The UE Army was once again relevant and prioritized, but the logistics of taking it from a peactime army to a modernized war footing were daunting.

THE UE ARMY IN 2153
  At the time of the Xindi attack, the United Earth Army resembled nothing more than the support elements of the armies that had come before it.  With no actual wars to fight, the UE Army specialized in disaster response, civil affairs and engineering endeavors.  Earth had largely recovered from the post-atomic turmoil that preceeded First Contact with the Vulcans in 2063, but that recovery came at a price.  The establishment of the European Hegemony had long ago moved social and political tides toward unification.  This momentum quickened with concrete proof from the Vulcans that humanity was not alone in the galaxy.  The fledgling United Earth Army was composed in large part of recruits from North America - the United States and Canada - as the energy and excitement of First Contact took hold like ripples from a stone dropped in Bozeman, Montana.  These initial units had a fresh infusion of pioneer spirit and leadership that were veterans of the recent and continuing conflicts that were United Earth's birthing pains.  The UE Army was forged in this crucible, adopting many of the customs and traditions of the United States Army whose veterans populated the first units of the new organization.  Peacekeeping and minor combat operations with the belligerent nations that held out against UE membership quickly changed to infrastructure creation and civilian assistance.  The UE Army became an expert organization at civil engineering projects, repairing damaged levees, water purification systems, food distribution, constructing temporary and permanent shelter complexes and many other tasks.  As the twenty-second century matured, the UE Army found itself less and less of a combatant force.  Arms and combat equipment were allowed to remain stagnant in favor of more mission-critical gear and technologies focused on the Army's current role.  As the Xindi Incident approached, the UE Army had become a much leaner organization than the Western-style armies that created it.  Many changes in basic organizations and structures had occurred to facilitate the mission of the peacetime Army that would differentiate it from the Armies of the past.

THE TECHNICIAN GRADES
  One development that seems to be a throwback to the World War II or Vietnam-era of the United States Army was the re-adoption of multiple technical grades within the UE Army.  While the US Army had, and indeed still has in its role as a ceremonial organization for the US as a member state of United Earth, the rank of Specialist, it had long ago done away with multiple grades of specialist or with cumbersome titles like Quartermaster Sergeant, Saddler Sergeant and the like.  With the return of the UE Army to a largely technical role, the need for specialized soldiers was such that the non-commissioned officer (NCO) grades became overfull with soldiers who had stripes, and thus authority, based on technical expertise rather than leadership prowess or the need for small-unit leaders.  This prompted the UE Army command to adopt the ranks of Technician-4, Technician-5 and Technician-6 as extensions of the three enlisted ranks of Recruit, Private and Private First Class.  These soldiers carried grades E-4 through E-6 and were paid at that grade, but carried no official NCO status for those grades.  The insignia for these grades were inverted chevrons with a "T" device inside the angle of the innermost chevron.  In practice, these soldiers were often pressed into service as ersatz-NCOs or placed in charge of special details that usually - but not always - reflected the technical specialty of the soldier.  In most units, a TN4, TN5 or TN6 filled the same billet as a PVT or PFC.

ORGANIZATION

The Infantry Platoon (Light) - 1 Officer, 13 Enlisted
  The standard Light Infantry Platoon in the United Earth Army was composed of only fourteen individuals - scarcely more than a squad from the previous century's military formations.  The change in mission and focus had yielded a much smaller necessary force for most applications, and infantry were more often employed as laborers and engineers.

Platoon Leader - O1 or O2
Platoon Sergeant - E6 (Staff Sergeant) or E7 (Sergeant First Class)
Two Infantry Squads
Squad Leader - E5 (Sergeant) or E6 (Staff Sergeant)
Assistant Squad Leader - E4 (Corporal) or E5 (Sergeant)
4 Soldiers of grades E1-E3

The infantry squads themselves were enumerated First Squad and Second Squad, and were broken down into A and B Fire Teams.  Each Fire Team had a single NCO, the Squad Leader lead A Team, with the Assistant Squad Leader leading B Team.  Each team had two soldiers in addition to the NCO leader.  On paper, all members of a light infantry squad were armed with the EM-23 plasma rifle, although EM-19 plasma carbines and EM-17 plasma support weapons were also commonly seen.

<<THIS POST TO BE ADDED TO AT A LATER DATE>>

Total System Kitbash : Robotech

  I am a big fan of the Robotech franchise.  Oddly, I'm much more a fan of the novels, comic and the roleplaying games than I am of the actual anime series.  Aside from nostalgia for the voices of Tony Oliver, Cam Clarke, Dan Woren and the rest, as I continue in my life journey as an adult I find myself preferring the original Macross series over Robotech when I'm watching it for me - I am trying to invest my son in Robotech, as it will work well for him until he's old enough to know the difference.

  As most folks are aware, Carl Macek fused three Japanese television series together to make Robotech, as the Japanese shows were narratives shown once a week until the story was told and the longest of the three, Macross, was only 36 episodes.  American syndication required 65 episodes - that is, a new episode every afternoon Mon-Fri for thirteen weeks.  Macross was a masterpeice - think Japan's version of Star Trek.  Even now, three decades later it's still wildly popular and has spawned games, sequels and feature films.  This was NOT a "cartoon" made for "children."  I recently had to beat my head against the wall of a very good friend who "just does not like anime."  I've got some GREAT plot ideas for a Robotech game, but alas, with my current group of players I'll probably never get to run it.

  OK, back to the kitbash.  Macek took the three shows and rewrote the dailogue to make three previously unrelated shows a single narrative.  It was messy, and sometimes not done as elegantly as it could have been.  But there it was.  85 episodes of Robotech.  And when I discovered this show in 1985...  it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen.  All the cartoons I watched up until that point were relentlessly episodic save the big 5-parters that were usually stand-alone miniseries or introductions to a longers series - "GI JOE : A Real American Hero" or "More Than Meets the Eye" for Transformers.  You could show a lot of the episodes in any order and not really mess much up - until the new wave of action figures hit and new characters popped up.

  So Robotech was a kitbash of a television series, for better or worse.  The first RPG I ever purchased with my own money was Palladium Books' Robotech RPG.  I loved that game. I played the hell out of that game.  I noticed the inconsistencies with the series even in my early teens.  Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun with Palladium's games.  I'm not one who will sit here and tell you how truly terrible and unplayable they are - because I don't believe it.  A little rusty, maybe.  In need of a tweak here and there, sure.  But unplayable?  No.

  So I watched as much of Robotech as I had avaialble.  At the time I was really running the game a lot, Robotech did not (and hadn't ever) run in the Austin TV market.  There were some episodes out on VHS one could rent, but initially they were one episode per tape.  Later, you could get Macross at one Blockbuster 30 minutes from my house on several casettes that each had about six episodes on them.  The problem there is they edited the hell out of those tapes to cut out all the superfluous character scenes and stuff.  Just get to the fighting already!  So those weren't that great from a fan perspective, but it did allow us to check out the mecha battles.  And they did NOT play like the RPG.

  The main problem was MDC.  For those of you who aren't in the know, regular humans and stuff like your car, your PC, your front door- these things have Hit Points or Structural Damage Capacity.  SDC.  An untrained human punch does 1d4 SDC.  Most humans have around 10-15 hit points without special training.  A regular gun, say, a 9mm pistol, does 2d6.  With me so far?  OK.  Mega-Damage, or MDC, is what really tough things like tanks and mecha have.  1 MDC = 100 SDC or HP.  If your weapon is not rated to do MDC, however, it is explicitly prevented from doing MDC damage even if you can generate over 100 SDC on a damage roll.  So, mecha etc. are effectively immune to small arms.  Mostly OK.  The problem then comes with the way the numbers work.

  The "typical tank" in the Robotech RPG has 200 MDC in its main body.  The main cannon of the tank does 2D8 MDC per shot.  So...  The typical tank has to shoot another typical tank an average of 22 times to destroy it?  Now, 2D8 MDC is a LOT of damage.  A semi truck has 600 SDC, or 6 MDC equivalent.  It would be blown to smithereens by such a cannon.  As it should be.  Thing is... it's impossible to one-shot a tank with a tank's main gun.  You can't even mobility kill one if you use the straight up rules for MDC.  The maximum damage of 16 points won't destroy a single tread, it would still have 9 MDC left!  Later in the book you find out a LAW does 1D6 MDC, and a 90mm recoilless does 1D10.  Neither of these weapons could achieve any kind of useful effect against a "typical tank."

  This just gets wonkier as the game line goes on.  By the time of the Invid Invasion book, a man-sized suit of personal armor has 50 MDC.  This means if you discount the impact and shock effects, which aren't part of the core rules (just part of GM common sense) a PC wearing CVR-3 armor could eat an average of 5 shots from a "typical tank" before the sixth shot wasted 'em.  Strager still, the Gallant H-90 rifle does more damage with a single shot, 4d6 MDC, than the four head-mounted lasers on Roy Fokker's VF-1S Veritech (4d4 MDC.)  We clearly see Fokker's Veritech take out a Zentraedi Battlepod with those lasers, too - and those pods have 50 MDC!  Even with rolling a crit for double-damage and rolling max damage on the lasers, that's only 32 MDC, so what we see in the show would be impossible in the game...  And wait a minute... an armored human has as much MDC as a Zentraedi Battlepod?

  So we've established MDC numbers are broken somewhere.  At best, MDC vehicles have too much MDC.  At worst, both the armor and weapons values are borked.  We went so far as to divide all MDC by 10 for non-PCs or important enemies, and 5 for all PCs and important enemies.  It just emulated the show better.  In a strange twist, we inadvertently invented the "mook rules" we're all so fond of nowadays from Savage Worlds and other games.

  How would I deal with this now?  Well, Palladium has revised the Robotech RPG.  It's better in a lot of ways, but still has a frustrating MDC imbalance.  The numbers just don't make sense in places.  I got some inspiration one day a few years back reading the excellent Robotech Reference Guide. This amazing site has a lot of information on mecha presented in a real-world format, much like reading a Jane's briefing on something.  I decided that I would use that information to create a combat system.  Actually, it's not a full combat system, but rather a patch you can use with any combat system that replaces the damage resolution mechanic for the mecha.

  The articles on the RRG refer to armor by how well it does against benchmark weapons.  Here's an excerpt from the file on the VF-1 Valkyrie:

VIII. Armor:

The armor of the standard Valkyrie is composed of an advanced titanium-steel alloy. The armor stops all small arms fire, provides good protection against heavier infantry weapons, such as a 12.7mm machinegun round, and fair resistance to light mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Zentraedi 22.3mm HE autocannon round.

The additional armor on the reinforced sections of the Super Valkyrie stops all small arms and heavy infantry weapons fire, provides good resistance to light mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Zentraedi 22.3mm HE autocannon round, and poor resistance to medium mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Valkyrie's 55mm APFSDS round.

The additional armor on the Armored Valkyrie is composed of a standard Chobam laminar developed in the late 20th century and improved with the materials science advances made during the Robotech era. This armor was mainly designed to defeat projectiles and other kinetic weapons. The armor stops all small arms, heavy infantry weapons fire, and light mecha-mounted weaponry, and provides fair to good resistance to medium mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Valkyrie's 55mm APFSDS round.

The Valkyrie provides full protection from nuclear, biological, and chemical hazards, using an overpressure cockpit environment activated by radiation and hazardous chemical sensors, or manually when biological warfare conditions are anticipated. The internal consumables supplies can provide atmosphere for two days maximum.


So all this "good protection" "fair resistence" and "stops all small arms, heavy infantry weapons fire..." reminds me of something.  Oh, yeah, the table on the back of all my Marvel Superheroes books!  You know, FASERIP Marvel where your ability scores are rated not in numbers, but in adjectives.  Spider-Man didn't have a 22 Agility, he had an Amazing one.  So I started thinking... what about a chart like that to determine how much damage mecha might take from a weapon?

  Reading through the files, I came up with the following scale:
No Resistance
Poor Resistance
Poor to Fair
Fair Resistance
Fair to Good
Good Resistance
Good to Excellent
Excellent Resistance
Stops

  Now, I originally married this scale to the 10-block Shadowrun damage track and a D100 chart.  For this article, I believe I am going to keep the Shadowrun-esque damage track and instead go with a 2d6 chart.  The reason for this is that I like the way a bell curve concentrates results on the most likely outcome (7 in this case) so as to model what would "normally" happen in the game world.

  So let's define each mecha as having ten structure blocks.  If you want, you can use Shadowrun's method of -1 after a single block, -2 after three, -3 after six etc. to simulate performance degradation due to damage.  The chart will give results in number of damage blocks to mark off.

ROLL	NONE	POOR	P2F	FAIR	F2G	GOOD	G2E	EXC	STOPS
2	5	5	3	2	0	0	0	0	0
3	6	6	4	2	1	0	0	0	0
4	7	6	5	2	2	1	0	0	0
5	8	7	5	3	2	1	0	0	0
6	DEST	7	6	3	3	2	1	0	0
7	DEST	8	6	4	3	2	1	1	0
8	DEST	DEST	7	5	4	3	2	1	0
9	DEST	DEST	8	6	5	4	3	2	0
10	DEST	DEST	DEST	7	6	6	4	2	0
11	DEST	DEST	DEST	8	8	8	5	3	0
12	DEST	DEST	DEST	DEST	DEST	DEST	6	3	1

So basically, I use whatever system I want and roll to resolve a hit.  Say I'm a VF-1 Valkyrie firing the GU-11 gunpod at a Zentraedi battlepod.  I hit, and roll 2d6.  I get an 8.  The Battlepod's resistence to medium mecha-mounted weapons is listed as "virtually none" so I'm going to use the "none" column.  Hmmm... an 8 on the none column is a big badda boom.  Wicked.  In the old RPG, I would have done 3d6 damage to a 50 MDC battlepod...

  The table above allows for instakills all the way up to "good" if you roll boxcars, but it also allows for total "PING!" armor shots at the higher levels.

  So there's the bare bones of my Robotech kitbash to make mecha combat more like the show.  It also reduces die rolls and math.  What does the Internet think?