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Karagin
Imperial Karagin Army
Imperial General
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
Posts: 4120
Location: United States
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 Posted: 18-Jan-2012 22:28 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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Okay one of my soldiers notices that I am reading a BT novel, BLOOD LEGACY, he asked me what it was about, so I tell him a bit about the book and some back ground on the BT universe. Now the soldier is a tanker (19K) and he believes that the M1A1/A2 is the ONLY TRUE combat vehicle to be made ever. So as I am explaining about mechs and their role as walking tanks, he stops me goes "But you have spaceships right?" I answers him that yes they are around in various models etc...he then says "Why not blast the mechs with these and call it a day, land some tanks and rule the planet?"
I did not know what to say, first thoughts that came to mind "Holy crap this kid has hit on just what FASA claims a single lance of mechs can do" to "WTH? Why would I want to do that?" to "Damn that is a reasonable way to deal with things"...so I went plan C, I pointed out that the game didn't do that because it didn't fit with the idea of the mechs being the primary focus etc...so he borrowed a couple BT novels to read, I love second hand book stores. Maybe he will want to play the game, maybe not, still it did give me a good laugh over his question.
So do you think he is on to something or just needs more time reading about the game and it's universe?
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Karagin
Only the dead have seen the end of war. - Plato
"Wasted trip Man. Nobody said nuthin' about lockin' horns with no tigers." Oddball
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Kraken
Federated Suns
Marshal
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
Posts: 2755
Location: United States
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| Posted: 18-Jan-2012 22:52 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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Has the person in question ever read "Starship Troopers"?
If not, then he needs to.
There's a sequence in there wherein a recruit asks his drill sergeant why hand-to-hand combat training is still needed in a day and age where nukes can just blast any opponent into itty bitty pieces.
After questioning the man's fitness to serve in the military, the drill sergeant notes that dropping a nuke on every last belligerent power is akin to grabbing an axe and murdering every last unruly child: you've demonstrated your power, but in the process you've destroyed anything of value.
The problem with orbital bombardment is that, like with nukes, not only do you take out your target, *you take out everything in the radius of your target.*
Speaking in-game, the Ares Convention actually forbids orbital bombardment under certain circumstances, and the Clans regard orbital bombardment as the mark of a commander so cowardly or incompetent that they no longer deserve their posting (the Smoke Jaguar bombardment of Turtle Bay was met with absolute horror even by members of other crusader clans, such that most commanders now bid away their jumpship support in the first round of bidding).
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"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat." -Edgar Allen Poe"I knew there was something special about you, but I never realized you were really a cat." Wolfwood to a random cat (Trigun)
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Vagabond
Mercenary
Mr. Referee
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
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Location: United States
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| Posted: 18-Jan-2012 23:50 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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Thank fully, the universe has given you an answer to this question: collateral damage as Kraken said. Then goes farther to by having almost all of the combat ships destroyed over years and years of fighting. Sure, you could easily bombard the enemy from space but then you still need ground forces [as he described] to hold it. Sadly or fortunately, BT does not have the fore thought to give any unit weapons that have realistic ranges on them. And such, that expensive and hard to construct warship needs to get into orbit to bombard the surface and thus within easy reach of an enemy aero fight defense force. A few nukes later and lots and lots of attrition you end up with no more warships.
Its funny, the more I learn about space and what would be in space the funnier the warships in BT get. Honestly, all you would need to defeat orbital defense and ground defense structures is an over sized solid metal telephone pole accelerated up to 0.1 or 0.2 C and a predictable ballistic trajectory.
| wrote: | | Distance to target is 8 AU Captain, planetary rotation is near earth norm and places target within viewable space every 16 hours. Target will be approaching the dark side in 3 standard hours. Optimal firing window is in 8 hours. |
Then you fire the missile at the immobile target that will be at X/Y/Z coordinates in space by H:M:S:Ms time. Its not like the damned planet is going to move suddenly on a new course. All you need is a scout to relay target data if the target is unlikely to be viewable from the system edge. Stations may give a little more difficulty as their station keeping drives could be used to try to move enough to be off target, but even then you could fire a spread or move in closer to give the station insufficient time to move.
But basically, after my side rant, the units that could do such a thing quickly began to be put at risk if they tried to establish orbit. And then eventually just disappeared until nothing remained that could undertake orbital bombardments.
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one must work hard to cultivate the mind and body. and one must always cultivate the mind.
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ralgith
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company
"Ralgith's Renegades"
Colonel
Joined: 18-Aug-2003 00:00
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Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 10:17 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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@Station moving... they probably wouldn't have enough warning. Detecting something that small is often difficult in the vastness of space. If you want good fiction that gives examples of missiles used in this manner, read the Honorverse (Honor Harrington portion specifically) series 
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Colonel Ralgith t'Mayasara
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company 'Ralgith's Renegades'
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Vagabond
Mercenary
Mr. Referee
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
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Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 11:27 Post subject: Re: But you have spaceships right? |
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| ralgith wrote: | | @Station moving... they probably wouldn't have enough warning. Detecting something that small is often difficult in the vastness of space. If you want good fiction that gives examples of missiles used in this manner, read the Honorverse (Honor Harrington portion specifically) series |
1st: is this a twitter page all of a sudden? lol.
2nd: conceivably if the stations sensors were sensitive enough, they would detect the launch of the projectile. And if I was that stations commander, my ass would be changing orbit immediately upon detection of a launch. This assumes that your passive sensors (your on board hubble) was good enough to detect the engine flare.
3rd: I'll check it out. Was exposed to the concept first in a book series called The Lost Fleet. Then I did independent research on the dynamics. Only understood part of it, but it was interesting research.
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one must work hard to cultivate the mind and body. and one must always cultivate the mind.
//^(^_^)^\\
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master arminas
Clan Goliath Scorpion
Star Colonel
Joined: 07-Mar-2007 16:14
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Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 15:30 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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I second Ralgith. David Weber's Honorverse is an amazing collection of work. Well worth the read if you get an opportunity to do so. Don't start in the middle thought--find a copy of On Basilisk Station and start there.
In fact, check the hardbacks at your local book store. Many of the more recent novels produced by Baen include a CD on the inside cover that has RTF files of the older books in the series (and other series). Pop it into your computer, and you've got two dozen new books for the price of one, although only one is hard copy.
Master Arminas
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Kraken
Federated Suns
Marshal
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
Posts: 2755
Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 15:35 Post subject: Re: But you have spaceships right? |
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| Vagabond wrote: | | Thank fully, the universe has given you an answer to this question: collateral damage as Kraken said. Then goes farther to by having almost all of the combat ships destroyed over years and years of fighting. Sure, you could easily bombard the enemy from space but then you still need ground forces [as he described] to hold it. Sadly or fortunately, BT does not have the fore thought to give any unit weapons that have realistic ranges on them. And such, that expensive and hard to construct warship needs to get into orbit to bombard the surface and thus within easy reach of an enemy aero fight defense force. A few nukes later and lots and lots of attrition you end up with no more warships. |
Look at it this way.
One of Hussein's favorite tactics was parking his anti-aircraft and SCUD missile batteries next to hospitals, schools, mosques, and other such areas.
If conventional munitions were used against to take them out, it was almost a guarantee that there'd be civilian casualties; he was actually banking on this in the hopes that we wouldn't try to bomb him. Fortunately, we had just enough "smart" bombs to keep things to a minimum.
But imagine, though, that instead of a 100-pound "dumb" bomb, someone was trying to take out that SCUD launcher with a laser fired from space. Unless the gunner had pinpoint accuracy and the beam was sufficiently narrow, the entire block would be gone by the time the launcher was destroyed.
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"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat." -Edgar Allen Poe"I knew there was something special about you, but I never realized you were really a cat." Wolfwood to a random cat (Trigun)
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Karagin
Imperial Karagin Army
Imperial General
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
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Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 19:49 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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In Renegade Legion that the THOR SYSTEM crow bars fired from space that well could kill with kinetic force a lone.
Also the Pournelle book series called "There Will Be War" talks about a similar system in real life and explains how we could have built and had in place in the 80s/90s or still could.
I also know that several of books out in print talking about future weapons makes mention of similar systems.
Looking back at what my soldier was saying, I think he meant blast the main force aka the mechs, land your troops and take it from there. Yes we all agree it is not that easy to with a orbital bombardment and none of us are going to land with out at least a 2 to 1 in aerospace assets locally, but still it is a good question and one that I think needs some discussion do you use this type of bombardment prior to landing or do you hold to use as needed once the battle is engaged? Do you use it on cities or not?
If you are there to invade and take over, you are not going to play nice, and our notions today of limited damage etc...aren't military ideals they political ideas to keep the home front viewers (yes I said viewers) and voters believing war is no longer about leveled cities and refugees clogging the roads in flight and that is relatively bloodless. Those of us who have been there and seen it up front know better but the viewers back home don't and most don't care to know the truth, I doubt this kind of restraint will be in effect 1500 years into future as political ideals and needs will be different on a scale we can't really even guess at with an interstellar level of government. But spinning back on the topic, I do believe his idea is not one that can be dismissed outright since it has been used in the game before and it does show up from time to time since the first mentioning of it.
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Karagin
Only the dead have seen the end of war. - Plato
"Wasted trip Man. Nobody said nuthin' about lockin' horns with no tigers." Oddball
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ralgith
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company
"Ralgith's Renegades"
Colonel
Joined: 18-Aug-2003 00:00
Posts: 2021
Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 20:39 Post subject: Re: But you have spaceships right? |
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| master arminas wrote: | I second Ralgith. David Weber's Honorverse is an amazing collection of work. Well worth the read if you get an opportunity to do so. Don't start in the middle thought--find a copy of On Basilisk Station and start there.
In fact, check the hardbacks at your local book store. Many of the more recent novels produced by Baen include a CD on the inside cover that has RTF files of the older books in the series (and other series). Pop it into your computer, and you've got two dozen new books for the price of one, although only one is hard copy.
Master Arminas |
I have several of those Honorverse CDs in fact. 
Though I think the ones I have are pdf files, not rtf.. either way though 
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Colonel Ralgith t'Mayasara
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company 'Ralgith's Renegades'
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ralgith
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company
"Ralgith's Renegades"
Colonel
Joined: 18-Aug-2003 00:00
Posts: 2021
Location: United States
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| Posted: 19-Jan-2012 20:44 Post subject: Re: But you have spaceships right? |
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| Vagabond wrote: |
1st: is this a twitter page all of a sudden? lol.
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Would you have preferred "RE: Stations" instead?
| Vagabond wrote: |
2nd: conceivably if the stations sensors were sensitive enough, they would detect the launch of the projectile. And if I was that stations commander, my ass would be changing orbit immediately upon detection of a launch. This assumes that your passive sensors (your on board hubble) was good enough to detect the engine flare.
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And this is the problem. You may have excellent sensors, but they can only see so far. Because of the nature of a Station, and how it would be... well stationary!... I can be millions and millions of kilometers outside your effective sensor range and do a purely kinetic launch (multi-stage boosters to get it up to speed while still outside sensor range, which then just let the projectile go on a ballistic launch for kinetic damage, or even use a coil or rail gun of some type to launch it) and you would never see it. If you happened to have an "onboard hubble" type, yes, you could see it. If it was looking on exactly the correct vector. What are the odds of that?
| Vagabond wrote: |
3rd: I'll check it out. Was exposed to the concept first in a book series called The Lost Fleet. Then I did independent research on the dynamics. Only understood part of it, but it was interesting research. |
Its an interesting concept, and the US & British Navies worked on a ship launched ballistic weapon in the 90s. They actually had an operation protoype. The projectile was launched from a railgun into space on a ballistic arc, and impacted with more force than any nuke in our inventory. With a "clean" kill.
Or at least that was the idea. I don't know if they ever fired the prototype at full power though, nor what has happened to it now.
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Colonel Ralgith t'Mayasara
Blighted Sun Battalion
1st Company 'Ralgith's Renegades'
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innersphere3050
Federated Suns
Corporal
Joined: 12-Jan-2011 18:43
Posts: 69
Location: United States
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| Posted: 29-Jan-2012 23:28 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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The tanker is on to something. In reality, mechs probably would not exist in a universe with warships bombarding from space, so FASA made the bombardment violate the ARES convention so we could play the game.
As mentioned accelerating an object the size of a telephone poll or any car sized object would cause a huge amount of damage and no radiation...essentially if collateral damage is the issue the only mech forces that would be left alive would be those near something that needs to be taken intact.
And those could be removed by naval lasers....... or missles...In a universe with warships you would likely have some precise stealthy missles as well
I am just as happy with no orbital bombardment in BT. Since Operation Bulldog/Task Force Serpent it has become a cheap way to eliminate a ground unit. Can't figure out where to go with this battle, just have the warship take everything out. Want to destroy a famous mercenary unit, just write 2 sentences about a warship taking them out. Viola, 20 years of BT fiction erased....so probably better if this is used sparingly
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Vampire
Free Worlds League
Lieutenant Colonel
Joined: 05-Feb-2002 00:00
Posts: 915
Location: Spain
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| Posted: 03-Feb-2012 14:33 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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Short reply to your tanker friend:
Yes, spaceship navies are the strategic decisive arm in interstellar campaigns, but you eventually have to put boots (or threads, or giant metallic feet) on the ground to take and hold the planet.
It's all explained in Battletech history. After the collapse of the Terran Alliance, the colonies didn't have the resources to build and mantain spaceship fleets, so most Age of War campaigns where about landing infantry and tanks in a planet and fighting on the surface of it to conquer it. Even the Reunification War was mostly a ground operation. After the fall of the Star League, the navies of the Succesor States destroyed each other, after the Second Succession War the only spaceships left were cargo transports, Jumpships and Dropships, that's why the Battlemech is the king of the battlefield, though tanks and infantry and artillery form the bulk of the armies. Every planetary campaign is mostly a conventional forces affair, with .Mechs playing the decisive role armored divisions played in WWII. Your tanker friend should now that World War 2 was very much like the first one: and infantry and artillery war.
Now, why use Battlmeches instead of landing tanks? Here is a extract from a post of mine in another forum regarding the subject of Mechs vs tanks:
....The original description of the Mackie test run was meant only to tell how awesome a Mech was, when actually contradicts the setting. There was nothing new in either the Battlemech weapons or armor, IIRC. That writer made a grievous mistake, taking too litherally the description of Mechs as kings of the battlefield. That is simply not true, what makes a Mech awesome is not firepower or armor protection, but tactical and strategical mobility. What it cannot outgun, it can always outmaneouver. Plus, they can be used for orbital assaults for stablishing planetary beachheads. You cannot do that with conventional armored vehicles.
Is said that tanks can always have more armor and or firepower than Mechs, but the difference in Btech is much more narrow than is thought. In my previous post I pointed out that in armor protection the Mech has an advantage over tanks given the bulky nature of Battletech weapon systems, the armored box of a tank increases in cubic progression with the volume to protect, because you no longer just have to protect the front of the hull and turret, but also have to add substantial side and top armor. A single laser hit can melt your roadwheels or tracks, and with all the scores of hollow charge rockets being fired around, simple side skirts of sheet metal won't be enough.
...
(end of exceprt)
Basically 'Mech forces don't need bridges and they can litherally run rings around conventional armor. Over and over again in Battletech history you will see the theme of outmaneuvering an enemy rather than fighting him head on.
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Sleeping Dragon
Draconis Combine
Tai-i
Joined: 06-Apr-2005 00:00
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Location: Czech Republic
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| Posted: 03-Mar-2012 02:42 Post subject: But you have spaceships right? |
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The matter of having spaceships is about equal to having a thermonuclear arsenal. It's a powerful tool of mass destruction, buta as all countries have already realized, it's better to leave it sitting behind. Plus there is a matter of relative fragility and high cost on spaceships. Too precious to loose under most circumstances. Once you break the bombardment convention you could also face nuclear kamikaze / drone attack that IMO most planets can muster if cornered early on.
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