StarFleet Marine Corps: Combat Engineering

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Combat Engineering is one of many specialisations a soldier entering the StarFleet Marines Corps may train for a career in. Officers of a combat engineering unit are professionally certified civil or mechanical engineers, while NCO's are generally not.


Vessels with Marine Engineers aboard

Starship Deployment

While on deployment aboard a spaceship a combat engineer will train with the rest of his unit and carry out maintenace work on the units weapons, vehicles and equipment. During an emergency they will support the ship as needed. During a boarding situation this may include repelling the hostiles and guarding key areas of the ship. In a non-boarding situation this may include helping the ships engineering department as needed, perhaps helping to solve engineering issues or helping with the repair crews.

Planetary Deployment

While on planetary deployment a combat engineer performs a variety of construction, demolition and other physical tasks under combat conditions. More generally, the combat engineer's goals involve facilitating movement and support of friendly forces while impeding that of the enemy. They are trained in Geomatics, or surveying and cartography and can map target areas and assist with strategic planning.

Practices and techniques

Combat engineers use practices and techniques of camouflage, reconnaissance, communication methods and enhancement of survival by other troops. Combat engineering also includes construction or demolition of roads, bridges, field fortifications, and obstacles. In these roles, combat engineers use a wide variety of hand and power tools. They are also responsible for construction rigging, the use of explosives, camouflage erection, use of assault vehicles, expedient shuttlepad construction, general construction, route and road reconnaissance, the production and distribution of drinkable water, and erecting communication installations.

All these role activities and technologies are divided into several areas of combat engineering:

Mobility

Improving the ability of one's own force to move around the battlefield. Combat engineers typically support this role through reduction of enemy obstacles which include minefields, ditches, wire obstacles, concrete and metal anti-vehicle barriers and wall and door breaching in urban terrain. Mechanized combat engineer units also have armored vehicles capable of laying short bridges for limited gap-crossing.


  • Clearing terrain obstacles.
  • Overcoming trenches, ditches and other gaps that need to be crossed.
  • Opening routes for armored fighting vehicles
  • Constructing roads and bridges


Countermobility

Building obstacles to prevent the enemy from moving around the battlefield. Destroying bridges, blocking roads, creating airstrips, digging trenches, etc.

When the defender must retreat it's often desirable to destroy anything that may be of use to the enemy, particularly bridges, as their destruction can slow the advance of the attackers. The retreating forces may also leave booby traps for enemy soldiers, though these provide a threat to non-combatant civilians as well.


  • Planting mines.
  • Digging trenches and ditches
  • Demolishing roads and bridges


Explosive material handling

  • The placement of mines to create minefields and their maintenance and removal.
  • Clearing fields of land mines.
  • Demolition.


Assault

  • Opening routes during assault.
  • Demolishing enemy structures (using bulldozers or explosive charges).
  • Use of flamethrowers, plasmathrowers, turrets and other heavy weaponry.


Defense structures

Building structures which enable one's own soldiers to survive on the battlefield. Examples include trenches, bunkers, shelters, and armored vehicle fighting positions. General engineering sustains military forces in the theater through the performance of facility construction and repair, and through acquisition, maintenance, and disposal of real property.

Defensive fortifications are designed to prevent intrusion into the inner works by assault infantry. For minor defensive locations these may only consist of simple walls and ditches. The design principle is to slow down the advance of attackers to where they can be destroyed by defenders from sheltered positions. Most large fortifications are not a single structure but rather a concentric series of fortifications of increasing strength.

  • Building fortifications
  • Building outposts, bunkers and other buildings.
  • Building fences
  • Erecting turrets


Special Ops

When a more subtle approach in needed a combat engineer can breach electronic obstacles via a number of hich tech means. They allow SecOps teams to be able to gain access to locked areas quickly and quietly and can retrieve data from secured computers.


Equipment and vehicles

Combat engineers employ a wide range of transportation vehicles and equipment, and uses weapons unique to the engineers. Combat engineers will usually use the industrial fabricators and transporters of the ship deploying them to beam down the materials and vehicles needed for a job to a primary site, which will then become the main outpost or base from which the deployed marines will then work from.


Equipment

Basic combat engineering tools include safe use of:

  • Driving tools and chopping tools (hammers, mauls, sledges, screwdriver, and bits).
  • Cutting tools and smoothing tools (plasma cutter, chisels, planes, files and rasps, brush-cutting tools, miscellaneous cutting tools).
  • Drilling tools, boring tools, and countersinking tools.
  • Measuring tools, leveling tools and layout tools (rules, tapes, marking tools, levels, plumb bobs, squares).
  • Gripping tools, prying tools and twisting tools (pliers, wrenches, bars).
  • Holding tools, raising tools and grinding tools (vises, clamps, jacks, grinders, and oilstones).
  • Timber handling tools and climbing tools; digging tools (shovels, posthole diggers, picks, and mattocks).
  • Portable power tools and trailer-mounted tools (electric tool trailer and generator, portable power tools).
  • Miscellaneous tools.

Vehicles

  • Armored front loader.
  • Armored all-terrain buggy.
  • Armored mobile generator and tool storage trailers.


Obstacle breaching

For obstacle breaching, including minefields, the combat engineers use a variety of vehicles, explosives and devices including:

  • Minefield breaching devices.
  • Mine rollers.
  • Bomb disposal robots
  • Explosives, mines and bombs.
  • Field-deployable bridges.