The Military Thread

Nowadays I suppose the closest things you'll get to what you're looking for are probably religious/political militia groups.

OK, so... How can the "PMC hires sociopaths on a regular basis" idea be made workable in a near-future setting, then? Do I need to go as far the Shadowrun setting, where the megacorps mass-censor the media as a matter of daily routine, Corporate Warfare is a fact of life (though, for the sake of every megacorp's bottom line, is usually kept at a "cold war" level), and have extensive (though not total) legal protection against infringing upon their independence from most national governments, for example?

edited 13th Sep '14 9:31:18 AM by MarqFJA

Or maybe the boss of that PMC company is some flavour of passive sociopath who does his business for ... more than mere business.

You mean like Senator Armstrong and the Winds of Destruction, leaders of Desperado Enforcement, LLC. from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance?

edited 13th Sep '14 9:33:42 AM by MarqFJA

@ Ach, previous page:

Rather than the Sherman, if the Germans thought along those lines they would probably come up with something more like the T-34, given that the majority of its armoured clashes were on the Eastern Front. Of course, simply copying a machine designed and built by Slavic untermensch would not do, so, German tank design being not unlike German car design, they would decide to design something larger, more complex, more powerful and hideously expensive to repair when something inevitably went wrong...can you tell what it is yet?

edited 13th Sep '14 9:45:15 AM by pagad

@Teufel: I know. I didn't actually mean it. I was kjnd of having a bit of a flip-out already and read a remark about shooting kids and posted as a sort of reflex. I just.. I have a 'thing' about shooting children, you know?

I know a lot of guys who went private when the Tories decided that having the ability to defend one's country was, like, so last decade. A lot of good guys who just found themselves unemployed and with only one, rather specific, area of expertise.

Also, I notice that we're mostly referring to Western PMCs, the ones that have public stockholders and a host country to answer to. Those have some constraints on their freedom of action; hiring psychopaths or criminals would be too risky.

Note that if the PMC or security company is based somewhere where it doesn't need to worry about public scrutiny, it's free to loosen up a lot more. Also, PMCs subcontract, and some of those subcontractors may be shady as hell. Especially if it's a local player: in some African countries the line between "PMC" and "private militia" is blurry at best. A Western PMC can't hire criminals openly, but it might be tempted to subcontract duties out to a local figure with a corporate logo, a spokesman, and a bunch of guys with guns.

Jones: Its cool brother. I certainly understand the shooting at or of kiddie. Complex and ugly their place on the battlefield is these days.

Yes, very. Especially when the bad guys get to them and fill their heads with crap and basically weaponise them.

I mean, what can you do against that? You have a responsibilty to your soldiers to keep them safe and get them home, so what choice do you have, even when the 'enemy' is some sprog who has no idea what's really going on? It just isn't right, is it?

I'm sorry. Like I said...it just presses buttons and I can get a bit arsey.

It's good. I know more then a few who share the sentiment.

Ok. Sorry. I'm not having a good time down here this week.

The Iraqis have taken delivery of the first of the Mi-28s they ordered.

Bad weather meant no visit to the Philippine Military Academy.

If it's some consolation, an M24 Chaffee is on display along Mac Arthur Highway. I will be able to see it again on our way home tomorrow. Lol It wasn't there last February, along with an 8 wheeler APC (I presume) and a couple of howitzers. And it's hard to type on a phone at almost 2am.lol

Something that has been bothering me for a long time... Would it ever be possible to make the Terminator-style handheld Gatling gun a reality?

I'm pretty sure mini guns are already capable of being used as such, it's just not practical most of the time.

It is a real gun.

Not practically.

As Gabrael says, the gun in T2 and Predator (it's actually the same M-134 minigun in both films) is a real gun, but what works on a movie set doesn't translate to RL so easily.

The big problem with any rotary barreled weapon is power - a minigun needs to turn its barrels very rapidly to work, and this requires a battery, whilst a simple MG is purely mechanical. Thus, a minigun operator(s) needs to carry the gun, a power source, and ammo - and since it uses it up so fast, they'll need a lot of that ammo. Bet it's a maintenance horror too, at least compared to an M2. In Predator, "Ol' Painless" was powered by a wire going up Ventura's pants leg from truck batteries offscreen. T2 apparently had the ammo and batteries in a duffel bag carried by Arnie. The minigun was also undergeared to a rate of fire of 1250 RPM - the weapon is capable of 4 times that.

The XM-214 Microgun was an attempt to make a tripod-mountable weapon (the Microgun was apparently too small◊ for Predator), but nothing seems to have come of it. I've read unsourced claims that US Special Forces tried to make this work in Vietnam, but found the practical challenges impossible to overcome.

edited 15th Sep '14 2:31:47 PM by Achaemenid

Also, Arnie had to be braced during that scene to stop him from falling over.

The issues of using even the Micro Gun as a hand held weapon are many. First is weight of the weapon alone. The weapon, motor, and feed system make it a whopping 36lbs. Now add in an ammo pack capable of being used with any reliability with the weapon and the basic spare parts to keep it up in the field from common malfunctions and that weight goes up even more. While it can be adjusted to lower rates of fire that isn't the advantage of a motor driven Gatling Gun platform, high rate and volume of fire is. At the higher rates of fire it would be unwieldy and would burn through ammo at a frightening rate. Even the tripod mounted version would need a 3-4 man crew to serve the weapon with several people carrying ammo to keep the weapon fed with ammo.

Compared to pretty much any other machine gun option the man portable mini-gun is grossly impractical. For the same amount of weight you can get far more flexible and reliable weapons that are easier to use and field by a long shot. Even with power armor such a system would be rather impractical for the same reasons.

edited 15th Sep '14 4:40:07 PM by TuefelHundenIV

it sure looks cool though.

I think ammo is definitely the key hurdle - even if you could solve the weight, power, and maintenance issues, you'd still have the problem that the weapon chews up ammunition at a ferocious rate. If you undergear it like they did in T2 then you defeat the weapon's purpose; if you use it at full whack then you've got a weapon that is really only good for filling the air with flying metal for a very short period of time - for which purpose a grenade is more efficient. Meanwhile, everyone's miserable because they have to lug around box after box of ammunition.

Incidentally, I just rewatched the T2 minigun scene - you can see the wire leading out of Arnie's costume to an offscreen battery quite a few times.

Ammo and the recoil is bad enough weapons like that have notably higher regular maintenance needs. The motor alone would require additional special tools for field maintenance. The gun itself would give any armorer fits having to repair it. Field maintenance especially in the more harsh conditions like jungle or desert would take a fair bit of time and the amount of CLP type lube and cleaners you would need would not be small.

As a man portable field piece that thing is a nightmare.

On another note, possibly why veterans have problems communicating with civilians.◊

Nohbody: Yep. I had to learn that really quickly when I got a job with a library. Substitute words that sound angry enough but are nonsense instead.

I don't get it.