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I'm running a roleplaying game in a semi-post apocalyptic setting where gangs rule the city that the characters are in. Not the sort of gangs we have today in the US, mind you, more along the kind you get in places like Columbia where they go up against government troops and often win. These folks have lots of money to throw around, and being the thugs and strongmen they are, like to spend it on the fanciest military equipment they can find. So what I'm asking is, given that these gangs employ many ex-soldiers who have the expertise to operate and maintain sophisticated military equipment, what sort of equipment would they have, and what would break the bank? I'm not so concerned with purchase price as operating costs.

I know that the Abrams tank can consume 30-60 gallons of fuel per hour, which at $10 per gallon in this setting is $300-600 per hour right there, but I was unable to find out more information about what it actually costs to keep the things running, and about fuel consumption and costs of more modest tanks like the T-72, and how much more it costs than lighter vehicles like the M2 Bradley and Stryker. I would welcome any sharing of knowledge or pointing me to sources.

My assumption is that MBT's would simply be too expensive, and that small gangs would have trucks with attached steel plates, medium-sized gangs might have something like up-armored HMMV's, and the large ones might be able to throw some M2's and Strykers, but I'm looking for hard information to either support or contradict that assumption.

I'm not sure about using the Abrams as a baseline for fuel consumption because IIRC the gas-turbine engine design makes it a very thirsty tank compared to the diesel-powered tanks.

I would think that in a post-apocalyptic setting, the bigger problem would be getting ammunition for the main gun. It's going to be hard to find and harder to replace.

Further, a tank is also a mighty big target. If you can find ammunition for it, I would think you could also find man-portable anti-tank weapons, which would themselves probably be much cheaper than the tank itself.

mil.fi (FDF Homepage in Finnish, quick translation by me)

T-72 M1

* lenght 9,5 m (barrel fwd)
* width 3,6 m
* height 2,2 m
* battleweight 41,5 t
* engine V-12 diesel, 780 hv
* fuel tank 1200 l (I think... "polttoainetäyttö"="fuel fill")
* fuel consumption on road 240-450 l/100 km
* max road speed 60 km/h
...

BMP-2

* lenght 6,7 m
* width 3,2 m
* height 2,5 m
* battleweight 14,3 t
* diesel engine, ower 300 hv
* fuel tank 4601 (I quess than should be 460 l)
* fuel consumption on road 80-100 l/100 km
* max road speed 65 km/h
* carry 7 with equipment
...

"Normal" equipment pages had no fuel consumption values, so no more than these two..

He doesn't just want fuel costs - he's asking about the costs of keeping a tank 'on the road'. Maintenance, spares, that sort of thing. I wonder how many hours maintenance they need per hour of use, and how many techs you need to have to service one? I understand that some planes need as much maintenance time as they get flight time, and often more.

You could run a Russian BMP or BMRD with little maintenance spending on your own, I've seen people who do it with decommissioned machinery. Takes your time to maintain it though and a good skill.

If you want easy to maintain weaponry go with Russian tech. Most of the older Russian MBTs were designed to be operated and maintained by farmers. Modern Russian hardware are also quite well built though things designed in the late 80s onwards tend to get more complicated.

If you have the inclination, look up an old game system called Twilight 2000. It goes into great detail about the endworld scenario. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000

Use the original setting, the others are too happy

While I can't give you the figures for a tank. I can give you the maintenance figures for a Bison 8x8 APC that the Canadian Forces use. It's also in widespread use by the US Marines and the Swiss Forces. For every 100 hours driving time, you have to swap out the oil, oil filter, gas filter, hub oil and tranny fluid. Takes about four hours. This can easily be exceeded in combat conditions but if you want the vehicle to be kept in top shape you should follow these guidelines.

No gang can support a tank. It's really too expensive and requires specialized skills and equipment. A T-72 requires about 2-3 hours of maintenance per day. This includes basic checkups and minor repairs. Basic maintenance and repair equipment require a vehicle of their own. For any serious work you need a lifting equipment because the transmissions need to be overhauled every 4000km. This is just from the top of my head, the real list is alot longer.

Battalions are the first level in an armored force that have the resources needed to do major repairs.
Even if you're talking about a single tank you'd need atleast one vehicle for parts and tools, one for fuel and one for ammunition. This just to keep the thing running and supplied.
This without even going into where you'd find replacement parts and expendables.

A gang could field, depending on the exact circumstances, a wheeled APC for example. A fine example would be the finnish XA-180 or PASI. It's engine and power transmission are easily explained to anyone with training or experience about trucks. It uses very few specialized parts, and most repairs can be done without heavy lifters or other support vehicles.

The trouble with any dedicated IFV or AFV is that you can keep it running with simple maintenance, as long as nothing breaks. All IFVs and AFVs require loads of special parts. Even if you have a tech genius with you that can repair damaged components, it won't do you any good when something breaks beyond repair.

If in gangs are included say battalion sized mercenary forces, those could field more advanced armored vehicled, in limited numbers, but tanks would be out of their reach. A tank, maybe. And that's a big fucking maybe.

-Gunhead

Although if a gang did get ahold of a tank, it would be a "one-shot wonder" they could use for maybe a week or two at best before it just got so bogged down in maintenance needs that it would be little more than a pillbox.

If they parked a tank at the end of a street and ran the engine solely to support the turret & gunnery systems, it could last months. But even then it would degrade and need hydraulic fluid, or oil if hand-cranking it. I did find some old T-72s in Iraq that had been abandoned since the 1988 Iran war that were still hand-crankable.

Finding a museum tank might be something else altogether. One kept indoors in pristine condition might last for several days before giving up the ghost. An old M8 Greyhound armored car would last quite awhile. But anything with tracks is going to encounter problems real soon.

Go for Russian or Chinese reworks over any other nations. Most of them were designed to be idiot proof. And depending on the armorment it would be easier or harder to find shells or reloads for it.

Hint: If I was in a post-apocalypse survival scenario, I'd go to Ft. Irwin, California, to find all this funky cool Russian equipment. It's literally all over the place out there.

If at all possible go for original russian. That's the shit that's built to last. Avoid licence crap when possible. Accept only if nothing else is available.
Shitty tank > no tank.

-Gunhead

Wow! Didn't expect so many responses. Thanks, guys.

It's not quite a post-apoc setting, it's semi-post apoc. Between a Third World War followed immediately by a Second Civil War to end America's involvement in WW3 and overthrow the corporations (it's a post-apoc / cyberpunk setting), the government has collapsed and communication lines between cities have broken down completely. In New York, the corporations have occupied Manhattan and walled themselves off, leaving the surrounding city to the gangs.

Although a large part of the population died, the survivors fled the rural countryside and concentrated into the cities for protection from bandits and genefreaks and for medical expertise, so the greater NYC area still has a lot of people, over ten million. The largest gangs are not like the street gangs we have today. They're sophisticated organizations that effectively govern hundreds of thousands of people, and have lots of ex-military in their ranks. So they definitely have resources, manpower, and sophistication. The question is whether the heavy equipment needed to maintain a main battle tank or other tracked vehicle would have survived, and if so, whether it would be worth it to spend the time, effort and cash. From the responses, it seems like the answer is no, and that only the largest gangs would even bother with something like a Stryker, and that it might not even be possible for heavy tracked vehicles outside corporate controlled areas to still be running.

Russian equipment doesn't really make sense for the setting, since people in New York don't even know what's going on in Chicago, much less able to purchase and ship equipment from Russia, especially since the seas are controlled by the hostile and much better equipped corporates.

I wonder what sort of spares are needed mechanically and electronically? I mean, you need to overhaul and replace parts ever x hours, but in a pinch could you convert an AFV to use a different fuel pump or hydraulic system? How removable are turrets - both for use in fixed positions or to discard them when they become deadweight due to maintenance needs. Do things like APCs and Strykers run on regular fuel/oil/headlights?

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote: It's not quite a post-apoc setting, it's semi-post apoc. Between a Third World War followed immediately by a Second Civil War to end America's involvement in WW3 and overthrow the corporations (it's a post-apoc / cyberpunk setting), the government has collapsed and communication lines between cities have broken down completely. In New York, the corporations have occupied Manhattan and walled themselves off, leaving the surrounding city to the gangs.

In such an environment, the economy will have collapsed. Where do the corporations continue to draw their support from, especially in a world where American dollars are now likely worth very little? (And, how is Manhattan getting food and water in?)

Where do the corporations continue to draw their support from

They own physical production assets in America, don't they?

They do, but even the production assets of the largest conglomerates tend to be spread out across the nation. Yes, a corporation may have assembly factories in Detroit, but the manufacturing factories needed to supply those assembly factories with parts may be in Mexico. Or China. Not to mention that food is often shipped across hundreds of miles.

Our economy is a highly international and interlocking one which depends on a constant flow of goods across land and sea. If things have gotten so bad that New York doesn't know what's happening in Chicago, that economy is going to crash - and corporations derive their power from the economy, because why are you going to continue to work for GM if they can't pay you?

Uraniun235 wrote: Our economy is a highly international and interlocking one which depends on a constant flow of goods across land and sea. If things have gotten so bad that New York doesn't know what's happening in Chicago, that economy is going to crash - and corporations derive their power from the economy, because why are you going to continue to work for GM if they can't pay you?

This has been one of my sore points with post apocalyptic scenarios, the ones where the evil corporations continueto thrive and control people, despite the fact that the economy that supported them in the first place is gone. I don't think many corporations are going to last that long in such a scenario.


And tanks are a PITA to own and operate. Hell, a semi is a PITA to operate, something breaks down all the goddamned time. If my dad can't even keep a Peterbilt running for more than a week without it needing some work, usually a lot of work, I don't see how any organization could keep a tank or several tanks running in such a world.

This is getting sort of off-topic, but the economy did crash, and hard. The corporations are still powerful entities that have the lion's share of wealth, resources, and expertise, but they're a pale shadow of their former selves. The New York corporations have basically become parasites, walling themselves off from the unwashed masses and subsisting from taxes and sales of goods, competition from independent operators being suppressed with violence. An 'employee' of these companies is basically just a term for the privileged class. The increasing power and organization of gangs and black marketeers has put the squeeze on these practices, and so there would have been trouble ahead for the NY corps even if the players hadn't unleashed a robotic army on them at the end of the previous campaign that has utterly levelled Manhattan in the first few sessions of this one.

But that's just New York. Each city and region has its own story. In San Francisco, the corporations were overthrown and a supercomputer became a mostly benevolent ruler before being destroyed by the players in the last campaign (sure were a destructive bunch, now that I think about it), leading to a sudden power vacuum and utter anarchy. In Oklahoma City, the corporations are much more active and established governors and fight against a powerful resistance movement. And in Washington, D.C., the rightful U.S. government is attempting to rise from the ashes and restore the constitutional democracy with an eye to preventing the acquisition of too much corporate power.

Phantasee wrote:This has been one of my sore points with post apocalyptic scenarios, the ones where the evil corporations continueto thrive and control people, despite the fact that the economy that supported them in the first place is gone. I don't think many corporations are going to last that long in such a scenario.

I'm not aware of other post-apoc scenarios that feature big evil corporations heavily, but then I don't read a lot of post-apoc fiction. Anyway, in my setting, the former U.S. has fallen so far that some of its southern areas have actually been reconquered by Mexico, who did not participate in WW3 or have a destructive civil war. Their economy also crashed from loss of trade, of course, but a ruined economy is nothing compared to almost total destruction of major assets and communications and transportation networks. So you have to redefine the image of the powerful corporation in a place where any access to high-tech equipment at all is considered impressive, and even Mexico can make gains against former US territories.

Yeah, if the economy crashes, corporations remain powerful - just because everyone else loses everything. Case in point, the bankrupcy of both Germany and Japan. Mitsubishi over-quadrupled the profits during the war, and even as Japan lay in ruins, it re-emerged powerful.

If I remember right about my high school WWII lore, didn't a small group of German soldiers in the elite Panzer Lehr manage against all odds to keep their tanks operational through the Siege of Berlin and even managed to increase the number of tanks operational. I don't remember the size I was reading about, but probably a squadron. If anybody can provide more information about that, it would be cool.

I know, a gang isn't anywhere near as good as the most elite soldiers and technicians of Nazi Germany, but if you want to wank and have tanks in the first place, looks like there might be a real life analogue if I remember the details right.

Judging from the responses, I don't think any tanks will be featured in this campaign. There weren't any in the last one, either. The heaviest armor that the corporates had were M2 Bradleys, and their military was quite a bit more impressive than any of the gangs (although dwarfed numerically by all the gangs put together, a constant source of worry for the corporates). The corporates also used helicopters and a trio of stealth bombers, but those actually had a lot of utility for their horrendous maintenance costs, while a tank's extra value over a lighter armored vehicle in a situation where enemy forces were mostly light infantry with is questionable, especially since the corporates had laser defense systems to protect the Bradley's and Stryker's from RPG's and ATGM's.

It might actually make sense for a large organization to have a T-72 or two, but I wonder where they'd get it from? They can't get it from Russia, and any such assets would have been looted from museums and private owners years ago during the civil war, and most likely destroyed at that time. I suppose a few might have survived and been maintained, especially if they were looted by people looking to use them to defend their farm or something, and not actively used in the war.

Those elite soldiers probably cannibalized knocked-out tanks for parts. A squadron might run for a long time when you have a battalions worth of wrecks to rip apart. That's a lot easier than trying to replace parts you don't have.