Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[El_Phil]

You will never see infantry in space, not even super shiny mechanised space marines 'o' doom. Planets are very easy to slag with just kinetic weapons making invasions a waste of everyones time. You'd have to kill every weapon system capable of shooting down a shuttle/drop pod/etc before a landing. Once you've done that why not just take out the land forces from orbit? Or just say 'Give in or we kill you.'

Ship boarding is equally pointless, by the time you've supressed the enemy ship enough to board it, you can just threaten it into giving up. Plus it's probably a flaming (as the internal oxygen burns up) wreck from end to end and so not worth boarding and easier just to analyse the wreckage.

Kinetic energy weapons, although not dramatic and so on, are the way forward. 1/2 mass x velocity2 produces ridiculous energy very quickly thanks to that squared. Rail Guns are the way forward!

[Starhawk]

LOL El-Phil that sounds like the theory people used when we first got the A bomb and some goons in the senate wanted to disolve the army and navy because "Hey we can always just nuke em"

If you think about it you will always need a ground pounder because yeah you can just destroy the colony outright but then what was the point of even fighting for it? Land, population and money would be against the whole "Just glass it and recolonize it" theory.

[El_Phil]

Starhawk said:
LOL El-Phil that sounds like the theory people used when we first got the A bomb and some goons in the senate wanted to disolve the army and navy because "Hey we can always just nuke em"

If you think about it you will always need a ground pounder because yeah you can just destroy the colony outright but then what was the point of even fighting for it? Land, population and money would be against the whole "Just glass it and recolonize it" theory.

Not glassing, just slagging any millitary unit from orbit. If you control space you will control the airspace, then just scale up any air superiority doctrine. Now crowd control and whatever you will need, but that is a police job, not a millitary job.

I seriously can't see any role for a ground force in space. They wont be fighting any organised millitary force, that can easily be taken out from space/air. Hell we've seen what modern air power can do, now imagine that but massively scaled up. Any organised land force is just a selection of targets to space based weapons.

So your not fighting enemy forces on the planet, what do these troops do? Put down any opposition on the planet perhaps. No. Against irregular forces your best weapons are political, getting the planet not to oppose you in the first place. If the majority of a population want you out you will lose, no millitary force can change that without getting very bloody hands and doing some unpleasent things. Even then that just gets the population to fear and hate you. Yes they stop, but only until they can build up strength to hit you again.

Besides such things are so far in the future with such totally different tech and physics it's impossible to predict. Hell its worse than that, there's a whole extra dimension. Space and orbiting weapons change things more than airpower and we've barely scratched the surface of possibilities. Try getting Henry V to predict how the Gulf War would be fought is probably a good parallel.