Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Sorry, I should have clarified. "Superheavy" for this universe means Applied Phlebotinum powered behemoths with more bulk than a Baneblade. Stuff like the Namer would be considered a heavy vehicle, and there's a large gap between heavy and superheavy defined mostly by whether or not it can house the Phlebotinum that makes such huge combat vehicles at all practical. A superheavy IFV would likely be able to transport a full platoon of infantry.

If it cant fit through city streets, I am honestly not sure if there is a niche for it.

Nature is already pretty mean to vehicles, just ask tanks trying to move through Artic, Alpine, or Swamp conditions... and the bigger you get the worse the mobility gets....

Additionally, IFV exist because they do way more then carry infantry inside, they provide light fire support, and recon duties, the later of which is just completely out of the question when your the size of a house, and the former becomes more heavy fire support which is normally under the jurisdiction of tanks.

Basically under normal conditions size is a disadvantage to your infantry carrying battle taxis, which is why outside of urban warfare niches they tend to have armor only sufficient to stop machine guns.... They get in, drop people off, maybe provide some fire support if there is other people there, and leave.... they don't plant there ass and stick around.

Edited by Imca on Jul 20th 2019 at 11:21:20 AM

So basically you have a land raider.

See above about logistics in general. Giant ass vehicles are really niche use devices and either built for a specific or unique mission.

Thanks for the advice. It looks like the superheavy IFV will join the ranks of weird ideas that got prototyped in-universe but never went anywhere. Incidentally, is there anything you'd like to use a superheavy tank chassis for aside from being a battle tank or hauling anti-orbital defense guns?

Super Heavy Tanks normally get pushed to the role of breaking through fortification, at this current point in time they don't exist due to aircraft making them vulnerable, but assuming that your shields solve that.... that's probably what would happen once more. A really big gun, sometimes foward fixed and a lot of armor that is for just driving right into the enemies face, and destroying any fortified position they have.

For as old of a concept as the battering ram is, the principle didn't die until after WWII when airplanes made both the ram and the fortifications themselfs too vulnerable.

this was one of the last ones, kind of a shame it never saw service◊

Edited by Imca on Jul 21st 2019 at 2:25:23 AM

What about a superheavy logistics vehicle? Like a fabrication shop on treads? You wouldn't need heavy armor, you could keep it hidden from air attacks, and you'd be have to make major overhauls to damaged vehicles in the field.

Edited by Belisaurius on Jul 21st 2019 at 9:29:28 AM

Okay....but why? At that point you should just make it a permanent base that doesn't move. Any time you move the base you're taking an enormous gamble on it not being targeted by enemy aircraft.

If an opposing air force even heard a rumor of the base being moved, heaven and earth will be moved to make sure they have plenty of bombers to destroy it.

Plus, what's the inherent value of a shop that moves anyhow?

The only value I could see to a mobile logistics/fabrication vehicle is you're fighting a war where you can't be pinned to a single location.

Which heavily implies you're either losing or fighting a guerrilla war. (Not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

Edited by MajorTom on Jul 21st 2019 at 6:40:38 AM

Partially lessons learned from WW 2. A lot of soviet and wehrmark tanks would need to be taken hundreds of miles back to the factory to repair things like transmission breakdowns. You literally had to take the tank apart just to access the part in question.

I figure if you can't bring the tank to the factory, bring a machine shop to the tank. You don't need to make an entire tank, just replace parts that break down.

There are some categories of rather heavyweight logistic systems used to move artillery and heavy equipment. A number of specialist vehicles exist in the support role for various uses including bridge layers.

Like already mentioned a type of recovery vehicle might be a viable use partly because it can't stray far from logistical lines and that is exactly where vehicles being repaired need to be. You need beefy vehicles to haul around armor to depots and repair yards or a rather large one to contain equipment to do those repairs in the field directly.

The game, Supreme Commander has a very large, shielded, and moderately armed mobile factory. It can make and repair vehicles. It is slow, vulnerable to massed armor/K-bot attacks, massed air, and massed artillery. But when properly supported its a very valuable asset.

I have a hypothetical for you, a scenario where countermeasures have won, and the deployment of missiles on the battlefeild is unfeasible.

While I am also curious as to what this means for tanks given that there primary threat from infantry and air is missiles....

My main thing is what would air combat look like in such a scenario, there is no way in hell I can imagine wwii dogfighting tactics still holding up with jets and advances in manuvering tactics (let alone if due to whatever reason you could still automate the plane(say counter measures having limited range, or planes being big enough to get a an AI that can see through them)), but at the same time missiles are such a foundation of modern air combat I am having issues visualizing what a gun duel between scifi planes would even look like.

Hell even the guns, pretend you have magnetic weapons to work with.... would you go for one big hit, or try for area saturation

Edited by Imca on Jul 23rd 2019 at 3:36:46 AM

You could borrow a page from crazy and look at Mike Sparks love affair with large-caliber cannon based fighters. If I can find it, I will link you a source from somewhere less batshit.

Well I couldn't find anything that isn't batshit insane or mired in conspiracy or wonk garbage to share readily.

I do remember the basic gist of the concept was instead of missiles or rockets an aircraft was armed with 75mm-105mm cannon of some sort. Both recoilless and self-loading varieties were explored. This was partly based on the experiment from WWII heavy fighters like the Mosquito and B-25 Mitchell mounting large caliber guns. They were of at most limited use in general.

You could have EM weapons firing hypervelocity projectiles with a burst fragmentation warhead or just fire a bundle of flechettes. The US is no bullshit looking to mount lasers on aircraft to fight other aircraft AND fend off missiles.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 23rd 2019 at 6:23:40 AM

Assuming you simply don't have lasers or other energy weapons you simply aim via Helmet-Mounted Sight and it automatically points and shoots where you're looking almost omnidirectionally, air combat sans missiles won't look much different than air battles today if both are restricted to guns only.

Either that or missiles re-emerge as MCLOS/SACLOS type weapons guided by the pilot (or AI) as opposed to tracking heat/radar/other signatures emanating off the target.

Assuming the countermeasures in play are all soft-kill measures that is. If it's hard-kill like point defense lasers any kind of explosive shell is out of the question too and even kinetic only weapons can be deflected or reduced. At which point bring on the Frickin' Laser Beams!

Hmm. Moving back to cannon-based combat, the range obviously is greatly reduced, but I dont think the manuvers change by very much. The relative speeds, turning distances and the need to evade hostile fire is still the same.

What are the pros and cons of having your political capital be a space station vs a planet from a military point of view.

Space stations are more vulnerable to military attack, by many orders of magnitude. They also have a supply chain vulnerability: they are not self-sustaining. I've said this before and I'll say it again, from any realistic point of view, a space installation is critically vulnerable to the simplest kind of attack imaginable: KKV bombardment.

If you need to manage affairs down on a planet, you'd rather your government's center of power be on that planet. If you're trying to manage a multiplanetary society, then putting some sort of transient capital in space might be useful, sort of like the United Nations. The individual governments still live and work on their own worlds, but there's a neutral place where everyone can meet.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 28th 2019 at 2:05:21 PM

It always did irk me that the Federations capital was in San Francisco and not some neutral point in space.

Makes the Federation seem almost hypocritical

What if said Capital can move, ala like High Charity for the Covenant.

Well, by definition everything in space is moving. What I think you mean is that it can change its motion by applying some kind of thrust. That's only logical for something freely floating in space, since it might need to correct its orbit or avoid asteroids or whatever. The International Space Station can do that: it has thrusters to correct its orbit against atmospheric drag or to dodge orbital debris.

Your capital might be able to dodge things shot at it from long distance, but you'd be talking a lot of mass. You'd need a fair bit of advance warning. Something moving at solar system velocities (10-20 km/s) wouldn't be a big deal, but if you can get your KKVs up to thousands of km/s, it'd be a rough job. Also, a serious assault wouldn't launch just one projectile; the attacker should be aware that the target has the ability to move so would presumably bracket it with multiple shots in a pattern that's impossible to avoid.

If what you mean is that it can change its location periodically so that people won't know exactly where it is at any given time, that's a little harder to justify, since it's a political capital and knowing where it is is kind of inherent to that concept. "I drove to Washington to talk to my Senator, but they moved it. I don't know where it's got to today."

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 29th 2019 at 7:57:28 AM

A headquarters in space trades the defensive value of a planet for increased ease of access for fleet vehicles that must come and go on a frequent basis. It depends on what element provides the largest defensive value in your universe—can the station safely depend on the fleet itself to defend it, or must the station largely provide its own defense? To the extent that the fleet can be counted on to keep enemies away, it doesnt matter much where it is, and it may as well be placed outside a powerful gravity well. If, however, the fleet cannot reliably prevent attack upon the station, then it would be more prudent to place it on or under the surface of a massive planet. So it mostly depends on your own worldbuilding, and precisely what the offensive and defensive capabilities of the military technologies you decide are in use are and how you see the interaction of those things playing out.

So we count the counterweight station of an orbital elevator as an orbital rather than a land based object, right?

It's entirely reasonable to have space stations acting as transit hubs, maintenance and assembly facilities, and so on. It's much more economical to send ships to and from them instead of making them land and take off from planets. Even in Earth orbit, every ship you can dock at a space station instead of landing saves you at least 7 km/s of delta-V (assuming the landing portion of the trip is handled via aerodynamic braking).

Now, depending on your setting, delta-V may be cheap as air. That's fine, but if it's true, there's also less reason to rely on space stations, unless starships are so big or ungainly that they can't reasonably land. As always, it's a matter of tradeoffs: the easier it is to get around, the less important any particular place becomes.

At K-1 or lower, having a political center of power in space is just plain impractical, since getting to and from it requires an enormous expenditure of effort. Space war at this tech level is absurd. At K-2 or higher, constructing defenses for your solar system becomes, if not trivial, then at least straightforward enough to dissuade any attacker without comparable technology. The idea of an intra-system war — over resources, if not over political or cultural differences — becomes kind of ludicrous. K-2 is when you start being able to destroy planetary biospheres, so warfare is completely Pyrrhic.

In the range between K-1 and K-2 is where you find a mix of chemical and fusion rocket spacecraft moving around a solar system on weeks- or months- long trips, needing support from space stations and other free-floating installations, and where space war is at least possible, if not practical.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 30th 2019 at 9:48:13 AM

The K scale is a very crude scale at best. It makes no allowance for the distribution of power. The power of a star spread across several star systems allows for isolated instances of very advanced technology.

It's more of a measure of industrial might than anything else.

I'm using it as a shorthand to avoid having to go into long-winded explanations of technology and power consumption levels that might all be hypothetical. So sue me.