Re: NIFT Stealth II Trial AAR

At 8:13 PM -0400 7/8/01, Glenn M Wilson wrote:
>
>Other then Ortillery, when would you want to expose your expensive
space
>ship (should stand out like an Iron Dinosaur to an aerospace defense
>system designed to stop something as small as a warhead from a
>sub-orbital vehicle (to give one example) to ground defenses?	If the
>processing power on a starship can place a Beam weapon on target over
>those ranges, why can't a larger, underground, armored facility with
>scattered ground station collection points easily place a Class  8 (to
>heck with those puny Class 5's!) or Class 9 beam over those vital Space
>Ports the Drop Troops seem so eager to take?

Seriously. The big landers would have to come in once the smaller 
landers were down and had eliminated the majority of the surface 
defenses that were large. Imagine all the various batteries on 
Normady still intact and ready to fire when the bigger LCTs and LSTs 
came in to drop off their cargos.

The big balance with shore support vs off shore support is that the 
Shore based batteries are fixed and can't move. But they can be 
deeply dug, scattered around and nicely camoflaged until they fire 
(add to that the heat sinks for the weapons and reactors can be stuck 
into rivers and lakes, much more efficient that way). The Space craft 
can maneuver. Once a battery has fired it's likely going to find life 
hard unless it has good defenses (do screens work in atmosphere?).

I suspect it would be a difference of who spent more time getting 
ready and if you had the correct number over the opposition. Just 
like with anything though.  If you didn't spend enough assets 
reducing the defenses first, your landing en masse would fail.

>( "Report: Sighted Troop Transporter, Shattered Same.")
>
>I just think a "positive loop" discount for Stealth AND aerodynamic
seems
>awfully cheap.  But I am a FT secondarily to DS2 so I'll not get too
>involved in this thread.

Stealth on re-entry would be pretty hard. The number of thermal 
events in the atmosphere would make targeting that much easier.

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