15mm scifi ground combat in Battletech universe

Few days ago with my friend from different town we started toying with idea recreating ground infantry battles in Battletech universe. Battletech mainly aims for combat big combat robots called Mechs. But there are lots of fighting where mechs arent involved in every battle and sometimes infantry platoons have to takeout on Mechs by themselves as portraied for example in Battletech novel Price of Glory.

Battletech is set in 31st Century meaning you get all that your fancy gadgets you want in your scifi setting - laser rifles, hover tanks, power armors etc are common so you should be worry about losing something. Also this setting can be played across various system from Tomorrows War, Gruntz, Stargrunt and propably many others.

So skipping everythings blachat lets move on how platoon are organised. Most of the platoons shares similiar structure because they share similiar ancestors - Star League Defense Force.

Each Line Platoon consists of  28-men divided into four 7-men squads. first 3 squads are considered maneover squads carrying standart weaponery usually rifles or smgs and two specialist weapons. 4th squad have issued instead of specialist weapons platoon heavy guns for support infantry movement.
Jump Infantry have similiar organisation but they are lacking heavy support weapons squad mainly because this support weapons are hard to setup or carry for jump troops.

There are four basic types of platoon according to their mobility : Foot, motorised, Mechanised and Jump. The last of them are using man-portable "jump packs" to enhance their mobility, in reality in open terrain this mobility is somewhat comparable to motorised troops in terms of speed but in urban terrain these troops have ability to quickly engage troops in upper levels or move past enemy defenses so durning cityfights their skills and abilities are well demanded.
Motorised troops use buggies, trucks, motorcycles jeeps and similiar softskin vehicles for movement. Mechanised are equipped with IFVs. and Foot is good old PBI foot sloggers.


Each platoon also differ by their role/weapons they are using - Rifle, MG, Laser, Flamer and SRM
(Antitank platoons). the exact number of weapons are different from House to House but most of them have prodominance of slug-throwing weapons like rifles or smgs. with suplementary with squad support weapons.

Battletech universe still offers lot of freedom in terms of chosing infantry and vehicle and mechs for larger battles are accessible via 3D print or old unnofficial model kits. or you cant  leave them completely

For this article i used  old Battletroops book which was infantry combat game from FASA while it proved rather uninteresting back then  (it was released 1989) mainly because mechanics and other factors it contains few interesting pointers like platoon organisation and few scenarios. The only expansion pack this game had is named Clan troops which introduced the battlearmor (Powered-armor) but without any hints of organisation but it can be figured out from scenarios.

Quick note also be taken that book itself is very outdated, it almost 30 years old so few things can be
changed like support weapons- for example if your enemy is deploying armor your mg squad will propably requisition few disposable AT weapons or maybe even change one of their LMG for SMR at least in my opinion

I hope you find this article at least informative
see you soon!