Re: [GZG] FTverse colinies

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 12:38 AM, Richard Bell <rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > And so far-fetched as to be difficult to discuss reasonably.  I was
> > actually requesting a historical instance.	And I don't mean the
> > Italian invasion of Ethiopia either--since you've got possibly the
> > most incompetent army on historical record as the "high tech" force.
>
> The North Vietnamese	were not precisely low tech, nor ill-trained,
and the
> americans did seem to do everything in their power to negate their own
> advantages, but the americans were very high tech for the time.  They
failed
> for many reasons but high among them was failure to occuppy where they
had
> searched and destroyed.

The insurgency failed utterly in 1968.	After that, it was PAVN
fighting the US, and you'd have a hard time to argue them as poorly
trained militia.  :)  And while they weren't as sophisticated as the
American forces, they were being equipped with artillery and tanks by
the Chinese and Soviets, which kind of pitches the "ill-equipped" out
the window.

> > You're making a lot of strange assumptions.  For a US invasion of
> > Canada to be concievable, economic realities would have to have
> > changed to the point that Canada is (for whatever reason) no longer
a
> > major trading partner.
>
> It is actually wierder than that.  If the US is no longer Canada's
major
> trading partner, but still wants what we have, it can only be that
someone
> else was willing to pay more for it.	The US economy would have to
tank to
> the point that canadian raw materials are all going to China for
prices that
> the US cannot afford to pay, yet still be healthy enough  to mount the
> invasion.

Those would seem to be mutually contradictory conditions.  IMHO.

> > You kind of assume that the high-tech troops are static popup
targets.
> >  We tend to do a lot of very careful work looking for Bad Guys. 
Folks
> > who aren't as clever as they think they are tend to end up very,
very
> > dead when playing this game.
>
> I have spent too much time thinking in Hard SF terms which do not
allow for
> dropships disgorging space marines in a surprise attack.  Human
colonies
> with reasonable fear of invasion from other humans may have the
potential
> targets of an invading force pre-wired.  Depending on what sort of
> terraforming needed to be done for the colony, they may still have
some
> landscaping devices in the high fractional megaton range.

Go ahead.  Detonate a "fractional megaton" device in a population
center.  See how that goes as far as winning hearts and minds.
Remember that your terrorists (and when you detonate that sort of
device in a population center OF YOUR OWN PEOPLE) are presumably
home-grown, and hence have maiden aunts and little sisters and aged
fathers living in population centers that MIGHT, presuming they aren't
outright death cultists like the Wahabbists and 1930s Japanese, give
them pause before wiping urban areas off the map.  The terrorists need
to swim in a sea of the people, not eradicate them from the face of
the planet.  Start blowing up the infrastructure people need to
survive and killing civilians indescriminately, and all of a sudden
joining the occupying force's local auxiliary police force and keeping
the crazies out of your neighborhood starts looking like a REAL good
idea.  Ask me how I know.

There are a couple different scenarios here.  I can see some pretty
extensive resistance on a planet that has reason to believe a relief
force is coming, and it might last for years.  See: Phillipines or
Poland or Yugoslavia in WWII.  Absent that sort of "I will return"
commitment, then the population has to decide whether or not continued
resistance, especially resistance that is destroying vital
infrastructure and killing civilians, is worth it.  After all, you are
talking about a million or fewer people with a whole planet, and over
99% of it howling wilderness.  It's too easy for the diehards to hold
a little Voortrek a couple hundred miles into the interior and forget
the whole mess for a century or two.

But the most critical piece of information for an insurgency is a
question of PSB.  You have to determine how (relatively) easy or
difficult it is to smuggle off-planet weapons, ammunition, advisors,
etc. onto the planet.  You can't just load a mule train or a truck and
take off through the back roads to smuggle onto a planet.  This will
make or break an insurgency.  I tend to believe that orbital reentry
would be pretty spectacular, and that the invading force SHOULD be
patrolling the skies pretty extensively.

> In an interstellar setting, the low tech colonial militias are not
going to
> be that low tech.  A truly low tech colony will have nothing worth
taking.
> If interstellar freight is cheap enough for the export of raw
materials,
> frontier colony only refers  to location, not tech level.

Yeah, but how much of that high tech stuff can be maintained,
repaired, or replaced?	The occupying power is going to put the (very
limited number) of manufacturing facilities on lock-down.  If your
background includes home nanotech forges that can produce anything the
size of an automobile or smaller in every toolshed, and a fusion plant
on every farmstead, that's one thing.  But I've digressed from the
initial point.

Arguing theory is masturbation.  Without a specific scenario, you can
'what if' it to death all day long and never resolve the issue.

John
-- 
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again. We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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