On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Grimmund <grimmund@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:

> He also seems to be saying that Patrons don't regard mercenaries as
> expendable. The way a Patron would see it, mercenaries (especially
> interstellar mercenaries) are the definition of expendable.

I doubt it. Mercenaries may range in skill level and expense from
expendable levies to very expensive high-tech cadre and specialists,
but given the expected cost of transportation and hiring, nobody's
going to look at them as expendable peasant levies.

I didn't say anything about peasants or human wave attacks. I defined expendable in very specific ways. But basically, the mercenaries are expendable in that [at least in principle] they have no impact beyond what happens on the battlefield. In the Patron's view, they aren't "his" troops, so he doesn't have to worry about them, as long as they fulfill their contract as agreed.

Of course, honorable, skilled mercenaries are historically incredibly rare. Most fought primarily for loot (meaning they were massively more destructive to whatever their Patron wished to achieve than a national force would have been), promptly surrendered (usually to other mercenaries) when the battle got the least bit serious or switched sides when the opponent offered a better deal.

I mean, if all you need is peasant levies, you can probably press gang
them locally, probably at a much lower cost than what it will cost you
to hire, bond, transport, pay, and export mercs.

Not when you include all the incidental costs involved, such as creating an army of skilled veteran survivors which you may challenging to subjugate again once the campaign ends or losing the field labor of said peasants during planting/harvesting time (and thus courting famine).

[Mercenary overhead charges cover]

Transportation off-planet . . .

insurance,
pensions if they're killed,

Each individual Patron pays only a fraction of these cost totals - for the length of the contract and no longer - particularly if the mercenary force owns it's own transport. A native force would impose the full value of these costs upon the Patron indefinitely.

> mercenaries can be expected to have no moral
> qualms about whatever mission they are assigned to
> do (or they wouldn't have become mercenaries in the first place)

Also likely to be incorrect. Imported mercs may not have *political*
qualms about whatever the backwater indigs are fighting over, but they
are still unlikely to engage in blatant violations of the Rules of
War, which still means limited warfare and some levels of restraint.

The "Rules of War" are . . . flexible, which is why they've never been written down.

And mercenaries who display too many inconvenient morals are not likely to sign as many contracts as the more "flexible" sort.

NOTE: I'm not saying that Traveller mercenaries are necessarily savage brutes. They would simply be expected to not care - or at least not behave as if they cared - about collateral damage, unless limiting this were part of a specfic contract's rules of engagement.

> Mercenaries come in, they do the job and then they leave again.

Ideally, yes. Unless it looks like they aren't going to get paid.

Which is why Traveller has mercenary bonds.

Scifi mercenaries which do not enjoy the benefit of such bonds would probably behave much more closely to real historic mercenaries.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester