Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Worldwar War Of Equals but with the Aliens being a bit more well equipped.

Battle Los Angeles wiki and expanded works pretty much stated that the Aliens have exceptional drones but they are mostly dedicated to ground pounding and suck at air-to-air. But they have enough numbers to just overwhelm any FOB hosting an air fleet.

If I had knowledge of the BLA Aliens drone capabilities I'd focus more on signal jamming and A2/AD, if I didn't I'd still use a lot of A2/AD and more defensible positions more inland and layered defenses.

Those strategies all assume the aliens get here before we engage. Thats suboptimal. Engage them at maximum range with anything we have that can reach that far, and keep engaging till they get here.

Immy's 35 bashing aside we have a far better training program for the F-18 and other aircraft than the 35. The 35 is still very new and there are not a lot of pilots for it yet and the training programs are still new. The Super Hornet and the older F-18 design on the other hand have plenty of pilots trained on those craft and fairly well developed training routines. But in a year in a half we aren't going to churn out shit tons of F-18's. However we can churn out shit tons of munitions.

Put as many Ballistic Intercept/Hypersonic Threat Intercept systems out there as we can. Possibly dust off the plans and see what missiles we can rapidly convert into air to orbit weapon. Basically like De Marquis said swat as many as we can before they even touch down. One of the best things we can do is to reduce the number of them that reach the ground intact and have anti-air ready to rock and roll to contest their own air power before they even make planet fall and keep the pressure up as they descend. Back up the beach heads and entrenchments with long range guided artillery to pound their grunts as they slog ashore. Have mobile forces ready to contain or intercept leakers or breaches of the lines. Dig in and dig in deep. In the movie they are attacking mostly bases without heavy fortification. The engineers are going to be really damn busy in a year and half building bunkers and defenses to chew up coastal invaders. Make them do a D-Day beach slog with our modern systems chewing them up only we are hitting them before they ever get to the water and even before they hit the beach.

@Angelus: Not sure if sucking at air-to-air is all that helpful when most of their aircraft is stated to go at Mach 7.

There's very few air-to-air missiles that can keep up with that, so I'm not sure the F-18s would be relavant.

How fast can we make a modern military aircraft anyhow, if the fate of the world were on the line?

edited 17th Sep '17 1:30:52 PM by TacticalFox88

The movie had several drones being shot down by F-18s, even if they go to Mach 7 it doesn't means they can stay there, they pretty much have to stop or slow down if they want to use the guns.

Forget aircraft guys. We need to reach out and touch them before they even get to orbit. Time to start working on interplanetary kinetic launchers.

Within 18 months?

Unless DARPA pulls something out of their asses that's absolutely not happening.

Even ASATS are going to be in limited supply and use.

Nah, your fancy Hornets are too expensive and complicated. What we need to do is start mass-producing Curtiss Warhawks. We can use flight simulators to train the pilots, Armada style, then rain hell on them with the six-packs of Ma Deuces packed in the wings. Ask any internet wonk, the Ma Deuce is the queen of aerial warfare (even if we only relied on it so heavily because American-made 20mm cannons were garbage).

I can build a railgun in my backyard in 18 months that could hit something in low orbit. You're saying all the world's governments pooling their resources and working together can't build a system that could intercept targets at least several million miles away?

Considering how much trouble the navy has trying to get railguns on warships I'm going to question what kind of impossible back yard you have.

^ It's easy to make railguns.

Making railguns that can fire more than one shot without wrecking or warping themselves? That's the part the Navy's about figured out.

Yeah the Navy has reportedly licked the barrel wear and tear problem so they can fire it repeatedly without need for a major overhaul.

De Marquis: Ok when did you become a mad scientist trying to build super weapons in their suburban home?

I think he moved to DARPA's backyard.

Electroboom managed to make a railgun out of off the shelf parts but it wasn't exactly lethal.

He he he he he he...

You all laughed but soon, soon I'll show you all!

Well, old fashioned chemical driven cannons work in space too. And of course there are also rockets. There are various strategies available, but I like "throw lots of cheap munitions at them till they go away." Put a couple hundred nuclear bombs coasting along their inbound orbit and lets see how mucj enthusiasm they still have.

Like an inverted Space Invaders. Maybe they'll rock out to Rush while blasting their way through.

edited 20th Sep '17 12:19:49 PM by AFP

I know this is gonna depend on the method of FTL (let's just say it's similar to Star Wars for simplicity sake) in a "realistic" soft-science fiction, would 250,000 warships (NOT civilian ships, specifically under the control of a factions military) be enough to defend the territory of roughly 8,000 light-year radius? Along with another 10,000 exploration ships (i.e. like the Enterprise)?

Given the density of stars in an 8000 LY radius, you could defend that size of territory, but you'd likely be pretty thin if you have hundreds to thousands of inhabited worlds.

Depends on what you mean by "defend". That many ships might not be able to form a line and physically prevent anyone from penetrating the frontier, but they should be sufficient to respond to an incursion, providing that a sufficiently effective surveillance system is in place.

And as always, defend against what?

Even only assuming your talking about a 2d circular plane your taking a huge amount of space. An area of 201,000,000 Light years.

It would depend on how you break the fleet up or clump it together to patrol the given areas. You would need to divide it up according to what areas warrant the most effort vs the least. You also need to consider response times minimum and maximum. Also reaction forces for when an event is too much for an individual patrol to handle. There is also how far out you can extend a logistics chain to keep ships supplied.

edited 28th Sep '17 11:34:07 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Well, I think that's a bit low. The Empire in Star Wars at its height had a fleet in the millions. And they didn't control nowhere near the entire Galaxy.

Might want to just make the territory smaller. Half I'd say, to be frank.

edited 28th Sep '17 10:24:37 PM by Jasaiga

Reminds me of the line from The Orville about how the Union has 3,000 ships exploring the quadrant. And how that's really not very many when you think about it.

3000 is absolutely pitiful.

That's roughly equivalent to the Netherlands, in terms of size.

3000 is definitely far too few. Heck, even with millions of ships you'd need quite some time.

And with 250000 ships defending such a volume... If you don't know from where the enemy is coming, forget it. I just did some quick, dirty, and rough maths and for that radius I get hundreds of millions of stars within the volume. If you want to defend only the outermost 100 light years you are still at several million stars to defend, for 50 light years it's still... millions. And if it's a sphere it would be worse (I assumed a galaxy with a disc thickness of 1000 light years and a stellar density of 0.002 stars/cubic light year)

Tl;dr: Put several zeroes behind the 250000 and you might be able to do it.

edited 29th Sep '17 2:00:01 AM by LordVladek