A thought on killing planets

[Alpha Kodiak]

The one thing I would like to add to this thread concerns hit probabilities. While it is true that hitting a planet with almost any weapon from orbit would be easy, hitting a pinpoint target such as a weapon platform should be pretty hard.

I would think that planetary napalm should be easy to hit with, do a lot of damage vs. population, but not much against weapon platforms. On the other hand, pinpoint weapons should damage weapon platforms just fine, but be hard to hit with and not do much to population. Alot of this has been mentioned before, but I want to emphasize the difficulty of hitting pinpoint targets through an atmosphere.

Actually, the atmosphere causes another problem. I would think that beam weapon energy would be attenuated by atmosphere, so they would cause less damage. I'm not sure you could even get small projectiles to survive penetrating the atmosphere, and if you could I think that both accuracy and damage would suffer severely.

I'm not sure what the perfect solution to all of this is, especially in light of minimizing the coding impact on the software. Some of the ideas mentioned before sound pretty good, but I think weapon accuracy against planets needs to be addressed.

[dmm]

Maybe the weapons aren't targetting the population directly, but instead are taking out "soft" infrastructure, like power plants, water purification, refineries, factories, high-tech farms, etc. Sadly, we know from history that this kind of warfare can be devastating to urban populations. The more-advanced societies of SEIV might be extremely urban and therefore extremely susceptible to such warfare. The deaths from a DUC cannon would then be due directly to starvation, exposure, poisoning, disease, fire, rioting, etc., and only indirectly to the DUC. There might be a few hardy civilians able to survive in the wild, but not enough be worth counting. (Hey, there's an idea for a special race trait: Survivalists. Or maybe PhysicalStrength and EnvironmentalResistance could be used, making them much more valuable abilities.)

[Spoo]

But even if certain weapons could destroy infrastructure, it would take several months for the population to decrease from starvation.

Not that this would be a bad feature; you could then "resupply" the planet with transports loaded with food. (How this could be implemented I'm not sure, maybe similar to a plague).

[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by Spoo:
But even if certain weapons could destroy infrastructure, it would take several months for the population to decrease from starvation.

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Each (strategic) turn is 0.1 years, which is over a month. Also, famines don't usually kill people with outright starvation. Most of the people die from famine-related diseases. That is, the malnutrition makes them susceptible to stuff that wouldn't normally kill people. And keep in mind that famines on Earth usually involve _shortages_ of food, rather than a sudden total cutoff.

Try to imagine a society that relies on replicators, or similar "just in time" food delivery. Very little food is stored in homes, not even staples. Now they are suddenly attacked. There's no power, very little food, and no water except from the environment (which may be inhospitable).

Which brings up another point: Besides the population's EnvironmentalResistance and PhysicalStrength, the planetary conditions should generally be taken into account when determining population damage from bombardments. (Someone has already sensibly suggested that domed colonies should be more easily destroyed.)

Added: And planetary type should matter. For instance, rock dwellers should Last longer on a rock than ice or gas dwellers.

[This message has been edited by dmm (edited 22 January 2001).]

[Barnacle Bill]

Actually, hitting pinpoint targets from orbit is not that hard. Rumor has it that satellite recon photos can pick up a pack of cigarettes, but not tell you what brand it is. With today's tech, we can drop a guided ("smart") bomb down a vent shaft from several thousand feet. With smart weapons, a longer distance to fall just gives you more time to correct the course of the weapon in-flight. The problem today is that the weapon costs more than most targets, and that little problem of how much it costs to get the weapon into orbit in the first place. You spend half a million $ hauling a $100,000 per pop smart missile into orbit, then use it to bLast some tinhorn dictator's Red Army-surplus T-72 that's worth maybe $10,000 on the international arms market. Presumably, in the distant future the high tech weapons will be cheaper...

[apache]

Actually, I think it should be impossible to completely wipe out a population from a breathable planet, unless you are using plague and/or neutron bombs. Its pretty historic that airstrikes alone, even pinpoint ones, cannot bring a population to their knees. There should be a minimum population on breathable planets that simply cannot be destroyed from orbital bombardments. There will always be those folks in caves, ruined structures, underground structures, and generally just not able to be taken out effectively from orbit. Maybe it should be a bottom limit of 10M, above which you can use planetary napalm to good effect, but once it hits that number, you need to invade or use neutron or plague bombs to finish off the population.
On domed planets, well, they really do not have much chance if that dome cracks, so they should be much easier to wipe out, even using beam/projectile weapons.
I think beam/projectile mounts should not be able to be used on population at all, only on weapon platforms and facilities. Planetary napalm should be limited to population and facilities, and not be able to wax weapons platforms. You figure that a weapon platform is an armored structure that won't be affected by napalm significantly.
Now, on plague bombs, I think they should be changed to kill a percentage of the population, not a set amount, per turn. This would be more logical since a huge population will be hit a lot harder than say, 3 people spread out across the whole planet.
I should also mention that CSM's should be excluded from most of these rules since they are described as using nuclear warheads. They should be less effective at killing population than planetary napalm, but still much better than nothing or beam/projectile weapons, and be able to kill point targets as well. However, they should not be able to break past the minimum population limit.

[Spoo]

I like your idea apache.