This would be far better if you use the SST game Terran Ascendancy, which fuses elements of the books with the movie. PA is commonplace (and separated by three types and three classes, with 1st class being monsters and 3rd class being almost as common as dirt).
Yeah, those guys would be able to win pretty handily.
In addition, it outright states that Klendathu was a major intelligence fuckup, as the Bugs managed to trick the Federation into thinking that they were just giant bugs...
An intelligence fuckup doesn't explain the entire Starship Trooper army routing from
two casualties. They literally show signs of panic at the first guy to die and then the entire army flees in terror at the second one That's not an intelligence problem, that's an organizational problem.
And as the later movies make clear, their success later on Klendathu was the bugs rolling over for them and doing what they could to
bolster the Federation, so they could get the Brain Bug "captured" and have it start influencing the higher-ups to make them even more vulnerable and steal intelligence.
In universe Klendathu is a total fucking disaster. No denying that. They even go so far as using it as an example of what NOT to do. But even that rable would curbstomp the Empire. Guns, artillery, drop ships and Starships make all the difference
Doubtful. Let's take a look first at "guns."
Here's the flame dragon that killed Hodor behind him. The point of this is to establish how nightmarishly large it is, its individual teeth are larger than Hodor's head and its mouth alone is at least as long as his entire body. Other images bear this out in the same manga chapter. When it swipes its claws through a guy, we see that each individual toe is as large as a human, call it six feet.
A couple of pages earlier we see the archers firing at the dragon. It receives multiple headshots from the archers, then breathes fire on them. No, this isn't about the dragon fighting the Federation, the Empire doesn't have one anything like this mighty, though we do see their dragonriders take out a helicopter, drop bombs on the JSDF, and generally do more impressive feats than the artillery we see in Starship Troopers.
We're just scaling. The dragon's toes are three pixels long, so each pixel is worth two feet. The diagonal breath attack calcs out to 163 pixels long. Each pixel being thus around two feet, it's breathing fire a distance significantly longer than the length of a football field. A page later the survivors start hitting it in the eyes directly. We can thus reasonably conclude that these archers are hitting it in the head, and their top dudes in the eye, from over 320 feet away.
There are probably longer ranged archery shots than this in GATE but I didn't bother looking past chapter 3 once I found this one because the Starship Troopers are already outmatched.
We've already seen the range the Starship Troopers like to shoot at from the video above, twenty feet is a long shot and they just give up and don't bother past 50. Their guns won't help because they're so hilariously outranged their entire army will be dead before they get into position to fire. It's worth noting that not one of them in the vid above uses even iron sights, in fact the guns seem to have some stupid carry handle in the middle that precludes sighting at all, which would help explain why they don't even bother shooting past a range normally associated with throwing knives rather than firearms. We do see
one long shot in the movie by Razac (although it wouldn't be considered long by our military's standards), with a rifle that has a zooming scope not equipped on any other Trooper's gun indicating that shots past point-blank range require specialized equipment normal troopers don't have access to.
As for artillery and air support, they have to secure the gate before they can even
try to send anything like that through, which they'll have trouble managing since their first go-to tactic is human waves of soldiers who break and flee the second they start taking losses. Never mind how they're going to get a starship through the gate. Granted, they can try those things on the army the Empire is sending against
them, but that means the Federation is doing orbital bombardments and blowing up their own cities, which I've been assured they won't do in this very thread since it would draw Rory's attention.
