[Lord Mondando]

I think the 'its better on Connery/Matherson' stance is an outright fallacy.

A lot of the outfits on both servers (not all, some notable exceptions) have little more organisation than 'GO TAKE THAT' and 'GO HERE' and unless the squad lead happens to be particularly good or the PL has a talent for mircomanaging without being outright smothering. It's usually only a few steps above and organised zerg.

I can only speak for NC, but where we lack in individual outfit numbers, we regularly make up for in Inter-outfit cooperation. Deliberate nights for which are going on at least once a week, and as much as 4 sometimes.

Overall its an example of the success of a decentralised command structure over a centralised one. Its simply easier to run 2 or 3 squads properly as it is 2 platoons. We in DL* also make a point of allowing within our platoons a huge amount of independent command on the part of a SL and increasingly even more decentralised than that.

Thats not to say we are not intent or growing, or indeed that we are now (both yes).

Yet I see no advantages and several disadvantage to suddenlying gaining 40 members every night, running 2 platoons and from that point simply not being able to build unit cohesion, drilling them effectively and raising a properly competent officer core to command them. We've grown at a snails pace for months now (but steadily) as despite all our stupid bullshit (myself especially), growing a pace always a step behind that which we could effectively train and incorporate into our e'spirit d'corps has always been our ethos.

We also don't like the idea that members of the outfit might be complete strangers to each other and this is what a lot of our month long trials are devoted around. Else people who squad with 'team A' don't work as well when they are in 'team b or c'.

Not that we would not one day like to be twice the size, but I fail to see how trying to get twice or even thrice the size as quickly as possible would serve our goals.

This is why (in part) an idea for merging sections of the NCTO together was rejected some months ago. Its 1) unneeded, everything in terms of force mutliplication and organisation can be acheived with inter-outfit cooperation (if we've won an alert underpoped at prime time, its something to do with the NCTO) and 2) largely counterproductive to organised team play.


*And i'm not trying in all seriousness to make ourself in this as some sort of super elite space paratrooper regiment. Far from it, but we are on the 'pretty good' side of competent.