Re: Troop Capacity

You wrote: 

>Well, it assumes that you won the space war to be able to land the 
>troops, so you have got some pretty good space 'ortillery' to back 
>you up, so that evens things out. And lets assume that your special 
>force dropship and missiles from space managed to take out the 
>planetary defenses in orbit or on planet...

Ortillery is a nasty proposition--but very limited in actual abilities 
with regards to providing accurate fire support without trashing the 
entire planet.	A lot like nuclear weapons.  And as for the Planetary 
Aerospace defenses, a fortified SML emplacement with a vast magazine 
and a couple points of armor (concrete slabs) will have a field day 
knocking ships out of nice, predicatable orbits.  And if you build as 
many of them as, say, the Mississippi had river fortresses during the 
'Merican Civil War, it'll take a LOT of killing.

>Numbers of troops... Well, standing armies have been shrinking as 
>technologies increase.  The equipment is vastly expensive, and you 

Beg to differ:	From 1789-1918, armies multiplied in size rapidly.  In 
WWII, much the same levels were maintained, but spread out over the 
globe instead of all crammed into a teeny-tiny European front.	The 
phenomenom of smaller professional forces is interesting, and a likely 
indicator of Things To Come, but don't always bet on it.

>need very well trained troops to operate it.  So perhaps you end up 
>with pretty small numbers of troops with very advanced systems.

Or perhaps much larger forces with not-quite-as-advanced-but-pretty- 
good stuff.  Like GEVs with HKPs instead of Grav Tanks with MDCs.

>Which tangentially brings me to fighters in FT. They seem to have an 
>extremely short lifespan. Are they remote piloted? Military forces 

Nope.

>can't put up with the massive wastage of men, and the morale 
>implications are rather poor. Even if the fighters can be mass 
>produced, the pilots probably take years to train, and soon run 
>out. Or should we perhaps think of kills in FT for fighters (and 
>perhaps even for normal ships) as being mission kills. The drifting 
>hulks recoverable and many survivors picked up by the side that 
>'holds the field'.

Lots of idiots wanna be fighter jocks.	Check the average lifespan of 
pilots in historical wars--grotesque attrition throughout the first ten 
missions.  

John