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Team Yankee Leopard Week – What About The Nukes?
July 22, 2016 by dignity
Where are the Nukes? Well, we wanted to know too so we talked to Phil Yates about it within the world of Battlefront's Team Yankee?
Follow Team Yankee Leopard Week
The guys talk through the nuclear option and how you could play out Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) or Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) scenarios in your games of Team Yankee.
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Get chatting and share your thoughts in the comments below!
Grab The West Germans & Leopard Here
Get The NBC Rules Pack Here
Have you considered how you'd play a nuclear scenario?
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Take off, nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way
nukes seem a bit much perhaps. unless you were going for a post apocalyptic wasteland. which would be neat
Yes – one option would be post-nuclear where you have the troops fighting. Sculpt little gas masks and chemical/biological suits onto the troopers 🙂
Exterminatus – should never be an option, hard game resets are a bit too drastic for me, they can work in some games like Game of thrones LcG – but unless lke it’s been mentioned that it is used as a variable end game event, I don’t think it fits in this game.
Stuff n things, the Sangria kicked in halfway though the video.
This now makes me think along the lines of Bolt AckAckAckAction, and want to play against radwaste mutants!
In real life terms this would definitely been an option. Apparently the Bush administration commissioned a report into the use of small ‘tactical’ nukes to destroy Saddams Republican Guard. The result was 10-12 of them to destroy them, iirc (?!). So, I think that for a fully fledged Warsaw pact invasion, wmd would definitely have been on the table.
One of the joys of historical war gaming is the ‘what if?’ Scenario. For this kind of thing, if it can be introduced in an insightful and thoughtful manner, I say why not ?
NUUUKES!!!
As far as I know our German stuff was “protected” against EMP-effects. Which means if the EMP was not too close the equipment wouldn’t be harmed. But my Leopard was from an later period so it is possible there were some changes in that.
On the other hand… every little thing using electronics is effected by EMP. So the Soviets would have suffered as well.
But the NBC rules sound good. Might give them a try.
Biological agents such as nerve gas would have definitely been used, so rules for them is actually quite realistic.
Military electronics are hardened/protected to withstand EMP but they can be overwhelmed and this is where I am afraid some of your assumptions have gone out the window. Yes the fancy radios, radars and fire control computers are down. Guess what? There is a high probability that your main electrical harness in every vehicle was FUBARed at the same time so now every vehicle is immobilised and has no power, the engines will not tick over, the NBC sysytem will not function etc etc etc. The main guns are electrically fired so even manual laying of the turret is pointless. So now you are back to an infantry war in an irradiated environment. Good luck with that.
EMP can be achieved without resorting to nukes but on a much smaller scale.
Another nuke consequence: the roads that your reserves/troops will try to move along are blocked by immobilised civilian vehicles as their electronics and electrical systems are far more vulnerable to EMP. So you have tens of thousands of refugess trying to get as far away as possible from likely targets (cities, ports, airfields) clogging the roads, just like they did in WW2.
Sorry for sounding brutal folks but that’s the way it is.
Mostly right but at least the Leopard 1 has a manual device to fire. It is a small manually generator. So you Can fire without electric energy. I think in other tanks are similar devices.
I suppose it will depend on the specifics of the tank. I remember reading abouta Centurion that was nuked as part of a test, and that one started up just fine afterwards.
I was wondering when Warren would make an appearance.
It’s been a good week to watch.
Things got slightly enthusiastic with the EMP rules here considering that this was not a technology fielded separately from tactical nuclear devices as such at the time. Any EMP damage would go hand in hand for NBC effects at this tactical level. Even low yield tactical weapons with enhanced tradition effects, sometimes also referred to as Nuetron bombs, would still pack a considerable explosive punch and also cause as much damage to people as well as equipment through radiation.
The idea of Enhanced Radiation Weapons was initially to cause causalities among troops rather than destroy equipment. A lot of western equipment was enhanced against EMP effects so unless a bomb was detonated on the table the actual impact would be more limited.
But then it is all speculative so each to their own.
I didn’t jump at Team Yankee straight away (being a WW2 enthusiast) but watching this week… Man… I feel I am really missing out. And with the possibilities of Nukes and EMP’s…. *Mind blown!* I think Team Yankee may soon become a project on my painting table in the (hopefully) near future.
Agree completely, these new releases (and some of the coverage and new ideas) have really added an extra dimension to the game.
Hopefully get to actually play a game at some point soon! 🙂
Jumping in to this game!
Bio-chem weapons are horrific enough, but DON’T NUKE PEOPLE.
Ahh. I commented before watching and had the idea that this would be a weapon to play in game. Playing though a wasteland is a different matter though, I like the idea of a cratered area on the edge or corner of the table to give the idea of driving through the aftermath. Maybe even get all the trees and tilt them away and blacken building sides.
what a great banner, need WMD’s!!!! and ladies protesting them 😉 😉
So Battlefront need to produce a group of CND protester minis and they can have rules where they assault any unit at random? 😀
No nukes is good news…
I must say this: I served with the italian army in 1990/1991 and we were massively trained for NBC scenarios because they were so likely to happen in a confrontation with the warsaw pact. Every time there was an exercise, soon everybody was wearing gas masks and occasionally your NBC suit too. Within 5 minutes you were drenched in sweat, short of breath and blinded. I can only imagine what would happen in real combat. Not only your body slows down but your brain too, it’s like fighting underwater fully dressed and holding your breath. Not a funny experience… well maybe if you just watch it!
The idea of any scale of a nuclear war is not a good one but this is battle in a nuclear age so maybe play around a failing generator. Trying to clear the enemy away from a power station to stop a Fukushima style breach turning into a Chernobyl type meltdown. That way there doesn’t need be a fully eradiated battlefield, the area could grow each turn unless you can get a team of engieneers on the objective.
Nukes: douse the table in gasoline and toss a lit match. Nobody gets to play with any of their toys ever again.
Nuclear aftereffects are another story entirely. I wish the download was more specific, though.
Remember folks, “Duck, and cover!”
Wouldn’t the EMP set off before the nuke?
The hardware is emp safe so must military hardware will be unaffected.
Talk over radio would be affected for a short while.
it would affect reinforcements
fob would be alone
Both NBC and EMP rules seem interesting and could be quite fun in a campain/league game. I’m not sure about reducing the armor on tanks though (during the cold war the Australians left a Centurion tank near the epicenter of a nuclear blast and it later drove away under it own power, the crew would have been killed by the shockwave though).
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-atomic-tank-survived-a-nuclear-test-then-went-to-w-1542451635
Also in the Great War (WW1) ruleset chemical weapons are talked about effecting reserves. I’m not sure about having one less of a model, but maybe rolling one fewer reserves dice or rolling for each model in the unit.
In case anyone’s interested here’s some info on the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khyZI3RK2lE
A nuke for every one .
Star Wars baby!
I think you could at least use a mobile ballistic missile like the RT-2PM Topol as an objective.
Id say not for main games but in campaigns perhaps
Another interesting dimension to the game. I like the idea someone put forward of a table with lots of bent trees and blackened ground near a huge crater 🙂
Make room for the mushroom!
Now I’m going Battlefront releases a model and rules for the Object 279.
Hoping, not going
very neat to hear about possible rule sets just for fun, and gotta say I am a sucker for battlefield conditions. Good Stuff.
thank God its a game
@warzan you asked “Why Birmingham?”
Well, at the time when Team Yankee was written, as well asbeing the home of much of Britain’s automobile industry (Rover being a giant at the time) Birmingham was also the second city of the UK – it is where the government would relocate to in event that London was compromised/destroyed. It is debatable whether or not this is still true today because although Birmingham is still the most populous city outside of the London Conurbation, it is arguable that economically and financially Manchester is the second city of the UK. However debates about which city should and should not be the second city of the UK, at the time Team Yankee was written, Birmingham could have been considered a political target and a serious industrial target.
Warren and company did touch on a huge elephant in the room for fighting any wars in this age of warfare. Firstly lets not mistake it for now the lines on the maps were a little different. West Germany was seen as an unknown risk in the event of an eastern block advance. Yes we would have used nuclear weapons and possibly even the likes of blister agents across huge parts of the frontage. Small nuclear devices on large numbers of armour (again at the time we in the west overestimated the Warsaw Pacts capability) the use of what was a small nuclear blast would work instead of meeting numbers in the first 24 hrs of any exchange in Europe in that day and age is what mattered. We in the west it was believed did not have anywhere near the time value to stop the east either. Many exercises were run not with conflict directly in the forefront but with ability to delay the Warsaw pact, a lot of the thought and workings where by the clock. I.E. A pilots life was measured in minutes a soldier depending on their jumping off point in a couple of days and naval exchanges in regards surface fleets of the day again a day or so. Back then no carrier fleet or gathering of surface vessels was not complete without the Russian fishing boat hanging around its no enter safe zone. No we would have without any doubt in my mind have been the opening salvo in any size of nuclear exchange.
Good hunting
Chris G
There is an interesting book on Soviet nuclear strategy. There have been some plans revealed a few years ago that showed which cities would be attacked and how the offensive into western Europe would look like.
We look at Russia now and we see very much an aggressive stance.
However to put a slightly different shade on things.
Imagine your a country with strong ideals and not as rich as the country a few countries away from your borders because you have a buffer zone between them and you, lets call it the Warsaw pact of countries. Everything is as good as it can be in your garden because you have this idea of a wall however literal you want to look at it between you and the naughty capitalists in the west.
Then the next day the west in this case NATO have whilst you were resorting things, being friendly and giving out sweeties to the rest of what was your gang. Find out that they have jumped over to the other side, effectively instead of having that buffer zone between you and what you see as next door neighbours Dobermans and your kids playing in the garden. How would you react. I am not putting this to side with modern day and very militaristic Russia just saying. That sometimes looking with other persons eyes helps see the enemy in a better perspective.
I think part of the issue with Russia today is that their leader is a repressed homosexual who resents the break up of the old Soviet Union and wants to rebuild it.
Push the button!
Just had images of the Chinese girl Soo Ying in Rush Hour where she’s shouting “Push the goddamn button!”
A good collection of interesting thoughts on the subject of NBC in Team Yankee, but think I’ll stick to conventional warfare for my games to be honest.
cool
This sounds fun may have to put it to a WW2 Japan invasion with some changes like a Last Man Standing roll for all infantry stands on a roll of a 1 the stand is removed, but ill have to look at the PDF so I can make changes to work for WW2 and maybe Nam as well.
Brits called NBC suits noddy cause you looked like a right noddy in them. During the Iran Iraq war, the Iraqi army used chemical warfare. The troops were wearing the Russian rubber suits but because they were so hot the slit the under arms to let air in. When they dropped chemical munitions on Iran the wind direction change and the gas was blown back onto the Iraqi army. So because they had been making slits in the suits the casualties were really high.
During the Gulf War I was back in Al Jubai which was the rear echelon collecting supplies, when during the night we got the alarm for biological/chemical attack. I and my two mates spent spent the night sat in full NBC in a trench. It was quite scary because all the alarms were going off. No one wanted to go to the loo all night, because that meant decontamination, a number one isn’t too bad but having to decontam for a number two is a nightmare lol
I served in the artillery and we were trained to operate the kit manually as well as with the electronic AIDS. So if the tech side went down we could still operate the guns, which it did on mthe gun I was serving on during the Gulf War, and we had to complete a 50 round fire mission manually. Our electric fuse setter stopped working and so we had to set all 50 fuses by hand.
A nuke might be a bit ridiculous for this scale.
Just a thought – randomize whether a Nuke or EMP happens at some point during the game?
The players would not know what their “leaders” are planning or doing off board?
So give it a chance that nothing happens, or an EMP happens at some point during the game, or a Nuke happens off board. It adds the unknown element to the fight!
The British Armed Forces suit is known as a “Noddy suit” because some of them had a pointed hood like the hat worn by the fictional character Noddy.
Interlining the A Soviet suit was known as a “Womble” because of its long faced respirator with round visor glasses
Det er et megalækkert spil!
Looking forward to these modern weaponsystems…
Interesting ideas, but I will skip the NBC stuff
Great rules and scenarios!
You could do a mission where you have to draw in as much enemy forces as possibles (point wise) before losing all your troops and then nuke them, of yourse you coudl try to evac most of your troops first, but someone has to stay behind as bait. A little bit like what happend in the World in Conflict mission Last Stand.
First I was afraid of the idea about nukes, as I’m convinced that in real live it wouldn’t have stopped at tactical level but soon evolved into an all-out Armagedon.
But the game effects discussed are intriguently easy to apply so I might give it a try – thanks for the download.
If you nuke ’til they glow, wouldn’t be easier to see them in the dark? j/k
Surely if you introduce nukes then we go to a post apocalyptic game?
I like this about dirty warfare. And you could have some fun with these rules for spies messing with the comm systems some how. Or some other things to spice the games up.
Are you guys coming up with this stuff on the fly? I’m really liking it a lot. I agree that most likely nobody was eager to start using strategic nukes, even though they may have had the opportunity at the time.
Oh, and top notch work on the videos this week. All around highly enjoyable to watch and very informative on both the game and the real life stuff.
It might be cool having a table that looks kinda like snow but is actually all dust from a fallout.
FYI also Nukes prob would have been used to take out fleet assets at the very least as the are prob pretty good at taking out carriers, tankers, supply ships and their escorts.
I concurr with @rickoshea I was also told it was because of the hood looking like noddy’s hat. As good as our stuff was I was always concerned we didn’t do the real time training that the Soviets did. All that human rights crap about not using real nerve agents on your own troops! Or that was what all the stories said about how the Soviets trained for NBC.
Glad to see that the NBC rules shows how much wearing mop gear is unpleasant. Although different penalties for the different levels of mop protection would add more realism. The lower the level of mop gear the lower the
Glad to see that the NBC rules shows how much wearing mop gear is unpleasant. Although different penalties for the different levels of mop protection would add more realism. The lower the level of mop gear the lower the penalties for Nato troops. Sorry about double post had to deal with (expletives deleted) phone scammers and hit submit by mistake.
I saw a documentary on weird weapons and it covered the nuke mines. They were actually attempting to keep them warm with chickens because the triggers would freeze in winter and fail to detonate.
Nukes might be interesting to use once in a while but as said in the video, Russia tactical doctrine fully intended to use Chemical weapons in an attack so those NBC rules could see a lot of use. All of the novels used for inspiration have Russian artillery dropping nerve gas, etc at some point I’m sure.
Am also in the no nuke camp
Me as well.
Nukes and chenical weaponry is nowaday a definitive answer to a conflict as well as nanothecnology like ok low scifi movies! So all must be aware of it
Love it game design on the fly
I do like the idea of the nuclear side of things affecting the army composition, in that the EMP or such perhaps takes out a random percentage of the vehicles or perhaps radiation takes out a lot of the troop numbers. Or perhaps you could have a random turn generated EMP effect that suddenly knocks the fliers out of the sky and you lose ground vehicle control for a bit.
I liked Justin’s scenario rules brainstorming. I really liked Phil’s reigning in Justin’s ideas to keep things a little easier to remember. Phil was literally streamlining Justin’s thoughts. For some reason, the idea of fighting a desperate battle in a nuclear wasteland (accurate or not) seems really interesting.
Just NUKE it out!
In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz when asked about his Nuke the Whales poster: “Gotta nuke somethin’.”
Commenting to win, good luck all.
If he gets a nuke…I get a nuke
One step from a Fallout world!
maybe they will add other types of transports, like SAM movers and NUKE trucks. not to have them active in the game except for and objective for the allies to either capture or destroy them but destroying them has a chance to set off the ordinance and kill the units near them?? OH OH OH then the next mission of a campaign you coud use NBC or EMP rules to show what type of ordinance you accidentally set off? oh im excited
Just saw this on BBC news. Relevant to say the least!
Linky: The BBC’s detailed plans for nuclear war
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36865345
It’s pretty amazing the planning that had to be in place. And this stuff has JUST been released, imagine what is still locked away in archives. I for one feel the whole story isn’t out yet. The conspiracy theories all round…
Great show. Thanks. I wonder if they will make the nbc/SMP environmental rules official in a later book.
The EMP rules will make it very hard for NATO, as they pay a few points for those goodies that have now been removed. Would love to give the NBC rules a spin though.
D6 it
1 = EMP
2 = Chemical/Biological
3 = Nuclear
4 = Nuclear + EMP
5 = All NBC effects. Crew bailed = automatic dead tank.
6 = Tactical nuke ends game before it starts.
This was definitely education.
What a great discussion. I am glad that we were reminded that this is primariky a game of toy soldiers and tanks. In a real shooting war the inner German border would have been radiated to a depth of 25km. That was the first order of business for Honest John and Lance, both under German and American control. Yes, there was the so-called NATO mrasured response but Soviet doctrine called for the use of ALL assets when crossing the frontier. This would atomatically mean tactical nukes. A full nuclear exchange would have been likely within a day.
Back to the game. The whole thing is based on what-ifs.The utilisation of small scale NBC makes for an interesting game dilemma and I for one am grateful that you discussed it. I think, I’d like to play a game with the NBC rules in play.
NBC war would be difficult to act upon as both side would not like the idea of going into those areas, so yes moral would be affected.
But both sides trained for such things, Allied not as much as USSR at the time did.
Very intesting, I’m wondering how plausible those tactical nukes would really be? No way that wouldn’t escalate into strategic nuclear warfare (unless it’s a bluff like Phil suggests).
Interesting discussion. From a purely gaming perspective, I’m not sure that NBC weapons, even small scale tactical would make for that interesting a game. Unless the game centred around one group trying to stop the other group from releasing them.
Loving the coverage BOW! So tempted to invest in this! Any news on new factions? Will we see Brits?
NBC? What has this game come to…….
Great discussion. It`s got me interested in Team Yankee.
I would never introduce the nuke! But if you did i would give the loser of the match the last to launch a last minute chance to destroy the world. Roll a 6 and the hukes are launched! Goodbye!
Totally amazing shows
Great show but let’s keep it a game and not a PTSD event 🙂 Special weapons(nukes) would have seriously changed things. It is hard to believe some of the plans from the Cold War. While an interesting topic of discussion and research not one that I intend to game. Most Nato AFVs of the later part of the era were supposed to have been hardened to with stand EMP. Operating at any MOPP level truly sucks. To put it into perspective to those who don’t understand what a MOPP suit is. It is a complete over suit(2pc) worn over your uniform that consist of an OD materiel that contains activated charcoal. Rubber over boots. A gas mask with rubberized hood to cover your head and neck. Your flack jack, helmet and 782 gear is worn over top of it. You tape all joints. It is very restrictive to your movement and slows your reflexes quite a bit especially with prolonged use.
I listed the above as in the Video Justin was questioning the movement restrictions. I believe movement restrictions are called for. As someone who has had to operate in this stuff for prolonged periods of time I can honestly say your movement will be slowed. Plus troops are always taking extra time to check each other as well to insure against accidental rips and tears. No one likes an enemy they can not see. I would add in addition to the penalties you already discussed. a +1 to go to ground for infantry. As they know the best place for them to get cover is were the invisible enemy lurks as well. This is more to reflect the slower and dulled reactions in MOPP gear as well.