Re: [GZG] Small thought re: Orbital Assault

Having the background allow for or encourage the idea of multiple 
population/political units on colony planets also makes it easier to 
explain how large (even if it's only a battalion per side) end up on a
DS 
battlefield.  I'm all for it. :)

J

John K. Lerchey
Assistant Director for Incident Response
Information Security Office
Carnegie Mellon University

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Brian B wrote:

> On 11/22/05, Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@telia.com> wrote:
>> John Atkinson wrote:
>>
>>> My thought is that these force numbers respresent the huge
difficulty
>>> of transporting large armed forces across space.
>>
>> To me, these numbers suggest rather small colonial populations (with
a few
>> exceptions where a power had gone all-out to push the population up
fast,
>> eg. Albion). For real-world comparisons, compare the size of the
forces
>> deployed in North America during the French and Indian War and the
War of
>> 1812 with the field armies in Europe in the same period - and relate
the
>> force sizes to the sizes of the *populations* in North America and
Europe
>> at the time.
>
> That's a plausible explanation as well, although I don't see the two
> as being mutually exclusive.
>
>
>>> And COA superiority (Close Orbit/Aerospace) is a precondition to
even
>>> attempting to land
>>> troops.
>>
>> Nope - or, rather, you only really need local COA superiority over
your
>> chosen drop zone; everywhere else COA *parity* is enough to give the
>> invasion a chance to succeed. A planet is a very big place to defend,
and
>> unless the defences are truly outrageously massive you're pretty much
>> guaranteed to find an unprotected spot to land in.
>
> Also to be considered is the assumptions the given background makes
> about how "balkanized" most colonized worlds will be.  Quite frankly,
> I'm as disdainful of whole planets belonging to one power as I am of
> Star Wars-styled uniclimatic planets.
>
> Especially if we accept Oerjan's points that A) Colonial Populations
> (especially early on) are small and B) Planets are big places to
> defend -- two points with which I'm in agreement.
>
> Which means that if a given planet has colonies on it belonging to
> multiple powers (likely), ESPECIALLY if it's 3 or more powers, and two
> of those powers go to war, the other powers on the planet will have to
> be taken into consideration by BOTH sides when fighting for
> orbital/air superiority.
>
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