Should CompNor have a Navy?

[Henrik.Balslev]

[Bren]

[Kemper Boyd]

[Bren]

Oh, I fully agree with you Kemper Boyd. And I've tried to make that clear in how I see COMPNOR. The Emperor intentionally created a system where none of his underlings can ever feel fully safe, secure, or trusted. They are all scheming to undercut, showup, and outmaneuver each other and few Imperial officials trust each other. And BTW, I doubt Stalin trusted the Communist Party or the NKVD either.

[garhkal]

I see compnor more a combination of the hitler youth and the old communist party
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[Bren]

[vanir]

My family escaped Germany after the Russians came, some were Nazis, I knew them well of course and it's always been the resource I draw on as a GM for the Imperials, the stark contrast between military and COMPNOR.

Lucas originally based his conception of the Imperial machine loosely on WW2 Germany, we all know this.

So I use them as per familial insights of Nazi Germany. ISB are Gestapo, which were actually created by Goering and handed over to Himmler some say because Hitler feared Goering's political ambition, shocking temper, diagnosed psychoses and unbridled chemical escapism. According to my grandmother (who knew Galland and several other figures), Goering was who you feared in Germany more than anyone, if he wanted you dead, if you offended him at a party, your whole family just disappeared overnight. Everybody knew that about him.

That's the ISB for you.

(eg. have the ISB founded by Vader but command of it given to Tremayne, sets up a very interesting political dynamic accordant with the loose historical reference...and just like Goering, if Vader wanted to, he can just contact any ISB office and ask them to take care of someone for him, and they'll never question it or mention it unless Palpatine himself asks, even though technically they can only take orders from Tremayne)

The Stormtrooper Corps are technically COMPNOR, just as the Waffen-SS are required to be Nazi Party members as a prerequisite for recruitment (in practise you have to be a member of the allgemeine SS too). They are the SS verfuegunstruppe, formed originally as a paramilitary of loyal bodyguards required to join the Party, later they became front line assault units and with their combat experience realised that half the time the orders they received from SS "golden pheasant" bureacrats were completely ridiculous. They countermanded and contradicted Hitler's own express instructions of how to conduct warfare at Kharkov in 1943, the kind of thing which landed more than one Army Generaloberst in Dachau previously, but for the Waffen, if they managed to pull off the campaign and win the victory (they did) all they got was medals, holidays and upscaling of logistics.
Essentially they're so damn loyal they'll ignore orders and do what they think you meant to say, and Hitler was cool with it but he'd kill an Army officer for taking the same liberty.

That's the Stormtrooper Corps for you.

The Kreigsmarine isn't relevant to the Imperial Navy simply because Germany did not have the relative resources of the Imperial Galactic slice regarding enemies. In this regard the Imperial Navy is most like the USN or Royal Navy and should be handled along those lines.

What you could do with the Imperial Navy is treat it like a space based version of the Panzerkorps. That would be relevant and appropriate.

Imperial I star destroyers are Pz IV gruppen (assault armour, penetrating defensive hardpoints not designed to combat other tanks), where Imperial II star destroyers are Pz V panthers (brilliant MBT). Super star destroyers are of course Tigers, hulking, shepherded nasty surprises that can stall entire armies. At Normandy the entire landing of one beachhead was held up from moving inland by three, yes three tigers on a hill. They cleaned up everything thrown at them for a couple of days until some Typhoons finally took them out with aerial rocket attacks.

So if you were doing that then absoutely COMPNOR gets its own fleet. But here's an interesting thing, the heavy guns are mostly prestige. You see the funny thing about Hitler, his insanity was that he conducted sociopolitical warfare, his whole agenda was to change the game, like the Bolsheviks with their workers councils, Hitler's idea was a bunch of wacko cronies replace anyone qualified to actually run a country and hand out orders to its citizens and organisations. To do that he had to kill anything presenting an ideological challenge, and he had to present his own ideology as ultimate and superior above all others.
So it was very important for the SS to wear neckties and white shirts originally for example as part of the military uniform, and for the Waffen-SS to be given the latest and best tanks and equipment.

But in pragmatic reality what COMPNOR needs in naval terms is a transport/escort fleet with siege and line support from the regular Navy.

But you see Hitler never trusted the military, he sought to replace them. It's why they vied to assassinate him. He wanted Party members in charge of all the guns.

So I'd run it like that.

*shrug*

[vanir]

I momentarily forgot CompForce.

They're easy, Battle of France era SS verfuegenstruppe (waffen). Stormtroopers are Kharkov era Waffen-SS.

The difference? Well obviously equipment, the Waffen started off as light infantry with Stugs. Later they became panzerkorps.

Early on they were inexperienced combatants, mostly camp guards reassigned as shock troops and occupational police. They were nuts, more than one Army general demanded they be removed from the front lines, at France they got a real bad reputation not just for brutality (a complete disregard for military law), but also for suicidal fanaticism of the kind that gets regular Army formations alongside them killed.

But Hitler persisted with them. At the Battle of Moscow the real hardcore assault waffen formations made a niche for themselves as completely incorruptable and totally reliable. They received countless 'commendations from regular Army field commanders early 42, but the secondary occupational waffen were still greatly disliked (they were slaughtering thousands of civilians by this stage and the Army didn't like it much).
Some of the Army commanders who joined in the slaughter were courts martialled and sent back to Berlin, only to be recruited to the SS and placed back in the field as occupational troops at places like Warsaw, so you basically had Army war criminals working directly for the Nazi Party in command of occupational forces whenever there were prisoner riots...

you can guess how that worked out.

[vanir]

Soviet NKVD Kommissars were reassigned as regular Army in 1942, renamed Political Officers. They worked like having a Royal Guardsman or an ISB officer in your ranks, not so much like a formation of troops. Actually they never, ever were assigned in formations, only as individuals.

Even their authority was largely unofficial. A modern contemporary would be having a health inspector visit your restaurant, he doesn't have a rank per se, but acts as an ad hoc representative of existing legislation and greater authorities will definitely listen to him over you.

Technically they are an equivalent military role to the Prussian General Staff (as opposed to military field commanders).

[Bren]

Nice info and ideas Vanir. Thanks for sharing.

Interesting idea on the difference between an ISD-1 and and ISD-2. I've always found the weapons on an ISD-1 made little sense to me (5D turbolasers with 7D hull and 3D shields means one ISD-1 can't really damage another ISD-1 whereas an ISD-2 mounts 7D turbolasers). You at least provided a rationale that made some sense for the weapons mix.

For CompNav, my thought is they want warships so that if an entire Naval vessel mutinies, they would have the ships to stop the mutiny. COMPNOR doesn't trust the Imperial Navy since the Navy is not filled with COMPNOR members. No matter how many troops or transports CompNave has they can't really take out an ISD without a warship of their own.

[Henrik.Balslev]

Personally I would not make a dediacted fleet for CompNor. Instead I would simply use the fact that "CompForce gets preferential treatment from the bureaucracy" basically they will get better healthcare, equipment and ofc. transportation than the army and the regular navy conscripts.

I still see CompNor as the Schutzstaffel of the empire, with CompForce the equivalent of the Waffen-SS. As such they pretty much can get whatever they want, without needing to have their own navy. if they need transportation they simply requisition it and hey presto a naval ship (or however much they need) is redirected for their use.
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It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

[vanir]

I had that exact line of thinking in an Imperial campaign Bren, based around a Royal Guardsmen party that wound up becoming dark side adepts.

So part of the dynamic we got into was the discourse between the career military personnel of the Navy and the fanatical COMPNOR.

Early on we dealt with the potential for mutiny. Individual Star Destroyer captains command tremendous power and yet are extremely subordinate to the whimsy of the Emperor.
To ensure their loyalty I had a bridge security attachment standardised in the bridge section of every Star Destroyer, consisting of one company of veteran Stormtroopers, often secretly under the command of a Royal Guardsman wearing normal Stormtrooper armour, whose job it was to repel a boarding attack on the command section (there is a private shuttle bay on the bridge decks), but their secondary job was to kill the Captain of the Star Destroyer if he failed to follow the orders of the Emperor, and decided to turn pirate in a Star Destroyer.

Not much can be done about an entire Star Destroyer crew going rogue however. There are too many independent command centres all over the vessel, capable of locking out the bridge and running the entire ships systems remotely (another standard feature which evolved out of our campaigning).
But you can certainly stop bridge command personnel from mutiny with a handful of elite troops.

But you are right, we used the Imp II SD as the standard COMPNOR warship and Imp I as the Navy ship. Later though, around Endor era the Navy got Imp II as well (but Dark Empire era warships were on the horizon for COMPNOR).

Had Luke Skywalker roll up in a Sovereign class SSD once to bring that PC party under control. They had formed an independent Imp faction by then, even defeated Thrawn's fleet and took half his ships.
The Sovereign scared them but.

[garhkal]

One of the games i enjoyed at my first convention, had us rebels storming a 'skeleton crewed' isd whos' bridge crew were wanting to defect, but the engineering crew were loyalists. We had to take engineering and the back up bridge out of the equation..
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[vanir]

Yeah it seemed logical that several command hubs within a vessel like a Star Destroyer are capable of operating all its systems independently, or by rerouting redundant systems (such as Engineering to form an emergency Bridge).

I mean they're so large and the layout brings a space station to mind. In traditional scifi vessels that big and well fitted represent a space station (like say, the Cylon Baseship, both a battleship and a space station in one), so boarding one as a foreigner is like trying to take over an enemy space station. We played it like that, the hangar area is more like a starport, there are half a dozen other small shuttle hangars but the main one we considered appointed as per a stellar class starport, including limited manufacturing facilities just like a space station.

It was really fun running around inside star destroyers

[mdlake]

I've thought a lot about this. It's an intriguing question but I'm also conscious that I was never in the military and anything I have to say is just armchair admiralty. Still... Lucas clearly took his cues from historical military forces, and especially Nazi Germany for the Imperials, so two historical truisms seem relevant:

First, that the navy has historically required more technical skill than the army, though that gap is shrinking fast. Second, that naval fighting units are more expensive than comparable army units, often much more expensive. Combine these truisms with the consensus that COMPNOR is roughly analogous to the SA: ferocious and fanatically loyal but indifferently skilled. Add the way that personal ferocity is less important in ship-to-ship combat than in man-to-man combat, and you're wasting the best feature of COMPNOR troops in the navy. Napoleon got a lot of mileage out of his mob-like columns; at sea, his underskilled mob was a failure. It seems CompNav misuses COMPNOR troops and begs for an expensive naval disaster. A bad investment.

...But only if you presume the Emperor wants the most efficient navy he can get. Political agenda might well create a CompNav just as they created a CompForce. Hitler hobbled both his government and his military by creating parallel, competing departments and dispensed resources according to which better curried his personal favor, not which functioned more effectively. Palpatine probably does, too. He's no dummy, and probably knows CompNav is a military waste, but might calculate a political gain. The question is how much he values military victory relative to political security. Does he give CompNav second-rate equipment to cut his losses, or give it the best stuff to reward loyalty?

What does this mean in game? An underfunded CompNav becomes a relatively easy target, something you can allow your players to single out as the weak point of the enemy line before diving in like Alexander at Gaugamela. A decked-out CompNav, by contrast, becomes a more difficult target but a spectacular propaganda coup if you trash one, a great climax to a campaign. Either kind of CompNav offers an opportunity to defeat a superior force by taking advantage of its aggressive but foolish commander, if your PCs can find the right psychological buttons to push. I think both your Berya ideas work fine.

I'm not sure CompNav adds much substance to adventures; what we saw in the movies suggests the regular navy already has aggressive, loyal, but foolish officers. Setting up a parallel navy might add useful flavor, though. Maybe professional jealousy is the reason an impie officer defects. Maybe a regular officer slips enough intelligence to the rebels to get Berya killed in action, telling himself it's for the good of the Empire. Maybe Berya executes a relevant underling for disloyalty just before the PCs make their move, so their target is having difficulty adjusting to a new commander. Maybe your plausibility-sensitive players need additional reasons why the big-bad can be brought down by a handful of hotshot punks. Competing navies present opportunities for PCs to pose as members of the other branch while infiltrating a base.