I'm not talking about nukes or other WM Ds that will leave permant damage. I'm talking stuff like firebombs, or smart missiles, or kinetic kill vehicles. Stuff that will destroy crops grown in the open or power stations and other critical infrastructure and basically make it hard for the colony to do anything other than hide in hardened bunkers and pray that reinforcements arrive soon. Sure, you'll destroy the existing infrastructure, but the land is still usable, and assuming the both of you have the same enviromental requirements, you can just bring in your own colonist to rebuild infrastructure and sow new crops.
edited 27th May '14 9:54:12 PM by cannongerbil
ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!You talking colonies or a developed planet? There is a bit of a conceivable difference. A planet that has been developed and inhabited for a while is one thing. Some colony world still getting off it's feet or is not quite there to be developed would be another.
Smart missiles fall under precision strikes rather then carpet bombings and compared to saturation fire are harder to use. That means getting close enough to target things with those weapons effectively. As for burn the place down. Pretty much every incendiary weapon is either toxic when burned or contains toxic elements never mind the amount of damage they do to pretty much everything. Never mind the effects of a large scale scorched earth approach.
Kinetic impactors damage depends on their mass and speed so they could be not a bad idea to use to "Oh shit did I just cause a tsunami?" kind of bad.
Now if you are targeting a small area of the planet that is not as big a deal to scour with a heavy hand.
Tom; True but the trick is taking everything intact enough to still be useful. That is where the fun really starts and honestly that is where the interesting and good stories start as well.
Who watches the watchmen?I was thinking that kinetic impactors would be used as essentially bunker busters, taking out hardened targets or specific building size structures such as power plants. They'll be use to take out spaceports and military bases to remove their ability to retaliate. It's going to be really hard to send an object from sea level to orbit, and any launch site capable of doing so is going to be huge, while it will be quite easy to do the reverse, even from quite far away, such as lunar orbit, which will give you quite enough time to intercept any ordinance that is launched your way.
I'll admit, I don't exactly know enough about firebombs to say exactly what types will be used, but in my mind I was essentially thinking "Like napalm, just bigger and dropped from orbit". The kind of things that will start a large wildfire but leave no ill effects once extinguished.
In my mind, the most valuable thing about taking an already established world is that most of the terraforming work is already done, so you can just shuttle in your colonists and let them get to work. Most of the really valuable stuff (breathable air, EM field that blocks radiation, liquid water, etc) is still intact, and since the most expensive part of any colonization effort is going to be the terraforming, it's going to look quite economically attractive to simply take worlds that someone else has terraformed instead of starting from scratch.
edited 28th May '14 4:46:47 AM by cannongerbil
ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!True taking a terraformed world is likely preferable to the long work yourself. Not a bad thought as for a reason to go after a world. I would do it as soon as the terraformers are not looking and squat a big force on it.
Napalm is one of those incendiaries that has toxic chemicals in it. Phosphorus itself is highly toxic. Pretty much any militarily useful incendiary will likely have some unpleasant side effects from being burned, partially burned, or the occasional dud. But if you have the planet long enough and can terraform you should be able to scrub out the issue.
Incendiary effects caused by say energy weapons would be cleaner by comparison but harder to torch a large area unless you can cause a fire storm.
It is hard for us now to send objects from sea level to orbit but when you start talking about the kind of power available to civs that have FTL and terraforming capabilities that is a lot less of an issue.
edited 27th May '14 11:17:28 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
rollin' on dubs
Ah, Gerald Bull
and his High Altitude Research Project
. The attempt was to blast satellites into orbit. Caught the eye of some oil sucking dictator you may have heard about.
Those guns are kind of impressive. He succeeded partially in getting at least one round into space after a gun fired it at 12,000 feet per second. A 390lb saboted projectile mind you. It didn't stay there and eventually fell back to earth.
edited 28th May '14 2:06:42 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?But it did prove you didn't need a gigantic launch facility easily seen from orbit (like how Canaveral and the Cosmodrome are) to get things to space.
Meaning in the future you might have the equivalent of old fashioned "shore batteries" in the form of surface to orbit railguns or plasma weapons or what have you. These guns may be built as static defenses around key installations like spaceports and military bases or built semi-randomly in small outposts/emplacements scattered planetwide. (Or ideally both.)
Thus in the event of planetary siege you are not helpless against spaceborne threats. If Orbital Bombardment isn't a viable option e.g. ROE forbids it or binding treaty upon spacefaring powers or whatever, the planet's defenders have a means to defend themselves without necessarily forcing a guerrilla war. If that option is gone, the invaders have to deploy ground/air forces to knock out the surface to orbit batteries first which while an easy enough task for air forces when engaging sites in cities or at military bases isn't so easy for hidden emplacements/outposts scattered worldwide. The only way to end that threat to your invasion force is get down there and get your hands dirty in a ground war.
rollin' on dubs
Aegis Obital Defense Platform
from Babylon Five.
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Which did prove less than adequate when not directly supported by mobile forces both times it came into play. General Lefcourt's fleet was disabled over Mars when Sheridan moved on Earth during the Civil War, and the Drakh fleet was able to bulldog past it and salt the Earth (so to speak) when the Interstellar Alliance forces were occupied trying to take down their Planet Killer later on.
Heh, those things did not look practical. But they were cool as hell. I can only assume the Cerberus cruiser they shot down was not in fact struck by an Anti-Space munition, but exploded in sheer testosterone-addled squee at the coolness of such a gun.
edited 28th May '14 8:51:04 PM by AFP
The issue is that even if you have surface to orbit gun batteries, you'll get one shot out of it at best. If that shot doesn't take out orbital forces, there's nothing stopping them from just carpet bombing the launch site. The second issue is that, if the orbital forces have even halfway decent targeting computers, they can perform orbital bombardments from as far away as lunar orbit, maybe even further. This gives them plenty of time to detect and intercept incoming weapons, while at the same increasing the difficutly of suface to orbit shots making contact. Sure, planetary forces will get plent of warning too, but they can't really move around the same way spacehips can.
ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!Not necessarily. A big thing is travel time. Let's assume I have a surface to space battery that can fire one round into space every three seconds. Now assume the enemy vessels are at Luna orbit (circa just over 300,000 km away). Now assume the transit velocity of my rounds are .1c (30,000 km/s).
In this scenario it will take just over 10 seconds from firing to impact. In the intervening 10 seconds between impact (or evasion) I can prep and fire a total of three rounds with a fourth being readied at that exact moment. Let's say the enemy vessels return fire at similar velocity immediately after impact (or evasion) with aimbot precision that drops a round right on top of my battery. If I'm constantly firing rounds at the enemy fleet in the time it takes from my first shot to when their counter-strike hits me will be circa 20-22 seconds which means I have a minimum of 6-7 rounds in transit before my battery goes down.
In short it's like the old bombers vs flak batteries battle of WW 2. The flak batteries can keep firing round after round until the bombs themselves actually hit and given that the drop times for bombs were often more than a few seconds those flak crews could put up several more rounds before they perished. (Or found out they had a dud/miss.) Because they could keep putting out rounds owing to travel time the likelihood of at least a Mutual Kill trended towards one.
And this works the same in space though the defenders may have first shot advantage because ships in space won't have the kind of sensor resolution or precision to find a gun battery that may only be a few meters in size. At that size you're pretty much impossible to see from orbit higher than LEO satellites. You might be able to track the projectiles in flight to a general area but that grid square reference is going to be at best a four digit number (a full kilometer sized area) rather than the 100 meter (six digit grid reference) or narrower (8+) type accuracy.
This exercise is assuming Orbital Bombardment is not a viable option for whatever reason.
I'm assuming that orbital bombardment is done with stuff like smart bombs and cruise missles, not ecologically damaging asteriod impacts or the like. Essentially, it's going to look alot like modern air and naval bombardments, just done from space.
You do make a good point about travel time, though. Orbital forces will have the advantage of mobility and being smaller targets, while ground forces will have more surface area to work with and be able to fill the air with staggering amounts of munitions if they are properly prepared. I still think orbital forces will have an advantage, it's alot easier to drop stuff from orbit into a planet than do the opposite, and short of battlefield teleportation technology nothing is going to change that.
ALL HAIL THE WARGERBIL!Also, bear in mind that planetary batteries aren't under the size, mass, energy use, and heat generation constraints that ship mounted weapons are. This also applies to the defenses of said batteries.
In a head to head fight a warship is going to loose against a planetary fort. A ship can dodge and maneuver all day but eventually it's going to run out of supplies and ammunition. An invader either needs overwhelming firepower or knock out the ground batteries via subversive methods like ground troops.
rollin' on dubs
You can launch cruise missiles like Tomahawk from the torpedo tubes while underwater. Sub-launched cruise missiles became a fucking scary ass thought in the Cold War because suddenly you'd see anti-ship missiles pretty much appear out of fucking nowhere with no surface or airborne foe to trace it to.
A similar effect can happen for space. Fire the anti-orbital missile out the torpedo tube and when it breaks the water the missile goes into its acceleration stage and moves to kill the spaceship ultimately. The sub can have firing solution and/or positional data on the enemy relayed to it by other assets. The sub need never surface unless it takes fire or suffers a major malfunction.
And what is this shit about "off board" sensors? Real subs have full radar integrated into them these days.
edited 30th May '14 9:22:26 AM by MajorTom
rollin' on dubs
Hard to use radar submerged and the radar's in the periscope to see ships not look up. Communicating with submerged vessels needs ELF unless they always travel at periscope depth (risking detection).
The easy and cheapest thing is to have them wait, get an ELF signal to come to periscope depth, give them targeting info and have them fire then submerge and wait.
Most Harpoon or Tomahawk missiles are either sent on a bering or from data via sonar. Harpoon can use active radar homing, Tomahawk uses terrain following or active radar homing (from a bering launch) with the ASM variant.
edited 30th May '14 12:35:03 PM by TairaMai
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....Taira: If their sensors are in the periscope they can still fire submerged. All you need is to have something feeding the sub the data. Even then they have data buoys they can hook up with under water. The buoys area really small and innocuous against the surface of the ocean compared to a submarine.
Who watches the watchmen?

True and if you are there to slag that simplifies things on the attackers end. You don't have to be careful or picky about targets. If you just want everything dead carpet bombing and powerful WMD's are a valid option. Just shit as much fire power at the planet as you can preferably from as safe a distance as you can. When you don't need the precision of being picky its get easier to attack something.
The more you want from the planet the more complicated things get. You may reach a point where finding something like an outpost or under developed colony is more ideal. Or you could just find your own uninhabited planet and do with it what you want instead. Might be easier that way. Developed inhabited worlds might be something to avoid unless you have a pretty large advantage.
edited 27th May '14 9:01:51 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?