Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Horizon Guard- not sure exactly what it means, but it sounds badass.

...there is no horizon in spaaaaaaace!

The local space patrol (and damn that sounds tacky) would also have the responsibility to prevent asteroid impacts and possibly orbital clutter.

Angelus: Not necessarily true. When you are in various orbits there is a horizon line. Of course if you go out far enough it effectively disappears.

"Horizon Guard.. the last line of defense for our planet. See a recruiter today."

In the Honor Harrington books, they've got the "Manticoran Patrol and Rescue Service" or something like that. Really you could probably come up with any sort of dry administrative name like that. Or you could just lump it in as another mission of the overall space forces or defense forces.

"So. what are we? Some kind of Horizon Guard?"

Roll credits.

I'm looking at the Standard Sci-Fi Army and it has me thinking about some construction of military forces.

Especially the use of drones on ground or in sensitive locations. I get that the exploding microdrone is the way of the future, but what if a installation has sensitive computer terminals? Would we still send them in?

edited 17th Dec '16 1:03:35 PM by EchoingSilence

Well the way I see it, if there's something militarily valuable, the enemy is going to want to A)Destroy it

B)Reverse Engineer it/Steal it

C)Prevent you from using it against them.

Well there are ways to limit how much destruction an explosive can cause. One is by shaping and directional blast, directed fragmentation, and even just smaller explosive packages. The Switchblae for example uses directed fragmentation to reduce its foot print to something easier to target and control.

"I get that the exploding microdrone is the way of the future..."

Yes! The triumph of an idea! Microdrones for the win!

Ahem... Anyway, in answer to your question, you just make the drones, and therefore the explosive they contain, smaller. Antipersonnel micro-drones needn't be any more powerful than a shotgun shell. They can make them even smaller than that.

They won't be the weapon of the future forever. They'll eventually be replaced by something else.

Well sure. Telekinesis, obviously.

Mind bullets.

Or that awesome Star Trek Sniper Rifle. It's fucking awesome!

It's got a kinetic slug and a built in transporter on the end, you can shoot through walls.

Double Posting for some fun.

Build a realistic militaristic force using Star Wars tech. Empire only, no lightsabers.

Remove the Tarkin doctrine, use repulsorlift, wheeled and threaded vehicles instead of walkers, give the Storm Troopers uniform that isn't meant to intimidate but to blend in the environment, make a star fleet with focus on both bombardment and space combat, drop the super weapons programs in favor of a better equipped fleet, retire the stock TIE fighters and build the TIE/sf with hyperdrivers and shields to counter the X-wings, remove the humans/humanoids only recruitment rule, separate the military forces and occupation forces as in one is focused to combat the rebels and the other is trained to conduct COIN but focused on law keeping, nation building and maintaining order instead of oppressing the living shit out of everyone.

Interesting, but little note about the Repulsolift tech. They got jammers for that, hence the use of walkers, the Jammers only exist for military forces.

I would argue for every thing there except the droping of walkers compleatly, since they make great expidionary vehicles into rough terain, but still reduce there role, and keep them to the 6 leged ones instead of the bipeds and the huge legs of the AT-AT.

Also while the sheilds I fully agree with for the TIE, I also disagree on the hyperdrive, those are extremely expensive and the star-destroyers can pull carrier duty. A built in hyperdrive makes sense for the rebles who cant always get capital ships on a mission, but for the empire lacking one is just fine.... Sheilds though? Yea they need those.

The reason why the Rebels have been successfully pulling raids in the Imperial space is exactly because the Empire needed to deploy Star Destroyers, which takes a lot more time to deploy and are a lot less flexible than star fighters.

If you have hyperspace capable fighters you can have a much more flexible force to answer intrusions on your space. Which theoretically allows you to deploy a small task force to quickly answer an intrusion while a larger and slower one is right behind it.

Well, the AT-ST proved to be a really bad choice though, its high profile and exposed legs without means to get up made it very vulnerable to teddy bears.

edited 19th Dec '16 12:35:58 PM by AngelusNox

So why not develop Hyperspace ships for that purpose?

You mean a smaller star destroyer with a tactical wing of TIE fighters?

Could work too.

Or a specific class of TIE Fighter meant for that purpose as well.

So basically the Empire should invest in X-Wings. Presumably they can afford them.

And some more diversity in starship types than we've seen the Empire employ in the movies (at least in the games they operate many smaller warships, to include many of the same makes and models used by the Rebellion, who presumably are using ships that defected from the Empire, system defense forces, or were outright stolen or "fell off the back of a shipyard".

A light or medium carrier class could go a long way towards providing additional flexibility without needing to either garrison fighters or deploy Star Destroyers. Even the old Clone Wars era Venator starcruisers would probably be more than perfect for the role, if not already overkill themselves.