(Summary: arctic troops should eat double)
Another nuclear winter is rolling in on my players and soon the winter whites will be part of the dress code. As it's going to be a long hard winter with even more famine and nutrition deficiency illnesses I thought I might make a few notes here about climate and food.
Firstly, modern westerners have different bodies to twilight soldiers. Since the 1970s our body fat content has doubled due to our modern food types. This layer of energy-rich insulating fat will be much missed by the troops who have been primarily eating potatoes and dog meat for over a year. They are lean and stringy rather than buff. You can see the average perfectly fit, healthy and enduring soldiers today that would be categorised as "moon faced" in former wars.
Twilight 2000 has us surviving on terms of kilograms, an annoying metric but useful for kit purposes. The net says one MRE is 1250 calories, well below the daily requirement for soldiers in tropical environments (3300 calories). Notably this number is for 1947 and is more presentative of twilight 2000 conditions. This is considered bare survival level and just above a starvation diet. Realistically twilight 2000 troops should binge occasionally and build up a body reserve, especially before it gets cold.
So, winter rolls in for Poland and the normal temperatures vary where you are. but -5ºc is the common bottom temperature. However we've thrown nukes about with MAD (pun) abandon so we could probably expect temperatures to hit -15ºc regularly. Note that this is a best case Nuclear Autumn. I can see really horrid blizzards rolling in off the Russian Massif going well below that. Don't forget wind chill lowers the temperature from -5ºc to -30ºc and even just slowly moving in a vehicle adds the minimum amount.
So what will the troops be eating?
The gold standard for arctic weather food intake is 4400 calories per day. We could argue that as a game mechanism that we could use double standard twilight 2000 rations of 2500 calories per day but I think this is being fairly lenient. 3750 calories, or triple standard rations, is actually more likely for troops who expect to be outside and active. Twilight 2000 life is hard, grinding work with little sleep and constant stress.
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