ChalkLine's Desiderata

[ChalkLine]

Tank Riding

Tank riding, or "Infantry Tank Desant" is the practice of riding atop a tank into combat rather than merely for transport. While on the surface this might seem stupid it actually has some slight advantages as it allows the tankers to have more eyes and weapons scanning for threats. However tanks draw fire and the practice of "scrubbing" infantry off tanks rapidly becomes standard.

Now, while most people assume this is purely an eastern Bloc practice this is not the case. The USA for instance has not totally disavowed the practice and reading some field manuals shows that there's actually instructions given on things to keep in mind when adopting this practice.
Of course with things like an M1 series MBT the gas turbine makes riding on the engine deck dangerous in the extreme however there are images of US vehicles carrying infantry on the turret and even the front deck (which doesn't seem wise). This must be either an emergency or a doctrinal shift because the M551 manual strictly bans infantry from riding forward of or in close proximity to the smoke/grenade launchers.

How many troops can you get on your ride?
Luckily, there's actually a table for this:

- Heavy tank, 10-12 soldiers
- Medium tank, 8-10 soldiers
- Light tank, 5-6 soldiers
It should be easy to extrapolate from this how many PCs you can get to cling onto a fast moving vehicle as it smashes through urban wreckage and trees that do their best to wipe them off.

[ChalkLine]

BMP-1M, probably the Twilight War standard.

During the 80s we thought the BMP-1 would stay as it is and would be thrown into depots before being issued to third-echelon troops. It seems the Russians, knowing they didn't have the rubles to make the BMP-3 in sufficient numbers, decided to have a hard look at the old war horse.

The big complaint among the many of the BMP-1 was that it was built with another role to the one it now occupies (although that role didn't exist when it was designed). It was only designed to stop shell fragments and rifle calibre rounds, not even having enough armour to defeat the 12.7mm on the sides. This is the vehicle in the rules.

Obviously, this had to change. I could go on about soviet battle concepts, they're quite different to what they led us to believe, but the main thing is that the soviets moved from a "well, we're going to lose men, let's make sure the objective is achieved so it doesn't turn into a slugging match where we'll lose lots of men" theory to a theory where they needed to stop attritional warfare grinding down their troops. This occurred during their Afghan commitment and went fairly unnoticed by the west.

Thus we get the first modernisation; the BMP-1 Afghanka package. This is a survivability package to minimise crew losses. It is a 6mm applique armour package that brings the sides of the vehicle up to a level where it's resistant to 12.7mm armour piercing rounds. They also developed a system where the troops could remove the ATGM from the roof (already upgraded to those used by the latest vehicles) and replace it with a carried Plamya 30mm AGL in a remote mount. If you really want the old 73mm-armed BMP in your game you should be using this one.

However after Chechnya, Afghanistan and watching the west in Iraq the Russians decided that the standard BMP-1 was going to be a rolling coffin in modern combat and embarked on a widespread upgrade to give these vehicles some effective firepower to hold western IFVs at bay.

Here we get the BMP-1M, a very different beast and probably quite a surprise to many people. They turfed out the old turret because they'd come to believe that IFVs were unavoidably going to be involved in urban combat. In its place was put a remote mount, here's the blurb:

"It is fitted with a TKB-799 "Kliver" one-man weapons station armed with a missile pod, a 30 mm 2A72 multipurpose autocannon (it can be used against both ground and air targets) and a 7.62 mm PKTM coaxial machine gun. The missile pod is mounted on the right side of the weapons station and normally holds four 9M133 Kornet (AT-14 Spriggan) or 9M133F "Kornet" ATGMs with a laser jam-resistant fire control system, but these can be removed and replaced by a pod of 9K38 Igla (SA-18 Grouse) surface-to-air missiles. It carries 300 rounds for the main gun, 2000 rounds for the machine gun and 4 ATGMs. It also has a modern computerized fire control system with a two-plane stabilizer and a 1K13-2 telescopic sight with distance measurement/thermal/laser channels and ballistic calculator with external sensors.
Computer simulations proved that the BMP-1M can outperform the American M2/M3 Bradley at firepower efficiency (the tested aspects included ATGM power, the effective range of the ATGM and the autocannon during day and night conditions and launching the ATGM while on the move). In these simulations the BMP-1M won a combat engagement with the M2 Bradley 1.3 times more often."

This beastie was available in 1998 but you can bet your bottom ruble it'd be turning up a lot earlier during the Twilight War.

[ChalkLine]

Do you still have East Germany in your campaign?

I've had reunification but before it was made the East Germans shifted stocks of all their gear to other communist nations. This leaves all sorts of NVA kit turning up in odd places.

This causes problems. Also in my game the Germans created several emergency units using residue NVA stocks for service elsewhere. Sometimes these units end up encountering units using old NVA equipment. However the Germans only use Bundeswehr body armour and webbing.

(I also ditched the "French Stab In The Back" gimmick as it's frankly offensive. Instead there's Warsaw pact troops all over Germany and in France)

[ChalkLine]

My players have just encountered this Twilight 2000 refugee vehicle

Goat Cart
Weight: 34kg (75lb)
Capacity: 227kg (500lb)
Uses one goat as a draught animal. Generally constructed from lightweight steel construction and wheelbarrow wheels. In T2K the operator usually walks alongside the vehicle.

This draught vehicle has surprising cross country mobility and is really only limited by the skill in which the load is secured and the balanced nature of the load itself. It generally moves at human walking speed.

[ChalkLine]

Denmark, a much-forgotten NATO member, actually fielded their version of the M41 Walker Bulldog right into the Twilight 2000 period.

Now, it's been covered in some source-books but the salient feature is that it was updated to mid-nineties grade while still keeping the venerable to impressive derivative of the late Second World War US M1 76mm cannon in its 76mm M32A1 form.

Now, this gun is absolutely perfect for Twilight 2000 and I don't use that lightly. The reason is that it's powerful but not too powerful. While powerful enough to see off anything below an MBT the M32A1 isn't so powerful that your players can tear a swathe right across Poland and Germany. If you come up against a T-62 or above you have to pull your head in and go around or become extremely creative in how you deal with it. This means a GM can give the players the effects of modern tank warfare but also have that moment where they look at the two T-80s nosing around the hill an decide that that direction is not worth investigating.

As the Danish M41, the M41DK, has only about 25mm of very well-sloped armour it can tussle with stuff that mounts KPVs but has to be an ambush predator for anything else. Thus the infantry players still have a role as they screen and protect the gun tank. They go in, clear out the RPG teams and look for mines/IEDs so the M41DK can get into position and then it does its job. This sort of combined arms warfare should be the meat and potatoes of T2K fighting.

For play I recommend one player be the TC and give the rest of the crew positions to NPCs. The TC controls the NPCs through his Leadership skill (or equivalent). Still, the GM should do the NPC's rolls or the TC suddenly gets a whole bunch of characters to play and that makes a power disparity for those players who elected to run a PBI out there in the mud. I recommend also a far larger diversity for crew personalities than the cards and training quality. I'd make entirely new characters and base them on someone. This makes the crews much more memorable and stops them being robots that one player controls.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M41_Walker_Bulldog)

[ChalkLine]

Well, last game the players were sneaking across the rainy, muddy Polish fields when they found one of these lying in the mud.

[ChalkLine]

BRDM-2M

What's not to love? It's a UAZ with (some) armour!

The BRDM-2M was pioneered by the, uh, "BRDM-2M" but not the Russian one but rather the Polish one.

The Poles noted that even though they loved this thing it had serious flaws. They especially didn't like the way you had to enter and exit the vehicle's deck hatches. The vehicle isn't short so it's a big drop to the ground and they wanted a way to get in and out quickly, it is a scout car after all. You need to get out and scout.

So the Poles had a long hard look at it and decided they didn't need the belly-wheels. Out they went and now not only could they put actual doors just aft of the forward wheels but there was room inside for two scouts as well.

The Russians looked at this and thought the Poles had totally missed the point. Until the Polish vehicles worked so well in actual combat. At that point the Russians also looked at ditching the belly-wheels and adding stuff including the doors and passenger positions. However when they switched to newer radios in the 1990s they noticed that there was now room in the turret due to the smaller systems. Rather than lavish stuff on crew comfort, Russian wars are supposed to be unpleasant, they managed to cram in a mount for the AGS-17 slaved to the main armament and now had something a bit like a M1117.

Okay, new stats:
Same speed stats except the vehicle doesn't have the same obstacle crossing ability the old one had which was remarkable. Now it's just "good".

+1 AGS-17, external mount but belt fed from internal stores. I can't tell you how much ammo it carries for this but I do know the other ammunition stowage is unchanged.
+2 passengers.

(While this might not be all that common, I would make it common though, all the Polish ones had the extra passengers during the period)