TL12+ Mechanized Warfare

[alanb]

Striker assumes a rather fluid, "WWII tank battle" model of warfare. I suspect that what you would actually see would be something like siege warfare, where the defenders are hiding inside the planet, and the attackers are trying to find them.

The orbital sensor networks would be spending their time trying to spot tiny individual targets that don't even appear as threats until they open fire at you, and turn out to be remotely controlled disposable launch systems once you destroy them. The enemy's infantry would be difficult to distinguish from civilians or animals, even if you can detect them at all. And many of them would be dug in nice and deep, and only interacting with you through tiny drone units. And not so tiny missiles.

The defenders would, of course, have difficulties with mobility and resupply. This suggests that they would tend to adopt guerrilla patterns very quickly. But these would be invisible guerrillas with tac nukes.

 

[PBI]

Fifth Frontier War makes neither of those assumptions, as far as I can tell, however, and that's primarily what I'm basing my assertion that things wouldn't be over as quick as others have suggested.

Now, granted, it's only a matter of scale; with an average fleet of 8-12 squadrons, I've seen TL 14 and 15 field armies last 3-4 weeks before being destroyed by orbital bombardment, and oftenimes giving up the ghost in 2 weeks, with bad luck.

There's always going to be targets worth taking intact, be they bases, the planetside facilities of starports, and/or the major population and industrial centers.

Assuming that FFW must be taken into account (due to its canonical nature), it seems that ground units can survive for limted periods of time against orbital bombardment. Also, larger units can survive for longer periods of time, if ony because it takes longer to kill them all, but there does seem to be a point at which the investment in the larger units (corps and field armies) gives diminishing returns, which leads me to wonder if the net effect should be a proliferation of division-size units or smaller, with the reduced number of corps and army-sized units being maintained as a sort of blitz force.

 

[jappel]

The surface bombardment table in FFW has a serious flaw, though: the damage done is a percentage of the defending unit's strength, with no regard for the size of the unit. Dumping 36 bombardment factors onto a regiment yields the same percentage damage as bombing a field army, with vastly different results in terms of actual numbers of casualties. In FFW, you want to bomb the big units and send in the grunts for the small ones.

Also, the maximum damage one can do via bombardment in FFW is 50% of the unit's printed strength per week. It can take many weeks to cause significant damage to a gound unit, and if you don't have 12+ factors you may be there for a long, long time.

The TL modifiers are key also: they range from -3 for TL 8- to +2 for TL 15+, with low rolls being good for the attacker. It's not quite as dramatic as the column shifts for TL difference in ground combat ("See a battalion of the Huscarles shrug off an attack by 15K strength points of guerrillas on Porozlo!") but it means that even large forces at low TLs melt away quickly when the enemy has ships in the sky.

John

 

[Straybow]

TL mods for the attacking force or the defending force? Strangely, neither seems to make sense.

 

[alanb]

It all sounds a little awkward...

Still, if you wanted to go into things in detail, a game of FFW would begin to resemble a massive set of games of Invasion: Earth being played in parallel.

How well do worlds like Jewell and Efate hold out in FFW?

 

[jappel]

FFW deals with TL modifiers in several different ways, depending on the type of combat.

For starships vs. SDBs, the SDBs get a modifier of 1/2 their TL, fractions rounded down (FRD). This is subtracted from the roll of the player attacking the SDBs. (For game purposes, all SDBs are assumed to have the same TL as their world.)

For SDBs vs. starships, the SDB player's roll is modified by the table I mentioned earlier (ranging from -3 for TL 8 or lower to +2 for TL 15 or higher) based on the TL of the SDB. This table is also used when resolving bombardments against ground units, using the TL of the target ground unit.

For ground combat, the difference in TL is applied as shifts on the odds column in the favor of the player with the higher TL. The odds columns range from 1:100, 1:10, 1:5, 1:3, 1:2, 1:1.5, 1:1, 1.5:1, 2:1, 3:1, 5:1, 10:1, and 100:1. So, in the example I cited above, the Ine Givar horde on Porozlo vs. the TL 15 elite Huscarle battalion (base strength of 1, doubled for being an elite unit) starts at 100:1 but with their TL of 10, the fight shifts down to 1.5: odds! This goes from being likely annihilation to "roll well and we might not take any losses".

There's an optional rule called "squadron quality" that is really dealing with the TL differences between the various navies; I don't recall if that's a column shift or a die roll modifier.

Jewell and Efate can hold out for some weeks depending on the dice and how much force the Zhodani focus on them, but you can't recreate the canonical year-long "sieges" in FFW against a Zhodani player with any clue at all.

John

 

[PBI]

It's really not that awkward No more than any other rule set.

I'm not saying that the FFW combat rules are exactly modelling RL, but that they can't be disregarded, because they are part of Traveller.

The combat tables might be slightly clumsy, but I think they do a good job at simulating how the various factors relate to one another.

The combat tables in general have no regard for the size of the unit in question in terms of how many casualties are inflicted, but that's as it should be. It should take longer to degrade a large force to the point where you want to insert your own ground forces than it would to soften up a smaller force.

The effect that differing tech has on combat also cannot be overlooked. I rather like the way that FFW bring tech into the game. It does a good job, within the FFW rules, of representing just how nasty being on the wrong end of a massive tech shift can be; we have such examples in real history.

The squadron quality rule in FFW, as an FYI, gives column shifts in favour of the player with the higher quality.

As to the question of Efate and Jewell, if the Zhodani player is smart, Jewell won't last more than 4 weeks and Efate will never be attacked

Now, just to relate all this back to the topic, while the FFW rules are most definitely not the be all and end all of how all the high tech stuff works together in combat. But what they do do is give some insight into how things might work.

In summary, I don't think the presence of orbital bombardment would not be as devestating (re: instant death) as some have posted. What having enough orbital assets would do, though, is exactly what having air superiority would do today; namely, to hasten the disintegration of the enemy force.

I'm reminded of an old joke that used to make the rounds before the Warsaw Pact fell apart. After the end of World War III, two Soviet generals meet up in Paris. One turns to the other and asks, "So who won the air war?"

 

[Larry Reese]

Hmmmm.... How do TL modifiers not make sense??? Examine any of the technological advances in the Second World War or the aerial engagements in Viet Nam, for example (Linebacker II is a good one, while the US took some losses, they were pretty few compared to the effort expended against the bomber streams - in fact, no other country in the world was capable of doing that and the US was only able to do it because of technological superiority). In short, I think TL modifers are pretty much required, particularly to sensor and weapon effectiveness. But I digress.

What I really wanted to address is the idea that "deep" weapon or command sites are either undetectable or untouchable. Another issue is the idea that "disposable launch facilities" will exist in essentially unlimited numbers and present a credible long term threat to an invading space force (or ground force for that matter).

Firstly, I think it is grossly unrealistic to arbitrarily limit the ability of future sensor systems to effectively detect, track and classify below ground targets, particularly large ones that have an inordinant amount of power generation facilities or delivery systems. Ten years ago ground penetrating radar (or sea penetrating detection systems) were essentially unheard of but are accepted technologies now - nuclear magnetic resonance at a distance detctors would be perfect. Hitler said no nation on Earth could produce 50,000 planes in a year, that America was lying because experts assured him it was technically impossible. Well we all know the answer to that one too. Don't bet on it.

And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that large power sources, particularly fusion, would be easily detectable and localizeable under existing rules. Anyway, be all that as it may, why enter orbit at all? Remain at long range in a covering orbit and deploy grape or grapefruit sized sensor satellite networks (given the current rate of technological advance such small devices would be highly capable and cheap at even moderate Imperial tech levels). Use these and energy source mapping (particularly in response to feints) to locate and attack the power sources or distribution networks. I'd gladly ship in a few mondo fusion power plants to attach to the grid after occupation and destroy all known energy sources if necessary on a highly populated well-defended planet that refused to surrender and for whatever reason could not be obliterated. The costs are not even comparable and as long the transmission systems and industry remain relatively intact production etc... can be restored in a matter of days. Energy is the key - it's always detectible and non-detectible sources are limited in time (batteries), amount (solar, wind, etc...) or can easily be targeted (geothermal utilizing a location hot enough to generate militarily useful amounts of energy). Not to mention the problems of digging deep on a planet with any kind of active core - it gets quite hot at comparatively shallow depths, and anything really deep like that would be suspicious anyway. In short, I think planetary defense batteries (if faced in planning with a high tech large space fleet in opposition) would be quite shallow or actually placed in cities anyway (it's the only way to make them uninviting targets).

As for hordes of supposedly disposable weapons implacements, who pays for all these things, including their siting, construction, maintenance, power, and service infrastructure? Any fixed fortification can be outflanked, and what happens if the enemy doesn't deign to operate where these weapons have been placed (lots of fixed fortifications sound good on paper, like the Maginot Line, but have problems when faced with the real world and mobility). If they are going to be placed in limited numbers in areas where the enemy will have to advance, they'll be detectible unless they're clustered with non-military installations (inviting massive retaliation in my opinion). Anyway, I would guard against any ready made or limited assumptions. A study of historical military fact leads on to the extrapolation that most predictions of the future will only detect shadows of the truth, if they detect any at all.

Larry Reese