The Commander Series Forum

I've been rereading the Hammers Slammers opus, and have been wondering about translating Fire Central into FWC. If you haven't read the books and short stories, Fire Central is basically a command override that lets the battalion commander take control of idle vehicles for local air defense via the tanks' onboard computer network.

It'll take some trying out, but my imagination says that it would be a command issued at the HQ level to the units subordinate, converting their main gun into an AA weapon with the same stats for the remainder of the turn. The command would terminate that HQ's command phase, and would prevent the vehicles so commanded from engaging in any further actions, but would put them into a "defensive posture" to fire as normal AA against any air targets that came into range for the remainder of the turn.

The reason I'm considering this is that I'm kind of mixing milieus for my current project, pitting the St. Vincent Brigade against the Earthlight Division. While the Vinnies have standard missile-based AA weapons in the form of tracked "Silk" SAM batteries at the company level, the Earthlight Division doesn't have any really good AA weapon proxies at the moment, and I'm trying to rationalize that. Something like this might break the system, though, I fear - I'm doing a lot of Commander System tinkering at the moment, with tacnukes and all, maybe this would spoil things. I Guess only play testing would tell.

That sounds cool.

Love the sound of this as I just ordered up a ton of models to make a Hammers Slammers Army.

You could just give all vehicles a secondary AA weapon at (say) 2/30. Be pretty cheap and a nice adjunct.

Or make their general weaponry AA capable, and say if they fire AA then it uses their opportunity action (and thus no ops fire or initiative action next round).

Simple, I think?

That was actually what I first considered, but that put too much AAA weaponry on the field for my tastes. I wanted it to be more like a compromise, not actual AA but kind of a workaround for forces armed with railguns and powerguns, but no actual missiles. Again, I might be breaking the system a little but some play testing will shake it out.

Given the books "if it flies, it dies" right up and so stones including orbital altitude then every tank, calliope and IFV having full AA factors is probably right. Not much fun if you want to use VTOLs and orbital strike craft and so on though, so a compromise of giving a secondary AA weapon with less dice on "company command" tanks might be as easy - say one in three. Or up the HQs AA factors? Or every tank but only one dice, perhaps...