USMC Pioneer squads?

[Yaab]

DaBigBabes A

What are USMC Pioneer squads? They have Anti-armor rating 0 and they are not Engineers.2nd USMC Pioneer Batallion starts in Sand Diego and is described as an engineer unit, yet if I rest all units at San Diego and put the 2nd in Combat mode, no engineers show up in the base screen. Can they dig anything? How do I use them? Disband them in San Francisco?

[JWE]

Pioneers are Shore Party enabled. Pioneer Bns are specialized units configured to conduct Shore Party operations during Amphibious assaults in support of their divisional echelon. They help the rest of a MarDiv to load/unload and control the beach, i.e., load/unload follow-on supply and reinforcements. They are not classical engineers, per se. Their equipment TO&E includes lighters and boats, not bulldozers. Like all Marines, "every man a rifleman", so they will AV and have decent firepower. This is so they can take a sector on the defensive perrimeter. They had a secondary function as engineers, but that (limited) portion of their capabilities is abstracted into a proportional increase in the scale of "combat" and "other" engineers at the regimental level.

It is suficient to make them Shore Party enabled. That was their primary function. They are very valuable in that regard.

[Yaab]

Thanks a lot, JWE! Makes sense.

Wow, the unit has 27 Shore Party value! Do I get bigger Shore Party units later in the war or is this one the biggest?

[JWE]

Well, there's some base force units (that aren't tagged BF) that are equivalent to Cub and Lion advanced Naval bases.

And then there are the USN "Special" Naval Construction Bns. Not really classical Seabees, but rather Seabee stevedores whose job was to conduct Shore Party and port improvement operations on island bases.

And then there's the USMC AmphTrac Bns, which were not tanks, but rather PhibSup transports. Those specific devices (LVT-1s) are also Shore Party enabled, so they work just like LCVPs in assisting load/unload of non "A" ships in harbor, without the need for LCVP TFs. Army AmphTracs, too. Worth a poopload more as Shore Party than as tanks.

Probably a couple more that I can't remember offhand, but the whole idea is to limit the availability of NavSup to a very few units such that only specifically populated bases, with specifically defined units, can operate as Naval bases with repair and rearm capability. Everything else is a "base with boats", or a unit with "handy hands". It's an operational concept kinda thing.

Ciao. John

[Yaab]

Resurrecting this old thread.

If a unit has a 10 Shore Party value, what is the increase to the speed of unloading/loading operations? Each Nav Support gives you +10 points boost to troop/cargo unloading. How much does 1 Shore Party give? Is it 5,10 points?

Second question. Does Shore Party only work during amphibious operations or can I park a unit with Shore Party feature in a port to help with everyday loading/unloading of docked ships ?

Third question. Is there a way to see in the Editor if a device has Shore Party feature enabled?

Thanks.

[tanjman]

Yaab,

From my scenario editor notes taken from a post by JWE.

Shore Party - adds 10 points to the Troop and Cargo load/unload ability, for each Shore Party device present.

The difference between Shore Party and Naval Support is Shore Party only helps with loading/unloading (as far as I can tell it helps both in port and amphibious ops) and not with ship repair and rearming.

The latest version (1.0.0.7) of the editor (came with one of the updates) has a new Device Attribute check box called Shore Party.

[Yaab]

Thank you!

I was using the old Editor, I can see the Shore Party checkbox in Editor 1.0.0.7.

10 points per Shore Party is huge. I use Tracker, but the loading/unloading levels in Tracker for bases which have LCUs with Shore Party feature are the same as for bases without Shore Party.How can you tell if Shore Party really speeds up loading/unloading? Maybe it only helps with loading/unloading undocked TFs at a given base?