The base premise: Military Riot Officer
-
The Military Riot Officer, or MRO, would be a marine role in the Military Police category, in charge of serving as both a minor supporting role for on-ground marine, and as an extension for shipside MP who often have difficulties reaching out to marines outside the FOB for arrests on rare occasions.
-
Similarly to the Military Warden, it would be a very limited role (1 on lowpop, 2 on highpop) and their main duty would be to accompany the marines to the ground on deployment, as they are responding to a distress signal, for crowd control of desperate or angry colonists, and arrests of any hostile factions such as CLF on site. In practice, they would be the one in charge of processing survivors on the ground, identify if they are hostile or not, and in cases of hostile survs, make sure that they are properly cuffed and taken to the ship’s brig.
The Equipment: To protect and baton
-
Armor: M3 Pattern Riot Armor. A modified version of the MP issued M3 armor with some extra platting and heavy kevlar paddings, it’s pretty much a Riot Armor that has a floodlight, giving excellent protection at the cost of a slowed down movement akin to EOD armor. It’s particularly good at reducing incoming bullet damage.
-
Main Hand/Armor storage slot: ARMAT Military Riot Shield. A heavy shield that is designed to magnetic-clip into the M3 Pattern Riot Armor, while it’s held in hand, it provides a flat damage reduction when the user is attacked from the front, a minor damage reduction from the sides, and nothing from the back. Can be wielded with both hands to provide improved damage reduction and pounce reflection from T1 and T2 xenos, nullifying a runner/lurker pounce and even warrior grab when jumped from the front. This will however slow doen the MRO even more, and make them unable to use their offhand.
-
Offhand option 1: ZEUS taserpistol. A heavy version of the crowd control tasers used by the MPs, ZEUS has two firemodes: standard fire, in which it shoots stunning bolts similar to the CL’s energy self-defense gun, and overcharged shot, a heavy bolt that has a reduced effective range (4 tiles sounds good) and puts the gun in a brief cooldown, but can stun/paincrit humanoids on hit and deals moderate burn damage, and will massively slow anything smaller (in size) than a defender for xenos.
-
Offhand option 2: ARMAT Stunmace. The bigger cousin to the stunbaton, the Stunmace is more akin to a overcharged electrified medieval weaponry than a police tool. While the tip is solid electrified heavy alloys, it uses a reduced field dampener to minimize blunt force… which can be turned off. Similar to ZEUS, it also has two modes; safety on, in which it works as a regular stun baton, albeit slightly more effective, and safety off, in which will work as a regular stun baton, and causes an unholy mix of both burn and brute damage. In xenos, when hit by a charged safety off melee, it will cause a slight screen shake and moderate slowdown for the smaller castes, while bigger castes just get the slight screen shake.
Additionally, both the ZEUS and the Stunmace have an internal battery that need to be charged; However the ARMAT military shield is capable of slotting them into its internal system, working both as a holster and a charger. This means that the Military Riot Shield works as a usable shield and as a holster for either the ZEUS or Stunmace. In fact, if the MRO has both shield and offhand on hands, and wields the shield, instead of dropping the offhand ZEUS or Stunmace, it will get holstered into the shield similar to how Magnetic Harnesses work in-game.
- Additionally they carry quick IFF tags that can be applied into Survivors that they deem as non-hostile, to prevent them getting sentry’ed as happens so often when survivors approach the FOB.
Otherwise, the MRO is free to equip regular Military Police equipment.
So what exactly would fit their role?
-
Gameplay-wise, they would serve as a hybrid between Military Police and combat roles; they would be expected at the start of deployment to secure and protect civilians, making sure that they are given IFF and properly escorted to the Dropship to be sent up to the Almayer. In the case of hostile survivors, they would be in charge of actually making sure that they arrive to the brig cuffed, as usually hostile survivors once taken down are: A- Left to rot and perma by the marines. B- Decapped and/or frac’ed on every single limb by bored marines. or C- Sent up uncuffed or unsupervised from where they inevitably start killing shipside personnel.
After their initial job of sorting survivors is done, they would be expected to play as a sort of guardian for the backlining marines; protecting field HMs while they operate, securing secondary FOBs, escorting doctors from FOB to secured surgical beds in hospitals and back, etc.
They could participate in the frontline if they have nothing else to do, but they’d have to be authorized by either aCO or the CMP. -
Combat-wise, the MRO serves as a pinning role for the marines, providing some semblance of area of control around them, especially when dealing with runners and lurkers that target combat ineffective marines such as those injured, resupplying or corpsman doing medical treatments. Their durability means they can often lead pushes as long as they have marines covering them, but also at the same time their sluggishness and lack of pursuit abilities mean that the Xenos will most of the time have the advantage of deciding how and when they want to engage a MRO. Additionally, they are virtually useless against high damage dealing T3s due to most of their kits and shields being useless with bigger Xenos. In other words, the MRO can be seen as the MP SPEC role. It’s absolutely cursed. In lore they are meant to be strong at HvH, and in game they will be strong against lone lesser xenos preying for easy backliner marines, but are easily overrun by the bigger ones.
Does it make sense in-lore?
-
The USS Almayer and the Falling Falcons are responding to a distress signal; they aren’t exactly going down with purely war in mind. For all they know, there could be a riot, maddened colonists, CLF terrorists and other miriads of issues that your regular marine Joe isn’t trained to properly handle further than “bang bang, congratulations you just commited a warcrime”. It would make sense for some numbers of Military Police units to accompany the marines to ground for actual policing if needed.
-
Additionally, the USCM and the Falling Falcons have been involved with several riots and social disturbances in the recent years, from the Arcturian uprising to CLF cells and independance riots by disgruntled colonists. In this regards it would make sense for the USCM to properly deploy Riot Control MPs alongside marines when they expect possible scuffles with the local colonists, such as a Distress Signal, and for some manner of advanced riot control equipment to have been developed by the higher command for use on such situations.
I understand that something of this scale won’t be implemented easily EVEN if it was actually good, but I’m the kind of dumb person who when younger would spend time designing (badly) on their head new league of legend champions for fun. So treat this more as a “what-if” exercise for fun rather than me actually hoping something like this gets added.