YACOPI (Yet Another Comment On Planetary Invasions)

Adrian Hurt [email removed] writes:
>Marc Alexandrovich Volovic [email removed] writes:
>>   The very fact that spending is limited would favour an attacker or
>> defender who balances the quantity of medium priced combat vehicles with
>> a quality of high priced combat vehicles (be these vehicles TL9 grav
>> tanks or TL15 super dreadnoughts). There may be 5 Atlantis battleships
>> (Robert Dean's Prize Baby :-) in a star system, but a mixed force can
>> outmaneuver it and perform a planetary landing.
>
>Perhaps, but there had better be something that can take out those 5 Atlantis
>class battleships, or at least keep all 5 occupied for a long time, or else
>at least one battleship will come and make the invasion very costly.

  Granted, partially. However, it may be possible to take out the Atlantis
sized ships with ramming drones. Does it matter how much damage the Meson-T
can do on it - anything short of "Ship Vaporized" will still propel a drone
at a high speed into the ship. Black globes MAY be the answer, but the
arguments about these were held and held and held. Say about 40 unmanned
20 displacement ton drones would do the trick?

>>   On another hand - a planetary assault may take place WITH THE CONSENT
>> of the defender - if an attacker finds himself faced with an apparently
>> impenetrable defence belt, he may just give up the idea of an assault
>> and accelerate a few medium sized asteroids at the target planet. Thus a
>> situation similar to a battle of Maldon may arise - the defender
>> granting battlespace to the attacker.
>
>The whole assumption in this discussion is that for some reason, the attacker
>can not/does not want to destroy the defender totally in this manner.  (Why
>was such a tactic never used during any of the Frontier Wars, by the way?)
>Otherwise, if the attacker finds himself faced with an unbeatable defence
>at any stage, he can just give up, take off and nuke the planet from orbit.

  I assume the following - Steve Kellog suggested a possible way to
obliterate (or, at the very least, heavily damage) any planet by a single
Type S scout. This is a tactic employable by any starfaring nation. The
only possibility is to have it mutually proscribed, the same going for
planetary bombardment to destruction. Otherwise - better not speak, eh?


>>   If the above comments hold true the deciding stage in an invasion
>> would be how much of the attacking force can the defender destroy before
>> an engagement on the world surface, but without making him desperate
>> enough or hurt enough to bombard and jump outsystem. This may or may not
>> be the fine art of generalship in the future.
>
>Fine art?  Either the attacker wins, or the defender wins.  If the defender
>wins, the attacker brings up the asteroid.  End of defender's story.

  See comment above. Otherwise, granted.

>>   The future battlefield itself depends very much on the concept of
>> anti-gravity. If it is invented (and within Traveller it is assumed so),
>> field artillery and infantry will rapidly decline in importance. Indeed,
>> infantry is losing importance even now, long before even air-cushion
>> combat vehicles have appeared.
>
>Why?  There are reasons why the infantry has to get out of the vehicles
>and fight on foot.  The only way anti-gravity will put an end to fighting
>on foot is if every soldier gets a grav-belt, and anyone with Striker will
>know what that will do to the unit's maintenance costs!

  With the widespread usage of rapid-firing laser guns (say, the Traveller
equivalent of the 10Mw pulse laser) infantry - mounted, dismounted or with
grav-belts - shall become very vulnerable. A phalanx arrangement of ten or
so vehicles, carrying three to five such guns will probably deny the area to
anything but other vehicles.

>>   Infantry shall continue to be used in city assaults, police and
>> security work, shipboard actions and heavily broken areas combat.
>
>The first and last of those come under the heading of "Getting stuck in
>and capturing the real estate".  Assuming you actually want control of the
>planet, you're going to have to take control of the cities, which means
>city assaults.  If the cities have been bombarded, it means broken areas
>combat.

  Granted, see above.

>> Artillery shall probably lose all almost all use except for the most
>> rapid-firing cannon in light anti-vehicle combat.
>
>Certainly it is true that at higher tech levels, you can build vehicles which
>are invulnerable to any practical conventional CPR or mass-driver round.
>So long as the infantry stay in their heavily armoured APC's, or in their
>bunkers, they are safe.  (And so long as someone doesn't let off some nuclear
>rounds.)  Artillery will still be a good way of keeping their heads down, and
>weakening their morale.

  Area denial is granted, space denial is not. If there is precious little
infantry, artillery shall almost disappear.


Marc A. Volovic