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15mm War in the Extreme -- Extra-terrestrial and Polar Combat, Mid 21st Century
In the mid 21st century most of the major planetary combines have colonies on the Moon as well as several of the planets and their moons. These colonies are largely “populated” by robots, the most common being prospector rovers, about the size of a small car. These typically have claw arms to manipulate the ore, and laser cutters. These robots can, and frequently do, make war on each other for control of a mining sector, and will on occasion need to defend themselves against attacks by human special forces or by "warbots" -- either dedicated military robots or prospector bots that have been reconfigured to mount a missile launcher or other heavy weapon.
The rovers typically work in teams of four. In times of conflict or competition for the same sector, one of the four may be militarized -- armed with a missile launcher -- and conduct Overwatch to protect the other three. Occasionally kill teams of four militarized rovers are deployed on search and destroy missions.
Although the extra-terrestrial activities of the combines attract the most interest, the same forces also find themselves at war on occasion in another extreme environment, the Antarctic, as the great combines seek to extract that continent's raw materials.
Human forces are increasingly intervening in these struggles, elite special forces traveling for months or even years to reach their objectives. These conflicts are typically lumped into the "low-intensity" category, due to the small numbers of human combatants involved, and the fact that self-preservation in the incredibly hostile environments in which they take place often trumps efforts to take the conflict to the enemy. Veterans of even one such campaign know how unfair this is -- casualty rates are often extremely high, with medical care being very difficult to administer and even minor wounds sometimes resulting in fatalities, despite advances in combat suit technology. And the war with the Xenophobes on Europa is anything but low-intensity ….
Each prospector rover kit comes with a missile launcher, and two poses of claw arms.
Special Forces in low grav environments often propel themselves at considerable speed using rocket booster packs. They will typically carry spare fuel cells to extend their range. Each set may be purchased without rocket boosters (for instance, for operation in Antarctica or for station defense) or with rocket boosters and space fuel cells. One set for each faction is shown in an image, to demonstrate what the soldiers like with boosters attached.
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The US
The US, its close allies and client states had a head start in space travel and exploration but the other powers quickly gained on them, and so the US developed and deployed its "Marshall" prospector robots throughout the solar system, seeking valuable ores before they could be discovered and extracted by rival powers. Once the ore is located, enormous mining robots are deployed, requiring little if any direct human oversight. But it was just a matter of time before the Marshall Rovers, commonly simply called "veybots" (short for "survey robots") had competition as they crawled across rocky landscapes.
The bots soon came into conflict with those of rival entities, and initially engaged in crude combat -- sometimes little more than wrestling using their manipulator arms and low power lasers (used to identify minerals). Quickly the powers armed some rovers to protect the others, or to hunt and kill rival robots.
These escalations eventually brought human intervention, with the extraterrestrial special forces of the powers sent to intervene. The USA's Marine Corp provided several platoons of these elite special forces, the ETO (Extra-Terrestrial Operations) platoons. These were referred to as the White Knights because of their armoured combat vac suits, which were suitable for operations in space but also for combat in the Antarctic, another frequent zone of low intensity operation.
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The Latin American Union
The Latin American Union’s “astrocol,” short for astromóvil colonial, is the main robotic utility rover of the Union, the answer to the US "Jimbo." Like the US rover it has an arm and laser cutter combo as its main equipment for picking through and testing rock, but it can be militarized as shown here with a missile system. The astrocol was rushed into service to compete with the US rover, and during development and testing the MMRTG power source interfered with the proper functioning of the rover, so it was set off onto a small trailer which solved the problem, but resulted in a larger, somewhat heavier, and slower rover than the veybot.
Like the US and its client states, the LAU has sent elite special forces to fight enemy robots, and enemy special forces as well. These are the Agrupación de Fuerzas de Operaciones Del Espacio, called the AFODE, and they provide formidable foes or dependable alliies to the USMC, depending on the mission.
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Xenophobe Europa Forces ("ZEF")
It was a LAU Ice Mining Project on Europa that first encountered the Xenophobes, implacable aliens whose unwillingness to surrender or take prisoners, and predisposition toward the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield despite their fatal proximity of their own forces, led the great powers of Earth to coin them as such. The Xenophobes have superior technology to that of earth, but this was not especially evident in the equipment of their assault engineers in our solar system -- they typically transport only lighter equipment and weaponry when surveying outside their star system. As a result, their battlefield tech is often strangely familiar to that of the earth powers.
As can be seen in the image, the Xenophobes are about as tall as a human, but more massive and quite a bit stronger, although slightly less agile or quick than a human.
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