Re: Theater Air Defense Systems

Phillip spake thusly upon matters weighty: 
>	Actually my thought was this was not represented in the Full
Thrust Level
> but only as an abstraction in the DirtSide/StarGrunt (covering that
entire
> planetary zone, i.e. large table) level with a representative
facility.  If
> you wanted complete coverage off your entire planet, then you would
have to
> buy around a hundred of these things.

Makes sense. Sorry the words "Planetary Zone" said "entire world" to 
me. Pardon my ignorance of DS2. 

>	Yes, the goal is to force PA/Drop troop actions against a
facility like
> this, either that or you land in an adjacent planetary zone and walk
into
> your enemy's holdings.  This means that a deteremined defender can
extend
> the lenght of the campeign by having a few of these things.

Depth in defence forcing your enemy to drop outside your main areas 
and advance by land. These could even be up once PDCs are 
neutralized. Or maybe you have to take out both before landers can 
come in. Probably. That would make for intense drop troop/small 
lander actions since I'm sure both are heavily emplaced. I'd also 
figure that these would be tuned to killing mid size (say SG2 size 
2+) landers whereas PDCs take out FT ships. 

Neat concept. Makes planetary assaults more thorny and explains why 
your infantry goes in first as drop troops and why you don't drop big 
landers in wave 1. That means no armour (unless you've got a lot of 
ECM and stuff). Probably just grunts, SF and PA in wave 1. When you 
take out THAAD, then you drop your size 5-7 landers with the tanks 
and major troop formations. Or maybe ships that are just "out of 
scale" for SG2 like a company or platoon lander. But to land those, I 
think you need to have killed the PDCs too. PDCs probably can't 
engage anything smaller than an FT mass 1 ship. That would be 25 CP 
in SG2 or size 5. So anything size 6 or bigger can be targetted by 
PDCs unless FT says somewhere that you need to target a specific 
minimum mass - if so then multiply that by 5 to get an idea of what 
SG2 or DS2 size class equivalent. I suspect PDCs would only engage FT 
ships. Your THAAD would be the anti-drop used against landers. Drop 
troops just don't get stopped (too small). Either that or you are 
forced to use some sort of specialized PDS-AA system that can target 
such small targets...

Tom.  
 
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Thomas Barclay		     
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