A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[MKSheppard]

How long does it take a tank crew or fighter pilot to stop screwing up, in training? Granted we can do it in simulators, but they still have to put in the hours.

According to a 1993 RAND monograph "Device-Based Training of Armor Crewmen", brand new ARMOR enlisted soldiers who have been picked to be crew members on M1/M1A1 Abrams tanks get sent into the M1/M1A1 Abrams OSUT (One-Station Unit Training) course to teach them how to be a Abrams crewman.

Abrams OSUT is fourteen weeks; providing 415 hours of instruction; it's broken down as:

Basic Training/Soldierization: 84.5 hours (hup hup hup! MARRCH!)

19K Tailored Tasks: 164.5 hours (qualification on M9 pistols, learn the types of communications equipment on a tank; etc)

Vehicle Specific Tasks: 166 hours (Actual Factual driving around in a tank and shooting stuff, or doing it in the fixed trainer).

[Simon_Jester]

This is not totally out of line with the time needed to learn to walk, look, and (I think) shoot in an ACS suit... Especially since the guys you send to that are already done with the soldierization training so you've got about 250 hours to put them through.

[Ahriman238]

Woo. Voodoo resurrection, but I wandered back into this thread after finding one of my random posts about the REAGAN MILITARY BUILDUP in here; and I skimmed through the thread again.

Following exchange by Ahriman caught my eye:

It takes a sohon master either a month or 6 (conflicting numbers again) to make a suit, and there are only about 1,000 sohon masters in the entire galaxy.

EDIT: Whoops I fucked up maths -- edited to fix

So yearly production of ACS suits is between 6,000 and 12,000 units, if we assume every single sohon master is making the damn things.

This...is not a good weapon to base your entire plan on, particularly since an ACS battalion would need 900 to 1,000 suits to be operational; and combat losses would mean hundreds of suits are lost per year minimal.

Yeah, there's a part in Eye where Mike asks if they can't maybe restart ACS production. Micheele says she saw a master visibly age from the long-term strain of suit creation. It seems they used up and largely burnt out the greater portion of a generation of sohon masters just getting enough suits for the Posleen War, and fifty years later they haven't recovered to the point where producing combat-useful numbers of suits can happen.

It takes at least 100 hours in a suit to synch up with it enough to move when you want and stop when you want and not make the world spin around when you try and look to the side.

So basically ten days of full time training 7 AM to 5 PM, with all your attention devoted to that one issue just to go beyond baby steps in the suit?

This is considered practical for anything beyond special forces?

As Mike said way back when the suits were first being deployed on Diess, an ACS trooper requires a truly breathtaking ability to multitask. Even the basic grunt suits can perform hundreds of discrete operations simultaneously, most of them useful, some of them critical. If you master just three, that gets you run-jump-shoot.

And yes, I'd consider the ACS a sort of Special Force, in that they employ technology and training that is very hard to come by, and exist in limited number. At their height, the ACS had a single division for every major industrialized nation, two for the US. And they never really came close to making up combat losses.

[Mr Bean]

That is to be noted the suits are highly durable and short of a kinetic missile strike anything strong enough to kill the soldier piloting the suit won't screw up the suit itself. In fact considering Posleen trophy taking and anti-grav units it should be quite possible to get some kind of insane recovery numbers on suits assuming you win the battle. If you lose twenty suits unless they died by carved apart by boma blades or a missile strike (Or maybe hit by an anti-lander weapon) the suit should be repairable out of it's own resources. The only issue comes with lost limbs and needing to track those down. But ACS suits are crazy durable as we see in the series, they have all sorts of self repair functions and assuming they do work the way they describe you should just be able to take a suit dunk it in raw material goo for it to work with and have a functional suit in a couple of hours/days out of it's own repair systems. Sure your going to have weaken areas where ever the death came in and you might have to replace the gel, but assuming you got a similar sized soldier you should just be able to swap the AID's and start training a new soldier in it.

[Ahriman238]

Once again, the material is self-conflicting. Suits are considered high-value salvage, and the Darhel insisted on recovery beacons for the fallen. On the other hand, a middling-level sohon adept is required to tailor a suit to a specific individual and no one else can wear it. BUT, the president did, by virtue of being roughly the same size. But the suit had developed it's own AI personality, the gestalt, independent of the user and the AID, as they all appear to do, and the gestalt was fighting against him half the time. But he was able to fight the Posleen when a lander fell into his lap, but he didn't do very well.

These aren't inherently irreconcilable. Since the suits can be fitted and adjusted to an extent by lesser adepts, perhaps the truly nigh-impossible part is just creating the raw materials. it was mentioned that suit material makes up only a very thin layer of most starships. And the suits are made from 60mm (or Mike's custom suit is 60mm, I don't know about everyone else's) of silicon and uranium that form a chemical bond through the magic of sohon. How does that work? What properties would such a material even have?

[Mr Bean]

According to my sources (IE my memory ) an ACS suit can be said to be three parts

1. The Suit itself and it's weapon systems
2. The Gestalt (The bio-go and associated systems)
3. The AID

Swapping in an AID seems to be easy as is repairing the Suit itself as that is self repairing. The issue with the suits and tailoring the suit to specific individuals seems to be in the gestate, the goo that fills the inside of the suit that users get into that houses all the human sustaining systems and the interface between the mechanical suit and the human user. This is the area which causes all the difficulties as humans are unique. Thus the gestures are unique. Our facial ticks and unconscious body movements have to be learned from person to person and when I squint my eyes in one suit I might activate the helmet zoom, in another I might fire the main weaponry if there was no adjustments done per person. The Gestalt is thus the stumbling block from adapting one suit from person to person.

Also per my memory but the AID is just a clever computer not a full up AI, however the Gestalt is described (Particular the one the President is fighting with) as semi-sentient and molded after the mind of the user. The reason I can't take of my suit and throw on Bobs even if we have the same height/weight is that Bob's Gestalt is in some ways Bob himself, no mind memory transfer or anything just with the ten thousand and one unique person to person quirks of Bobs that I don't have.

[CaptainChewbacca]

AID stands for 'Artificial Inteligence Device', they're fully sentient with distinct persnoalities but can be reset.

[Mr Bean]

AID stands for 'Artificial Inteligence Device', they're fully sentient with distinct persnoalities but can be reset.

Yes but they handed out AID's to tons of people and it seems AID's can interface with any suit. So the suit is fine, you can just hot swap in the AID but the Gestate is still the stumbling block.

[Ahriman238]

AID stands for 'Artificial Inteligence Device', they're fully sentient with distinct persnoalities but can be reset.

Yes but they handed out AID's to tons of people and it seems AID's can interface with any suit. So the suit is fine, you can just hot swap in the AID but the Gestate is still the stumbling block.

Yes, that's pretty much my understanding.

[MKSheppard]

Yeah, there's a part in Eye where Mike asks if they can't maybe restart ACS production. Micheele says she saw a master visibly age from the long-term strain of suit creation. It seems they used up and largely burnt out the greater portion of a generation of sohon masters just getting enough suits for the Posleen War, and fifty years later they haven't recovered to the point where producing combat-useful numbers of suits can happen.

Um. Am I the only one who sees the inherent difficulty in a war effort based upon these suits, if producing them is so degenerative to your industrial base? Does anyone in the Posleenverse actually think about military industrial mobilization?

And yes, I'd consider the ACS a sort of Special Force, in that they employ technology and training that is very hard to come by, and exist in limited number.

The problem is they are worked out to be the end all for anti-posleen fighting by the Author.....

[Ahriman238]

Yeah, there's a part in Eye where Mike asks if they can't maybe restart ACS production. Micheele says she saw a master visibly age from the long-term strain of suit creation. It seems they used up and largely burnt out the greater portion of a generation of sohon masters just getting enough suits for the Posleen War, and fifty years later they haven't recovered to the point where producing combat-useful numbers of suits can happen.

Um. Am I the only one who sees the inherent difficulty in a war effort based upon these suits, if producing them is so degenerative to your industrial base? Does anyone in the Posleenverse actually think about military industrial mobilization?

I doubt it. The Galactics can be excused for being both desperate and inexperienced. I don't think desperation alone would be enough to justify how the US military screwed up.

And yes, I'd consider the ACS a sort of Special Force, in that they employ technology and training that is very hard to come by, and exist in limited number.

The problem is they are worked out to be the end all for anti-posleen fighting by the Author.....

Well, them and the 10K, SheVa, SS, Tigers, battlecruisers, and orbital supremacy once they actually got it. The original Casta gun also played a small part.

If you look at it as a tactical problem, the Posleen are death to aircraft, more mobile than non mechanized infantry, and possess worryingly large numbers of anti-tank weapons. Infantry die like flies in the open, can usually get a 10 to 1 exchange rate if they have trenches or solid enough barriers, and do alright for themselves with serious fortifications. But the God-Kings provide some air support, and can chew through almost anything given a couple of days barrage. And the Posleen will gladly lose 10 of their own to take down a human, it'll just put orn'adar off a little more.

Good thing they're too dumb to come in out of the steel rain. But it's not hard to see how attractive the suits could be as a mobile platform that chew up unholy amounts of Posleen without exposing themselves to every heavy weapon inside the horizon.

But yes, there were never going to be nearly enough suits to get the job done.

[MKSheppard]

The Galactics can be excused for being both desperate and inexperienced.

Um, they've been already fighting a war with the Posleen for a while before the Great Apes with Atomics [tm] show up. Also, wouldn't they also be well versed in basic econometry like this?

"We need to produce x of y, but doing so causes our production force to age at a rate of z. How do we maximize our return in technology for minimal aging Z, and retain a reserve for producing the next generation of adepts?"

I don't think desperation alone would be enough to justify how the US military screwed up.

No, we have the Magic Darheel Saboteurs [tm] injecting stupid-inducing nanobots where needed so that MIGHTY MITE (or whoever is Ringo's mouthpiece at the time) can save the day.

[Simon_Jester]

The Galactics can be excused for being both desperate and inexperienced.

Um, they've been already fighting a war with the Posleen for a while before the Great Apes with Atomics [tm] show up. Also, wouldn't they also be well versed in basic econometry like this?

"We need to produce x of y, but doing so causes our production force to age at a rate of z. How do we maximize our return in technology for minimal aging Z, and retain a reserve for producing the next generation of adepts?"

I'm not sure they actually got the calculation all that wrong. Yes, the sohon adepts get 'used up' to a large extent to supply what they do supply- but if it wins them the war (and it probably would in the long run, even if Earth fell, just because of the capability of the human-crewed Fleet formations)... well, they can rebuild.

The Darhel didn't want the Posleen to be killed by a massive mobilization of earth-based troops. They wanted a relatively small, controllable force of human janissaries... which meant that giving them powerful enough weapons to do the job while putting Darhel backdoors in the hardware to lock it down probably worked out better for them than the alternative, even if it meant burning up a lot of sohon adepts. They could still replace the sohon guys, after all.

[Ahriman238]

The Galactics can be excused for being both desperate and inexperienced.

Um, they've been already fighting a war with the Posleen for a while before the Great Apes with Atomics [tm] show up. Also, wouldn't they also be well versed in basic econometry like this?

"We need to produce x of y, but doing so causes our production force to age at a rate of z. How do we maximize our return in technology for minimal aging Z, and retain a reserve for producing the next generation of adepts?"

About 200 years, though that's mostly been the Posleen walking all over them, except some space battles or a couple tanks that sacrifice Darhel button-pushers. Remember, there was a long debate on whether or not to involve humanity in the war at all, and it was only decided in favor of human janissaries when it become a "use them or lose them." situation.

The Darhel are probably still relative amateurs at the economics of combat. "Winning a war takes almost everything you have, while losing actually does." and all that. They didn't expect the suits to be so effective that they'd have to sabotage the war effort to get their desired result, but they also probably didn't figure on the rate of attrition for ACS units.

At one point it's said that the gel lining of the suits, and all the nanotech that fills it, constitute 1/3 of the suit's total cost. Monetary cost isn't the most reliable way of comparing the time and effort put into something, but I can't help but wonder if they mightn't have gotten more suits if they did away with the nanotech gel and the autdocs and poked eyeslits and breathing holes into the helmets.

[Simon_Jester]

Since making the suit metal is very labor-intensive in adept-hours, I'm not so sure of that. Also, you'd really hurt performance without the nanotech and whatnot, because the suits would no longer be sealed against NBC environments (or conditions like a forest fire), because it would introduce an exploitable chink for shrapnel and small arms fire, because it would reduce the suits' shock-cushioning and ability to ride out impacts... I don't know.

[Ahriman238]

Since making the suit metal is very labor-intensive in adept-hours, I'm not so sure of that. Also, you'd really hurt performance without the nanotech and whatnot, because the suits would no longer be sealed against NBC environments (or conditions like a forest fire), because it would introduce an exploitable chink for shrapnel and small arms fire, because it would reduce the suits' shock-cushioning and ability to ride out impacts... I don't know.

All military procurement is a matter of balancing quality with cost and availability. The question of where you make the cut is, of course, endlessly debatable.