Looking at some vertical farms on Google Images, I think if it the farm itself doesn't rise above 50-100 meters I think it can be done. Beyond that though, you're right.
Perhaps make whatever food the enemy needs on the middle floor? If they want it bad enough they have to send out a lot of bodies. Attrition and all that.
New Survey coming this weekend!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Fires in high rises is bad mmmk. Seriously that is a good way to just kill everyone.
The smaller the building the easier it is take. Not necessarily about height but the number and dimensions of floors. The more individual spaces there are inside a space the harder it gets.
Who watches the watchmen?
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Hmm...about taking worlds at all...does the nature of space conflict—fighting over what are essentially mobile oases in nothingness—mean that there are no strategic points, i.e., one has to take every planet of a rival space polity one by one?
edited 2nd May '17 1:14:46 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
The space may not be stratigic, but the planets are.
Which means the map may be more like a checkers board during the conflict, but there is definitely tactics beyond blob it all.
One of the Honor Harrington books has a pitched battle involving several megaskyscrapers, each the size of a modern-day city, not counting the surrounding areas. They make it very clear that a battle for such a structure, assuming you aren't willing to just flatten it from above, is a very drawn out and bloody one.
In that particular example, it's only made worse by the fact that the attackers were trying to keep things relatively low-key by using the equivalent of large-scale SWAT teams to launch what was supposed to be surprise raids, rather than using their actual first-rate military units. One scene has a group of baddies going through great trouble to take the ground floor of one of the megatowers only to have the second floor get dropped on them by the defenders.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
See, the thing there is that even fighting over such structures at all is ultimately rather silly. Just cut the place off.
And then inform the occupiers that regardless of whether it's still held by them or glassed to the ground the building is equally useless to you, but far more dangerous to you occupied than glassed and really, that means glassing it loses you nothing and loses them everything, so maybe it's a good idea if they'd just surrender and everyone can gain something out of the situation, even if it's just their lives. And that while, of course, soldiers might not want to surrender, all civilians are cordially invited to leave without being detained. And that anyone leaving unarmed will be considered a civilian. *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*
Because let's be honest here: If the people occupying the skyscraper (or other massive structure) have no escape route and no help incoming, while the people surrounding them have access to reinforcement, then no matter how bloody they make the fight, they are eventually going to lose. 'No surrender! Fight to the last man!' looks very nice on a propaganda poster, but it isn't and never has been a sound military strategy.
Angry gets shit done.
As I recall, the government was interested in making a highly visible crackdown on a population they suspected to be responsible for a number of terrorist attacks and assassinations recently. They were wrong about who was responsible, naturally.
IIRC, there was also a bit about the city being old enough and having had enough unauthorized modifications made to the infrastructure that the government didn't actually know where all of the entrances and exits were. The towers sat on a veritable hive of underground passages, utility tunnels, and even roads. Not nearly as bad as the Honorverse depiction of, say, Chicago, but pretty gnarly.
Irrelevant.
Say for example I was a Captain in charge of an entire (mechanized) infantry company and my objective was to take and secure a Vertical Farm (VF) and the area surrounding it. Unless my CO is deliberately ordering me to charge in recklessly and clear it room to room no matter the cost, I actually need not fight in the VF at all. If my company moves in and meets only minimal or token resistance in the area and then falls back to the VF as a sort of fortress, all I'd need to do is surround the VF, cut off all access and resources such as water, power, heat, and especially reinforcements and ammunition. Then I wait. Without water, the defenders in the VF will do themselves in one way or the other in time. They'll either be dead from dehydration, starvation, shot and blasted to Hell by my men when they stick their heads out the window to see what I'm doing or ultimately they surrender and I take the VF without needing some grand Storming the Castle moment. If my ROE is permissive enough as in I don't need to capture the VF per se, just the geographic location, I simply surround the building and call for fire from artillery and air support on station. I have no need to waste the lives of my men picking through every hydroponics bay, greenhouse, hallway, office, janitor's closet and more.
This is Classic Warfare 101 from way back to the days of Sun Tzu and the others who wrote The Thirty Six Stratagems. If the enemy retreats to a fortified position, do not waste men attacking recklessly. Instead, encircle his position and starve them out to force a surrender or a desperate attack into your prepared defenses for an easy slaughter. Or in modern terms, call for fire and level their position. Or if my ROE says I need the VF intact, I get on the horn and call for reinforcements to keep this position bottled up as my company bypasses this strongpoint and moves on to our next objective.
The bottom line is, the laundry list of reasons why I'd need to fight for every centimeter, every inch of such a place while on the attack is appallingly short. As in you can count them on your hands short. Whereas my options and possibilities for what I can do to demolish their position, besiege it and wait it out, bypass it and move on and more is vastly larger.
edited 2nd May '17 5:46:58 PM by MajorTom
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Tom: Small flaw with your plan. Namely trying to cut off access to food and water. It is a farm and would quite obviously have those supplies on hand. There are also such things as time scale and timetable limits. You may not have the luxury of laying siege which by the way is a resource and time intensive process in and of itself. You have no way of knowing how much food, water, ammo, personnel, and other expendables may be in such a structure. In fact it is one of the strategies of war to force your opponent to try and lay siege to a fortified space as it forces them use units and resources they could use elsewhere.
That is the other pain about sky scraper like towers. They are more difficult to recon even the big glass walled ones.
edited 2nd May '17 6:46:44 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Well with a vertical farm, I know the water at least would come from outside, even if it was highly efficient in use and recycling of it. Which is a stark contrast to irrigated land in a river basin, not much you can do to stop the water there.
If my time scales and time tables don't allow me to besiege and wait out (or otherwise bypass) a defended position like that, if my ROE is so restricted that I can't level the place without a fight, then either my CO is a flaming idiot or the politicians who started this war are idiots like him.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Or your tactical/strategic situation is such that you have no choice but take the riskier approach in seizing a key objective. That tends to happen quite a bit.
Even if you cut off water the amount of water that would still be inside a structure like that would likely keep someone going for sometime.
Who watches the watchmen?
Vertical Farms also have emergency reservoirs of water IIRC in case of the primary water supply needing to be cut off either from contamination, maintenance, new pipes, etc.
New Survey coming this weekend!
Trying to trap people in a skyscraper, however, provides challenges of its own, as they have the advantage of height, which allows them the option of dropping things on you. They don't even have to drop particularly heavy things, if you have enough height, even things like reams of paper would probably be pretty nasty. Really, the best way is to block access to the skyscrapers, without actually trying to take them.
Feeder
They could also just throw their spare change, and if reinforcements arrive you're cut off too. You have an even big disadvantage than the defenders because you can't go up.
There's a new sheriff in town >tips fedora
It might make more sense to skirmish it out. Surround the skyscraper and snipe at it from all angles, pepper it with MG fire and the occasional mortar. If you can get fire superiority you can scale the building and come in through any window. Hopefully, you can find a weakpoint in their defenses and form a beachhead and if you can cover the stairs and elevators you could divide their forces and destroy them in detail.
Still not ideal but better than storming the bottom floor.
Not as long as if it were unmolested. If you cut off the power, a lot of water supply goes with it because you can't run recycling equipment and a lot of water otherwise is trapped in systems that are non-potable. You try drinking water from the boiler that's loaded with anti-freeze/anti-corrosion chemicals (they turn water red!) and live! I all but guarantee you the guys defending a VF didn't pack a portable distillery.
Another hitch with the skyscraper siege: You have to control access from the air. If the enemy has air resupply, then they can wait it out until the cows come home for as long as the air bridge stays intact. They can even provide their own fuel and generators to keep the power on.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
If you don't control the air, you have bigger issues than the enemy resupplying.
Such as the enemy not using their unchallenged air power just to deliver care packages, but also to deliver a different kind of 'care package' to your own troops
Angry gets shit done.
Air superiority is important.
If they've got the top of the building, they've got a pretty good spot for a SAM site.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Actually they kinda might not. Most SAM installation are pre-configured to use radar to track their target and that radar tends to need to be angled so that the lower end of the envelope is parallel to the surface (or the top of the trees if there's a forest) to since conditions near the surface tend to block or distort radar imagine and the less interference you create for yourself by bouncing radio waves off the ground nearby, the better (whence the old trick of flying low to try and approach 'under the radar').
While it's true that many SAM sites in real life are place near mountains or other high elevations, they (or at at least their radar emitters) tend to be placed as low as possible near the incline, because the impending elevation increase forces incoming aircraft that are trying to stay as low as possible to start gaining altitude way in advance, which puts them within the envelope of a .
A vertical farm, by its very nature, would tend to be well inside an urban area surrounded by lots of other tall buildings that would distort or outright block radar. The best place for a SAM site is on the ground at the edge of a city, (or, if there's a forest or other not on top of a building in the middle.
That said it is a good spot for a conventional style AA gun of some description or a SAM site using IR tracking (although IR tracking is very limited in range within an atmosphere compared to radar, especially above an urban area with lots of heat sources around).
(And boy am I glad the research I did on the strengths and limitations of radar turned out to be useful outside the topic of hypothetical stealth in space.)
edited 3rd May '17 1:11:26 PM by Robrecht
Angry gets shit done.
^ Well for SAM sites, the launcher(s) could be on the top floor but the radar(s) would be elsewhere connecting to them.
But then again, given how most SAM's (even Patriot) in the real world are on TEL (Transporter, Erector, Launcher) type setups or trailers or on self-propelled fighting vehicles, putting a SAM on the roof becomes much more difficult.
Of course that brings up a different problem too. Militarize the roof too much and you make the roof a target in such a way as to not bring the building down (or give all the more reason to knock it flat to begin with). Thus trapping any defenders in both ways from the ground and from the roof.
Depending on the circumstances, no one is gonna want to destroy what's essentially free logistics/food unless it's ABSOLUTELY necessary.
New Survey coming this weekend!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Tom: Maybe you didn't understand the part about the whole farm thing. Plants need lots of potable water and even systems that mix in other additives overwhelmingly keep the water and additive separate until they are ready to be mixed. It would trivially easy to tap the potable water source. Your idea is still falling very flat in trying to cut off water and food when the building is basically a giant store house for both.
You don't necessarily have to control the air to make the assault. Contested air space was common for US operations until the Gulf War. Controlling the air space for a limited time or at least contesting it yourself could be enough to carry out the operation or at least the parts that require air space to at least be accessible.
Yeah tall structures inside a city are usually not the best place to set down radar based missile systems. The various IR systems would fit the bill most are small and light enough and ideal for keeping the type of low slow flying aircraft away that would be used to land troops on a roof. Just don't expect them to be as effective in range as their radar based cousins. The AA gun option is a good option in general but the more reliable and accurate ones are radar based as well.
The other issue is that all of those systems are vulnerable to pop up threats simply approaching from below the target buildings roof top and popping up suddenly. Even gun systems would be hard pressed to respond in time especially if the target is hell bent on hosing down the defensive weapon in question. The other big issue is limited ability to fire downward would limit the weapons area of coverage and would create a lot of blind spots plus the physical structure it self would block both line of sight and line of firing. Troops on the roof with MANPAD's can at least aim down over the edge and improve their area of coverage.
Like Rob suggested it would make more sense to put the defensive units further out. You could park some of them on buildings notably lower then the structure you are defending. AA guns would work in that role as well, given they tend to have a high angle of fire capability in most systems. SHORAD systems would be preferred because they tend to be more compact and comparatively light weight.
As for climbing the tower. From the ground up that really isn't a viable option unless the structure isn't all that tall. You would have limited vertical reach and most vertical structures are not exactly ideal for climbing on or around. Even using ladders, ladder trucks, etc. you would be limited in how high you could go. The best option would be to start on the roof and then head down using rappelling and descent equipment and setting up link up or stop points and going from there. Breaking out any windows you want to enter is a good idea in general. Firing mortars at the building, not so much. You may wind up doing more damage then you are willing to the structure in the process of shelling it. Even 60mm mortars can pack some punch in their shells. Plus you never know what is inside and might trigger secondaries that could cause trouble or break something you didn't want to.
Assaulting up stairs is pure nightmare. It is always harder to fight up then down. Gravity in this case works in their favor and it is far easier to drop or lob something down around stairs then it is to send it up. You would need a lot of warm bodies plus some decent fire power to make it work. Which is in part why launching an assault from above is often preferred.
If we start going to the softer side of sci fi you can use some interesting options. The obvious jetpack or some sort of fligh tor limited flight capabilities. This gets you up quickly and hopefully where you want to be. The jump jet ala Starship Troopers/Warhammer 40k/other sci fi works would possibly allow you access floors quickly that would normally be out of reach. Some sort of self securing rapid ascent equipment. Namely something that anchors a launched cable and anchor that self secures and can pull up the object quickly. Pretty sure others will pitch in a few other ideas.
Just to get this out of the way for De Marquis. Flood it with a weaponized mini/micro drone swarm.
Of course the easy answer is to just forget the whole thing and drop bunker busters that will penetrate multiple floors and wreck the buildings stability, paste it with artillery, or just simply demo the fuck out of the supports on the bottom floor.
edited 3rd May '17 6:28:06 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
What if someone brings TWO flamethrowers?