Dead... and Back is a survival horror Role Playing Game. The Anarchy Zones is its official setting - aliens, reanimates, and the ruins of 2055 America.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Planetary Citizen Military Tech Preview

By far the most captivating piece of Citizen technology is of course their space ships and faster than light drive. However, almost no humans have been aboard one of the ships, and even most of the PCs are at a loss to explain the discontinuity system. However, what has been revealed is that the units are known to be unreliable, and thus the ships travel in convoys and are configured to allow for extended slow-boat voyages if necessary. A consequence of this is the massive size of any given vessel - approximately

Vehicles
Contrary to the usual depiction of aliens using only a handful of war machines, 

Most people in the zones recognize the alien "power-armor" - code named "Incubus". Of course, they are more of small piloted robots than strength enhancing exo-suits, but the misnomer has stuck. These are not particularly common overall, but their great utility means they are the most seen.

The PCs operate several varieties of aircraft, which due to the nature of aerodynamics, look surprisingly like human models. However, they tend to use electric-arc jets for most propulsion needs, with liquid fuel rocket boosters standing in for afterburners. Thus under normal power, they tend to have fairly low performance compared to early 21st century fighters - however they are usually equal to the lower performance yet more efficient models introduced in the 40s. Two main variates of combat units are seen:

NATO Designation "Pancake", alien name "Aalledji" (A led gee)
Appearance: blended delta, similar to the 1950s Avro Vulcan
Purpose:  Multi-role fighter bomber
Size: similar to an F-14 Tomcat
Range: Unknown
War load: 2x Internal bays 6x Hard points, 2x Cannon, total tonnage unknown

NATO Designation "Paladin", Alien name "
Appearance: Canard Delta - very similar to a SAAB Gripen

Purpose:  Multi-role fighter bomber
Size: P-38 Lightning
Range: Unknown
War load: 6x Hard points, 1x Cannon, total tonnage unknown

Alien watercraft are occasionally seen, but tend to be small non-ocean going catamarans. It has been noted that they tend to use a few anti-ship missiles, and a laser close in defense system (CIDS) but do not mount large lasers or other cannons. It has been speculated this may arise from a lack of power, or because salt-water degrades the large phase arrays too quickly to make such installations feasible.

A trend of citizens stripping old human military units has been notices. They may be attempting to reverse engineer vehicles more suited for earth based combat, or seeking dissimilar combat training. It is advised that steps be taken to prevent this from happening.

Sidearms
PC technology has allowed for very small yet powerful energy cells, however, the smaller size of a Citizen reduces the size of personal weapon considerably. Hence their most common small arms are projectile based, but not necessarily conventional. Rather than cased nitrocellulose rounds, the projectiles are tiny spin-stabilized rockets, like a mature version of the 1960s "Gyrojet" weapons. Unlike the human weapons, these feature a small propellant charge in a concavity before the main rockets for initial acceleration, eliminating the dead-zones in velocity. The use of large caliber (15-22mm) rounds with at least some explosive in the warhead also compensates.

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