Hooray the Fringe! I missed this game system and Tankreator, even if I never had a chance to play out a battle. As a sandbox, it's a great place to play.
I think I'll port Serednya Slaviya over to the Fringe. Mriya Slaviya, "Dream Slavia" for a name since this is a new place.
The easy way is that they're a breakaway colony of Cherkasy, a second-order location that split away from the Cherkasians around 150 years ago. It's old enough to be established, while still being arguably a young upstart colony among the others - and maybe with life extension technology, there's still a handful of first-generation ex-Cherkasians around to tell stories of the old lands.
A population of 100,000 formed the initial wave of colonists, and they bred themselves well. With an average growth rate of 2% per year, by the sesquicentennial of First Landing the population was 1.95 million. With the collapse of interstellar order and the rise of predatory worlds seeking to establish empires of their own, the Mriya Slaviyan Defense Forces was formed - technologically limited by its lack of heavy industry, they made up for it in manpower and mass conscription.
Land on Mriya Slaviya is centered around a single large, Australian-sized continent and outlying islands. Much of the coastal lands are farmland, providing Mriya Slaviya with a foreign export market above and beyond the planet's own needs. Much of the rest of the world, namely the interior of the major continent, is desert wasteland.
The MSDF is formed around four military districts on the continent, each with one mechanized infantry brigade operating wheeled IFVs and wheeled howitzers. Each district also gets an aviation brigade of mixed attack and transport helicopters. There's no tanks, but there is a healthy ATGM industry on the world that provides defense against an invading force. That accounts for 80,000 personnel in the military, the remaining 20,000 fill out an Air Force primarily focused around transports, allowing rapid redeployment of the land forces to respond to threats. Several squadrons of single-engine multirole aircraft provide air superiority to challenge an attacker with.
The primary AFV is an 8x8 of a modular design like the real-world Boxer IFV, with swappable modules for infantry, heavy mortar, ambulance, command, and engineering vehicles. The IFV is equipped with a cannon based around the French 40mm CTAS while lacking ATGMs of its own; each squad has a dedicated ATGM gunner among the dismounts.
For a reconnaissance vehicle, I'm going to copy over the EBRC Jaguar. It's got the same 40mm CTAS gun, plus a pair of ATGMs in addition to a comprehensive sensor and networking capability. It'll be a 6x6 vehicle on its own platform.
Artillery comes in two flavors, a 122mm wheeled SPG based around the PCL-171 from China, and a HIMARS-style wheeled heavy rocket artillery system. Each brigade is equipped with two batteries of tube artillery and one battery of rocket artillery.
The standard battle rifle for the MSDF is a 7x48mm semiautomatic bullpup design with a 500mm barrel and 25 round magazines and an underbarrel three-shot 25mm grenade launcher. The sidearm is a 6x28mm pistol, chosen for its armor-penetrating capability. A bullpup PDW in the same caliber is given to vehicle and aircraft crew.
Attack helicopters likely use something similar to the Chinese Z-10 - it's built around an air-to-air missile capability in its choice of ordnance, with the ability to carry as many as sixteen missiles with better range and lethality than MANPADS-style carriers in the west. It's also capable of carrying as many as eight AIM-9 Sidewinder clones, with two missiles per hardpoint. The missile hardpoints can also carry AGMs and rocket pods as well,
The multirole fighter is going to be based on the Gripen, because I like the looks of that particular jet quite a bit and it's a decent aircraft. Granted, it's not a stealth plane, but I figure the kinds of infrastructure required for radar and infrared stealth are beyond Mriya Slaviya's capabilities; it's why I'm using the Chinese attack helicopter instead of a FARA option (shame about that program).
It's definitely a more comprehensive military than Serednya Slaviya's, and larger as well - but Mriya Slaviya isn't as poor as its inspirational counterpart. It does have a high percentage of personnel in the military, at 5% of the total population, but that only puts it in line with Singapore with approximately 1/5 the military as active duty folks and the other 4/5 as reserves.
As far as industry goes, it's producing its own wheeled AFVs as specified above. Heavy armor and special materials are too advanced technologically for building things like main battle tanks, but electronics and sensors are easy to build. Drone technology is commonplace, with a mature technology base, so battlefield intelligence is pretty good. ATGMs are built in large numbers as the only viable answer to enemy tanks. Aircraft are imported, probably from various different planets. It's in line with Singapore's industry, having to import tanks and aircraft while maintaining a solid technical support base behind it.
I wonder how AI exists in the Fringe, and whether it gets much use. I could see combat uses for it in drone control and tactical biometrics, spotting enemy soldiers and vehicles from video feeds. There's also the question of AI controlled vehicles, since the technology's got a thousand years to mature before it reaches the current day on the Fringe. I suppose AI controlled weapons would be a thing as well, improving missile detection and tracking software to a fully self-sufficient, if suicidal, intelligent weapon.
This also comes to the question of information warfare and how advanced that is in the Fringe. I suppose it could be handwaved as not being significantly different from what we have now, because countermeasures would follow breakthroughs in IW - the end result is a draw between attacker and defender in such situations, with the occasional successful takedown of a target information network or computer.
I guess it's a question of "what is the Fringe the future of" in regards to Battletech being the future of the 1980s. Are we talking 2000s or 2010s or taking the Fringe from modern day and extrapolating outward from there?
EDIT: Looking over the Suggested Force rules in the core .doc, let's see...
Headquarters Element
HQ Section: 2 IFVs, 1 APC, 2 Mortar Carriers
Supply Section: 2 trucks, 2 jeeps
Maintenance Section: 1 ARV, 1 APC, 1 truck
Primary Combat Force
Mechanized Infantry Platoon: 4 IFVs, 4 Squads
Mechanized Infantry Platoon: 4 IFVs, 4 Squads
Additional Combat Platoon
Mechanized Infantry Platoon: 4 IFVs, 4 Squads
ATGMV Section: 2 AFVs
Combat Support Elements
Recon Platoon: 4 Scouts
Fire Support: 4 Mortar Carriers
Close Air Support: 2 VTOLs
I suppose this makes a standard reinforced company, accounting for the various elements. There's no tanks in the MSDF, so I replaced that line in Primary Combat Force with a second Mechanized Infantry Platoon. A third one rounds out the notional company, while an attached ATGMV section gives the unit a defense against heavy armor.
There's a lot of fire support with six mortars in the company, I went with four scouts to put the EBRC-alogues on the map; the thing looks cool and deserves to be up front searching for enemy targets. Last up, I went with a pair of attack helicopters - I don't have a lot of jet fighters for CAS; their primary role is the air defense mission. They can always be swapped out for a mission requiring a dedicated air strike on a target, but the typical force makeup would have the helos attached.
I suppose the infantry squads would count as medium tech, since they come equipped with body armor and camouflage along with communications equipment at the personal level. What they lose in rifle firepower (being semiautomatic only) they gain in grenades with their 3-shot launcher; I've got to sit down and draw the rifle again. I used to have a good picture of what I had in mind, but it'll let me come up with something new.
