Force sub: Rebel Strike Force vs WW1

[DudeGuyMan]

The OP assumes that the Rebels do not have anything "they did not have in the movies". This means that obviously they cannot have brought ABC protection gear because we did not see it on-screen, even if they use it in the EU.

That silly man, assuming that if a piece of equipment is never ever seen then they don't have it!

Do we know what kind of kit Rebel SpecForce troopers usually carry? SW NBC protection can be pretty small judging by the KOTOR-era breath masks and those miniature oxygen things Jedi can carry in their robes.

A little thing you stick in your mouth would be pretty shit NBC protection. Gas that can pass through ordinary clothing and kill via skin contact is as old as chemical warfare itself. The Empire would have to be beyond hopeless to lack such a thing.

This is very silly. If the British turn the area around the secret back door into a killing field, that pretty much negates it being, you know, a secret back door.

There's zero reason to imagine that the Empire places any priority on that bunker being secret. No one but C3PO translating for an Ewok ever refers to it as a "secret" entrance. It's an above-ground bunker in plain view with a few of the usual white-armored troopers hanging around out front.

The Empire totally compromising the defense of this back entrance in order to facilitate such a shoddy level of "secrecy" speaks only slightly better of their competence than the idea that they just sort of overlooked it.

Nor would I imagine Palpatine like it very much; remember that Endor is suppose to be a giant trap for Luke and the Rebellion (which itself is pretty silly, but beyond the scope of this discussion). Tipping the Rebels off to the fact that you know they're coming defeats the whole purpose.

It's a military installation of extraordinarily high value. Having it look ill-prepared to deal with an attack is far more suspicious than the opposite. Besides which, the Rebels even knowing that the back entrance existed was a fluke of their alliance with the Ewoks. Prior to learning of it, the Rebels were fully prepared to assault the (presumably better defended) main entrance.

But yeah, the Rebels go grab their shuttle, take off and strafe the British whilst laughing their asses off. At least until the OP gets fixed, and even then I'm sure they can figure out a way to salvage the weapons off it and blast the British from range.

Yeah, that's why they screwed around in the movie hotwiring the door, and getting shot at, and planting explosives. Because it was totally feasible to just rip a cannon off their shuttle and either blow the door open or just blow the shield projector.

It does beg the question of why the Rebels didn't bring any heavier weapons with them. I mean if fighter guns are supposedly kiloton-level, it should be pretty easy to make a man-portable blaster worth at least a few tons of TNT. Even if it required a backpack power supply or a tripod mounting or whatever.

That would have put a whole new spin on that scene where they're overlooking the Imperial base and remarking on how well-defended it looks.

PS: I don't really care if there's some obscure EU source that says they had NBC gear. For one, they didn't bother putting it on before engaging in battle, so who gives a fuck? For another, I stripped the British of chemical weapons in the OP. Further talk of them was just rhetorical thumbing of the nose at Stark and a few others who desperately want to turn this into "WW1 British versus space ship" because the ground combat discussion, otherwise known as the purpose of the thread, isn't proceeding to their liking.

Really the Rebels can't cheese it with their shuttle, and the British can't just gas them. Suck it up or go make a "WW1 Britain versus Rebels... in space combat!" thread. That'll be hilarious.

[DudeGuyMan]

Fuck it, I'll now argue for the Rebels. One of you twats who thought this was so hopeless that you needed to try to resort to shuttle cheese can argue against me if you want.

To my understanding, blaster rifles have multi-kilometer ranges, taken straight off the screen in AotC. They also have striking power far in advance of real life small arms. (At least when not shooting a main characters, har har.) The Rebels climb up on the overlook where they scouted the base out in the movie and rain hell on a bunch of sandbag/cement fortifications and shit from range and cover.

The WW1 guys have been specifically stripped of artillery and aircraft by the OP. They'll have to either run around the woods trying to get around this overlook and flank the rebels, or run uphill into laser fire.

I don't know where I'll go from here, but it's a better start than I've gotten out of anyone else.

[Darth Hoth]

PS: I don't really care if there's some obscure EU source that says they had NBC gear. For one, they didn't bother putting it on before engaging in battle, so who gives a fuck? For another, I stripped the British of chemical weapons in the OP. Further talk of them was just rhetorical thumbing of the nose at Stark and a few others who desperately want to turn this into "WW1 British versus space ship" because the ground combat discussion, otherwise known as the purpose of the thread, isn't proceeding to their liking.

They might have had reasons for not using it. For example, if it is bulky and deleterious to combat performance and endurance (as real-life ABC gear is), they might opt to go without, hoping that the Empire would not use ABC agents in the area around their own unprotected troops. Which is not a given, but can still makes sense as a tactical decision.

For the moment, though, I will concede that they likely did not have it easily available there and then, since I presently cannot show any evidence that they did.

[Aaron]

Fuck it, I'll now argue for the Rebels. One of you twats who thought this was so hopeless that you needed to try to resort to shuttle cheese can argue against me if you want.

To my understanding, blaster rifles have multi-kilometer ranges, taken straight off the screen in AotC. They also have striking power far in advance of real life small arms. (At least when not shooting a main characters, har har.) The Rebels climb up on the overlook where they scouted the base out in the movie and rain hell on a bunch of sandbag/cement fortifications and shit from range and cover.

The WW1 guys have been specifically stripped of artillery and aircraft by the OP. They'll have to either run around the woods trying to get around this overlook and flank the rebels, or run uphill into laser fire.

I don't know where I'll go from here, but it's a better start than I've gotten out of anyone else.

Well to start with do the British have? You mentioned in the OP that they would have period appropriate kit, save chemical weapons, artillery and aircraft, but do they have mines? What size force are we talking about, a company, a regiment, do they have attached machine gun support (MG's at the time being allocated to dedicated companies that were attached to units as needed)?

[Black Admiral]

do they have attached machine gun support (MG's at the time being allocated to dedicated companies that were attached to units as needed)?

That only applies to the heavy Vickers guns; c. 1918 each 36-man platoon had two or three Lewis LMGs (Holes, Tommy, pg. 393).

[Aaron]

Thanks. Do they have attached HMG's then?

[Darth Hoth]

I would think a 36-man platoon would be more or less the equivalent of the Force the Rebels had to fight at the location. The legion as such was obviouslylarger, but as noted, had a lot more ground to cover. Or are we assuming that the British deploy a proportionally larger force to guard the bunker entrance than the Empire did?

[DudeGuyMan]

Yeah they have mines, and those are one of the biggest problems for the Rebels. I do have to imagine that R2 can detect pieces of metal buried under a shallow layer of dirt though, and I guess massed blaster fire along a given path would probably serve to clear it eventually.

I imagine the Rebels will start laying into the base from range, destroying fortifications, aiming at the edges of trenches and foxholes trying to collapse them or injure the occupants, with Ewoks covering their flanks and dispersed as scouts and observers. Having only one being that can speak Ewok is annoying, but not an insurmountable problem. At the very least they can hoot when they see something.

If the Brits don't have anywhere devoid of mines that they can rush through to get at the Rebels, they're kinda stuck soaking up fire. If they do, then the Rebels can run down in there when they need to, using the dead bodies no doubt lining it as landmarks.

The main problem is time. The Rebels don't have days to sit outside the base sieging the Brits, there's a lot of them, and if nothing else I imagine WW1 forces are good at hunkering down in a hole and taking a pounding.

And yeah, I'm assuming a 1:1 substitution of WW1 Brit personnel for Imperial.

[DudeGuyMan]

I would think a 36-man platoon would be more or less the equivalent of the Force the Rebels had to fight at the location. The legion as such was obviouslylarger, but as noted, had a lot more ground to cover. Or are we assuming that the British deploy a proportionally larger force to guard the bunker entrance than the Empire did?

I don't know... How many Imperial soldiers were on Endor? It didn't seem like an entire "legion" they fought, but where the hell were the rest of them while the Rebels were having a giant firefight and then running in to blow up their base?

[Aaron]

I think a lot of it depends on what the Brits do with the ground, trenchworks, bunkers, obstacles etc. Thats aside from the number of men they have, and to be honest ROTJ didn't exactly impress me with weapon ranges or lethality. Yeah I know they were in dense brush and all that but why weren't the Rebels using their captured blasters to blow up Imperial cover (we saw Stormies using fallen trees as cover)?

Edit: Anyone know if the Commandos were wearing body armour?

[Stofsk]

I think a lot of it depends on what the Brits do with the ground, trenchworks, bunkers, obstacles etc. Thats aside from the number of men they have, and to be honest ROTJ didn't exactly impress me with weapon ranges or lethality. Yeah I know they were in dense brush and all that but why weren't the Rebels using their captured blasters to blow up Imperial cover (we saw Stormies using fallen trees as cover)?

Edit: Anyone know if the Commandos were wearing body armour?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Endor_strike_team

Doesn't look like they had body armour. Although interesting how they apparently had an E-web and some kind of projectile/grenade launcher. They also had 'low-feedback scanners'.

[DudeGuyMan]

The E-web helps a lot. Or at least it could. What the hell is up with the optimum range of 200 meters and maximum range of 500 meters? Cripes, Wikipedia tells me an M60 machine gun has an effective range of 1100 meters.

And the grenade-launcher thing has a range of 250 meters? What the hell? If these are the official ranges for these weapons, and I assume they are since they're on Wookieepedia, this is a bit of a problem.

I'd need to look at the movie and try to eyeball how far away that ridge was... Maybe there's somewhere else they could set up? And they were sort of looking downhill at it...

Yeah, more Wikipedia. Apparently a Vickers machine gun vastly outranged an E-web.

[Srelex]

According to Wookieepedia, said figures come from an early 90s sourcebook--so yeah.

[DudeGuyMan]

Why are tabletop RPGs the only place where shit that could be written off as "game mechanics" counts? Bah.

If the Rebels outrange the British they can sit somewhere lobbing cryo-ban canisters into trenches and fucking shit up with the E-web for as long as the ammo holds out. The E-web is meant to be able to take out vehicles and aircraft and such, no? It must have the punch for it. I'm loathe to bring KOTOR game shit from 25 years later, like cryo-ban, into an ROTJ discussion but whatever.

If the British outrange the Rebels then shit, I don't know.

[Stofsk]

Range in RPGs is a bit deceptive. Most systems have increments for range, so the first range band has no penalty to attack for example. You can still fire at longer ranges, it just means the shot becomes progressively harder to make. So an 'effective range' is simply that which allows for an easy shot, in most cases.

[Aaron]

Aye, Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader use that.

However if we assume that those figures are accurate then the British have the range advantage with both their rifles and any MG's they have. Fortunately for the Rebels, the bush is dense enough to mitigate most of that unless the Brits do a fair amount of clearing. I expect them to mine any high points but I think Stofsk posted that they had some sort of scanner.

[Star Wars 888]

Couldn't the Rebels simply get a bunch of powerful Star Wars level rocket launchers and blow the base to smithereens?

[DudeGuyMan]

Range in RPGs is a bit deceptive. Most systems have increments for range, so the first range band has no penalty to attack for example. You can still fire at longer ranges, it just means the shot becomes progressively harder to make. So an 'effective range' is simply that which allows for an easy shot, in most cases.

Yeah, but the description of the latter figure as "maximum range" seems unambiguous. I'm kind of at a loss as to what do do with the Rebels at this point, unless there's a legitimate way to weasel out of the RPG stats.

Couldn't the Rebels simply get a bunch of powerful Star Wars level rocket launchers and blow the base to smithereens?

One would certainly think so. One would think they'd have just popped off a shoulder-launched missle at the shield projector from that overlook and rendered everything else moot. But they didn't in the movie, so they can't here.

[Cykeisme]

A lot of the behavior of the Imperial forces is actually due to specific orders received from on high. For example, allowing the Rebels to infiltrate the facility, then having more Imps come in and capture them and ensuring no Rebel commandos escape, was vital.

Recall that the presence of the stormtrooper legion was supposed to be a secret, with the intention to trap the Rebels. The information leaked to the unwitting Bothan spies was that there would be no Imperial fleet, and that the planetside shield generator would be lightly defended.

Had the legion made their size and presence overtly visible, the Rebel ground team may have backed off and warned the arriving Rebel fleet that disabling the Death Star's shield was not possible; to paraphrase, "IT'S A TRAP!", and aborted the operation. That would run counter to the Emperor's plans to encircle and destroy the Rebel Alliance, in its entirety, at Endor, in one fell swoop.
Thus, the Imperial ground forces played things out as they did deliberately to ensure the ground team would be captured, fail to warn the Rebel fleet, which would arrive in time to be trapped by the Imperial fleet and shot to pieces by the Death Star.
Aside from crushing the Rebels, it's also about staging a big show to get Luke feeling hopeless and depressed to lure him to the dark side.

Anyway, we can assume if the Rebel commandos had discovered a legion of 1915 Britain's finest awaited them, they might very well have bugged out, taken off in the Tydirium, and halted the Rebel space engagement.

Are the stalwart British WW1 soldiers under the same orders?
If so, extensive and highly visible WW1 style fortifications (or Kashyyyk-style fortifications, for that matter) are out of the question.

[Aaron]

Not necessarily. If we're only talking about a platoon or so of men, it wouldn't be to hard to dig trenches and camouflage them, same with bunkers made from the local wood. With 6 months to prepare, mines aren't out of the question either as long as your careful not to rip the area around them to complete shit.

Whether the Brits have the presence of mind to do so is another question.

[DudeGuyMan]

Is there any actual evidence for all this monkeying around in the minutiae of the ground defense by Palpatine? All Palpy really said to Luke was "Nyah hah, a leeegion of my best troops shall pwn ur doods!" At most you can infer that he was misleading the Rebels about the number of personnel present, not that he was personally telling the Stormtroopers which trees they were allowed to cut down.

The Rebels weren't even really supposed to find out about the lightly-guarded back door. There was nothing about it in their briefing. It was some shit the Ewoks just so happened to tell them about shortly before they were going to try a frontal assault. Odds are the Brits will go "Why the hell is this even here?" and just block it off from the inside. I can't find anything about why that back door exiting into a random patch of forest even existed.

And how big was this legion? I mean we saw a decent number of guys, but no more than like a hundred tops. Are there supposed to be hundreds of guys somewhere fighting a much bigger battle than the one we saw? The Rebels didn't seem to bring that many men.

If it's a smaller number of Stormies/Brits then obviously things look up for the Rebels. If we decide there were thousands of soldiers there whom we just never saw at all in the movie, then obviously things are a bit worse.

That grenade launcher the Rebels have can shoot smoke grenades. How much smoke do they make, and can the "low feedback scanners" the Rebels have see through it well enough to make the difference?

[Cykeisme]

Well, to be honest, I don't think it's stated how far the local commanders were micromanaged by the Emperor. Perhaps the flexibility in deployment afforded to the RAR replacement troops should be specified, as well as specifying how far up the command structure they've been replaced. I'm at a loss too as to how to iron this one out, actually.

Basically what I'm getting at is this: If it's just a replacement of training and equipment from Imperial to British, I don't really see much of a change in the way things played out.
If we're talking about giving the British defending force free reign in laying out their defenses, we could just as well discuss the same freedom being afforded to the Imperial defenders, which may well have resulted in their success.

Whatever the case, just keep in mind the general the objective was to prevent the Rebels from retreating to the Tydirium to eliminate any possibility of them warning the incoming Rebel fleet; this could be done any number of ways, including, I suppose, capturing the Tydirium shortly after the commando party sets out into the forest (perhaps this actually happened off-screen in RotJ?). Once that's out of the way, it'll be more expedient for the defending force to prevent the commandos from even getting close to the back door, rather than allowing them to enter the complex and capturing them inside (which could have ended badly if the Rebels just managed to simply suicide bomb the generator instead of being captured).


Also note that the long ranges of blasters are largely negated by the dense foliage and the curvature Endor's surface; both factors can be alleviated somewhat by taking up firing positions in tall trees, on high ground, or in tall trees located on high ground, but only to an extent. It's not ideal terrain for long range line-of-sight weaponry.
You also make a good point about the back door that opens up to a tiny clearing with no road leading to or from it. Frankly, its existence makes little sense..

[CaptHawkeye]

Hey get this - if I put you in a room with a snail and NO OXYGEN, the snail wins through slower biology! OMG YOU SO WEEK!

I'd buy that for a dollar!

This thread looked so promising at first but it failed. Gasp, the scenario is no longer interesting once you start handwaving away so much shit. I was really getting pumped to the idea of Haig ordering a bayonet rush against Ewoks.

The Rebels have powerful ray guns and stuff but that's not too out of the ordinary for the Brits. They're basically direct fire grenade launchers. The Rebels don't have a preponderance of firepower here. Not surprising when you basically gimp every limb they've got.

[DudeGuyMan]

The Rebels get every piece of gear we saw in the movie, and even the gear we never saw but which the EU claims they had, like the E-web and grenade launcher. The only restriction placed upon them thus far is that they win via ground combat, and not kill everyone with their spaceship.

In comparison, the British have been disallowed from using artillery and gas, both of which are ground combat weapons they actually possessed and both of which would be useful in this scenario. I know everyone really wants me to also disallow them from preparing defenses, guarding the back door better, fighting competently, and Zeus knows what else (because maybe the Emperor told them something... that we never heard about... or saw in the movie... maybe) but I've yet to see a good reason why I should.

If this strikes you as screamingly unfair, then piss the fuck off. When I decided to switch sides for the hell of it and argue for the Rebels, I was almost onto something before being tripped up by some screamingly idiotic twenty-year old RPG stats. After that I was sort of toying with the idea of the Rebels using a smokescreen for cover.

But the fact is, I've received almost zero meaningful help. All I've heard is a bunch of bitching about how unfair it is that the Rebels can't remove the cannons from their spaceship and use them to shoot everyone, and that the British aren't ordered to stand out in the open and have John Wayne style shootouts against guys with ray guns.

Fuck you, go make your own "Emperor orders WW1 soldiers to stand in the open and be strafed by a spaceship, who wins?" thread.

[DudeGuyMan]

You know those explosives they eventually used to take out the base appeared to pack a hell of a punch, far more than was actually needed. Although I suppose that giant explosion could have been partly due to something in the base itself going up.

I'll bet it wouldn't be impossible to creep up at night and/or under smoke and throw one by hand, if necessary, and blow a giant hole in the outer defenses. Should make a nice gap in any minefield at least.

Maybe get the Ewoks to take out any sentries in the woods without blaster fire ringing out across the night. Then set the E-web up close enough to the base to be relevant, lay down some smoke with the grenade launcher, lob thermal detonators into the minefield, and just fucking go for it, throwing more detonators around while the E-web opens up and the grenade launcher slings cryo-bans.

A bunch of Rebels are still going to get cut down by machine gun fire, but it's not like they weren't expecting to take casualties. And if they can gain control of the yard, it won't matter if they've had to use up a lot of their explosives. A few charges at the bottom of the shield projector will take it out and accomplish their goal. Reducing the entire base to smithereens the way they did in the movie was just overkill.