Re: [GZG] Small thought re: Orbital Assault

On 11/22/05, Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@telia.com> wrote:
> John Atkinson wrote:
>
> >My thought is that these force numbers respresent the huge difficulty
> >of transporting large armed forces across space.
>
> To me, these numbers suggest rather small colonial populations (with a
few
> exceptions where a power had gone all-out to push the population up
fast,
> eg. Albion). For real-world comparisons, compare the size of the
forces
> deployed in North America during the French and Indian War and the War
of
> 1812 with the field armies in Europe in the same period - and relate
the
> force sizes to the sizes of the *populations* in North America and
Europe
> at the time.

That's a plausible explanation as well, although I don't see the two
as being mutually exclusive.

> >And COA superiority (Close Orbit/Aerospace) is a precondition to even
> >attempting to land
> >troops.
>
> Nope - or, rather, you only really need local COA superiority over
your
> chosen drop zone; everywhere else COA *parity* is enough to give the
> invasion a chance to succeed. A planet is a very big place to defend,
and
> unless the defences are truly outrageously massive you're pretty much
> guaranteed to find an unprotected spot to land in.

Also to be considered is the assumptions the given background makes
about how "balkanized" most colonized worlds will be.  Quite frankly,
I'm as disdainful of whole planets belonging to one power as I am of
Star Wars-styled uniclimatic planets.

Especially if we accept Oerjan's points that A) Colonial Populations
(especially early on) are small and B) Planets are big places to
defend -- two points with which I'm in agreement.

Which means that if a given planet has colonies on it belonging to
multiple powers (likely), ESPECIALLY if it's 3 or more powers, and two
of those powers go to war, the other powers on the planet will have to
be taken into consideration by BOTH sides when fighting for
orbital/air superiority.

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