Re: [FT?] Planetary defenses

kwalsh@mail.ice.net spake thusly upon matters weighty: 
> one of the standard ideas for Traveller is the Deep Site Meson Gun
> which can fire out to near orbit, no matter what the atmosphere. 
> these sites are usually buried under mountains or undersea. 

Conventional wisdom was because the guns were miles deep in mantle, 
you didn't attack them. Their sensors were not (but these were small, 
many in number, and hard to kill all of them). So you attacked the 
sites from orbit. The active ones could be targetted with missiles 
(HARMs) and the passive ones could be attacked with area bomardments. 
Now, you'd kill some, but not all of the passives, but if you 
degraded the firing solution, you were better off - and then you 
hoped you took the planet. It was also practical to use intel to gain 
sensor maps to target your bombardment. 

And orbital assault forces could be dropped on the planet (the Meson 
gun couldn't get them all on the way down) and you would then hope 
that the Marines in BattleDress could force access to the Gun Control 
site and eliminate the gun. Alternately, a spec ops or covert mission 
could be inserted ahead of fleet arrival with this in mind. (I once 
had this happen to a planet the PCs were on - commandos destroyed the 
deep site meson gun). 
 
 the sensors were carried on floats with long tethers, 
> allowing the ships to maintain passive ops til the last minute.
> they were hidden in undersea caves until needed.
> this is also not a bad idea for small system defense craft, they just 
> need to be streamlined.

SDBs should be anyway to get in and out of atmospheres and hide. SDBs 
on the sea botttom can lurk until main line fleet elements leave and 
then emerge to support guerilla operations by attacking second line 
fleet elements, supply, repair, and troop ships. 

> the idea of using a Trident sub as an SDB is almost appealing, you 
> could mount space combat nukes instead of ICBM's.
> yeah I know thats a major stretch, but its the same basic concept

And probably not all that expensive relative to spaceships.
 
 
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Thomas Barclay		     
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