On 11/22/05, Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@xxxxxxxxx> 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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