With a City Planet you'd never need put a single pair of boots on the ground at all. With little means of self-sufficiency pretty much all such worlds have a simple blockade would be the most effective tactic to force their surrender. (After vaping their defensive garrison both in orbit and on the surface.)
Not necessarily. If the City Planet in question is a massive industrial hub you want it intact. If you nuke it into oblivion you destroy the reason you came for it.
Meaning you have two options in taking such a locale militarily:
- Urban Warfare on steroids fighting building to building Stalingrad style across an entire planet.
- Orbital blockade of resources effectively causing the planet to starve. (No ecumenopolis is going to have self-sufficiency in food, fuel and raw materials.)
The first option is only viable if you effectively have the Zerg at your beck and call. The sheer manpower needed to take such a place to root out any and all possible resistance pockets would probably be beyond the capabilities of even interstellar empires like the Imperium.
The second option however is done dirt cheap. Park about 200 vessels in orbit or enough to repel an attempt at blockade running or naval counterattack whichever is more effective and starve the planet. This has historical precedence as for example the Allied forces in the Pacific never took the major Japanese naval, air and army station at Rabaul in New Guinea despite fighting on Okinawa in 1945. The place was simply cut off, surrounded and blockaded into starvation and uselessness.
edited 25th Feb '14 8:43:24 PM by MajorTom
rollin' on dubs
Deep Space Nine shows how a planetary occupation can be, in the words of Sf Debris: "like the alien invasion movies of The '50s". If the occupation force sees the occuptied as "the other" (colony vs. terran, human vs. alien)...there is potential for very ungood things to happen.
edited 25th Feb '14 9:33:03 PM by TairaMai
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....It depends ultimately of the treatment of occupied areas. If the area is taken and held in a "gentlemanly" way, there's a lot less reason to form La Résistance. Most folks aren't going to go all fanatical insurgent in that scenario, doubly so if said invading force left or tried to leave the area's infrastructure intact and the needs of the civilian populace met. (That was what happened in Iraq. Most of the insurgents ended up being foreign imports as the locals increasingly saw it was more beneficial to side with US forces than the Islamists.)
If they go in indiscriminately and flatten everything, starve everyone and start herding off survivors into pens and camps like cattle you'll get a lot of resistance fighters and defiance. (Unless you hit so hard and so deep you break the spirits of the people there.)
edited 25th Feb '14 9:01:44 PM by MajorTom
A planet is a big place and you don't need to nuke the whole thing into oblivion. Just nuke some well chosen places and demand that they surrender between each nuke.
Where you nuke depend on how the planet and culture looks like. The leader and the rich, the poor, some place of cultural importance, some place of infrastructural/economical importance and so on.
Like if there is a lot of poor people that don't like the leaders/rich on could nuke the capital/economical centre and 'liberate' the poor.
edited 25th Feb '14 11:36:11 PM by m8e
And the problem with nukes is they are not exactly small scale weapons. That problem becomes rather manifold when said "select targets" tend to hang around what you don't want to flatten or irradiate.
Never mind it is quite very possible that such a heavy handed tactic will only breed more resistance and stubborn attitudes.
edited 25th Feb '14 11:45:42 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Well, the selected targets could be the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
, that was in 1945 by the way. Now and a few hundred years into the future the nukes could be smaller/more efficient and be more accurately targeted.
and as I said, where you nuke, the tactics, depend on the planets culture. Nuke some place, tell the leaders to 'join' you, rinse and repeat until they do. Now you have the planets military and its rebels fighting each other.
Given that those two nukes were actually fairly accurate for the tech of the time especially by bombing raid standards of the day and still managed to swat a huge section of the city that doesn't really help. Again a nuke is not a small foot print weapon. There is a reason they are called weapons of mass destruction. Increased efficiency just means it winds up being more destructive getting more bang for the same amount of materials. Even with a cleaner nuke there is still quite a bit of radiation involved.
And again 'selectively' nuking anything is just as likely to piss the people off. The military and rebels could also just give the would be invaders the middle finger and keep on fighting. Again there is zero predictability in any one human groups behaviors.
You are also talking about a target on a planetary scale. A few Nagasakis or Hiroshimas is nothing. They are drops in a bucket. Also I wouldn't want to hang around the orbitals of a planet too long unless you have had a very long time to ensure they can't lob anything back at you. Everyone seems to forget planets have a lot of mass and surface area for weapons of all sorts. You have societies capable of interstellar travel and FTL capability lobbing something from surface to orbit at speed becomes rather trivial.
Never mind a nuke is not just a simple thermal flash. Shitloads of destruction comes from flying debris and fire storms as well as the big flash of radiation.
For the record resorting to nukes is rarely a wise idea if your lucky you might get only nukes shot back. You drop a nuke you are invariably crossing a line. If you have the ability to use FTL and settle alien planets you likely have something less likely to piss off the locals then nuking their settled planet.
Who watches the watchmen?War always piss people off, and eh, nuclear bucket drops?
Pissing people of can also be a good thing, it can create conflicts between people on the planet. People get pissed of at different things "The attacked us", "The leaders allowed the conflict to get to this stage", "The leaders/military didn't do a preemptive strike", "Our leaders hides underground while we get nuked, even when they can stop the nukes at any moment", "The attacker haven't nuked region X, people in/from region X must be traitors", "Bastards are invading (actually fleeng to) region X". et.c.
People would also want do to different things, surrender to stop the nukes, defend the planet even if it doesn't help, return the attacks even if it changes the attakers goal to complete annihilation.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it would always work, there is nothing that always work, or that it would work most of the time. Just that a nuclear bucket drop at the right place at the right time can be all what's needed, depending on the goal. Nuke the capital to destroy the economy and the politic stability, nuke the space elevator to stop them building new starships. Nuke a tiny island in the middle of a ocean just as a warning. whatever.
Isn't the fallout part of the fun.
No, to be a little more serious, the fallout can have an area denial effect if needed. People have to be evacuated, people can't start to rebuild right away, it can leave some stuff (temporarily) unusable without destroying them, and so on.
edited 26th Feb '14 5:35:02 AM by m8e
rollin' on dubs
Fallout takes time to go away and depending on how the bomb was built, could be "dirty". Nukes are a last resort unless the user is a A(bomb)hole. There is nothing temporary about fallout when several bombs are used. Cobalt "salted" bombs would be a permanent denial weapon.
The rods or kinetic kill vehicle is a better idea. Hit it with enough force and you don't need nukes. Bust bunkers and crack open city blocks. The rubble can be swept aside. Even at the "slow" speeds of an SR-71, a steel slug of 500 lbs hits with the force of a meteor. For "map fire" (hitting a city or area target), close is within a square km.
edited 26th Feb '14 6:00:32 AM by TairaMai
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....However this cuts both ways. If you're trying to capture the planet then irradiating it hurts you in the long run. After they surrender you're stuck with the irradiated zones that you can't move into either.
As an alternative to a blockade and protracted siege, consider a take and hold of only parts that you want. Send in drop troops to capture transit centers like road junctions and train stations. Target industrial centers, farms, and mines. Hit hard and fast and dig in quickly. Consider what parts of the planet is useful to you. Don't bother dealing with residential areas if you can help it and import your own workers whenever possible. If they attack en masse you can call in orbital strikes. Small raids aren't going to bust through your fortifications. All you have to watch for is someone sneaking in. Importing labor helps, as does fortifications but it's not impossible for someone to sneak in and sabotage your operations.
^ But we were talking a City Planet type endeavor. Those probably no longer have mines or farmland or what could considered "strategic" locales.
Provided you have a conventional planet with wilderness and untapped resources and space to hide/build such weapons. A City Planet has no such mojo.
![]()
Yes, it cut both ways, but the nuker have some control over the fallout (spread, amount, kind of fallout, halflife). "Salting" the nukes with Cobalt
gives cobalt60 that have a halflife of 5.27 years, salting with 64Zn gives 65Zn that have halflife of 244 days, salting with sodium-23 gives sodium-24 that have halflife of 15 days.
If you plan on having men on the ground after a year, you make sure it will be safe enough for them then. Actally, it could be possible to nuke the planet so it will be lethal for anyone living there, but then a few months or years later it could be safe enough for the new people to just move in.
edited 26th Feb '14 8:35:51 AM by m8e
^ If you're going the genocidal route like that you might as well just crash a space station into the planet or glass it into molten lava with plasma weaponry.
Then again if you did that to a City Planet you want to conquer not only have you destroyed the thing you came to take but you've probably invoked the ire of the entire galaxy to respond to your atrocities...in kind.
edited 26th Feb '14 8:15:26 AM by MajorTom
Either way, you're committing down a path where you have to either succeed beyond any conceivable plan or your entire military and/or species dies.
Once you commit to a planetary scale genocide there's really no going back to being just a conventional enemy in need of a classic asskicking on the battlefield. Everyone on that side is thus marked for death.
Tom: City planets are no exception. Military bases, missile silos, and other weapon systems have been planted right near towns and cities with no real problem. If your choice is planting weapons in certain areas or no weapons at all i am sure plenty of people would say fuck it this are is zoned as a military base and use it to house weapons. We have multiple military facilities smack bang in the middle of cities all over the US. If you have no room elsewhere you really have little choice.
Yikes people. Jumping into radiological weapons is even worse. Even with the "cleanest" of the radiological weapons like the Neutron bomb the radiation tends to linger in metal a lot longer and you still have the nuclear initiation and other effects happening including some limited fall out. That is sometimes considered worse.
Who watches the watchmen?^ At the same time on a city planet, such sites are going to be a hell of a lot more obvious than places hidden in the boonies like China Lake or Yamantau. Sure you can see Groom Lake from orbit but it's a hell of a lot stealthier than the Pentagon or Pearl Harbor. If everything's city, the military stuff stands out that much more.
Yeah, nukes are unnecessary for "conventional" orbital bombardment (whatever that is). In the Honor Harrington books, they have kinetic munitions that can be launched from orbit to strike a specific building on the planet (mind, the building in the cited example had the population of a small city, sci-fi future civil engineering being what it is). The missile's firepower was basically determined by controlling it's rate of descent. Need a bigger boom? Simply apply more acceleration. Want a more discrete application of force? Less acceleration.
IIRC, hasn't it become a thing recently to fill bomb casings with concrete and drop them on targets from 20-30,000 ASL? With a GPS guidance package, those things are accurate to within a space around the size of my desk.
I would say, if anti-orbital weapons are a concern, you'd set up a base nearby (for a group with Casual Interplanetary Travel, this could mean basically anywhere in the same star system) and send raids to fly through and strike their targets as they pass, similar to how bombers work today, but on a grander scale. The closer your base, the more rapid the turnaround on your strikes. If it takes a few days or weeks to strike from a planet in the same system, you might be able to launch multiple sorties in a day from one of the planet's moons. Your risk of counterattack gets higher is all.
And on the topic of Easy Logistics, yeah. Watching Revenge Of The Sith, I was immediately stricken by the sheer scale of the war, given the battle over Corouscant, and considering that the Republic had negligible military forces a few years previously. Even if you're not worried about a supply chain following the spear, just imagine that construction project, and finding the manpower to crew those ships.
edited 26th Feb '14 8:13:27 PM by AFP
I like the kinetic weapon idea. But I would tweak it one way. Guidance doesn't start until after atmospheric entry. It is kinda hard to get signals through the shock heating much less do any serious steering unless you want the shear forces to snap your projectile like a twig.
The estimated impact power of the infamous Rods from God was 11 tons. Now keep in mind that isn't all explosive as most of it would have been focused on the tip. Part of the issue was figuring out how to steer the projectile once the plasma envelope covers the projectile.
Basically after you make it through the upper atmo you need to slow it down to guide and steer the projectile.
Couple of other ideas. If you have sci fi ship you likely have energy weapons. If you have the range and the power to push the beams at long range through atmo use those on certain targets.
I saw a neat idea can't recall where though. Sort of a take on the drop pod idea crossed with wind corrected munition dispensers. You drop a container that acts as the heat shielding for a payload. After reentry it slows down and shits out a bunch of self propelled smart drones programmed to attack certain targets. Basically it sprays out a hundred or so "drone" munitions that attack a bunch of targets. Small projectiles hard to track and attack on their own and basically sew chaos.
edited 1st Mar '14 5:28:25 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?

It would depend on how densely populated a planet is. A planet like say Corosaunt from Starwars would be nearly impossible to take by force.
Where as say a planet with at most a few million colonists and their local defense forces is something else entirely.
If you are invading there is something you want on the planet. This tends to keep most militaries from just breaking out the most destructive weapons possible to just burn everything to the ground. Most invaders are traditionally after what a country has inside it. Loot, culture, key pieces of infrastructure, access to certain resources like ports etc.
It really depends on the motivation of the invaders, size of said planet, and population density of said planet. The more surface area the civilizations on it cover with high density population clusters the harder taking the planet will be.
Oh and relative tech and military levels is also an important consideration.
Earth as it is now vs a Galaxy Spanning Empire that has FTL is going to be a curb stomp for Earth. They could have a dozen earths worth of infantry alone.
You don't have to cover the entire planet in armed forces but you can subdue it enough that locals surrender. You capture the capital and hold the population hostage for example.
Keep in mind nothing is ever guaranteed with any groups reaction.
Who watches the watchmen?