How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Imagine the enormous neutrino heatsink radiators being used such a facility - flower petals around a very dangerous teraton-powered central STIGMA (yes that is what the protruding fertilizing-parts of the flowers are called!).

Do they use ocean water - or ice cap glaciers - as heatdumps, coolants?

A centuries old Defense Archipelago that was mostly unused, lifeforms and corals and shit growing on the platforms' base. Then war comes and energy has to be dispersed to the area and entire coral reefs and fish havens and bird sanctuaries and whale hives melt. As the turbophasers and the shields just bleed out energies.

A small sea ending up as vapor would provide added cover. :P
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Galvatron »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:A centuries old Defense Archipelago that was mostly unused, lifeforms and corals and shit growing on the platforms' base. Then war comes and energy has to be dispersed to the area and entire coral reefs and fish havens and bird sanctuaries and whale hives melt. As the turbophasers and the shields just bleed out energies.
Well said! Many worlds might have defenses as old as the Republic that can be demothballed in case of emergency. :D
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Simon_Jester wrote:Shooting it repeatedly with 'merely ordinary' heavy antiship weapons might do the job- you'd cause so much shattering that you might well knock the thing back into a stable orbit, and would tend to reduce the problem to one of large numbers of individually smaller fragments you could take on the planetary shields.
To a certain size that would work, and actually project mass back into higher orbits. Past a point though gravity is a thing, and you planet could face being drown in a thick layer of dust if nothing else. If it settled on top of your shield it could block out the sun!

The orbital nightcloak from what back in the day was a pretty epic siege weapon.
Or on not wanting to gamble on their eternal superiority. It's like building walls for your city in an ancient or medieval context. You hope your field army can keep them at bay, but it's so much better to have walls and not need them than to need walls and not have them!
Yeah but on the other hand nobody ever built walls that would repel the entire planet attacking, and in Star Wars a single city being attacked by the whole world is the kind of force mismatch you would precisely expect. Anyway even if you worry about your fleet sailing away to other duties orbital platforms still start to make far more sense then surface guns after a point. All the more so if the metal to make this stuff is already imported. Old SW worlds probably have the crust long mined out.

Notionally such platforms could be in clusters protected by a collective shield overlaid on top of a planet wide shield, forming a series of space based strongpoints, or even by shields projected from the planetary surface if that someone provides an energy generation advantage. Such platforms though must have some engine, or the enemy could just shove them out of orbit. But then that would also mean they could cluster and disperse too. In peacetime they might be in much higher orbits too, because that's better for securing local space.

Plus, hyperspace interdiction technology and the like is a thing in Star Wars, at least in the old EU and maybe in the new. It's not impossible to imagine a situation where some enemy could show up above your planet and somehow trap or prevent reinforcements from reaching you in time to prevent the planet from taking damage. Good planetary shields are the minimum needed to prevent that, and having some meaningful anticapital weapons for shooting back into space would be really helpful.
Yeah well that's what I was saying, put more budget into shield more then anything else.

Now I'm imagining designated island bases and stuff where the heavy weapons are installed, with an extra layer of shields that forms underground so that the entire island fortress can explode and burst up through the shield like a blowout panel if something goes wrong. :D
You'd certainly have to do stuff like that if you had to place these systems near urban areas, and the richer the planet the more that's a problem. I dunno what you do about the open oceans though, that's part of why I think mobile is going to be the way to go, stuff gonna have to float or fly or something.
Yeah, but you saw me do the math. No matter how tall your flak towers are, you don't really want to have to fire parallel to the horizon or at extremely shallow angles. So you do wind up needing at least 6-8 sites to cover the whole planet properly, and more would be highly desirable.
Shallow angles? I want usable depression on these guns. Remember just by employing any anti capital weapon were are accepting some kind of probability that 1-10 mile scale exploding starships fall out of the sky onto our world because that's how gravity works. Were not going to limit the firing arcs on our guns out of fear. Not if its more then a token defense anyway.
Agreed. The catch is that if you only have a single-digit number of installations spread across the entire planet providing surface-to-space firepower, the blind spots in your firing arcs are hundreds of kilometers high. That stretches the definition of "low altitude" pretty far.
Yeah but you'd site that so those blind spots are over oceans, while you have gun coverage over your cities. Of course a lot depends on how many shield generator sites are needed, and if they each sector scan or actually project a uniform field.
Like having mounting the fortifications on islands hundreds of miles offshore or on top of remote mountains whose sides have been artificially steepened into 200-meter cliffs. Rioters aren't going to be able to get close unless they're flying. At which point you have light surface beam mounts to ionize and tractor anything that flies too close without a transponder code.
They have flying cars in this universe! Seriously, this whole universe is predicated on ultra high mobility for everyone, everywhere and up to the scale of a galaxy. Physical defenses don't solve the riot mob problem, that's a problem of the willingness of the people defending them to keep them out of the hands of the mob. The advantage of mobile platforms is you can remove them from the disturbed area, hopefully before you have a problem, and put them under the control of your elite regime protection mooks at a safe spot. Can't do this with giant fixed buildings.
In that context the mobile platforms are very much useful, though the fixed platforms also remain useful by doing exactly what they did at Hoth: deterring the enemy from sending heavy starships in over the areas still under your control to provide direct orbital fire support, and preventing the attacker from establishing a close blockade. At that point, they are back to being deterrent weapons instead of trading fire with the attacking fleet, though.
That's why it doesn't make sense to invest in more then minimal defenses. Like I said before, the enemy will just decline to grant you a battle that will make it pay off. The offensive value of a fortress is in providing a fixed pivot for maneuver, not in blowing up attackers. It's always been this way, the long walls of Athens for example mattered because they secured the Athenian Navy.

Avoiding close blockade seems relevant to a theater shield much more so then a whole planetary fortress. If you want to get serious about avoiding a blockade the only option I see is building in orbit, even adding moons if you could and fortifying those, until you have a protected roadstead and fleet base in orbit big enough for hyperjumps. But installations like this would be rare. Also this would protect all the civilian stuff your bound to have in orbit too.

One trick that occurs to me is to mount the shield generator on top of a scaled-up tractor beam that exerts force on very large zones of rock (and mantle) underneath it. Set it up right, and when you shoot the generator the impact is transferred elastically to half a million cubic kilometers of molten rock. It'll cause earthquakes, but no localized catastrophe.

Planets should have more ability to absorb momentum transfer and waste heat than ships, not less. Presumably this problem has a solution, unless ships routinely wind up scooting across the sky at comically high accelerations with par-broiled crews when they take hits.
Yeah this should all be solvable. However the cost of solving it much seriously reduce the different in cost between a shore battery, an orbital platform and an actual if slow battleship. Very little might exist in fact, and a surface weapon has to be at least sort of sane (by the 1920s shore guns had gotten so powerful you could not have them near cities, they shattered all windows, LA found this out the win way) in manners that wouldn't apply to space anything.

A big variable in this is just how much of the power generation on starwars ships is needed for firepower vs mobility. Hyperdrive can use the same power weapons do for example, because you never fire in hyperspace, while all sublight power, which is clearly linked to hyperspace power but not completely the same, needs to be usable while firing. It seems unlikely that an ISD for example can go full speed and use utter maximum firepower, but no reason exists why it could not. Its possible the power systems are totally non compatible, and that the ship actually has a large over design margin of power. We don't know.

Generally though the more and more power weapons-shields are going to eat, probably the less it matters if you have engines too as long as your ship isn't trying to be fast.The cost difference for ground based weapons may be very low. We have rather strong cost divisions in real life because in real life because we never pushed gun performance all that high. But say that SBX radar the military built cost less to put on a floating platform in warm weather then it would have to build it on land in Alaska...
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Imagine the enormous neutrino heatsink radiators being used such a facility - flower petals around a very dangerous teraton-powered central STIGMA (yes that is what the protruding fertilizing-parts of the flowers are called!).

Do they use ocean water - or ice cap glaciers - as heatdumps, coolants?
I'm sure any reasonably prosperous Star Wars planet abolished glaciers by the time the old Republic was founded.

The solution is obvious, BURN COAL. If our coolant is future tech hot enough this will work great. The burning is a reliable on demand process by which to liberate huge amounts of free carbon which our 10,000 degree primary coolant then melts. The energy of the initial burn in a coal dust turbine array can also self power the coolant blowers. The molten carbon is then piped off used to charge up extinct volcanoes until they become active volcanoes, from which geothermal energy can be recaptured after the war is won. Or everyone dies.
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Simon_Jester »

Sea Skimmer wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:Shooting it repeatedly with 'merely ordinary' heavy antiship weapons might do the job- you'd cause so much shattering that you might well knock the thing back into a stable orbit, and would tend to reduce the problem to one of large numbers of individually smaller fragments you could take on the planetary shields.
To a certain size that would work, and actually project mass back into higher orbits. Past a point though gravity is a thing, and you planet could face being drown in a thick layer of dust if nothing else. If it settled on top of your shield it could block out the sun!
True, but an industrial civilization that can build life support or generate electrical power on the scale of Star Wars might be able to deal with having the sun blocked out, or other kinds of Chicxulub-level planetary disasters. It wouldn't be good, but it could very well be possible given skill, determination, and planning.

Blowing up my planet, by contrast, is the kind of thing I'm not going to get to rebuild from. Hence the Death Star superlaser.
Or on not wanting to gamble on their eternal superiority. It's like building walls for your city in an ancient or medieval context. You hope your field army can keep them at bay, but it's so much better to have walls and not need them than to need walls and not have them!
Yeah but on the other hand nobody ever built walls that would repel the entire planet attacking, and in Star Wars a single city being attacked by the whole world is the kind of force mismatch you would precisely expect.
Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either. Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:

1) Suppose you're worried about a Trade Federation blockade fleet, or its equivalent. The Trade Federation may be big, but there are going to be limits on how much fleet they deem it profitable to send. Being able to reach up from orbit with the equivalent of V-150 heavy ion cannon and zap their droid battleships might just deter them from trying to attack at all.

2) Suppose you're worried about a purely local conflict between your own planet and a neighboring one. There is ample evidence in the EU (much of it old EU, admittedly) that the Republic does not always intervene in such conflicts, or does not do so in a timely manner.

3) Likewise, suppose you're concerned about some of the larger and more formidable pirate forces out there. Warlike opportunists have gotten their hands on star destroyer-sized ships before. And, again, the Republic doesn't always put them down as quickly as you might like.

There would be a lot of worlds in the Star Wars galaxy for which some or all of these issues are not a concern, but they do represent plausible reasons to fortify your planet, without building up fortifications to a level that could stop the Republic (or the Empire) if they mobilized their full strength.
Notionally such platforms could be in clusters protected by a collective shield overlaid on top of a planet wide shield, forming a series of space based strongpoints, or even by shields projected from the planetary surface if that someone provides an energy generation advantage. Such platforms though must have some engine, or the enemy could just shove them out of orbit. But then that would also mean they could cluster and disperse too. In peacetime they might be in much higher orbits too, because that's better for securing local space.
I'm reminded of the Golan platform series, though those appear to have been entirely immobile and not generally well integrated into planetary shields.
Yeah, but you saw me do the math. No matter how tall your flak towers are, you don't really want to have to fire parallel to the horizon or at extremely shallow angles. So you do wind up needing at least 6-8 sites to cover the whole planet properly, and more would be highly desirable.
Shallow angles? I want usable depression on these guns. Remember just by employing any anti capital weapon were are accepting some kind of probability that 1-10 mile scale exploding starships fall out of the sky onto our world because that's how gravity works. Were not going to limit the firing arcs on our guns out of fear. Not if its more then a token defense anyway.
Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.

I ran the numbers two pages ago for a fifty-kilometer flak tower, which is so high it's almost exoatmospheric.

Assuming there's nothing sticking up above sea level to get in your line of fire, your maximum angle of depression is 7.16 degrees. And any shot you fire at a significant angle of depression will skim the lower atmosphere for hundreds of kilometers. Now, assume for the sake of argument that we don't care about the energy releases on the planetary surface, even though said releases take place hundreds of kilometers from the flak tower's base, so that they could potentially cause major collateral damage per shot even if we built the tower in the middle of nowhere with a 200-km exclusion zone around the base or something.

Even so, punching through that much air is almost certainly going to cause major problems with accuracy and beam dispersion for an energy weapon. You are unlikely to be effective from a tactical standpoint, compared to firing the same weapon up at a significant angle of elevation. Or even firing on the level, if you've got a flak tower like that to shoot from.

Angles of depression on less batshit insane flak towers, or for turrets mounted on a realistic mountaintop, are going to be a lot smaller. And you still have the problem of skimming through huge amounts of atmosphere.

So I'm not arguing against relying on these guns having angles of depression "out of fear." I'm arguing that the guns are likely to be relatively ineffective and cause unusual collateral damage when fired at angles of depression, so that it's a bad idea to plan the defense around that happening.
Agreed. The catch is that if you only have a single-digit number of installations spread across the entire planet providing surface-to-space firepower, the blind spots in your firing arcs are hundreds of kilometers high. That stretches the definition of "low altitude" pretty far.
Yeah but you'd site that so those blind spots are over oceans, while you have gun coverage over your cities. Of course a lot depends on how many shield generator sites are needed, and if they each sector scan or actually project a uniform field.
That would help, although it also means that your gun emplacements are closer to places you don't want wrecked either by sidescatter or by enemy fire.
Like having mounting the fortifications on islands hundreds of miles offshore or on top of remote mountains whose sides have been artificially steepened into 200-meter cliffs. Rioters aren't going to be able to get close unless they're flying. At which point you have light surface beam mounts to ionize and tractor anything that flies too close without a transponder code.
They have flying cars in this universe! Seriously, this whole universe is predicated on ultra high mobility for everyone, everywhere and up to the scale of a galaxy. Physical defenses don't solve the riot mob problem, that's a problem of the willingness of the people defending them to keep them out of the hands of the mob. The advantage of mobile platforms is you can remove them from the disturbed area, hopefully before you have a problem, and put them under the control of your elite regime protection mooks at a safe spot. Can't do this with giant fixed buildings.
Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.

Plus, things like 200-meter cliffs or the gun platform being on a remote island may not stop rioters, but they certainly tend to discourage them. If people have to travel for a couple of hours at supersonic speeds, out into the middle of the Siberian tundra or its equivalent, and then enter an air traffic exclusion zone where turreted ion cannons can zap their car, just to get to the perimeter fence of your installation...

At that point, you're not really worrying about rioters attacking the installation. You're worrying about an armed revolutionary movement of fifth columnists, committed enough to launch military attacks against military facilities. Which is certainly a plausible threat, but if so then your real problem isn't your ability to defend the planet from a space attack. It's the ongoing civil war being fought ON your planet.
In that context the mobile platforms are very much useful, though the fixed platforms also remain useful by doing exactly what they did at Hoth: deterring the enemy from sending heavy starships in over the areas still under your control to provide direct orbital fire support, and preventing the attacker from establishing a close blockade. At that point, they are back to being deterrent weapons instead of trading fire with the attacking fleet, though.
That's why it doesn't make sense to invest in more then minimal defenses. Like I said before, the enemy will just decline to grant you a battle that will make it pay off. The offensive value of a fortress is in providing a fixed pivot for maneuver, not in blowing up attackers. It's always been this way, the long walls of Athens for example mattered because they secured the Athenian Navy.
I think we're in agreement on this, and the only question is what constitutes "minimal defenses" and how to design them. I figure a lot of planets that don't specifically fear attack might just establish a planetary shield and give up, aside from maybe some fighters in key areas just to stop random pirates from showing up in the equivalent of a Corellian corvette while your shields are down for maintenance.

Planets that anticipate attack being a realistic threat might well want anticapital guns, in which case the minimum required to consider yourself "defended" would be about, oh, ten plus or minus two installations- as few as four or six maybe, but that might be pushing it.
Avoiding close blockade seems relevant to a theater shield much more so then a whole planetary fortress. If you want to get serious about avoiding a blockade the only option I see is building in orbit, even adding moons if you could and fortifying those, until you have a protected roadstead and fleet base in orbit big enough for hyperjumps. But installations like this would be rare. Also this would protect all the civilian stuff your bound to have in orbit too.
I was discussing close blockade in the context of after the enemy has a bridgehead on the planet, but while you're still trying to resist them getting to expand it. Basically, you don't want the enemy operating freely in low orbit over your part of the planet that they don't occupy yet. And if they try that, you want the option of either potting a few of their ships, or of being able to do something like the Rebels did at Hoth and run blockade runners out through the planetary shield under covering fire from your own defense guns.

Conversely, you want to deter them from even trying to operate in low orbit over unoccupied territory, because they know damn well you can do that.
A big variable in this is just how much of the power generation on starwars ships is needed for firepower vs mobility. Hyperdrive can use the same power weapons do for example, because you never fire in hyperspace, while all sublight power, which is clearly linked to hyperspace power but not completely the same, needs to be usable while firing. It seems unlikely that an ISD for example can go full speed and use utter maximum firepower, but no reason exists why it could not. Its possible the power systems are totally non compatible, and that the ship actually has a large over design margin of power. We don't know.

Generally though the more and more power weapons-shields are going to eat, probably the less it matters if you have engines too as long as your ship isn't trying to be fast.The cost difference for ground based weapons may be very low. We have rather strong cost divisions in real life because in real life because we never pushed gun performance all that high.
True. On the other hand, I remember hearing arguments derived from the old calcs that a star destroyer actually needs something like 90 to 99% of its power output for the engines, and that even at maximum Base Delta Zero firepower the weapons are dramatically less energetic than the sublight drive. I could be misremembering, I suppose, but if true that would make static fortifications (planetary or orbital) a lot more economical than mobile vessels. Unless those mobile vessels were so slow compared to starships that they were functionally nailed to the floor in tactical terms.
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Simon_Jester wrote:True, but an industrial civilization that can build life support or generate electrical power on the scale of Star Wars might be able to deal with having the sun blocked out, or other kinds of Chicxulub-level planetary disasters. It wouldn't be good, but it could very well be possible given skill, determination, and planning.
Yeah, if you had a city planet you could resist that because you'd already need large scale weather control, though you could be a lot more vulnerable to being baked in fact. But for a planet like say earth now, we'd have a big problem with the planet freezing over. That's probably yet another strategic job for a really giant pile of coal.
Blowing up my planet, by contrast, is the kind of thing I'm not going to get to rebuild from. Hence the Death Star superlaser.
Yeah, and the Death Star has to be linked to some kind of shielding resistance to make sense. But it's also a threat you'd need to counter with system wide defenses, which is what I'd advocate anyway. We really can't stop the Death Star from destroying one planet, but a couple of spaced out supercannon installations could destroy the death star without suffering more then one loss.... that's not a horrible trade if anyone actually had time to counter the death star.

Prior to Rouge One...I would have argued the Death Star was probably delayed from the Clone Wars era, because it would not necessarily be decisive unless the Empire already had strong control over all major shipbuilding. Otherwise it's almost certainly vulnerable to attack by a fleet backed by siege weapons.
Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either.
No, but as faction size goes up the maximum plausible attack force goes up, while the 1 planet fortified zone remains just one place. So that makes it harder and harder to have any rational chance of withstanding it everywhere. With a fleet at least you have some chance of pulling off a victory.

Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:
Enemies simply interested in blockading you aren't a reason to spread your guns around, it would be a reason to try to make a completely defended zone in which you could destroy them, and then operate that as your supply point. The Hoth Ion cannon wasn't even that physically big. No reason not to make a 40m scale cannon mobile at that point, it clearly already was to some degree for it to have been emplaced quickly at an ice cut cave site.

Meanwhile sure, concentrating guns gives away that zone, but that doesn't mean the enemy can abandon his blockade elsewhere. It does make it possible that much bigger blockade runners, they don't have to be small since they can appear out of hyperspace, can just be fought through ab lockade. Blockades of course are never about 100% effectiveness, and folks like the Trade Federation probably break blockades for a fee.

The idea of fixed fortifications being uniformly strong everywhere is an idealism which has endlessly plagued the subject, people like Ian Hogg wrote books on that problem, the drawing room approach. It has a really bad track record of success. Even old school walled cities quickly learned to adapt towers as strongpoints to have any real chance of defending the wall, rather then just trying to build higher or thicker walls. Plan for victory even in your defense, not to just stave off defeat.
I'm reminded of the Golan platform series, though those appear to have been entirely immobile and not generally well integrated into planetary shields.
Sci fi is plagued by the idea that space forts shall not even have weak engines. This is terrible idea if you have sci fi powr generation, which SW stupendously does. Even 1 g of thrust capacity would let you go anywhere in the solar system in a matter of months not considering speed boost from towing. Meanwhile it would mean you wont just fall out of orbit if enemy KE weapons fire hits you, and you can actually reposition in combat to clear arcs of fire blocked by say, other forts. That's the whole magic of being in space, it's not a big deal to move at all. It's only a matter of acceleration rates. Merely having say station keeping thrusters, it's a horrible limit on what otherwise must be a highly expensive installation. Attach a damn armored tugboat to the thing if you've got nothing else!
Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.
It is only a matter of trunnion height, strength and will.

Assuming there's nothing sticking up above sea level to get in your line of fire, your maximum angle of depression is 7.16 degrees.
The point was in fact, to blowup the ground. Like 10 degrees would do. All the more if you have a low power firing mode you might seriously need this to defend the site.

And any shot you fire at a significant angle of depression will skim the lower atmosphere for hundreds of kilometers. Now, assume for the sake of argument that we don't care about the energy releases on the planetary surface, even though said releases take place hundreds of kilometers from the flak tower's base, so that they could potentially cause major collateral damage per shot even if we built the tower in the middle of nowhere with a 200-km exclusion zone around the base or something.
It's not actually a worse problem then tactical nuclear warfare already was. Just make a nicely drawn range card to show where you should probably not fire unless its literally to save freedom.

Remember the attacking enemy has much less reason to care about collateral damage if he attacks from high grazing angles then you do. You don't want to leave any kind of blind arc if you can help it. It just invites them to try it.

Fortifications that can blow each other up is a feature of a lot of world war era stuff. That's gonna be an issue if you've got turreted guns and flank firing artillery, you deal with it in training. I could see installing mechanical stops to prevent a high yield shot going directly into your own capital city in peacetime, but FREEDOM KNOWS the crew will cut those out if they think it the thing to do.
Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.
Assadism suggests you should never believe dire predictions like that!
Which is certainly a plausible threat, but if so then your real problem isn't your ability to defend the planet from a space attack. It's the ongoing civil war being fought ON your planet.
Being able to blockade your own planet would be pretty damn important at that point, kind of was the point. The damn rebels will start selling topsoil for guns.
Planets that anticipate attack being a realistic threat might well want anticapital guns, in which case the minimum required to consider yourself "defended" would be about, oh, ten plus or minus two installations- as few as four or six maybe, but that might be pushing it.
I would still favor grouping most of them together and then employing a proportion as mobile roving guns. Single gun fixed batteries are not tactically sounds since they will need maintenance, meaning regular planned zero defense periods and total failure if you have a fault in action. Everything has to be paired up. That's a big fiscal advantage of mobility at that point, if you think only 1 gun is enough firepower wise against a weak enemy then okay, but you could have say 8 mobile guns, but deployed at 6 locations. You've got two spares now, so an enemy has to lookout for suddenly being hit by three guns, and you still can maintain 100% defense coverage with up to two guns down for maintenance, dependent on mobility speed.

To reach the same reliability with fixed guns you need three gun batteries...so two can fail and 1 still works, meaning we go from 8 guns...to 6 x 3 = only 18 guns now. Even if the mobile guns break more then can cost much more each and still work out better.

It seems far too easy to make these pieces at least rapidly relocatable to pass up. They'd need to be absurdly huge to be forced to be static, and at that point the goal must in fact be to fight off large scale capital ship attacks, not bullshit.
I was discussing close blockade in the context of after the enemy has a bridgehead on the planet, but while you're still trying to resist them getting to expand it. Basically, you don't want the enemy operating freely in low orbit over your part of the planet that they don't occupy yet. And if they try that, you want the option of either potting a few of their ships, or of being able to do something like the Rebels did at Hoth and run blockade runners out through the planetary shield under covering fire from your own defense guns.
That's exactly where you want mobility, so you can move your guns to near the battlezone both before and after a breaching operation, rather then most of them being useless.
True. On the other hand, I remember hearing arguments derived from the old calcs that a star destroyer actually needs something like 90 to 99% of its power output for the engines, and that even at maximum Base Delta Zero firepower the weapons are dramatically less energetic than the sublight drive.
Yeah, but no evidence exists for the ship engines being as massively destructive as they would be if they were working on purely newtonian principles and actually outputting the kind of energy claimed. Count me skeptical, since you know, the universe is predicated on FTL which just negates energy calculations in the first place, and appears to involve the sublight drive directly.

Meanwhile in the Clone Wars it was okay to fly whole squadrons of Acclamators off a damn city planet, and it wasn't so loud that all eardrums exploded within a 20km radius. Meanwhile that Repulsorlifts kickass is not in doubt.
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Galvatron »

Here's more fodder for discussion: skyhooks. I imagine they could be heavily armed and supplied with power via their tethers to the surface. I assume they could also be used as fighter bases much like the shield gate over Scarif was.
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Simon_Jester »

Sea Skimmer wrote:
Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either.
No, but as faction size goes up the maximum plausible attack force goes up, while the 1 planet fortified zone remains just one place. So that makes it harder and harder to have any rational chance of withstanding it everywhere. With a fleet at least you have some chance of pulling off a victory.
What I'm getting at is that defenses for a single planet would inevitably be scaled to what the government of that planet thinks it can fend off. They aren't going to seriously believe that they can stop the entire galaxy, but then unless you're one of a few very specific planets of extreme strategic importance, no galaxy-sized power would ever send its whole fleet to your doorstep.

The Geonosians may have needed that scale of defenses, but not many other people did, even in the Clone Wars given that Republic and CIS efforts were spread simultaneously over numerous individual planets. The only time either side seemed to really concentrate its forces, and launch a concentrated attack using a significant fraction of their total fleet in one place, was during attempted decapitation strikes (Geonosis, Coruscant, Utapau).

So abstracting all this over the long term and the entire history of the Republic and post-Republic eras, the pattern is to plan defenses on a scale that can reasonably hold off enemies much smaller than "the entire Republic navy." Such defenses will be almost instantly overwhelmed if the whole galaxy shows up to attack you, but then if that happens you're screwed anyway unless you have backing from a comparable-sized opponent.
Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:
Enemies simply interested in blockading you aren't a reason to spread your guns around, it would be a reason to try to make a completely defended zone in which you could destroy them, and then operate that as your supply point. The Hoth Ion cannon wasn't even that physically big. No reason not to make a 40m scale cannon mobile at that point, it clearly already was to some degree for it to have been emplaced quickly at an ice cut cave site.
The idea of constructing a single "citadel region" of the planet with NO heavy surface to space weaponry elsewhere on the planet is interesting. The big problem with it is that the enemy has very little to lose from trying to breach your defensive planetary shield and start "rolling up" your defenses from the edges of the hole thus created. "Dump fifty zillion proton bombs on the unguarded side of the planetary shield" is a relatively cheap-and-nasty way to breach planetary defenses.

You don't want a situation where a group like the Trade Federation decides to opportunistically escalate from "blockade" to "invade" because your defenses are so vulnerable that it would be risk-free for them to do so.

I do favor the idea of having the heavy guns be relocatable (as noted, the V-150 proves this isn't that hard to do). I like the idea you roughed out of having, say, 8-12 planetary defense batteries, each with two sockets for ball turret guns that can be dropped in so that there's never a permanent gap in the firing coverage.
Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.
It is only a matter of trunnion height, strength and will.
Well, I was talking about the surface-to-space mission, which is the main purpose of the defense guns. In the surface-to-space mission, shots fired at grazing angles through the atmosphere are very likely to be ineffective, in addition to the collateral damage problem.

You may well make a calculated decision that releasing nuclear-yield energies in your own atmosphere is an acceptable price to pay for firing a shot at an enemy starship, and I'm not even telling you that would be wrong. What I'm trying to tell you is that the shots you fire in this way probably won't work, will be so diminished in accuracy and effect on the target as to be largely a waste of time.

That is the reason I'm saying "angle of depression is pointless."

Now, the ability to fire on the surface in direct defense of the emplacement is something different, and I'd have addressed it directly if I'd realized that was what you were talking about. That part makes a lot more sense. Designing the emplacements to do that is a good idea, although it might be better achieved by having, say, a light turbolaser co-ax to go with the heavy cannon in the turret.
Remember the attacking enemy has much less reason to care about collateral damage if he attacks from high grazing angles then you do. You don't want to leave any kind of blind arc if you can help it. It just invites them to try it.
If we're talking about the surface-to-space mission, my point is that a "reasonable minimum" of defense battery sites on the planet is enough that there are no large, exploitable blind arcs. One turret's blind spot is covered by the neighboring batteries. If you put yourself in a situation where the only viable way to target an enemy ship is by firing one battery along an atmosphere-grazing path, the odds are you will simply fail to stop that enemy ship.

It'd be the equivalent of siting WWII antitank guns so that the enemy tanks could position themselves such that the only way to hit them is to fire at a seventy-five degree angle from perpendicular. Realistically, you can take the shot, but the shot will glance off the armor. So sure, making it physically possible to take the shot is better than making it physically impossible. But if you didn't already have another gun with a better firing angle in another position... you're screwed.
Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.
Assadism suggests you should never believe dire predictions like that!
What I'm getting at is that if the people crewing the defenses are so politically unreliable and unwilling to even defend themselves, they're probably one bribe offer from going over to the rebels and turning the defenses on you in any event. And yes Assad is hanging on despite being in roughly that position- but he's hanging on in large part because of foreign help, and because the rebels against him are politically divided. Qaddafi, in a similar position, got his ass kicked because the rebels were better united and the foreigners backed the rebels, not him.

It's not that you don't want reasonable provisions against the defense batteries (and planetary shield generators) being randomly overrun by fifth columnists or rebels.

It's that if you're designing your planetary defenses around the prospect of being in a civil war where your position is so tenuous you can't trust your soldiers to man their own fortifications... You really should be concentrating on the problem of winning that civil war, not on the placement of antiship batteries for fighting an external invader.

Weren't you just saying "plan for victory, not for defeat?"
Which is certainly a plausible threat, but if so then your real problem isn't your ability to defend the planet from a space attack. It's the ongoing civil war being fought ON your planet.
Being able to blockade your own planet would be pretty damn important at that point, kind of was the point. The damn rebels will start selling topsoil for guns.
Yes, but you can't really do that with fixed defenses intended to stop an incoming fleet or to stop attacking ships from loitering above areas of the planet you hold. At that point you need your own mobile force- but the mobile forces most useful for stopping rebels on your own planet from trading freely with outsiders are NOT going to be effective at stopping an invasion fleet.

Customs patrols don't repel enemy cruisers; you need either your own cruisers or your own fixed defense guns, neither of which is effective at stopping fleeing blockade runners, for which you need customs patrols again. Combined arms.

Trying to prepare one element of a combined arms force to stop a threat it is poorly prepared by nature to counter, instead of building up the other element(s) of that force, is a losing game.
I would still favor grouping most of them together and then employing a proportion as mobile roving guns. Single gun fixed batteries are not tactically sounds since they will need maintenance, meaning regular planned zero defense periods and total failure if you have a fault in action. Everything has to be paired up. That's a big fiscal advantage of mobility at that point, if you think only 1 gun is enough firepower wise against a weak enemy then okay, but you could have say 8 mobile guns, but deployed at 6 locations. You've got two spares now, so an enemy has to lookout for suddenly being hit by three guns, and you still can maintain 100% defense coverage with up to two guns down for maintenance, dependent on mobility speed.

To reach the same reliability with fixed guns you need three gun batteries...so two can fail and 1 still works, meaning we go from 8 guns...to 6 x 3 = only 18 guns now. Even if the mobile guns break more then can cost much more each and still work out better.
I can certainly get behind the idea of the weapons being redeployable. It's mostly a question of whether they can be redeployed on a timescale relevant in the event of an enemy attack.

You get the benefit of never having a scheduled gap in your coverage either way. But if your defense weapons are, say, V-150 guns like on Hoth... there's no easy way to transform one of those into a rapidly mobile vehicle. You could probably rig something up, this is Star Wars, but you'd probably be mounting the gun on something like Jabba's sail barge. It would take a while to get anywhere.

So in the event of an attack, you can't just park all the guns in the same part of the planet, and redeploy for more coverage against the threat. They won't get there in time.
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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Galvatron wrote:
Shroom Man 777 wrote:A centuries old Defense Archipelago that was mostly unused, lifeforms and corals and shit growing on the platforms' base. Then war comes and energy has to be dispersed to the area and entire coral reefs and fish havens and bird sanctuaries and whale hives melt. As the turbophasers and the shields just bleed out energies.
Well said! Many worlds might have defenses as old as the Republic that can be demothballed in case of emergency. :D
Or maintained in active use for decades or even centuries while seeing all sorts of action rather than some lame fool's preposterous idea that the last ever action they saw was a thousand years ago and ALSO a Sith-involved conflict. :P

I am mocking YOU by the way.

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Re: How the hell do ground invasions work in Star Wars?

Post by Galvatron »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Or maintained in active use for decades or even centuries while seeing all sorts of action rather than some lame fool's preposterous idea that the last ever action they saw was a thousand years ago and ALSO a Sith-involved conflict. :P
What action? The Jedi kept the peace for a thousand years, didn't they?
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I am mocking YOU by the way.
I know, but you're being way too coherent. Please imbibe something before you post again. :P
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