IAVRs

John the soft-spoken sayeth:

Depends on doctrine.  I mean think about it.  In 2183,
the radio, binoculars, and night vision are all built
into the helmet and weigh a few ounces each.  

[Tomb] This is likely correct.

Advanced weapons (gauss especially) would probably be
less likely to need spare barrels.

[Tomb] This is likely incorrect, or a bit of a red herring at best. 
I'm thinking that a weapon that fires projectiles _much_ faster than
conventional rounds (in order to inflict good damage using the old
KE=0.5MV^2 philosophy)would probably have barrel wear issues, heating
issues, and if nothing else, battery issues (it takes a lot of EMF
to sprint even a ferrous sliver up to "ludicrous speed"). Also, with
more advanced built in systems for sighting, for gyrostabilization, etc,
you may need other spares not currently required. 

Ammo weight is lower than present due to use of either
caseless ammo, binary propellants, or gauss darts.

[Tomb] Ammo weight is going down. Agreed. The amount of ammo an 
infantryman is carrying is going up at exactly the same rate. 
The amount of weight carried into combat by modern infantry wouldn't
be all that unfamiliar to one of your favorite Byzantines. The 
limitation here is human capability. Yes, an individual round is
smaller. But now I fire them in bursts of 10 at a time. And now
I carry enough rounds I can have a _real_ shootout. But the weight
I as an end user carry ends up about the same. 

Grenade launchers are built into the weapons of many
nation's standard riflemen.

[Tomb] This is true. Note this only gives you a +1 FP which suggests
that the grenades of the time are not terribly effective relative to
the armour (they have half the lethality of an AAR with FP2). They 
are small (by the looks of them) and probably have a limited explosion
and fragmentation danger zone and are probably well stopped by modern
ballistic armours. 

And the IAVRs are pretty compact too--I'm thinking of
the ones on the OUDF infantry for instance. You could
more plausibly issue them to practically everyone.

[Tomb] Yep. Just as you could issue every other piece of wazoo kit to
every soldier. And some people have done that. Sometime you want an
interesting example of "Light Infantry" and kit-carrying stupidity,
read the book "Bravo Two Zero" by Andy McNabb. This bunch of gung ho
SAS dudes went into Iraq carrying everything INCLUDING the kitchen 
sink. It didn't help.... 

Now, I don't disagree with you that you would probably issue these
in some frequency to regular troops. Assume the IAVR of 2183 is a
pretty advanced piece of gear in order to defeat the ECM/EW of the
time, and in order to defeat the armour, and in order to operate in
both AT and AP roles. So your jerkwad colonist on Nowhere IV won't
necessarily have 5 of these per squad. And in many nations' forces,
the GMS/P in the squad will reduce the need for the IAVR. In SG2
terms, you've got a weapon that can fire across the board with no
degradation in effect - I'd want more of my troops carrying spare
ammo for this instead of carrying IAVRs, but that's just me. 

The doctrine of specializing your trooops or spreading out your IAVR
assets is ultimately a matter of choice. Whereas John A argues for
specialization in vehicle designs, he argues for spreading your FP
around in infantry formations. I'd suggest that the specialization in
roles within some formations represents better how that force uses
its troops. Spreading the IAVRs around means if I lose 1 soldier, I
only lose a small portion of my FP, but on the contrary, it gaurantees
that for each soldier lost, I lose some of my FP. If I had a more 
specialized force, yes I lose more of my FP by losing one of the key
guys, but if I lose someone else, I don't lose _any_ of my AT FP. 
Really, its a choice. 

And in general, if you can justify firing your rifle an then another
weapon during the turn, I _really_ plan to give all of my soldiers two
rifles.... the intent of the SG2 rules is such that any given figure can
fire one weapon per activation (actually, even THIS correction
requires an errata... the original rules say once per turn or they 
did at one time anyway). The reason that they say a weapon can only 
fire once is because they don't want anyone firing their SAW multiple
times in a round. Well, similarly, I don't think Jon figured on the 
munchkinism of people wanting to fire the rifle, then whip out an IAVR
and fire it, thus getting two attacks plus changing weapons in the
same time period where a normal soldier with a rifle can only get one
effective shot (now, if you grant all riflemen the ability to fire
a second time, I have less problem with the IAVR/rifle double shot). 

You _might_ ripple fire a volley of IAVRs at a tank. You _might_ do 
it when shooting at an infantry formation, though I doubt it. You'd be
stripping yourself of your AT capability. The way to teach people who
do this a lesson is have them attacked by tanks before they can get
resupply. Too often in one-off games, people do "gameresque" things
that the actual people (were the game a real situation) would not do
because they have to fight (potentially) in other places before 
getting resupplied. You don't waste your FP on the battlefield, or 
you might not have it when you need it and that can kill you. If
more games punished this kind of Epimethean thinking, then players
might engage in it a little less often. But since we all seem to 
magically know how many units the enemy has, that he isn't getting
reinforcements, and that we know where his units are on the board,
we can carry out these very Limburger-rich actions....

Nuff said. The arguments over what you can or can't do in the SG2 
rules regarding firing IAVRs in support of infantry attacks has
been had at least once and possibly twice before and all was said
and done. I think if anyone goes to the archive (CUE JERRY HAN) and
looks for IAVR or Firing Support Weapons or something like that, they'll
find the lengthy discussions and rules citations. No sense
re-hashing this whole issue again when it was done so thoroughly a
year or a year and a half ago....