Re: Combat in 2180

At 12:34 PM 12/1/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I forsee combat falling into several categories:
>
>Outposts:
>Small defence force - corp, colonist or military.
>Raiders - small military or pirate force.
>
>Small (new or marginal) colonies:
>Small defence force - poorly equipped (small arms, maybe mortars,
>basic ammo, mines), few combat vets, no planetary defenses, poor
>comms, poor mobility. These forces have little ability to project
>power.

This presumes colonies like we imagine them in the eighteenth century.
Mobility can be just as advanced as anything else. Hey if you have
helicopters flitting around (example) that's pretty mobile. Nor do
colonies
necessarily means scattered out posts on difent sides of the planet.
Heck
that's porbbaly the least efficient way to do it. Keep the outposts
close
and mutually supporting, then expand out from there.

>It seems most conflicts would occur on outposts, small colonies, or in
>subparts of conflicts on medium colonies. Only major events like the
>SWs would prompt huge conflict on the larger more established core and
>large colony worlds. They can too easily bring a large force to bear
>on problems for this to happen too often.

Actually in the other described options (mid, large, and core?)the most
likely conflicts even up to full scale wars, imo, are as likely to be
internal planetary based affairs. Conflict can ocur for any number of
easily imaginable reasons on these types of planets, (especially with
the
core issue of mere survival and resource obtainment licked) particularly
based on initial colonization policies, etc. And the most likely people
to
deal with these events would be the owning governments forces already
stationed on these worlds. In fact I'd havetio imagine that local
goernemnts would be very reluctant to call in forces from the central
governemnt to deal with these porblems in any but the most dire
circumstances. Given the great cost of such reaction, and who the hell
wants the home office in your knickers becasue you screwed something up?
Not to mention that the rival powerblocks would be doing all  kinds of
things, clandestinely to precipitate such events. I think these types of
eventualities are glossed over becasuse they are not as sexy as orbital
dops, using marine forces, ortillery, or whatnot.

Cheers...

Los