Boarding actions

A couple of points:

1) PA for combat vs. PA for DC/Engineering:
Engineering PA will be armoured somewhat - 
sufficient to run the risks of penetration an 
engineer might face in ops around damaged 
ship bits. It will be fitted with a standard tool 
mount which has power and control feeds (or 
more than one). It will have probably a 
_greater_ strength boost than conventional PA, 
although a slower reflex enhance. The way it 
would use the strength is a gradual application 
for lifting or jacking, not in HTH or breaching. 
Engineering PA might have a laser torch or 
welder, a plasma cutter, some demo packs, fire 
suppression gear (ugly for an infantry guy they 
get close to), power drills, etc. Plus of course 
some nasty crushing manipulators. I wouldn't 
even give Engineering PA _close_ range. Close 
range is from 10m to 40/60/80/100/120m 
depending on unit quality. Sorry, but a plasma 
torch does not have that range. I'd let their 
weapons work ONLY in CC. And I'd give them 
the +2 die shift (good CC weapons) but no dice 
doubling. D10 armour sounds reasonable. I 
don't supposed they'd have 2d12" movement, 
but I'd want faster than a walking man 
(especially if I'm the casualty clearing guy). 
2d8" would be what I'd give them (8" base, like 
light infantry). 

2) I just saw an episode of Andromeda last 
night (two actually) where they faced "Magog 
Swarmships" - boreing boarding	fighters. 
They'd land, and start hammer drilling their way 
through your hull to inject boarding parties. 
Probably BS, but it looked good. :) 

3) Would you really fight evac'd? (Yes, 
probably, but...). That means that you either 
have to sacrifice your atmosphere (good god, 
but do you carry that much spare LOx 
aboard?) or remove it from the compartments 
with a suction pump/airlock kind of system. ALL 
COMPARTMENTS. This makes the ship design 
significantly more complex I'd say. And it would 
not be the case if you were surprised, certainly. 
I'd have my crew wear vacc suits, but I'm not 
sure if I'd be depressurizing if that cost me one 
atmosphere load for the entire ship! And if you 
do try to suck up all the atmosphere, how long 
do you think that would take? My guess would 
be evacuating fair sized cabins might take 30 
minutes! 

4) In traveller, ships crews used to make 
extensive use of shotguns, snub pistols, and 
lasers. They didn't want large explosions that 
might damage key systems (most of the time), 
so usually explosive projectile chuckers and 
PGMPs and FGMPs were out. They didn't want 
overpenetration in most cases either because 
of the risks of atmosphere leakage. 

5) Also, you have to think that the defending 
crew has control of the ships computers and 
can vary the grav plates, and any system that 
can compensate for X gees of thrust must be 
able to exert X gees in the direction of its 
choice. Imagine flipping floor and roof plates 
back and forth beteen +4G and -4G at about 
0.3 Hz. Something tells me the enemy boarding 
party won't like getting slammed from celing to 
floor (each impact being about the equivalent 
of dropping 800-100 kg a distance of 6-8 
feet). Not to mention any internal anti hijack 
systems (shrapnel charges, pop-down 
weapons, microwave or EM fields - pulse EM 
weapons to kill attacking PA, etc). 

6) Rating sailors. Hmmm, although it is 
tempting to suggest (as a gropo) that all 
sailors get a yellow-3 chit in SG2 terms, it is 
(admittedly) unfair. Only most of them... :) 
Seriously, most sailors would get a green chit in 
boarding combat. But not all. Senior POs and 
anyone who composes the normal boarding 
party (On Canuck ships, there are no Marines, 
so we have a bunch of crew members trained in 
boarding actions with rifles/pistols/carbines and 
led IIRC by the Bosun - who I think has keys to 
the arms locker). These guys should rate blue 
chit quality as they are very well trained for on-
ship combat actions. So even if you have 
Marines, some of your other crew can argue for 
Blue chits. The question is can you get them to 
anything better than improvised weapons.... it 
depends how sudden the boarding action is 
and if anyone could get weapons to them. As 
someone pointed out, who has weapons will 
vary from Navy to Navy and probably with the 
level of alert. 

7) I'd rate a normal Vacc Suit at D6, and a 
combat Vacc Suit (non PA Marine gear) at D8. 

8) Boarding actions: 
In order to board, you'd need to:
1) stop the ship from manouvering
2) stop the ship from shooting

#1 is accomplished by:
Killing the main drive (and presumably jump 
drive) or by having a Bridge Hit core system 
result. 
#2 is accomplished by:
Killing all facing weapons (see point 1 as to why 
this is not all weapons) including (or perhaps 
especially!) PDS, or by said same Bridge Hit 
core system result. 

At that point, it should be a matter of matching 
vector (something computers can do far better 
than human gamers....) and then grapplying 
(magnetic grapples? penetrating grapples? 
tractor beams?) or sending out boarding troop 
carriers (pods, torpedos, fighters, whatever). 

If you have a Bridge Hit, I'd suspect _all_ 
onboard systems are offline, including the grav 
plates (zero G!), the anti-hijack system, etc. So 
you'd only have to deal with crew. But hatches 
might also be a lot harder to open if you aren't 
wearing PA (they may all auto-lock when power 
goes down). If you just knocked out weapons 
and drives, boarding will be a much uglier 
prospect! 

Also, note that once boarded, some locations 
should be designated as points where 1) an 
explosvie charge will disable parts of the anti-
hijack systems and 2) places where your 
computer intrusion guy can interface and 
attempt to suppress the ship's defensive 
programs. These are key points, and always 
defended. They also make for some focus to 
the boarding action. Oh, and don't forget to try 
to get the bridge or engineering, as they may 
be rigging the ship for a big bang. 

Tomb. 
---------------------------------------------
Thomas Barclay
Co-Creator of http://www.stargrunt.ca 
Stargrunt II and Dirtside II game site
"In God We Trust... on Cold Steel We Depend."