Many 'military authorities' are surprised at the continuing role of ground forces in modern military action. After all, many have suggested that the ability of an orbiting vessel to obliterate ground forces of any size virtually at will has rendered the use of the footsoldier an anachronism, useful only for honor guards and shipboard security.
The truth is of course far less clear cut. Military science, more accurately known as the Art of War, is a system of checks and balances that is limited only by sentient ingenuity.
While orbital strikes can offer quick and clean solutions of mass destruction, the simple fact is that even the smallest weapon capable of such attacks costs many times as much as an armoured vehicle, even before the cost of the ship to carry it is considered. Thus, the destruction of a dispersed ground force of equivalent value to even a reatively small military starship can be a time consuming measure and time is the one factor no commander can possibly afford to squander.
Another factor is one of affordable targets. The major powers of three of the recognised sectors (Haven, Cameron and Centauri) have significant legal barriers to bombardment of planetary targets from orbit. While such restrictions have of course been violated many times, the simple fact is that doing so demands a heavy cost diplomatically. As a result, when such attacks are made there are almost always substantial efforts to avoid target population centres which thus requires specialised forces to secure.
The other major barrier to orbital bombardment rendering ground forces obsolete is the profusion of methods that have been developed to counter just such tactics. The accuracy required for effective bombardment, after all, requires a relatively steady firing platform and the luxury of accurate targeting data. Naturally, any defender does his best to deny these factors, with their own fleets and orbital defences and sophisticated electronic counter-measures. Ironically, the most effective orbital strikes are usually those co-ordinated by advance teams on the ground or delivered by stationary vessels. - the latter being near certain suicide against a well prepared defense net.
It is no secret that many worlds maintain energy weapons or even missiles capable of threatening orbital vessels from planet-based emplacements. While large and cumbersome, these weapons usually outmatch those on a mobile vessel and only a foolhardy or extremely well prepared captain will knowingly bring his vessel in range of them. Naturally, ballistic strikes from well outside the range of such defences are possible, but these sacrifice accuracy and are usually predicatable targets for orbital anti-missile platforms. The presence of anti-shipping satellites and extensive minefields, again, far cheaper than most military ships, is also a tremendous threat to any vessel seeking to engage in prolonged operations close to a defended planet even without the presence of a defending fleet.
However, once ships have penetrated the defence grinds, they are relatively safe from defenders as they can sink below the horizon of planetary weapons and few commanders will willingly turn orbital bombardments upon their own planets (even on Nueva Terra, the political consequences are ample deterent). As a result it is entirely possible to deploy a respectable number of ground troops to even a defended planet and this makes ground forces to use thus (and defend against this approach) of vital significance.
Thus, most modern military actiosn follow a relatively predictable course. After inital entry into the system, the invaders carry out an immediate strike for the planet, endeavouring to punch a hole in the defences for troopships to reach the surface. Once troops have been landed, the invading fleet settles into an effort to remove the defending fleet, while remaining in position to offer occasional tactical orbital strikes in support of the ground forces, who will strike out at key command and supply nodes on the surface.
This phase can last anything from hours to cycles, but in the end either the attackers withdraw (perhaps managing to withdraw their ground forces) or secure dominance outside of the orbital regions and can begin serious efforts to clear away the orbital defences. In the latter case, ground forces are crucial to the removal of planetary defence installations. Only after complete orbital superiority has been reached does orbital support exceed occasional strikes.
Of course, those who successfully break this pattern can achieve remarkable results...
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from Technical Issues: The Physics of Modern Warfare
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August 17 2002, 11:32 PM
The final issues to be addressed in orbital bombardment scenarios are accuracy and power - which are, in this context, intimately related topics.
Shipbound weapons are designed to be utilized without regard for environmental factors. When faced with an atmosphere, they almost invariably suffer terribly.
Lasers waste energy on thermal bloom even as they are diffracted and diffused by random air currents. Particle bolts and beams are absorbed and deflected by the local Ionosphere. Missiles, intended to engage at long range and the maximum possible velocities, are unable to dial down and incinerate themselves as they reach thicker air. Massdriver projectiles suffer a similar fate. Plasma weapons fare worse than lasers, but better than anything else as their bolts are simultaneously disrupted by the presence of other matter and subjected to convective and conductive cooling. Given the random nature of atmospheric patterns, these disruptions of effectiveness are not uniform, and produce a like degredation in accuracy.
Planetary mobile siege units such as Humanx Octos, Centauri Bolos, and Taiidani Ogres are capable of matching an orbiting starship, not because of any one-for-one equivalency in armarment or inherent durability (although these frequently exist, at least against light combatants), but rather because they are designed and equipped to operate starship-grade weapons through the interference of the pernicious "Goo".
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There's another thing that helps give seige units one on one parity against their interstellar brethren. Ground troops can make use of cover. Fact is, that if you want to gun down a groundpounder, you have to find him first - more challenging than it might first seem when you take into account the disruption caused by atmosphere, the actual existance of ground cover, and antiship ecm suites designed to exploit the hell out of both of these advantages. Most of the time the heavy ground forces will get in the first shot, too, because unless you have a solid intel presence on the target planet, there's no way to know that they're there. On the other hand, if you're close enough to bombard a planet, than any kid with a telescope, a desktop computer and a local starmap can locate you, identify you, and probably plot a decent approximation of a firing solution on you.
The real difference, though, is that seigecraft are amazingly cheap by comparison. Even with those that go full enviro and take heavier guns, megatanks have serious advantages in price and efficiency. The first, and most obvious, is that they are on the ground. No need for artificial gravity, starship engines, or inertial compensators. Likewise, even if you do choose to have full environmental, it doesn't have to last nearly as long, and it can be built to exploit the existance of an assured air/water medium. For those that use fusion, the fuel banks don't need to have neraly the same degree of endurance, because fresh hydrogen can be easily acquired by cracking seawater. Likewise, for those that choose various forms of fusion cannon (a popular choice for main gun) fresh ammo is only as far away as the nearest body of water. Heck, the very existance of heat sinks makes everything better all by itself.
Most heavy tanks are old.
I'll finish this later.
Fibula
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As I said, most of these things are old. This is due to a few rather interesting factors.
First, there is a profound difference between the tech level neccessary to create an OGRE-class battletank, and the tech level required to maintain one. Creation requires a good level of base tech in heavy weapons, armor, ground propulsion, power, sensors, AI, and electronic warfare. The AI may seem a bit strange, but bear in mind that these things are groundbound - which means that they can be broken into, and the one thing that you absolutely, positively DO NOT WANT is for your pet Bolo to suddenly end up in the hands of the enemy. Better to have him seize your nukes. Thus, most siege tanks are fitted with high-quality AI, with seriously hardwired loyalty protocols and with hefty internal security systems. There are rumors of a few that have been fitted for shellpeople, but as yet no proof has hit the galctic stage. On the other hand, as rumors go, this one isn't all that interesting. Perhaps there just aren't that many people looking.
Function and maintenance, however, assuming that the AI is still functional, requires little more than an a single dexterous biped with a bright and agile mind, a willingness to learn, and an appropriate security clearance. Heavy tanks for the most part contain all of the tools they need, with spares, and often with enough of a machine shop to replace those when broken. At the very least, they have full schematics files, and how to work up from raw materials and a forge (read, semi-functioning powerplant) to the neccessary implements of construction. Putting one of these monstrosities together in the first place is an endeavor within about the same order of magnitude as putting together a small ship of war, but they almost maintain themselves.
Second, there are some tasks that Heavy Ground Weapons are very good at, and some that they do not do at all. They anhillate lesser ground and sea troops. They battle equivalent ground troops. They provide heavy anti-air support, to deal both with dropships and more traditional aircraft. They battle ships in orbit. pretty much any Siege Tank worth its salt can do any of these tasks, but they do tend to be optimized. What they do not do is shoot anything further away than orbit overhead, or move offplanet without mothballing and special heavy transports. They are admirably suited for taking planets in the face of heavy resistance (if you can get themon the ground) and for providing defense for on-planet resources. For any other objective, they are either relegated to a support role or utterly useless.
Now, the Taiidani, Centauri, and Humanx all have interstellar empires, large budgets, fleets, and orbital emplacements. As such, in their native lands, Ogres and Bolos are used as the backbone of assault and occupation forces while Octos (what fiction are *they* from?) usually provide local security for worlds too marginal to support a serious space presence.
On the other hand, that's in their respective empires. Every year, more and more new principalities stepoutonto the galactic stage and try to open up trade. Some of them have valuable stuff to offer. Almost none of them have much in the way of space presence. A great many of them realize a sudden need for seriously increased protection from marauding starships, and a fair number of those fill that need in one simple transaction by buying a megatanks, one or two each, often used.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that there are some ships and strategies that are particularly effective against ground emplacements, mobile or otherwise.
- The Juraiian treeships are quite good at correcting for atmosphere (being, for much of their lives, trees) and the protection of their light hawk wings is far more effective when you can predict the direction from which the attacks will be coming. It is a little risky, though - more than one treeship has been lost when an enemy fighter attacked from above while the ship was bombarding.
- The Silesian gravships similarly enjoy never having to worry about kilt shots, and usually carry pretty heavy banks of lasers and grasers. Likewise, a Silesian that is feeling injured can roll to present its wedge, and thus render itself nearly invulnerable.
- Comet-bombing. If you really don't care about getting the installations on the planet intact, and you're willing to do bad bad things to the climate, ecosystem, ect, you can play "oversized massdriver" with a small comet or series of large asteroids and some appropriate tether. Sure, a fair amount of it will burn off on reentry, but if you start large enough, it'll still have plenty of mass to deal out damage with. Aim it at something that you don't like. If it hits, great. If not, do it again. Regardless, you can stay well out of range of surface guns, and may be able to pull back far enough to avoid the orbital stuff as well (and that stuff doesn't even have an atmosphere to protect it) Remember,in space, the max range for a massdriver is limited only by sight lines and accuracy.
Done, and crashing in the west
Fibula
So how exactly do mechs fit into this one?
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Mecha are mobile, which means that even in restrictive terrain they can usually move enough to throw off accurate targeting (of course, if you don't mind indiscriminate bombardment...) and most small Mecha (e.g. Heavy Gears, BattleMechs) can be deployed cheaply in small numbers. A capital warship commonly costs several billion ComStar-Bills, while the cost of a mech ranges from a few hundred thousand perhaps 20 million C-Bills in extreme cases. With a cost ratio of around a thousand mecha to one major warship, the economic advantages should be obvious.
Mecha, and other smaller military vehciles (tanks, APCs, light artillery etc) are usually the bulk of a ground force's vehicles and the proportion is higher in offensive operations due to the ease of transport.
Large Mecha, such as Titans, fall into the same catagory as mega tanks and are treated in the same way. They often act as mobile planetary defence stations but are quite capable of turning their weapons on tactical targets. Usually, due to their higher profiles, they require substantial defences (shields if possible, sophisictacted ECM, camouflage surfaces (a commmon type is known as a holofield that simply distorts the appearance of the Titan, making it difficult to target directly)).
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I was just noticing a few things about the Cameron sector, and pulling together some of my own recollections...
- The Cameron sector has few if any hypergates. Entering hyper there pretty much inherently involves bringing the machine along yourself.
- Very little space presence, and limited starship tech.
- Pretty much every important world in the sector has not one, not two, but entire squads of significant antiship-capable groundpounders.
so, basically, even if you've pissed off the entire sector all at once, you can fly around in hyper, and even flit about the system as you please, but if you enter orbit without the right clearances, you're taking your life in your hands. All significant emplacements are groundbound. In the Cameron sector, once you leave orbit, you're in an anarchy.
Now, we look at the Dropships. They are huge, powerful, heavily armed and armored, and crude hyperships. Given their tactical importance, comparitively poor abilities, and strength of opposition, any dropship that shows up in orbit is really just space dust waiting to happen. They deal with this by not showing up. The Cameron sector leads the well-known galaxy in atmosphere-capable ship cloaking. The first struggle in any mech invasion of an established world is between the ships trying to come down cloaked and the sensor techs trying to catch them.
Of course, they almost never make it all the way down - that's not the point. The point is to get in under the antiship umbrellas of as many of the big guns as possible, and as close as possible to the ground to minimize the number of mechs who can react before deployment. For the rest? Well, dropships are heavily armed and armored - and every gun on the ship is atmosphere-optimized.
This is actually a rather pretty closed system in terms of appropriate arms races and tactics. Everything is balanced by something. It keeps working just fine as long as the only enemies you have are your Cameron sector peers. On the other hand, as soon as any civilization with modern ship tech takes an interest, it can get *ugly*
I'm thinking that for balance purposes, dropship cloaking should be quite effective against most sensors, with Cameron sector sensor tech for the most part below par but significantly more effective than most against that particular form of cloaking.
I rather like this one both because tactically, it provides much the same effect as the direct teleportation effect, with the added struggle between cloak and sensor. It also provides some reason why the merchantmen would cruble like rotted wood in the face of concentrated assault, without completely defanging the potential of a Mech drop.
For that matter, if the cloaking is good enough against non-optimized sensors, this makes the prospect of a mech drop downright scary. After all, the defenses of most worlds assume that major threats will hit in orbit, at the closest - not a mile or less above the ground. At the same time, the entire Cameron sector is effectively defenseless against cometbombing, and not so hot against bombardment from either of the more popular forms of gravship. I could definately see the Haven/Manticore wars and the Battletech Wars of Succession fusing in ugly ways.
Fibula
Just imagine that moment when you realize that the best way to defend your own home planet from the invaders is to bombard it from orbit.
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Just to explain something with respect to perspective. From the perspective of most of the universe, dropships and mech drops are just a remarkably effective transport containing serious heavy gear. For the Manticore wars, however, it is something different. Due to the effectiveness of gravships in planetary bombardment, most manticore/haven tactics don't bother with ground assault at all. Instead, they take out defending fleets and orbital emplacements with greater hyper-capable force. Having completed that, they contact the planetary command, and inform them that if they do not surrender, the planet will be reduced, over time, to a lifeless cinder. The schedules of this reduction vary, but usually start with the planetary command in question. This has proven to be a remarkably effective tactic, and the fact that it involves a requirement for overwhelming force, a state of war, and a surrender request (with some internationally accepted time-to-response) mollifies those polities that would otherwise find the prospect heinous.
(this is, incidentally, taken more or less verbatim from the base material. It also fits fairly well.)
Thus, most silesian battles never hit atmosphere in the first place, and most who tried a traditional insertion against a gravship-defended planet would either a) be utterly destroyed or b) have enough force there to do it their way. The prospect of an invading force that might be able to utterly bypass their starship garrisons and orbital defenses is, to them, downright terrifying, especially as a force of battlemechs will pretty much laugh at any ground forces composed of traditional forces.
Fibula
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a) Cameron Sector fleets were previously fairly standard galactically, but after the departure of the Star League Defense Force and the bloodletting of the First Succession War none of the successor states possess any military vessels fitted with gatedrives. Civilian ships still exist in respectable numbers and since most permanent jumpgates were priority targets constitute most of the hyperspace activity. Only the Federated Suns can still build jumpships or carry out major repairs and this is a slow, poorly understood process. The major barrier to expanding this is economic - the vast cost of the research to replace lost shipbuilding knowledge and building the infrastructure to manufacture military jumpships would paralyse even the richest of the Successor States.
b) Dropships are fairly comparable to most light combatants in less capable navies. While any serious cruiser could shatter them with relative ease, the speed and firepower of an assault dropship is respectable and they usually have an adequate fighter cover. Their tech level is perhaps a century behind that of the Humanx, for example but is usually robust and low maintenance. Transports don't have as much firepower of course. Without a jumpcapable ship or jumpgate they can't get into hyperspace at all.
c) The successor states usually have perhaps ten to twenty thousand Battlemechs and perhaps ten to twenty times as many conventional troops. A proportion of these are likely to be mercenaries and local militia of various quality. A major point of military strategy for at leaset four hundred years is that landing an invasion force is relatively easy - driving the defenders off planet is much harder. The combatant/support staff ration is also very high - 1 to 1 in some units (for reference the modern US Army is around 1 to 10) so relatively little logistical support is needed. Most outside players to involve themselves have compared the experience to grabbing a tiger by the throat.
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>Now, the Taiidani, Centauri, and Humanx all have interstellar empires, large budgets, fleets, and orbital emplacements. As such, in their native lands, Ogres and Bolos are used as the backbone of assault and occupation forces while Octos (what fiction are *they* from?) usually provide local security for worlds too marginal to support a serious space presence.<
The anime Venus Wars centers around a war between two nations on a terraformed Venus. Basically, Ishtar invades Aphrodite, behind a spearhead of 500 ton "Octo" tanks (incedentally, Aphrodite countered using swarms of military monobikes, so this is where they're from, too). I'm taking the position that, for our purposes, this war was actually a civil war between the two main subcorporations/factions in the Venusian Bank following its abortive attempt to replace its economic dominance of the solar system with a military one in the years following first contact.
By SS:TY, these Octos have evolved into the Humanx Commonwealth's take on the Planetary Siege Unit.
yah...and this is where I start having problems comparing heavy mecha to Planetary Seige Units. The largest battlemech I've ever heard of is the stone rhino, at 150 tons. That's a little less than two orders of magnitude shy of a Bolo Mark XXIV. It's like comparing dreadnaughts and gargants. I can see a Bolo taking out ships in orbit. (I remember a short story in which one manages to do just that with relative ease, using a weapon that apparently fires shards of solid hydrogen that are driven to fusion on impact by an antimatter seed.) I have problems believing the same of an Atlas or Crusader.
on the other hand, the above argument, if sustained, completely tears apart my idea for cloaking dropships, but ah well.
As for the Cameron info, ah. I see. Thank you for the clarification. It still leaves the space wide open for serious damage by anyone with a decent combat ship or few. How do they deal with piracy?
Fibula
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>yah...and this is where I start having problems comparing heavy mecha to Planetary Seige Units. The largest battlemech I've ever heard of is the stone rhino, at 150 tons. That's a little less than two orders of magnitude shy of a Bolo Mark XXIV. It's like comparing dreadnaughts and gargants. I can see a Bolo taking out ships in orbit. (I remember a short story in which one manages to do just that with relative ease, using a weapon that apparently fires shards of solid hydrogen that are driven to fusion on impact by an antimatter seed.) I have problems believing the same of an Atlas or Crusader.<
Mecha aren't capital units. They're fighters. Their big advantages, when playing in the big leagues with capships and PSUs, is a combination of good firepower for their size, low cost and apeshit agility.
Unfortunately, Cameron Sector mechs are generally too crude to keep that last.
>on the other hand, the above argument, if sustained, completely tears apart my idea for cloaking dropships, but ah well.<
Not neccessarily. They could still have ground defense stations, as seen in the third Mechwarrior PC game. Still, it seems to me that the big thing about the Cameron sector is that, for actual technical knowledge, it's been hammered to somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
They use dropships and merchant ships and battlemechs because -no capital combat starships survived the 1st Succession War-.
The reason that Haven will go after Manticore, rather than, say, the Capellan Confederation is that conquering them would require ground level combat - which is a Successor State specialty - -followed- by a complete update of their technical base, the costs of which would stagger any nation short of the Jurai or the Taiidani, let alone one so chronically short of cash as the PRH.
>As for the Cameron info, ah. I see. Thank you for the clarification. It still leaves the space wide open for serious damage by anyone with a decent combat ship or few. How do they deal with piracy?<
The interstellar black market rarely trades anywhere near as broadly as the white one. In the Cameron sector, you'll probably only be able to find Cameron tech.
Which means that the best a spacegoing pirate will have is a dropship - which won't be anywhere near as well supplied or equipped as a government dropship.
For what that won't cover, the Cameron Sector is probably the only part of the galaxy that sees more Manticoran freight traffic than the Silesian Confederacy. And where there are Manty freighters, there's the Manty Navy. And Manties don't like pirates.
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> The largest battlemech I've ever heard of is the
> stone rhino, at 150 tons.
I'm not sure what the source of this is (computer game?) but the Stone Rhino aka Behemoth aka Amaris' Folly weighs only 100 tons. It is however, intimidatingly large.
It is worth noting that when the clans, with their tech base intimidatingly ahead of even the Star League, the needs of game balance led to FASA revising their previous Star League technology base downwards. The original Star League sourcebook tells of fusion reactors the size of briefcases, headhunter missiles and robot warships. I suspect that the could very well have placed SOMs (Surface-Orbit Missiles) on a Mech. Obviously, these would have been less powerful than those on a planetary defence centre, but were mobile and could be provided in large numbers.
They may not be around any more, but there is a possibility of secret caches of a few missiles scattered across the Sphere, preserved for deperate need only since they can no longer be replaced.
> Which means that the best a spacegoing pirate will
> have is a dropship - which won't be anywhere near as
> well supplied or equipped as a government dropship.
Piracy in the Cameron sector is rife, partcularly around the rim of the Inner Sphere. Usually they are small colonies with a commercial jumpship, a dropship or two and a small ground force (often renegades from successor state militaries). They are less interested in striking at shipping than in raiding worlds near the periphery for manufactured goods, slaves, and occasionally resources lacking on their base worlds. Some actually build up enough to control small states and are semi-respectable (despite the dominance of the Inner Sphere in the sector, there are a multitude of small powers outside that region).
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Nueva Terra did have quite a few Super-heavy units, most of which were handed over to the Unified Fleet in order to provide a coherent planetary defence system. Only one of the four existing leagues has found it viable to manufacture more, the United Western States (due to it's large Badlands presence) and they therefore sell to the Unified Fleet to fund their own forces.
Note - ETE Cannon fire electrothermally-enhanced 'conventional' rounds. Primarily artillery, they are often used as a first stage and can launch 125mm High Velocity Missile launchers into low orbit, from which it can fire on orbiting vessels.
Unassisted 125mm HVMs can reach around 75km altitude
155mm cannon can reach around 140km altitude before launch
255mm cannon can reach around 230km altitude before launch