Re: Portable Nukes

Thomas of Estoria wrote:

>
> 6) As it relates to landings:
> You plan to land where the enemy isn't. You cover the contingency you
> will be wrong. Thus you arm your landers and armour them. And yes, I
>

I just have to reiterate one thing. In any type of major operation it is
probably quite inefficient to have your landers perform double duty as
both
gunships AND transport landers.  At first glance this seems odd but
think
about it. This does not mean landers should not be armed and armored,
they
should be.  But effective gunship operations require different training
different skill sets and dedicated attention to be done effectively.
There's
a good reason why this is so in just about every militray today.
Examples of
Vietnam not withstanding even there you had dedicated gunships on every
operation. Sure slicks kicked in fire support on landing but the fact is
that once they dropped the troops off, they got the hell out of dodge
UNLESS
there was some sort of extraordinary circumstances that they had to
stick
around and add their firepower in (i.e. fuck up in planning or
unexpected
very bad turn of events!)

During an air assault (I have been in many live ones and they are
extremely
complex affairs, more so than straight parachute ops!) slick pilots need
to
worry about getting out of orbit. Most likely they will not just plop
down
right on the LZ but will come down some ways from the LZ and NOE to the
target in order to take advantage of terrain masking and what not.
There's
no time to be screwing around with fighting the enemy. Leave that to
dedicated resources. Of course this will be an entire package with
escort,
sweep and weasel support form aerospace fighters.  The pilots need to
concentrate on getting their loads down as fast as possible, then
getting
the fuckout and back upstairs for more troops or whatever. Naturally if
there's fire on the LZ they will have their won armament to add
suppressive
fire. Escort gunships will be the ones that get to the LZ and loiter
taking
out last minute undiscovered resistance and hanging around to provide
immediate fire support and suppression at the bequest of the landing
troops.
When my life is on the line I want a porfessional gunship crew that
spends
all their time worrying about covering my ass and understands all the
ins
and out of this particular skill. I also want to make sure that the
slicks
will be around to pull me out or bring down more troops. Or be my
transportation for subsequent operations on planet. (You are talking a
lot
of mass on transports to ensure everyone can get down in one pass.) Note
that assault landings are major undertakings and hence should have all
available resources dedicated to them.

Having said all that, there is obviously a very real niche for dual role
ships. The aliens scenario (for whatever other faults it has) despite
and
isolated unsupported mission by one ship. So without the resources
(Patrol
ships out in the fringe come to mind too) you do need to have a dual
purpose
lander. Note that this is not a function of the lander itself, (I
support
like airframe but modular package designs) but training and doctrine of
the
crew which is the real issue. Another instance is "third world" powers
on a
limited budget which may opt to combine the two into one, but they would
probably be default operate less efficiently at the point of action
sicne
they have to worry about two seperate missions at once. And these lesser
powers already with strapped resources most likely will ahve less
resource
sto dedicated to multirole crew proficiency. (Having experienced this
myself
first hand over the years)

BTW once a force is down and means to stay on the ground (Say in a major
extended operation), then it probably makes more economic and
operational
sense to have dedicated on-planet airframes to operate from field strips
both for transport and air support since they are cheaper to construct
and
maintain. (Truck them down in modular containers.)

Note that the Canadians have an interesting model in that they rotate
their
pilots between fixed witng and rotary wing paths throughout there
careers
but almost never is a crew doing both within the same tour.

ANyway my two cents take it or leave it.

Cheers...

Los