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Starship Troopers: By the Book. This webpage has been set up to allow fans of the book an opportunity to play the Starship Troopers game so that it is similar to the type of warfare that is described by Heinlein in the novel. My goal here is to use the framework of the Mongoose game as close as possible to set up games where the troopers act more like they do in the book. I don't want to come up with all kinds of wacky new rules, but will make changes to rules and army lists where absolutely necessary. Those changes will be noted where I have made them. I. The Book I. The Book Starship Troopers first appeared in print in 1959. It was written by Robert A. Heinlein. The book was revolutionary on a couple of different levels. At the height of the Cold War Heinlein was discussing a political system very different from that in the US and more akin to what was going on in the Soviet Union in some ways. The Oligarchy described in the book required citizens to perform military service in order to gain their franchise. While this is all very interesting, this can't be the focus of a table top battle game. What I am more interested in is the other aspect of the future Heinlein discussed: the narrowing of the battlefield. In Heinlein's work a single soldier in his combat suit was capable of destroying immense numbers of enemy. He was able to command a large section of ground and by being able to move quickly and bring a large amount of firepower to bear, was able to respond to threats and employ strategies unheard of in the time the book was written. And yet at the same time, with the introduction of air power and other force multipliers, the battlefield was narrowing in many ways. This mobile type of warfare involved three races, humans, skinnies and bugs. The skinnies will be left alone for now but I'll get to them later. I want to focus on the bugs and the humans for now. II. The MI MI stands for mobile infantry. This was the name of the forces deployed by the humans in ground combat. The typical MI trooper wore a combat suit that weighed about 2000 lbs and was armed with at least: A missile launcher, a beam cutter, a hand flamer, a heavy flamer, a small grenade launching device and an antipersonnel weapon. The missile launcher was capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons. The armour was so tough that when Rico moves back during a raid to pick up a fallen comrade he is shocked to see that the skinny weapon burned a hole through the armour. He certainly wasn't a man in football pads over a neo preen suit carrying a bull pupped assault rifle. Did I mention at times individual troopers were spaced over a mile apart and could jump football fields in a single bound with their jump jets. They were also dropped from the atmosphere in a egg-like drop pod. Truly these were the mobile Infantry. III. The Bugs The bugs are a space faring race of arachnids. Far from being just guided by instinct like insects are on our world they are very intelligent creatures guided by a hive mind. While individual bug warriors are not much more than guided bio-machinery, the brain bugs controlling them are capable of directing his drones to build advanced technology including space craft, guns and other types of machinery. We know from the book that they have eight legs and shoot. Rico says that if you burn off 4 legs on one side they will become immobilized but will keep shooting. Their nerve clusters are vulnerable and if damaged them can still keep moving. Presumably if damaged enough they would just die. There are four castes of bugs. The first two, warriors and workers, are identical in appearance. The difference between the two is that the warriors are capable of fighting, while the workers do not fight even when attacked. The second two are seemingly non-combatants also. There is a command caste called the brain bugs. These seem to be nodes of the hive mind or perhaps they are the hive mind itself and each individual brain bug represents a single bug individual. There is no indication of this but there is no real solid evidence that they are not. The brain bugs are small enough to be at least man handled by the MI troopers if not straight up carried by them. And then there are the queens. The queens are described as being as bigger than a horse but immobile. The warriors seemingly kill the queens before they can be captured if things are going against the bugs. The queens are the reproductive element of Arachnid society and are capable of laying thousands of eggs. Some of the eggs are kept in incubation and are hatched as needed. IV. The Figures So what to use to represent the above described forces. Clearly, for now, the Mongoose figures don't cut it. The power armour troops are not even close to what is described in the book and the bugs have neither guns nor eight legs. Bugs are a bigger problem than MI so I'll deal with them later. For the MI there are a number of sources. My favourite so far is Ground Zero Games. They make power armour troops that are pretty close to the game in both 25 and 15mm. I have started with their 15mm figs. The figures have Y-racks for their missiles and weapons on each hand. They look like what I imagine the book power armour troops would look like. I like the FSE armour in 15mm but your mileage may vary.
These are all pictures of various GZG power armoured 15mm figures. The terrain is from JR Miniatures. I will probably do a set of the 25mm figs later. For those I will be adding some conversion pieces like flames from GW's Tau Crisis Suit sprue. There is also em-4, which has power armour troops in their sci-fi range. The figs are pretty well sculpted, the only thing I'm not a huge fan of are the power fists. These don't work so well for me for this but I don't think it is a flaw in the figure. The figure, after all, wasn't designed for Starship Troopers. Copplestone Castings also has a power armour trooper that is very similar (almost identical) to the em-4 one. Another option is Games Workshop. If you got a bunch of their terminators with cyclone missile launchers. They aren't perfect but GW has any number of bits that could be used to convert them, or even just add to them, to make them have more weapons. Now for the bugs. The bugs are probably best represented in 28mm with Games Workshops Tyranids. The termagants, could use more tech looking guns and an extra set of legs but they are probably not far off. They are about the size of a human being in 28mm. The book doesn't mention the bugs size but given that the queens are remarked on as being bigger than a horse you get the impression that the standard bugs are smaller than that. The Mongoose bugs aren't too bad for bugs either, but they don't have guns and they are a little bit big. In 15mm you have a number of options. There are ripper swarms from GW's Tyranid sprues. Not quite correct but close too. I have used the venom sacks from the Tyranids sprues as proxy bugs for right now. My next purchase, and what I will probably use, are the 10mm Sci-fi bugs from Pendraken. I haven't seen these yet but I plan to order some in the next week. I'll post pics once they are finished. V. MI Army Lists The Mongoose book provides us with two options for fielding MI as they are in the book. They are the Marauder suits. First up is the Ape suit. The Ape suit is armed with a trip hammer mortar, a hellseed Y-rack, a Morita Ape Special and a Derringer light rotary cannon. This is a pretty impressive array of weaponry. However it is not quite up to the book. There is no hand flamer, nor a heavy flamer and while the Trip hammer mortar is a pretty impressive weapon it is not capable of launching nuclear weapons as the suits in the book are. So while it is a nice stat line, I don't think the Ape is what we are looking for. Next is the chickenhawk. This model looks a lot less like the book troopers than the Ape, the stats for this suit match up quite well. It's weaponry, if upgraded, matches quite well. It has a heavy flamer, an antipersonnel gun, a missile launcher and a one shot missile pod. This should be a pretty good basis for what the MI in the book is capable of. The only thing we are really lacking is the hand flamer and the beam cutter. At first we won't worry about this, since there are no rules limiting the heavy flamer from being used far away and we may be able to add in some limited tunneling rules later. That gives us a Chickenhawk suit with the upgraded and the upgraded blizzard missile pack for our standard trooper at 250pts. So that settles us on a model to use for the standard MI guy, what about organization. The 8 man squad is a good start. Since the Mongoose game deals with this at a platoon level we will have to translate everything one organization level down, so their platoon becomes our squad. Well, the rule book shows us that a squad of chickenhawk suits starts with 2 guys and can get up to 3 more. I want to keep the squad size small, because that will allow us to play with the rules as they are in the game while simultaneously letting the players move their MI guys pretty far apart. So we'll give them 2 man squads, the stats for Sergeants and Troopers in the game are the same so we'll morph the Sgt. in our TO into just a regular Trooper. For this squad we need a Sergeant and a Corporal. We will use the stats for the NCO and the Lieutenant for these two. The Sergeant who is using the Lieutenant stats will be the only model in the squad with a different stat line and that is only different by his +1 combat bonus. The Sergeant and the corporal will also be independent so they won't have to remain in command with anyone giving our formation that much more flexibility. So we have our squad, which in Mongoose game terms is a platoon, made up of 3 suit units of 2 each, a corporal (NCO) and a Sergeant (Lt.) The astute reader will realize that we have deviated slightly from the rules here in that you are only permitted one Marauder suit per officer which would force us to take another corporal. We aren't going to do that yet, if this is a deviation it is one we can live with for now. One squad of MI: 1 Sergeant, 275 pts. For a total of 2065 pts for a basic complete squad. Obviously this is paper strength and could be diminished as desired. If you want to add more MI, you can add a second squad or even field a whole platoon. The platoon would consists of 3 squads, as detailed above, as well as a Platoon Sergeant and a Lieutenant, along with a Platoon Sergeant. These I would base on the Lieutenant model stats but would give them 100 and 50 pts, respectively of heroic traits. This should really make these models stand out in a lot of ways without making them too powerful individually.
VI. Bug Army Lists This is a lot simpler. The bugs in the book are described as having warriors, workers, brain bugs and queens. The warriors shoot, the workers can't attack, the brain bugs are fragile and the queens are immobile. The warrior bugs need to be able to shoot and are probably not as good in close combat as your average trooper. The blaster bug fits this description. However it cannot tunnel or climb. For now though we will settle on the blaster bugs. The workers are a different matter. The rule for workers and warriors is unsatisfactory as it abstracts something that doesn't really need to be abstracted. So for our game we will allow workers at 5 pts a model. They look the same as warriors (blaster bugs) but can't attack. They can do everything else though. Brain bugs are brain bugs. Queens are essentially terrain or objective markers so don't really have rules. Check out some of the battles we have done Eventually we will be adding more ideas for terrain, including bunkers, research stations and so forth but for now, here is a link to the bug tunnel table we are working on.
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