Re: [SG/DS/FT] Orbital assault

From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com>

> As I have mentioned
> in the past, there are four kinds of planet in my
> interpretation of the GZGverse:
> 
> Planets with many millions of population, popularly
> considered to be unconquerable on a practical level. 
> New Moscow, etc.
> 
> Planets with small populations who are vital for some
> sort of reason, either location or resource
> extraction, which are fought over by high-tech
> expeditionary forces and defended by permenant
> garissons.  This is where most DSII scenarios take
> place.
> 
> Planets of low value overall, with multiple
> settlements who fight among themselves with low-tech
> weaponry (Los's Epsilon Eridani, fer instance).
> 
> Planets with low value and single settlements, who
> pretty much have police and some militia who never
> have to do their job.

Agree.

The following PSB and Rules has appeared either on this list
or the test list.

PSB:
Beams work in Atmosphere, but rather too well. They're good
for damaging the biosphere, but any target smaller than a continent
will get overkilled. They're also lousy at taking out hardened
targets - the beams cause the atmosphere to burn/glow, but can't
bust bunkers. Think of it as using a shotgun firing small pellets
in a crowd, where the enemy has full body armour. You'll kill
lots of people, just not the ones you want to.

For that you need precise, rapid-firing weaponry. That means PDS,
or weapons that can be used as PDS. Or specialty Planetary
Bombardment Systems.

The MT/FT2 rules on Planetary Bombardment state that things that
are the size of escorts get 1 shot, cruisers 2, capitals 3.

So mapping onto no of PDS systems works pretty well.

That takes care of the DS2/FT interface.

But what about FT? IMHO the best way is to have hardened defences
having an "infinite amount of armour" - only hits that penetrate
armour count. But keep track of the damage to the "armour", because
that's the damage you've done to the biosphere. Probably in terms of
100 Megatonne-Equivalents per point. A single point of damage is
the same as 100 MT of H-Bombs going off at a random point on the
planet. Not much, but it soon adds up, and your planet becomes a
real fixer-upper. 

Specialised Planetary Bombardment systems only have a range of 6 MU,
but ignore armour.

Towns/Cities can be built like (large) passenger ships.

Planetary Defences - or rather, Offences - may be constrained by the
same problems that beams have. Whether the fire is outgoing or
incoming, you still have the problem that you're irradiating a
large smount of the atmosphere with "Quasi-Solid Lightning" if
using electron charged-particle beams. Converting a few cubic
km of atmosphere to plasma as hot as the inside of an exploding
H-bomb (literally) is both wasteful of energy and ecologically
unsound.

This means that Planetary Defences will often be Pulse Torps
or equivalent at long range, and masses of PDS at short range.
Phalons can use Pulsars, KraVak can use Scatterguns ( K-guns
are also Ecologically Unsound, and will hit a planet with
devastating effect even when fired from 100,000 MU away),
and the SaVasku Leech Torpedos, as they have essentially
unlimited biomass. All are limited to a single 60 degree
arc.

Oh yes, and Fighters. Lots of em. SMs too. 

Now YMMV and all that, but at least this set of rules and PSB
means that although anyone can planet-bust from a distance,
if you want to do surgical strikes, you need to come within 6
MU. And to do so vs a city complex with, say, 200 PDS systems can
ruin your whole day. But that's only in one 60 degree arc.
If there are 2 or 3 city-complexes on different continents, then 
the price of the defences starts going up. Full 360 degree
coverage is possible, but it's better to have 6 x the firepower
over the one area that needs defending (see Type II and III planets
in John's comment)

"I don't say they cannot come: Just that they cannot come by Space..."