From: Alan and Carmel Brain <aebrain@w...>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 18:37:54 +1100
Subject: Re: [GZG] Not So Small thought re: Orbital Assault
Orbital assaults: I've been giving this a lot of thought, but from a rather different perspective. First, working out what would be a good game, utilising as much as possible existing game mechanics, and only then coming up with the PSB to justify it, rather than looking at authenticity first, or what happened in Iraq, Normandy, Dnieperpetrovsk, Market/Garden, Gallipoli, Iwo Jima, Klendathu and Hoth. Or how much Fire Support Falkenberg's 42nd or Hammers Slammers could call on. Where I did examine both real and fictional invasions, I tended to concentrate on the more cinematic aspects: the "Commando" operations ideal for SGII, and the base assault on Hoth. I started out with a "top down" approach: what planetary defences could do, what their likely limitations were, how they could be integrated into the GZGverse for FT primarily. The easiest method, and one with the least impact on the rules mechanics, is to have planetary defence bases being merely motionless ships on a planet. After all, if the Planetary Defence Unit (PDU) system is on an airless asteroid, what difference is there between a PDU and a cruiser that's moored to it? But when you get to "objects of significant interest", ie habitable planets with biospheres, hydrospheres, and atmospheres, the problem becomes different. Then, you have to consider interactions of weapons with the atmosphere. For this, taking FT only as canonical, we have specialised Ortillery, which has limited if any Anti-ship (AS) capability, but is vastly better at planetary attack. To get a decent game, we need to have normal weaponry degraded a LOT to make Ortillery useful. We also need to have PDUs cheap enough so they should exist, but expensive enough so system ships (with no FTL) become useful if there are multiple points in a system to be defended. A reasonable break-even point is 2 : if only a single point (planet etc), then use a PDU. If 2, then 2 PDUs or the same cost in System Ships. If 3+, System ships would be better. A better break even point is 3, if tugs are available. So let's say that a PDU costs 1/3 as much as the equivalent ship, providing its built near an industrial base. This is not so much due to the cost of lofting to orbit, but the use of cheaper construction materials ( 100 metre thick Ferro-concrete vs 2cm of Unobtanium), the use of oceans or underground rivers as heat exchangers, or whatever PSB you like. Now a reasonable "firing arc" for weapons is 1 arc, 60 degrees. Otherwise, I dunno, the thickness of the atmosphere gets in the way, whatever. Firing arcs SMs stay at 180 degrees, the things can "bunt" after a vertical launch. Similarly, a PDU can only be fired at by things in that arc. The upshot is that a planetary invasion has 2 possibilities: to land "outside the arc" of the defences, and face a month-long slog vs local guerilla forces and counter-attack to get to the place of interest, or to drop in the teeth of the defences and take its lumps on the way in, hopefully having supressed them with ortillery. A little jiggling of the fighter rules would allow fighters to be both useful planetary defences, and useful planetary attackers, operating inside the atmosphere and so with weapons not degraded. More jiggling, and "commando launches" of fighter-size, but carrying sticks of special forces, could land by stealth and conduct raids to take out the Beam-10s of Navarone. Well-settled planets, with population centres on multiple continents, will have multiple PDUs, with no single "safe" landing site arc. But that invites defeat in detail, if equally distributed, each 60 degree arc has only 1/6 of the defences that it would have if it was all in one place, to state the obvious. A neat way of balancing costs is to make them proportional to the number of sites being defended. An outer colony, with 1 continent settled, will have 1 PDU per X points. An inner world, with 6 continents settled, will have 6 PDU for the same price - simply because it has more industry that's closer. So worlds can be considered in a strategic game as having values of 1-6, indicating approximate population factors. A size 1 world has ~10,000, size 2 ~100,000, size 6 ~1,000,000,000. How much do PDU's cost? Let's say 1/3 of the equivalent ship, and they also get unlimited single-row armour free ( and all but bypassed by specialised Ortillery). Non-damagable Screens too, if the atmosphere is thick (but targets get the same protection). Damage to this armour indicates damage to the environment, civilian casualties etc. Cities could be represented by "passenger spaces". Give the PDUs too much of a pasting, and you'll kill megapeople in the bunkers. Use too many non-specialised planetary attack weapons, like the dreaded KV "Mass Drivers" or Beams, and you conquer a radioactive or dust-covered hellhole. That's why you need ground forces, and have a reason for DS2 and SG2 games. As to the exact mechanisms of landing troops, interface with tactical rather than defence-suppression ortillery etc, I leave that to the GroPos. This view is strictly that of the Sky Marshall, charged with getting the troops dirtside. It covers the space battles where an