David Drake - The Hammers Slammers Handbook

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The Hammer's Slammers Handbook

Table of Contents

Introduction by David Drake

Extracts From The Hammers Slammers Handbook

The Mercenary Regiments

The Men Behind The Guns

Weapons Of The Late3RD Millennium

Hammers'sSlammers

Extracts From The Hammers Slammers Web Page

Slammers Artillery

Figures

Introduction by David Drake

Miniaturewargaming involves moving figurines of soldiers and vehicles across contoured terrain against

one or more opponents doing the same thing. Rules of varying complexity cover movement and combat.

Figurines (OK, toy soldiers) are molded in many scales, but for ground combat 25-millimeter--that is, a

human figure is roughly an inch high--provides a good balance between detail and awkwardly large

playing surfaces.

Miniaturewargames have a long and honorable history. The Prussian general staff used a variation (sand

table exercises) to teach tactics, and H. G. Wells developed a set of rules. (By the way, Wells' rules

leave a good deal to be desired. Battles played according to them tend to devolve into squads creeping

through alleys behind a field gun.)

InGreat Britain , miniaturewargaming is big business. Most of the gaming-related materials which one

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sees in theUS --Osprey books andWarhammer 40K, for example--are spillovers from British industry.

A Britishwargamer , Dr. JohnLambshead (in his day job he's the man you see to learn about the home life

of the marine nematode) contacted me. From him I learned that the Hammer series has a cult following

inBritain even though the books have never been well distributed there.

With my enthusiastic approval, John and anotherwargamer , JohnTreadaway (a graphics designer who

already had a Hammer's Slammers website), put together a proposal for a Hammer's Slammerswargame

book and associated figurines.Pireme Publications

http://www.miniwargames.com/

bought the proposal; the book itself should be out around Christmas, 2003. Ground Zero Games are

casting the miniatures and metal details for the vehicles, while Old Crow are molding the vehicle hulls and

turrets from resin. (Copies will be available from

http://www.oldcrowmodels.co.uk

shortly.)

The section on this CD includes much of the text from the book. The game rules themselves aren't

included, but there are tables and specifications which wouldn't fit in the printed version. In addition

there's as many of the graphics, both drawings and photos of painted figurines, as were available before

this CD had to be put to bed.

I couldn't be happier with the results. These are the concrete expressions of the men and equipment

which were often much fuzzier before JohnTreadaway and I spent a great deal of time refining them.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

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Extracts FromThe Hammers Slammers Handbook

By JohnLambshead

The Human Galaxy

We are done with Hope andHonour, we are lost to Love and Truth,

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung;

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- Kipling

The theoretical scientific principles behind faster-than-light travel were discovered in the late second

millennium but practical experiments demonstrating theirutility were nor undertaken until the early third

millennium. Star probes were successfully launched by the middle of the millennium and increasingly they

actually made it home with live crews who reported the discovery of many Earth-like planets. This period

was sometimes known as the Second Age of Exploration after the mid-second millennium on Old Earth.

The Second Age of Exploration was followed by the Second Age ofColonisation , as interstellar travel

became cheaper and more reliable.

A new land grab developed amongst the stars. Initially, the richer terrestrial states and corporations

planted most of the colonies, usually for economic purposes, commonly to exploit some key mineral or

biochemical resource. These were mostly well financed but rigidly controlled by the parent body. Poorer

nations bankrupted themselves tocolonise for reasons of political prestige, the same motivation that led

dictators of second millennium starving nations to build battleships, international airports and six lane

motorways through the bush. Included in this second, poverty-stricken wave were political and religious

fanatics who left Earth to build paradise among the stars. Second wavecolonisation was under-capitalised

and the failure rate was enormous. The result was invariably impoverished, class-ridden rural societies

clinging by their fingertips to existence. Finally, there was a thirdcolonisation wave funded by the richer,

more successful colonies themselves. These enterprises were often multicultural adding ethnicity to the

potential for conflict.

It's a commonplace observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Many a

postgraduate thesis has been hung on the assertion that galactic and terrestrialcolonisationdo or do not

resemble each other. If one considers the ancient Spanish and English Empires it is clear that there were

two quite separate types of colonies. The first was where a rich but militarily andorganisationally weaker

civilised state was conquered and looted, as inMexico orIndia . No convenient alien race has yet been

discovered to fill this role.

The second form ofcolonisation was the occupation and expansion into an empty land as largely

happened with the English expansion into North America and the Spanish into South andCentral America

. Such colonies have always been a financially losing proposition. They absorb massive resources from

the host nation and promptly rebel as soon as they become economically profitable. A sole imperial

power might with great effort have hung on to its colonies but in human space there were always rivals for

power and so the scene was set for conflict.

And the galaxy burned.

Extract fromThe First Galactic Empire , Theodore Bose.

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The Mercenary Regiments

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

but we've proved it again and again,

that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld,

you never get rid of the Dane

– Kipling

It's a truism that human beings have never needed much in the way of technology to kill each other but it

is equally true that it never hurts to have better weapons than one's potential opponents provided, and

here is the rub, one knows how to use them. Many of the bush wars that burned across the galaxy

occurred in impoverished,disorganised , politically corrupt, class structured colonies. Where armies

existed, the troops wereundertrained , badly armed anddemotivated . The officer class tended to be, if

anything, even worse, commissions and promotions being generally dependent on political or family

connections.

Few colonies possessed the resources to manufacture anything but the most basic military equipment. Of

course, better equipment could be purchased, often at some economy-breaking percentage of a colony's

GNP, but was then handed to troops who had little idea how to service it, let alone use it in combat.

Peasant communities were littered with immobile and inoperable prestigious military toys. There were a

number of examples of low-tech armies slaughtering nominally superiorly equipped forces; a machete that

cuts has many advantages over a laser rifle that fails to fire because the owner did not know to keep the

mirrors clean. The classic example was on Sargon's World where the Bushmen massacred the beautifully

tailored and equipped army of the Third Prophet before sacking his city. Grass still grows in the streets of

what wasTempletown .

A better solution was to hire professional soldiers who brought and operated their own equipment. A

peasant community could, by putting itself in a debt that their grandchildren would still be paying, hire an

elite regiment for a matter of weeks or months. But at least this way they would have grandchildren,

losing meant impoverishment, cultural annihilation, economic slavery or even genocide.

Mercenaries can be defined as military units that are hired for a limited period of time and come

complete with their own officers and equipment. This rules out situations where foreigners are co-opted

either voluntarily or forcibly into a national army and armed and officered by national citizens. Other than

that it is rather difficult togeneralise about the mercenary regiments. Some were regular military units of a

Terran or Colonial state hired out for political or financial gain. Others, although recruited primarily from a

single state, especially the officer cadre, wereorganisationally and financially independent of that state's

government. At the other extreme were cosmopolitan units that had no connection with any particular

state or world.

The relationship between mercenaries and their employers is always fraught. The hosts tend to regard

their employees as a bunch of unprincipled, armed thugs who are leeching off them in their moment of

greatest need and whose loyalty is suspect. After all someone, possibly the enemy, might come up with a

better employment offer and business is business. It has not been unknown in history for mercenaries to

change sides at a critical moment.

For their part, the mercenaries tend to treat their employers with open contempt. After all, if they had

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any balls they wouldn't need to hire troops. This attitude is not helped by the fact that the only locals most

of the troops are likely to meet are the hustlers and the whores who hang around the army camps.

However, the real problems arise when the fighting ends. It occurs to the civilians that the mercenaries

are now the strongest power in the land and it occurs to the mercenaries that the civilians might think their

pay now an unnecessary expense. The situation can be even worse if the mercenaries' side lose. Any

armistice deal is unlikely to include clemency to foreign mercenaries, let alone back pay.

In the late 3rdMillennium, mercenary warfare was so prevalent that it was commercially viable to set up

a Bonding Authority of merchant banks to oversee mercenary contracts. The Authority grew out of

Felchow &Sohn inBremen , the first merchant bank to see the lucrative opportunities of war as a

business. The system worked by clients depositing a bond of money at the Authority which was released

to the mercenaries provided they satisfied their contract, which was to fight not necessarily to win, or if

the client broke their end of the deal. The Authority itself prepared and enforced the contracts,

mercenary units that reneged were declared outlaw and hunted down and destroyed.

In the short term, the Authority 'civilised' the endless bush fires across the galaxy, sharply reducing the

incidence of atrocities either by or to the mercenaries. In the long term, by making war just another form

of acceptable business, albeit a highly profitable one, the Authority had a devastating effect on galactic

development. The whole commercial system was winding down as resources were diverted from

infrastructure development into weapons and soldiers. In many ways this was more devastating then the

wars themselves as planet after planet spent the bulk of its GNP on servicing military debts.

The Great Crash was entirely predictable.

Extract from War and Finance, a history of merchant banking SarahLoyd

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The MenBehind The Guns

Thenit's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow'syersoul?"

Butit's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,

the drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,

O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

– Kipling

The poverty stricken agricultural societies scattered across human space made fertile recruiting grounds

for the mercenary regiments. They tended to leave with as many troopers as which they arrived from

every planet they fought upon regardless of losses. Regiments generally preferred farm boys as recruits to

the urban slum dwellers of Old Earth or the moreurbanised colonies because they had fewer

psychological problems; oddly enough sociopaths, psychopaths and gangsters tend to make bad soldiers.

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Farming families in the agricultural colonies tended to be large despite the high infant mortality rate;

children were needed to work the farm. However, eventually only one offspring and spouse could inherit

or the farm would have to be split into uneconomically small units. The options for younger sons were

limited. A trooper's monthly pay in one of the elite regiments was higher than a year's salary for an

agriculturallabourer . Troopers also got access to medical care and pensions if they survived. The death

rate among the dirt-poor farmers did not compare particularlyfavourably with soldiers.

Finally, soldiering had a certain romantic wickedness to it. The image of a swooning exotic girl on every

planet just ready to be bowled over by a likely lad in a uniform stuffed with money to spend held a

considerable attraction, at least for the male recruits.

If a recruit was lucky, they ended in an elitemechanised regiment where they fought protected by the

thickest iridiumarmour , the best electronics and the most powerful guns the galaxy had ever seen. They

also received an education, maybe for the first time in their lives. If they were unlucky, they spent their

days as paramilitary policemen in ill fittinguniforms, that sometimes still bore bloodstains from the previous

owner, gunning down rioters in shantytowns.

Officers in the regiments came from a variety of backgrounds. If the unit was mono-ethnic, the officers

might be drawn from the traditional upper classes. Sometimes they were businessmen, protecting their

investment. In the best regiments where results counted more than fashionable accents, officers were

promoted from below.

As long as business was good, and there was never enough productive farmland to go round, the

recruits came whatever their reception.

Extract fromPsychologyOf A Hired Gun , Fin Sao

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WeaponsOf The Late3RD Millennium

Gold is for the mistress – silver for the maid –

copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.

'Good!' said the Baron – sitting in his hall,

'But Iron – Cold Iron – is master of them all.'

–Kipling

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Firepower

The most effective weapons of the late 3rdMillennium werepowerguns . They worked on the principle

that metallic atoms of a fixed linear magnetic orientation could be converted directly into energy by the

application of heat, pressure and intersecting magnetic fields.Powerguns used cartridges of copper-cobalt

aligned in a wafer ofmicroporous polyurethane.Powerguns released a flash of energy and plasma that

struck in straight lines at light speed. Short iridium barrels were used to protect the firer from scatter. The

barrels were cooled with liquid nitrogen but even so had limited life spans.

Powergunscame in all sizes from 1-2 cm infantry weapons to 15-25 cm heavy tank guns. Starships and

planetarydefence systems used similar weapons of up to 100 cm diameter. Quick-firing guns of 1-3 cm

could be manufactured and these were commonly grouped into multi-barrelled, anti-personnel and air

defence weapons,gatlings or calliopes. One tactical quirk is thatpowergun shots released all their energy

on the first thing they hit, even soft cover could be protective to a target, at least for the first shot.

Powerguns were expensive and difficult to manufacture but were the standardTerran military weapon.

Fig. 3.HeuvelmanIA17,2cm Infantry

Powergunwith magazine tube waiting to be loaded (JohnTreadaway )

High intensity lasers wereutilised in much the same way. They had less destructive power thanpowerguns

, were expensive to manufacture, and were more delicate but they had one major advantage for colonial

warfare in that they did not require ammunition.

Kinetic energy weapons of various sizes, from infantry weapons to heavy tank guns, and various levels

of sophistication were still employed. There were too many variants to discuss here but they break down

into simple, cheap, solid propellant ammunition, the more effective wire-fired liquid propellant rounds,

and complex electromagnetic rail or coil guns that firedpenetrators at flathypervelocities . The most

sophisticated versions of the latter fired osmiumfletchettes down squeeze cone-bore barrels made from a

single synthetic diamond crystal. These hypervelocity guns had higher penetration thanpowerguns but less

destructive impact. They were not cheap and could only be manufactured by technically advanced

cultures such as the Gorgon Cluster.

Artillery weapons, which includesguns, rockets and missiles, could fire a wide variety of ordinance over

considerable distances. Loads included anti-personnel cluster rounds (firecrackers), anti-armourrounds

with seeker heads, groundpenetrators (bunker-busters), biochemical warfare rounds, nuclear warheads

(if the enemy was foolish enough not to be protected by nuclear suppresser fields), electronic warfare

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TheHammer'sSlammersHandbookTableofContentsIntroductionbyDavidDrakeExtractsFromTheHammersSlammersHandbookTheMercenaryRegimentsTheMenBehindTheGunsWeaponsOfTheLate3RDMillenniumHammers'sSlammersExtractsFromTheHammersSlammersWebPageSlammersArtilleryFigures IntroductionbyDavidDrake Miniaturewargamingin...

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