Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Regardless point still stands. Federation is more military wank than a government

Mind, the entire POV of the novel is a guy who spent his entire adult life to date in the military. If you want a treatise on the intricacies of the education system or highway system, Juan Rico isn't your guy and will be honest enough to tell you so. If you doubt me, just ask any random E-3 about how the government and/or society functions. The fact that Rico knew hew was clueless is how you knew he was smart enough to make Captain.

It's worth noting that some of Heinlein's other books, such as Podkayne of Mars and Stranger in a Strange Land, mention the Terran Federation as well and don't seem to paint the same picture. It's possible that the government just evolved and shifted over time, assuming that it was meant to be the same Terran Federation (given that it's Heinlein, not a bad assumption to make about the relationship between any two books, given his massive Future History shared universe).

Edited by AFP on Sep 8th 2018 at 4:56:32 AM

It was intended as a satire of facisim, to poke fun at it.

Problem is that satire seems dead.

Also the Federation has other ways to serve to earn the right to vote. Such as becoming a doctor, you need only serve the nation.

Heinlein's politics are implacable, he was anything at any day, but fascist is not one.

Also the book is based on Switzerland's standard 2 years of military service bit, we wouldn't call Switzerland fascist.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Sep 8th 2018 at 7:31:10 AM

Switzerland doesn't restrict voting rights based on service.

Interestingly, in the book it's mentioned that the vast majority of the Terran Federation's population aren't actually citizens. They enjoy the benefits of the benevolent military dictatorship they live under, but have literally zero say in its governance. The whole "doctors and scientists" thing is somewhat disputed as well, as Heinlein himself later claimed most Federation citizens took that route but the book seemed to imply only doctors or scientists serving a direct governmental or military purpose were citizens.

Civilians and Citizens, Civilians are granted full rights and freedoms, except to vote, voting is relegated to Citizens after serving 2 years of service. The idea apparently being that someone who actually gives enough a damn to take action to get to vote should have say in how the government is run.

Also supposedly the Government has to actually give people a job and help them find a service to get said right should they so choose.

I wouldn't call Heinlein a fascist, but I would call this government rather unbelievable.

It’s hilariously inherently unstable. You’d eventually end up with a group of uneducated and ignorant. civilians and whatnot.

There’s literally no downside to being a civilian so why serve? For a right to vote? Where most couldn’t be bothered anyhow?

Regular people don't have "full rights and freedoms". In the book at least, they have limited access to education and welfare, and it's implied that only the richest civilians are able to provide themselves with what citizens get. There's also some pretty uncomfortable stuff in the history of the Federation, particularly the parts where 21st century democracies are brought low by their supposed weaknesses.

Heinlein himself wasn't a fascist, but Starship Troopers has some stuff in it that can rightfully be called fascist. It's sort of his flirtation with crypto-fascism and militarism, an exploration of what a "good" military dictatorship would look like in his eyes.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 8th 2018 at 6:20:12 AM

I get the idea of making more informed voters, but honestly not like that. That's just unstable and broken, speaking more to Heinlein's rather idealized view of humanity.

The fundamental principle underpinning Democracy is as follows: if someone stands to be affected by a decision, then that means they get a say in the outcome of that decision.

That's it. That is the basic idea that gives Democracy it's overwhelming moral legitimacy, and it is precisely what the UCF abrogates with enthusiastic contempt through it's "Service Guarenteees Citizenship" policy.

The people living in the Federation should get the vote because they stand to be affected by the Federation's policies. Full stop. Everything else is just rhetoric.

Edited by Gault on Sep 8th 2018 at 10:39:56 PM

My take on the whole Heinlein Federation thing is he's emulating Ancient Sparta. At their height the Spartans were actually the minority, the majority of their population being vassals, slaves and fiefdoms of sorts. And the main way for Spartans themselves to receive full rights and honors was the military.

I'd argue maybe the Federation could've worked in the ancient world, but now?

I really wish he'd gone into a great amount of detail of just HOW it came to be. Cause what little information we have is, to be blunt, complete bullshit, even by Sci-Fi standards.

I'm reading up on the SST timeline right now. As it stands in the lore, the Veterans began as a vigilante organization composed of ex-military members that was formed to oppose the general lawlessness that had come to predominate during that time. This vigilante group would then go on to originate the Federation as their practices became normalized in the territories they controlled.

My personal take- and a more realistic one, at least in my opinion- is that the Federation is the long-term consequence of some military coup d'etat in Earth's past. All that "the veterans saved Human civilization from the decadence of the Old World" is just self-serving propaganda cooked up by the UCF's Ministry of Information equivalent. Even with their origins staying the same, the Federation resembles a kind of permanent emergency military government, just one that has become the new normal.

The core story is a bug war featuring nuke-equipped space marines. The politics is just the backdrop. Heinlein was very good at world-building; he just didn't feel it was that critical for what amounts to a propaganda piece. Frankly, the most unbelievable thing about the Federation is that most people seem to just accept it. You'd think the paranoid anti-government nutters would be out in full force.

Reading through on the wiki Heinlein said that he thinks revolution is impossible in the Federation.

Which is...lol

Yeah, he got very Pollyanna-ish about some of his future society ideas. It's one of the more endearingly ignorant traits of his writing. Which I love, don't get me wrong, but I certainly don't agree with his politics or his opinions about human nature.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 9th 2018 at 9:42:57 AM

I think I agree. There would be regular resistance to a government easily perceived as harsh or just not fitting any group in the populaces ideals. The bigger the population they rule over the more likely that is going to be. Which is why ruling the world would suck really hard.

Which is why I say the Federation only makes sense is if the Military took over in like an emergency government, in response to an alien threat, and that lasted several generations, and then it evolved.

No way it could come naturally.

I'm actually surprised vassalage isn't more common in fiction as it would allow a very large empire while keeping smaller nations semi-autonomous.

Edited by Belisaurius on Sep 10th 2018 at 8:21:27 AM

^ The problem with vassalage is it doesn't work in the present world. It won't be reintroduced in space colonization.

Plus there's also the history of vassals deciding to become independent states, separatist movements are rife in the history of vassalage. No spacefaring empire would dare let itself collapse because its vassals suddenly declared independence.

That's the big reason why nowadays things like autonomous/semi-autonomous areas are few and far between, most of the ones presently existing have metaphorical guns pointed at their heads to dissuade any notion of declaring themselves independent.

Edited by MajorTom on Sep 10th 2018 at 9:51:16 AM

I know since space is so fucking huge that the odds of this happening are damn near nonexistent, but would it be possible, aim your ships coilgun and fire a relativistic slug at a planets gravitational orbit (if I'm even using the correct term, it's late af), and have it slingshot around a planet's orbit and hit an enemy starship on the other "side" of the planet?

Not if you want to use relativistic speed anything. At velocities where you measure in significant fractions of the speed of light, "low level" gravity sources such as planets produce a negligible effect on the trajectory of such objects.

You could do it if you fired to the other side of a sufficiently large and/or dense star or stellar remnant (neutron stars, black holes, pulsars, etc.) but around a planet of 13 Jupiter masses or less? Not a chance. The deviation would be microscopic.

Now, if you did it with a much more realistic muzzle velocity, say 15-20 km/s? You could pull that kind of shot off in Earth orbit, maybe even the Moon.

And if a ship is hiding near enough to a neutron star for that trick to work and isn't obliterated, it's got tech that you don't want to mess with.

The math on this is actually pretty easy. 0.1 c is (approximately) 30,000 km/s. Earth's surface gravity is 9.8 m/s^2. An object at that velocity would take about two fifths of a second to cross Earth's diameter. In that time, the planet's gravity would change its velocity by less than 4 m/s, or .00000013 of its initial velocity.

It'd be like trying to deflect a high-velocity rifle bullet with the wind from a desk fan, only several orders of magnitude less.

A projectile moving at .01 c (3,000 km/s) would take 4 seconds to transit Earth's diameter and would be deflected ~40 m/s, or .000013 of its velocity. Using this approximation strategy you can get an idea of the deflection of a projectile at any velocity, although you need much more complicated math to calculate a precise trajectory.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 13th 2018 at 9:11:09 AM

Try using missiles instead. At 20 km/s you're still moving at a good interplanetary speed but aren't so fast that you can't gravity boost.

I was doing some searching to see if I could isolate the gravitational curvature that could be induced in a relativistic projectile by a close encounter with a neutron star and it's just too variable. Near the surface of such a star, the gravitational acceleration can be as high as 2.0×10^12 m/s^2, so intense that light itself can be trapped in orbit. If you could somehow survive standing on the surface, you could see all the way around the star and check out your own backside. That gravity decreases rapidly as you get farther away, according to the inverse-square law.

You could calculate almost any trajectory for a relativistic projectile you wanted in such circumstances: you could make it do loops, or turn 90 degrees, or orbit the star. However, the matter of the projectile itself would be subject to extreme tidal forces and might be torn apart. Further, "hiding behind" it is kind of nuts as a concept. It is unclear how anything made of matter could survive anywhere near such an object, and neutron stars have radii of less than 15 km, so it's not a very big shadow.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 13th 2018 at 11:22:40 AM