Re: [SG/DS] Orbital assault was RE: Troop Quality was RE: [SG2] weapons

>> if I'm orbitally assaulting...
>
>While these always sound so much fun in stories and in games (and so I
don't want to see them disappear from those!) in reality how useful
would
an orbital assault be and on how grand a scale would it have to happen?
So
in WWII (sorry if I butcher the following ancient history is more my
thing)
they landed in a few spots and pushed up from there. On the flip side
Europe is a small place relatively speaking and the top was penned off
by
Russia. How would you do it in a bigger area? Starting at a continent
scale, how would you do it for the North American continent or even
Australia? Going further how would you do it for an entire planet,
especially one settled for a century or more? Or is this a case of "in
reality you just bomb them into submission and send in troops to pick
off
what you want later", which makes for a boring game so we ignore that
and
pretend the much more dramatic beach-head style thing can happen?

Agreed we're pretending we don't have HonorVerse assumptions (if you
control the high-orbitals, the planet is obligated to surrender to
prevent
massive civilian casualties, because everyone accepts that once you lose
the high orbitals, you can't defend against orbital bombardment).  That
would make for dull games of Stargrunt....

Otherwise, it would all depend rather a lot on the assumptions built
into
your universe, wouldn't it?  If you're talking the 40k universe (or
something of that ilk) for example, having a billion-strong army and
millions of ships in your fleet, you can siege and assault any planet. 
In
a GZG-verse style setting, assaulting a heavily-settled planet is
well-neigh impossible.	Either the ships are too small, and carrying a
large force would require much of a major fleet's transport capability,
etc, or shipping takes a lot of time, expense, etc etc.

But a less-settled planet, like most of those in the GZG-verse (with,
according to Bethish population projections, not very large
populations),
will likely have most of the population within a relatively small area. 
It
doesn't make sense to spread out all over the place with a very small
population - you lose all the efficiency and safety of putting a colony
all
in one place to start and spreading slowly from there.	So an assaulting
power wouldn't need to assault a whole planet - just very small bits of
it.
 If the population is a half-million spread around 1 major city and 4 or
5
large towns, you need to go there...  Kind of just like the allies at
Normandy... 

On a continent scale, remember the Americans sent a landing force into
North Africa direct from the US, and much of the Pacific campaign was
fought over *really big* distances for the era.  Taking on North America
*now* would be impossible direct from anywhere else, just as it would be
to
take on Europe now direct from North America.  But that would be like
taking on Albion in the GZG-verse - you're going to need *overwhelming*
force to do it just because of the population and military potential of
the
target - and that isn't likely in a situation like the GZGverse where
everyone seems to keep a pretty close eye on everyone else. 
Concentrating
that amount of force is going to be noticable.... 

So either you're assulting a planet that can practically be assaulted,
in
which case you don't have to go after the whole planetary surface, just
the
small settled bits OR you're not assaulting, you're taking on their
fleet
to force political submission.

:)

-Adrian

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Adrian Johnson
adrian@stargrunt.ca
http://www.stargrunt.ca

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