Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

As long as you take into account that in this case 'costs the company x dollars US' means 'reduces the company's profit margin by x dollars US'.

Actually it does cost them money directly. They have various obligations and liabilities that kick in. It literally costs them money.

Just because your not making money doesn't mean you don't have to pay your thousands of employees, taxes, equipment costs, and what ever else you have.

Fuel doesn't stop being burned, consumable resources dont stop being used, employes dont enter stasis, you just no longer get ANYTHING out of the other end.

edited 19th Jun '17 12:11:44 PM by Imca

Exactly.

Those that are due payouts for investments still expect them to be paid as well.

A big part of it is that at some point a company was sued over it and forced either by necessity or court order to ensure they wouldn't dinged by it again.

edited 19th Jun '17 12:12:30 PM by TuefelHundenIV

You're taking this quite a bit more seriously than I originally meant it... But given the responses, let's actually get serious:

Sure, if there's some kind of situation that causes a company to end up spending way more money than it brings in, then their daily operations can be said to cost them money.

But on the whole? Businesses have overhead, the old adage 'you have to spend money to make money' wasn't plucked out of thin air. Sometimes that means spending money on things that don't result in direct returns or profit, but that are never the less necessary for continuing operations.

Far too many modern businesses, especially large multi-nationals, act like every cent they spend that doesn't directly go towards making more money in return is lost or wasted and that, therefore, anything that they have to spend money on that doesn't result in them gaining a profit directly 'costs' them money. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't. Even a hefty penalty clause in a contract that, if broken, means they'll be providing a service for free or even at a loss doesn't, ultimately, actually doesn't cost them money if the customer confidence that clause inspires ends up bringing in more money from completed contracts than they spend on the fees of occasionally broken contracts.

Money not made is not the same thing as money lost. And any overhead that's compensated by income from other instances doesn't, ultimately, cost the company anything, it's just results in a reduction in the profit margin.

Rob: No it is still a net loss.

Overhead is expenditure period. That expenditure is aimed at one thing ie creating profit that includes things that don't directly turn a profit but are part of a larger apparatus that does so. You can't cut that factor out. If that overhead expenditure is not covered by profits they are operating at loss. That is lost money period. Nearly every last one of those costs occurs regardless if they are making money for any period. Again they are not losing potential they are losing actual money. They still have to pay out what is owed to investors, lenders, and other groups doing business with them. They can't even escape that in bankruptcy companies that have been gutted to pay what is owed. If you are operating your overhead costs you aren't making a profit your overhead has a negative impact on the income.

Yes being fined is a loss and no a company being forced to pay out is not a good thing for customer confidence with that company by any stretch of the imagination. I am not sure where you got that but fees and fines like that have destroyed companies that couldn't absorb the losses. When companies have a company wide disruption and then get hit with all the contract fees that takes a big wet bite out of their pocket book in real money losses.

The inability to conduct business normally can and has caused significant actual financial loss to companies.

edited 19th Jun '17 7:31:33 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Or Put it another way: imagine just for a second if Wall Street firms, banks, and financial institutions, due to some virus couldn't do ANY transactions for approximately one week.

Just ONE WEEK, of everything grinding to a complete and utter halt.

You're looking a severe recession at bare minimum. Anything longer than a month, and you're talking about the entire world economy collapsing.

Well if you want to have an idea how an interstellar empire or civilization can handle banking, you might as well take a look how the British and the Dutch conducted banking during the Age of Sail.

It breaks down pretty simply. You have one of three states a company can achieve at the end of the day. Gain, loss, or breaking even. That's it.

Now most companies can go a few days with some emergency reserves but those reserves have to be replaced and will run out sooner than later. Companies and banks are very very heavily reliant on their day to day business to cover all the costs and turn a profit. If you cut off their ability to make profits system wide on a daily basis for a week or two, they are going to be hurting big time. Even some of the biggest companies out there would feel the pinch.

edited 19th Jun '17 7:39:43 PM by TuefelHundenIV

If I remember correctly, the entire New York stock market system was shut down for 3 days in the wake of 9/11.

It didn't cause some severe or even moderate recession. (Although the very next week had some huge losses when trading resumed.)

Tom: It was shut down for 6 days and the impact was significant. Not only were a lot of business offices lost but on the return to trading the financial loss was massive. In the first five days of trading the losses were estimated at 1.4 trillion. That isn't counting the sum total of losses in short and long term after the attack. That was pure loss from trading. Other things like the 40 billion in insurance claims and also the dropping from many insurances of Terrorist attack oriented insurance had a notable impact. That isn't a small loss those were literally record breaking and historic losses.

However something to remember here. That was the US stock market not a single company being targeted. They shut down to help mitigate panic and immediate impact. That was a willful and strategic decision that played out favourably to a limited extent in the long run. The market is more flexible and has access so to speak to a significantly larger amount of resources and points of income. Taking down a company is one thing, attacking a market as a whole is another.

A business is not a market and again is highly dependent on being able to operate at will. Sudden unplanned disruptions are not good for business. Lengthy ones are very bad.

The question that should be asked is not that if it is possible, because there are a myriad of ways to interfere with a companies ability to function, but how much effort you would need to take down your selected target. Scope and scale plays a huge role in this. Taking down a business that only spans a few towns is a lot easier to do than swatting a planet side international. A literal star system spanning entity not a market but an individual business entity that has the resources to do that would be a lot harder to take down like that.

edited 19th Jun '17 8:56:20 PM by TuefelHundenIV

An expenditure is an investment, that is expected to show a return. By shutting down the inflow of cash for a time, you are limiting the return they receive on the investment they made. When the return is reduced below the initial investment, businesses go bankrupt. However, if the loss of profits is seen to be temporary or recoverable, the business will probably be able to take out a loan to cover the temporary shortfall. It's hard to deliberately sabotage a large business.

edited 20th Jun '17 8:07:35 PM by DeMarquis

There's only so much a bank will loan.

They have shareholders too you know.

And if it's a war situation, unless the government literally forces them too, (which depending on the type of government it is, may not even be entirely legal) they aren't going to loan out a multi-billion dollar loan to a business, that's in the process of being attacked by an enemy who sees it as a legitimate target for warfare.

edited 20th Jun '17 9:08:29 PM by TacticalFox88

It would be more effective to attack either the supply or the market.

@Tactical: they will if the know that, if the enemy wins, their assets will be confiscated and/or their shareholders shot.

edited 21st Jun '17 2:50:38 PM by DeMarquis

That's not as much a motivator as it should be, especially considering how such persons have acted in previous wars. Idk if they think they're invincible or indispensable, but it takes dire circumstances and probably staring the issue in the face (a la the Battle of Moscow close) for that instinct to kick in.

Okay, we know there's no Stealth in Space, but from a soft science fiction point of view, which would be more appropriate for assessing intelligence? An Space version of the SR-71, or a full-blown Stealth Frigate, with crew compliment in the low dozens?

I was thinking with the former, it'd be situation specific, they'd take a few pictures of a colony, enemy space station, transmit them to back to HQ, and then hightail it out of of there using speed and precision, by flying behind a moon or uninhabited planet then using Warp to warp out of the system in question. Part of a space version of the EA-18G Growler and the SR-71Reconnaissance.

Basically, let's discuss Soft-Sci-Fi Stealth tactics!

If you have soft science 'magical' stealth, then the bigger the better. Sensor resolution is dependant on the size of the sensor. The bigger your ship, the bigger you sensor can be, therefore the more detailed your readings are going to be.

Which is actually part of why I say there is Stealth in space in a truly Hard science work: because the sensors we're currently using to be able to detect small objects in space are literally the size of several football fields and they still don't have the resolution to positively identify (detecting something might be there isn't too difficult, but knowing what it is you're looking at and whether to be concerned about it takes a lot more than that) objects under a half a kilometre across even as close as Near-Earth Orbit without several weeks of observation from several separate installations and no amount of advancement in miniaturization is going to defeat the laws of physics that determine the minimum size a sensor array needs to be for a given resolution at a given distance.

The SR-71 might work in harder settings too because even if you cant HIDE in space, that doesn't mean they automatically know your there.

There going to find you if they look yes, but if your small enough, they might not know to look in the first place.

There's also the submarine option of a relatively normal ship running silent, passively collecting data, either from ambient stuff flying about (think of a listening antenna or a telescope) or from information transmitted by probes sent further in.

Hell, if you're not concerned about the enemy knowing that you are out there snooping, as long as they don't know where you are, make the probe noisy as hell with an active scanner and transmitter setup, making it harder to pick you up.

If you can get, roughly, the same amount of intel from a 2-man crew vs a full complement, there's no reason to risk a stealth ship.

As morbid as it sounds, the military would rather have an SR-71 shot down vs an entire frigate being "sunk".

If you have a magical invisibility cloak, getting 'shot down' isn't an issue any way (unless your enemy has a magical invisibility cloak neutraliser at which point trying to use your magical invisibility cloak to scout out their vulnerable, high security positions is pointless, because that's where they'll be concentrating their neutralisation efforts).

Also, no. A two-man crew in a two-man craft is not going to get intel as good as a full complement of people in a larger craft. Not only because of the sensor size-to-resolution ratio I pointed out earlier, but also because more crew means more specialists. In a small two-man craft with, say, a pilot and a sensor operator, that single sensor operator has to look for everything that could be relevant and even if the pilot is also a secondary sensor operator, that means two people having to divide their attention across a lot of different subjects and since the craft is small, you can't include specialised sensors for detecting specific things without reducing the size, and therefore the resolution, of sensors, specialised or otherwise, looking for other things. A more fully staffed, larger craft however can have specialists with dedicated knowledge so you can have a dedicated sensor operator/analyst searching for, for instance, data that indicates active weapon production, while another sensor operator/analyst searches for data that indicates material production and with the craft's larger size, you can add more specialised sensors for searching for specific things at the same resolution that a smaller craft might search only for general things that might be of interest.

And you might say 'well, the small craft can just scan really thoroughly and then analysts back home can sift through the data, no need to bring them along' and that's true... To some extent. If an analyst with specialist knowledge of material production on board a larger craft spots something that might be a factory producing IF Vs or it might be a factory producing agricultural bulldozers, they have the required knowledge and the dedicated sensors to look closer and determine which it is on the spot. If an analyst back at the base for the data from a smaller craft has the same uncertainty (because they weren't around to ask the two-man crew to pay special attention to that reading), the craft has to an entire second flight just to go back and clarify that single data point. (Or else their side risks having imprecise intel.)

Though a two-man crew is always better than a one-man crew. That, from an intelligence gathering perspective, is an abomination that must never again come to pass. (Reconnaisance through aerial photography was a shitshow back when they had one-man planes where the pilot also had to operate the camera and didn't produce anything remotely useful until they started using two-seaters with a dedicated photographer instead, is what I'm saying.)

The real issue with stealth in space is IR, and unless you plan to blatantly ignore the laws of physics, it's going to be an issue you can't do anything about.

You still have to know to look in the first place, even if you will be spotted when they look, information processing isn't infinite, and you cant constantly look every where all the time.

This. During the previous discussion on stealth in space, I complained about perfect thinking and part of that perfect thinking is not taking that into account.

(The other two parts are thinking that any technology that is theoretically capable of doing something will and must always do that something without fail regardless of the situation and thinking that any technology that can theoretically defeat the use of another technology in a specific situation automatically makes that defeated technology useless in all situations. In it's abstract form as part of 'perfect thinking' the point Imca made is 'thinking that a technology that can defeat another technology in specific circumstances will always be effective against that technology regardless of circumstances'.)