Satellites and the Need for Fighters at Games Start

[Barnacle Bill]

quote:

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Originally posted by God Emperor:
Dont outlaw it, lets include a logical counter.
In a future space combat encounter, I could imagine someone seeding satellites around an enemy planet if they thought it would work.

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In Science Fiction you are dealing with something that hasn't happened yet. How it will work is conjecture, based on your assumptions as to the course of future technological developments. Sometimes authors make assumptions and then decide how combat would work based on them. More often, they adopt a paradigm based on some historical model and tailor the assumptions to make it work. For example, in Weber's Honor Harrinton stories he wanted it to work like naval combat in the age of sail, so he invented tech that makes it do so. Throwing in an aircraft carrier analog mucks it all up, if what you want is Trafalgar in space. If what you want is Midway in space, that's another story.

Offensive use of satellites does not fit the paradigm that it appears MM was seeking, which looks like what mainstream naval theorists expected in the late 1930's (battlewagons still rule the waves but carriers or at least aircraft have a significant supporting role). So, I support killing the concept altogether.

[Nyx]

I'd prefer leaving combat deployment in, and taking CSMs out of the starting tech suite. But that's because I don't like the massive power advantage they have over all other weapons at the start. I don't think sats with depleted uranium gun 3s would be nearly so abusive. But a player could still use a sat-deployer to place a defensive ring of sats around a planet (since the program tends to stick them on the wrong side or in other inconvenient places) as a way to have them actually protect his worlds.