Re: Communication and Travel

You wrote: 

>What did the americans do in Beruit or was it the Lebanon when they 
>were sniped at. Used the New Jersey for fire support on at least one 
>occasion.

In the first place, Lebanon was a case where they actually could 
identify areas controlled by the various militias, making it possible 
to target them.  In the second place, the New Jersey ended up 
plastering a bunch of villiages a couple valleys over and doing a lot 
more harm than good.

>What did they do when they got a truck bomb in a barracks? They kept 
>doing their job until they were told not to.

Actually, the government panicked and pulled back.

>As a note, there is little reason why you can't use smaller ship 
>mounted 'ortillery' for pinpoint attacks, or use some sort other sort 
>of fire support platform. You use the weapon that does the right job.

Particle beams are not "pinpoint".  Nothing is "pinpoint" in the 
military.  It's like this "surgical strike" nonesense.	You don't 
conduct surgery with high explosives.  To pretend you're getting 
precision with anything other than a SOF strike is loony.  They've yet 
to build a weapon that can go in, search the hootches for weapons, 
check IDs, and take appropriate action in each individual case.  And 
they never will.

>FT allows pretty darned big fleet actions, so that base is covered.

Yup.  I'd like to see more rules for Planetary Defenses, though.

>Dirtside and Stargrunt however, are relatively small scale. So how 
>to integrate them into the picture while allowing the actions that 
>you can portray in them to be of significant scale to the whole 
>planetside action. Or do we need an 'operational' level ruleset for 
>ground warfare?

Options:  
1)Realize you're never going to simulate the entire war on a tabletop 
with minis.  I've yet to see this done for, say, the Eastern Front in 
WWII, so why do we insist on it for SF wars?
2)Bathtub scale.  Don't ask me how this term came into being.  But what 
it refers to is a series of Command Decision WWII campaigns played at 
the 1:25 scale.  IOW, one Batallion's worth of miniatures would be used 
in the campaign for every 25 batallions in the real war.  So for every 
Corps, you might have a combined arms regiment in minis.  

John M. Atkinson