I put this spreadsheet together for Zeta Battalion, as it has all elements listed in the Wolf Dragoons source book.
You will see I made several assumptions as to what heavy replacemnt parts would be carried, based on what Mechs are deployed. I would be interested to see what others think of my assumptions, as I have never played a long table top campaign.
This spreadsheet is for an solid week of fighting.
That's good stuff, but it is VERY difficult to determine if it is right or wrong... in same cases it may be far under, in other cases far over. Logistics is the art of war, not combat
To properly predict supply usage we need to do a few things.
First, organize supply (using NATO classes at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classes_of_supply):
- Consumables (the most easily predicted type, food/water/fuel/coolant, Class I/II/III)
- Equipment (the most expensive type, weapons/engines/gyros/heat sinks, Class IV)
- Ammunition (the most used type, Class V)
- Armor/Structure (most often needed, lets say Class IV again, but consumed faster)
Then, we need to determine the amount of time engaged. This determines the Ammunition consumption rate. Fuel isn't much of an issue, but can be in ICE units, and should be included. Longer range weapons go empty before faster ranged ones, except perhaps on faster units with shorter ranged equipment (maybe a range+MP formula for calculating consumption rates). For each weapon, I'd just give a "turns shooting per engagement" for this, with engagements being maybe 12 turns on average.
Then, we need to determine the commitment level. This will determine how much armor/structure damage (and then equipment damage) a unit will take before it withdraws from battle, or is destroyed. This number is simply a percentage of armor/structure that when achieved, the unit runs off.
If we know those 2 values, its pretty easy to determine how much of all 4 types of supply we will require, assuming zero salvage. You could use battleforce to figure out the offensive potential of a unit over 15 turns for the first value to determine how much you affect your enemy, and if your enemy's armor/structure percentage is surpassed you make the unit withdraw (with possible losses). The enemy does the same thing, and in some cases it could mean almost mutual annihilation, or both units take hardly any damage but use up all their AC2 ammo and run off.
If we know the amount of ammo we need per time period, we can figure out how many techs will be needed to install it. If we know how much armor/equipment we are going through, we can again calculate the man-hours required to support it.
I *really* think that tracking the types of engines/gyros/ammo within a campaign system are, well, mind numbing and will rip the fun right out of a game. Instead, if I was doing a campaign, I'd just use tons and assume the S4 shop (logistics) knows the exact types of what are required. Engines take 3 hits, so a 400 engine that is 52.5 tons (XL wouldn't help this number), needs 17.5 tons of "engine parts" to replace each engine hit. However if done on a computer, all the detail is awesome, though I'm betting it'd take a dozen campaigns or more before you end up without too many of one part, and not enough of another, at least as a rule as shortages will always happen a bit.
It'll be awesome when I finish my code to fix stuff and track logistics in the BTU
Funny thing about Wolf's Dragoons, though always called Elite, in 3028 they were actually mostly Veteran (Beta/Zeta and some of the support units were Elite, the rest were only Veteran). Hardly the "best of the inner sphere", though obviously their leaders were (funny how they were clanners, who are hardly leaders, haha)
