Bounce into Action

This is a provisional title for a series of games set in Jim Wallman's universe for medium to small actions involving infantry, vehicles, air and space assets.

Bounce Into Action: Rules for Company Sized actions

• quick battles (about two hours playing time to a decisive finish)
• it should cope with orbital and air activity in support of the ground action
• it should cope with things too big for 'Starship Soldier' and too small for 'Plan A' in a way broadly consistent with both rulesets
• logistics and morale should have an appropriate impact
• it needs to support a campaign approach as typified in the Full Moon IFU campaign
• capable of playing with multiple players on each side (min two each)

This should be two-down from the main action level. The size of action that we are most likely to play with these rules might have an infantry company of up to 100 supported by up to eight tanks. On the air front there are only likely to be two or three combat capable craft on each side with perhaps one side having some shuttles to conduct a landing from orbit.

There could be orbital reconnaissance or even weapons platforms, the latter being most likely to be of similar capability to artillery. There might be some attempt using shuttles, pacifiers or marines to deal with orbital platforms.

Stuff happening purely in orbit should be abstracted and turned into a quick lookup table with a set of factors and some way of working out how long it will take.

Shuttles should be dealt with as individual air assets when they come into play to land/evacuate ground force elements.

Orbital weapons platforms in support of the ground forces should be treated the same as artillery. Orbital reconaissance should remove any hidden movement, or at least make it more likely that units are acquired and placed on the table top even when there is no direct line of sight to enemy ground forces.

These should be very few in number. Each aircraft or shuttle should be individually represented.

All fighting vehicles¹⁾ should be individually represented.

Infantry should be shown in groups dependent on their primary function and level of equipment. Crew-served weapons should be a single stand each, Special Forces in pairs, regular ground forces in four man fire teams and unarmoured militia with assault rifles in sections of eight. This should allow more flexibility for the better armed (and by extension better trained) troops and also make each stand slightly more comparable in terms of firepower.

All commanders should be individual figures to allow a separation between the commander and the troops under command. Only those commanders at platoon level and above (except for HMA troops where the section commanders will also be included) will be separately represented.

Commanders include key NCOs and other specialists (e.g. medics, demolitions experts etc).

For the purpose of working out all the other times in the rules I am going to use a ten minute time slice. This doesn't mean that all that time will be used by units for moving, firing or doing anything else, it is merely a choreographic abstract to allow all the bits to notionally fit together.

There is a huge gulf between the most and least able.

At the bottom end you can have a people's militia with untrained people armed with hunting rifles and the like through to infantry in Heavy Mobility Armour that can run at 40Km/h, shoot explosive slugs and are almost impervious to assault rifles.

With vehicles there is also a range from civilian wheeled vehicles up to the well armoured hover tank that can largely ignore ground conditions, move at road speeds across country and can shoot accurately on the move.

In the air there is also a wide range of capability, although this is more down to specialist aircraft rather than great technological differences. Largely that is because the air assets all represent controlled military hardware of one kind or another.

Bounce Into Action: Rules for Company Sized actions