Volunteer Trooper Team

Volunteer Trooper Teams are squads of troopers belonging to the Galactic Anarchists faction of Mahou Galaxy

Galactic Anarchist Volunteer Corps Maverick Squad
A typical Galactic Anarchist Volunteer Corps Maverick Squad Trooper.
Faction	Galactic Anarchists
Type	Trooper
Role	Local Defense and Logistics

Overview

Without a centralized government to enlist with, the independent citizens of the Galactic Anarchist territories must self-organize in order to provide for their own defense against pirates, warlords, natural disasters, and the rough conditions of their own home planets. Even without centralization to manufacture and distribute the tools of warfare that they need to put them toe-to-toe with other factions' soldiers, the individual production methods possessed by many citizens, the patentless nature of their most useful designs, and charitable contributions from better-off people hoping to preserve the way of life they hold dear for themselves and their neighbors combine to provide all that a group needs to become an effective and versatile fighting force.

History

The first volunteer corps in what we would consider Galactic Anarchist space formed shortly after the initial arrival of the Deviling races on Pharadon post-Schism. This initial group of former Divine was assembled in an attempt to locate and resettle lost explorers and colonists in the central Pharadon City before they were wiped out by the coming radiation storms. During the chaos of Stannis's Betrayal, these volunteer recovery corps called upon the veterans in their group to help them organize against the Majority Judges and their cronies, ultimately standing victorious with Lucius and his Minority Judges. By AD10 the volunteers had made a name for themselves by being the only ones brave enough to make sojourns out into the radiation storms using what armor and magic spells they had at their disposal, and they are credited with providing many of the more exotic resources required to bring the Entropic Phase Generator up to functional status. In the years leading up to the declaration of the Pit Lords' new dominion, it was largely Volunteer Corps who stopped power-hungry warlords from seizing control of the population, and when those Pit Lords gave their first edicts, they proclaimed that the Volunteer Corps were Mavericks too independent to submit to any of them. The name has stuck, and through the generations the Volunteer Corps Maveriick Squads have continued to provide protection to the citizens of GAN space, taking the fight wherever it's needed most.

Capabilities

Modern Maverick Squads are taught not only to fight and provide combat support to areas in need of defense, but also other forms of support. Known for their ability to survive and work in the harshest of conditions, these squads bring to the table a variety of abilities both magical and mundane that most commonly include flight, teleportation, diplomacy, power generation, and enhanced senses. This is largely due to the high percentage of Deviling, Mecha, and Demi-Humans in their ranks. Maverick Squads are quick to mobilize and highly adaptable to any situation, but typically work best when working with groups with whom they are familiar, as they are not as military-minded as your average soldier.

Equipment

Sentinel Combat Rifle

While "true" galactic militarizes are typically equipped with combat rifles created in mass fabrication labs to generalized specifications, GAN weapons are produced using a very different philosophy. Through the netcores transported from planet to planet within the galaxy, thousands of different blueprints for weapons are delivered to GAN worlds, and individuals with their own smaller production facilities create cheaper, but no less effective, weapons for their own use or to sell to others. The Sentinel Combat Rifle is the most popular of these weapons, as it combines a low cost and easy maintenance with relatively high performance. It accomplishes this by making a compromise that typical mahoulaser weaponry eschews, utilizing a broad range of magical energies without the complicated filter boards that produce a sharp, precise-looking bolt of energy. This gives the Sentinel, and nearly all GAN weaponry, a trademark crackling bolt of plasmatic energy that looks much more destructive than a normal mahoulaser blast, though in reality the damage it deals is somewhat comparable. It also generates far more waste heat than a mass-produced rifle, and it is due to this that the majority of the Sentinel's build is designed around a cooling system to vent this excess thermal energy. Built with a number of adapters to take nearly any size mahoubattery, the Sentinel can squeeze more shots from the same power source as its contemporaries, with an F4 battery producing anywhere between 800 and 1100 blasts depending on the area's climate and atmospheric composition. However, it also requires a liquid coolant that can become superheated if the gun is fired for a long period. Ingenious GAN engineers have turned this downside into a benefit, and have produced cheap coolant cartridges that can be flushed in an emergency circulation process that then ejects the cartridge like a grenade, exploding in a corrosive shower that melts through light armor. As is standard with GAN weapons, the butt of the gun features a modification port able to accomodate a number of unique modifications, and the most common of these adds a pack of coolant catrridges, allowing the weapon to use its flush feature multiple times.

Contingency Pistol

Another popular design produced in GAN space is the (Untitled_291412), a pistol blueprint that many suspect was uploaded in error but was discovered to be an effective combat weapon that can be produced with a basic personal fabrication machine. Like its larger cousin the Sentinel Combat Rifle, the unnamed contingency pistol is an easy to build, cheap to maintain weapon that relies on extensive cooling, in this case through a closed liquid coolant loop running through a massive heat sink. As it's not designed as a fully automatic weapon, its fire rate is reduced to the point where its operator needn't bother with monitoring coolant levels or determining when and where to flush it. Its ease of use means that it is often the first gun used by a GAN Volunteer as they train, and as a result of this and its often personal production, it is also host to a number of potent modifications. Some Volunteers prefer to use this pistol over their combat rifle due to their familiarity with it, and these guns often show the most customization.

Torrid SMG

Submachine Guns are a peculiar class of weapons throughout the galaxy. Meant to serve as a middle ground between a traditional sidearm and a battle rifle, compromises between the two different design philosophies typically produce a weapon without a distinct purpose. GAN engineers have their own opinions on the matter, and the Torrid SMG is a demonstration of what an SMG can be when it is given a specific purpose. In the Torrid's case, that purpose is to make the area around your squad unsafe to be near. This weapon's mahoulaser blasts are even less refined than those produced by other GAN weapons, and combined with its intense rate of fire, the various elemental effects that swirl around the targets this weapon hits cause issues for anyone or anything trying to close distance to its wielder. Mages have severe headaches. Heavy troopers' gear suddenly seems to increase in weight. Scouts find the terrain soft and difficult to navigate. This effect comes at the cost of a bit of the ease of construction GAN weapons typically enjoy. Rather than a slot for a standard mahoubattery, the frame of this weapon houses a specially crafted combination mahoubattery and heat sink, which clips beneath a rail used to deliver metallic liquid coolant to its internals through unwieldly tubes. The gun is difficult to aim due to these tubes, but aiming is rarely the point, and any hits it scores are considered a lucky bonus. Though these batteries will last through a typical battle, they can become overused in a prolonged firefight and Volunteers who prefer to use this weapon usually prefer to eject the entire battery configuration when it's emptied and replace it, then pick it up later when it's cooled down.

Diabolus Cannon

The production capabilities of any given community in GAN space will vary wildly, and the production of weapons, armor, and vehicles in the area will be affected by those capabilities. The high level of proliferation of personal-scale fabricators explains the large number of pistols and rifles, but there are many citizens whose ability to create extends beyond knowing how to work an extrusion printer. When a community has a smith with a dedicated machining operation, you can expect a different caliber of weapon to show up, and one of the most devastating pieces of open-source weaponry available is the Diabolus Cannon. This weapon builds off the fundamentals of all GAN weaponry, particularly the complete disregard for subtlety, and takes it to its logical extreme. A two-handed behemoth of a gun that could easily be mistaken for a starfighter laser, the Diabolus Cannon requires a strong and steady pair of hands to deliver its payload, and the average Deviling citizen will have a rough time handling this gun. Requiring the use of a backpack power source and a mess of combination conduit/linkage tubing, there's no easy way to stow this mammoth of a gun, and its slow recharge makes it unsuitable for creating suppressive fire, but that's made up for with its raw destructive power. As one of the few mahoulaser weapons to be influenced by gravity, this barely man-portable artillery requires extensive training and the use of a computerized rangefinder, but when utilized properly a squad armed with even a single Diabolus Cannon can be effective against heavy armored squads and vehicles, even those behind cover.

Watchman Sniper Rifle

Long-range rifles are often the most expensive, difficult to maintain, and hard to use weapons to be found on the battlefield, but the Watchman Sniper Rifle's blueprint was designed to subvert that standard. Using the same simple fabrication methods as the Sentinel Combat Rifle, the Watchman requires only an extra expenditure of time honing the optics when compared to other open-source weapons. The weapon that this design philosophy results in is more compact than any other military's sniper rifle and, though more fiddly than the Sentinel or Torrid, is still able to be maintained by nearly any trooper. Of course, all of this comes at the cost of what is often GAN's favorite resource to burn, subtlety. The long, twirling plasmatic bolts produced by this gun and the lack of proper sound suppression means that once this weapon's been fired, everyone is going to know exactly where the shot came from, but that's of little concern to most Volunteer squads, who tend to eschew the sort of tactics that would require a silent weapon, considering them practically a form of fraud. This makes a sniper in GAN a different beast than one from other factions. Rather than a stealthy, silent killer, a GAN sniper simply has a bigger gun that can shoot much farther with higher precision.

Berithian Armor Environmental Gear

GAN Volunteer Troopers are renowned for their survivability in harsh conditions, and this can in part be attributed to their sealed environmental gear, created through a custom template named "Berith_autofit_delta". Whether Berith is the designer of the original armor file or a name chosen for that armor, its inclusion in the filename has led the bodysuit and hermetics fittings to commonly be called Berithian armor, though some refer to it as "Maverick Gear". In this regard, the individual crafting of each set of armor is a boon over mass fabrication, as the plates can be custom-fitted to their user's exact specifications. This makes their suit of armor uniquely able to fill a role as both protective gear and survival gear, able to withstand pressures between 0 and 450 atmospheres without compromising the wearer. The armor is covered by a long coat that helps protect against dust and smaller blows, and atop the shoulders of that coat rest a pair of mounted air purifiers, which feed into ports on the helmet to provide clean air and comfortable temperatures. The helmet appears to be a single piece and can be held that way, but splits open along a seal around the eyes running to the back to assist in fully sealing the wearer and accommodating additional seals for horns and headwings common among Devilings.

Deployment

GAN space is home to a large number of manufacturing facilities, moreso than the rest of the galaxy, but these facilities are almost always on a much smaller scale, run by entrepreneurs or even small private facilities owned by the Volunteers themselves. Thus, their equipment is more often than not furnished and maintained by the individual trooper, though it is not uncommon for business owners to act as patrons to their local Corps. The open-source and modular nature of their gear means that it can be produced quickly and cheaply and even an under-equipped unit can quickly be refitted with everything they need to fight. GAN Volunteer Squads do not submit to any planetary or galactic authority, instead responding to help requests according to their ability and the severity of the situation. The fact that any battle could suddenly be joined by hundreds more squads is often deterrent enough for those wishing to engage in large-scale warfare in GAN space.

Recruitment

Volunteer squads do not enlist or draft in a fashion similar to most other factions, and in no part of GAN space is service compulsary. However, many families and their surrounding communities show an amount of reverence for those who have protected them in the past that they may encourage their children from a young age to pursue a career as a Volunteer Trooper. Much of the local media depicts them as heroes to aspire to, and while falling short of outright propaganda this can be a powerful motivator for GAN citizens entering into adulthood. Many community groups will aid young adults in obtaining both training and equipment, seeing it as an investment in their own security, and a number of retired Volunteers will lend both their gear and their knowledge to a Volunteer in their earlier years. Due to their distinct heraldry, this means that a number of Volunteers have also managed to pass down their reputations, and thanks to this it can be difficult to discern a neophyte wearing the legacy of an elder hero with a grizzled veteran in worn combat gear. Though many Volunteers will pursue other means of earning a living, for those skilled and willing to protect others, being a Volunteer Trooper is often a lifteime career. The most devoted among them will use their non-combat skills to help organize trooper squads and perform teamwork and training drills, acquire intelligence or resources needed for combat operations, or assist in the research and manufacture of new equipment.

Heraldry

In GAN space, heraldry is an important and personal element to nearly every civilian. From their childhood, they are taught the importance of independence and self-expression, and this carries forward into a ceremony practiced in most GAN communities with various local names but often referred to as their first tagging. The nature of GAN's planets and their culture has resulted in the vast majority of housing and workspace being fully modular, composed of common-sized room pieces that can collect water and solar power even when not connected to a house, and these buildings can be expanded in any direction. It is common practice for a newborn's family, their friends, and their community to chip in together and build or purchase that child a small room of their own, and as the child grows, that room is treated as both a personal possession and an integral responsibility. When the child reaches the age of puberty for their race, they are encouraged to participate in this First Tagging ceremoney, wherein they paint the door with colors and patterns of personal signifigance to them, in effect creating their own heraldry. Though these symbols can change over their lifetime, telling a story in its own right, these flags serve as a way of expressing their personalities and marking property as their own. Understandably, Volunteer Trooper gear typically has an individual's chosen colors or patterns incorporated somewhere on its surface, though newer troops often leave their personal colors on the interior of the various armor pieces, choosing to mark the outside with elements of their heraldry as they feel they've obtained specific milestones in their career. Squads will often have their own coordinating colors chosen, though this isn't strictly required in any sense.

Game Stats

Volunteer Trooper Team
Faction	Galactic Anarcists
Squad	4-6
Cost	9
Type	Trooper
Initiative	d8
Movement	10"
Defense	d6
HP	3
MP	1
Spell Slots	None
Command	1
Keywords	Rugged, Adaptive
Abilities	This unit has Armored+2 against Earth, Fire, Wind, or Water spells.

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