I'm reading Strategy Strikes Back, which is star wars military tactcs. Basically.
It's using star wars as a story to talk about modern military capabilities. Which is cool.
One essay discusses the inappropriate size and scope of star destroyers in fighting a guerrilla war. Which seems right; you want small, nimble ships to deal with a small, nimble opponent.
This same novel also deals with the lack of insertion forces; nobody has marines. Yet, several battles depend on ground forcing blowing shit up.
So, here's the question:
-- What sort of forces are tactically and strategically useful in a galaxy far, far away?
-- Similarly, what sorts of ships are useful?
-- What sort of starfighters make sense?
-- What training do your troops need?
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I think this depends first on what sorts of things are valuable and can be taken or held by force.
ReplyDeleteAre ships valuable enough to capture? You need insertion and boarding parties.
Are zones of space valuable and can be held by force? Like trench warfare in spaaaaaace? That implies an entirely separate set of tactics.
On the other hand if repurposing enemy vessels and bases is sufficiently hard, you realistically don’t need ground troops, just mass drivers. Craters put up very little resistance.
There could even be a sort of “soft target” doctrine: one you control a planet’s orbit, you offer reasonable terms of surrender and they accept. Fleets meet (or ambush each other) on the way to orbits and try to inflict unacceptable losses or reduce the force to where it can’t overwhelm the planetary assault batteries.
Saboteurs of said defense batteries may be extremely valuable troops, but they’re not going to be inserted during battle. Inserting them is a spy game.
But if there are space-lanes and hubs, fortresses become important, which is different. Your FTL impacts this a lot.
> Your FTL impacts this a lot.
ReplyDeleteA million times this. A galaxy far, far away seems to allow point to point FTL for any class or size of vessel.
Yes, it does — although not in and out of planetary wells, I think. The...implication? Is that precision at that level is low, and moving through something at light speed sucks, so you don’t want to jump in too close to anything big.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I do think they did FTL right into orbit over Hoth, and around the Death Star Mark II, and fleets FTL together. So...yeah. I guess I don’t know enough about how Star Wars FTL works to really speculate soundly about tactics.
So basically if you are making a game of this you have to limit ftl somewhat. Allowing ftl to freely move anywhere means establishing that there really is no space strategy. That is why it seems like there is a gravity well limitation. Otherwise you cannot protect, blockade, or really establish territory.
ReplyDeleteNext question for space combat is what protections exist against weapons and how big does a weapon need to be. At this point I feel like you want to throw away real world considerations, because they are boring.
In Star Wars it seems like a weapon carried by a small craft can do a decent amount of damage, when it "gets through." The feel they seem to go for is that any weapon could hit and do damage, if it was in the right place.
By contrast in star trek with their shields it feels like you need a big ship full of weapons to wear away the enemy shields, and a small ship rarely makes a dent. It's basically a more interesting version of the ship to ship combat in A Mote In God's Eye, where two ships stood still and point lasers at each other until one explodes.
I would imagine that one fun gaming variant of a star wars universe would have a combination of four styles of ship. Capital ships carry fighters and have big weapons that threaten planets. Fighters can perform tactical strikes on the ground and threaten capital ships. Some kind of mid size ship is loaded to the brim with smaller weapons to protect the capital ship from fighters. (Side question, why are there no homing weapons or missiles in star wars...?) Support ships have random other functions that are more specialized.
I think you are essentially right, Sean Leventhal.
ReplyDeleteI'm not altogether sure that Star Destroyers are useful against guerillas. They've got 40,000 crew, 60 turbolasers, as many ion cannons, and 72 star fighters. Oh, and a crapload of stormtroopers.
They are fortresses, right.
Instead: What happens if you have specialty ships? Some with guns, some with fighters, some with marines.Maybe some that can extent the gravity well so no one can leave. At least in the Zahn books, there are specalty ships that are interdictors.
Now, if hyperdrives had a limit on size of ship, then sure you can have a limit on ship size. But, we know not only do X-wing starfighters have hyperdrives, but for sure the Falcon does.
Because, of course, star wars ships are all about the futility of large organizations and the utility of X-wings.
Star destroyers can be useful against insurgents because they carry fighters, Stormtroopers, etc.
ReplyDeleteFor specialty ships you could look at military aircraft. At a broad level you have fighters, which are flexible but have less ordinance, bombers, with a lot of ordinance with one goal, and helicopters and other craft designed to back up people on the ground and really interact with them.
You could also do things with other specialized goals, sensors for example. Or weird shield things.
I would also like to see what a rag tag fleet looks like built from ships with non military goals. What does a repair craft look like, and how can it be retrofitted into a passable fighter? Can an escape pod be used for something interesting?
And of course, why not just use a bunch of freighters instead of these expensive military vessels since the millennium falcon is so badass. ;)
> expensive military vessels since the millennium falcon is so badass.
ReplyDeleteI mean, right.
So many things being more questions than answers. The Falcon is a light freighter who can double as an interceptor. Weird.
One gap I notice in Imperial forces is the lack of mixed arms: units that combine scouts, infantry and heavy weaponry for maximum effect.
ReplyDeleteThe whole “nuke it from orbit” thing, for instance, largely fails against mixed arms. You can definitely muss their heavies, but enough bombardment to wipe out mobile scouts or substantially degrade infantry (who, counter to A-team physics, largely just hunker down and crawl out of the rubble later) ... well, I guess trying to achieve that eventually led them to the Death Star. Nothing less will do the job.
The empire seems to understand they should have heavies, scouts and infantry... but then they’re like “okay, so... heavies go in front, I guess? Because they’re scary. And infantry, you cluster together over here. And scouts, uh... you all go chase that flying hamburger. There! We’re set!”
Star Destroys also don't seem to have turrets, so they seem to be essentially ronsides shooting directly ahead.
ReplyDeleteWith fighters. Because that makes sense.
Tony Lower-Basch yes!
ReplyDeleteWe see it in the Rebellion and Resistance forces a bit more, but even Mon Mothma (Leia's boss, more or less) emphasized a fleet, hence the cruisers we see in Jedi.
Seems a bit tangential to the original discussion but I'd imagine the big flashy oh so much force military being incapable of dealing with the guerrillas may have been the point, shortly after Vietnam?
ReplyDeleteTake the Opening of Star Wars IV: A New Hope: the best movie there is.
ReplyDeleteA single rebel blockade runner. The Tantive IV, a Correllian Corvette.
Being chased by an ISD. Which is blasting it sure, but ...
a) where are the fighters? pew pew!
b) Where are the mid-sized ships? Essentially, destroyers.
c) There seems to be nothing keeping the ship here. Oh sure, it's being kept here because politics, but I mean: In terms of the conflict, we see no reason why the ship can't just goto hyperspace.
That's probably true, Patty Kirsch!
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, the Tantive IV itself is big!
ReplyDeleteIt's a consular ship! It's got hallways, and guns, and and and....
There's no diegetic logic to anything in crypto-fascist space fantasy, every single element is there to look cool and advance the plot, in that order. None of it makes sense.
ReplyDeleteThe thing Holdo does in the latest movie, for example, renders capital ships obsolete and its use and efforts to defend against it would define naval doctrine. The implications are staggering. I guess nobody thought of it in a thousand years but it sure looks cool and advances the plot.
Jason Morningstar I mean, yes. Star Wars is better as stories that we all know about, so we can derive meaning from.
ReplyDeleteWhich is more or less what the book is doing; more people, even at West Point, know Star Wars than Gilagamesh.
Star Wars emulates WW2 naval battles because Lucas liked the imagery. That's really the core that everything else builds backwards from that design goal.
ReplyDeleteIME talking about Holdo's maneuver is really just asking for a fight, so I'll just leave it as I thought it was fine both visually and in universe.
The Empire's MO was intimidation through force projection. They didn't focus on smaller, more efficient ships because they would rather blow up your planet than figure out who was a rebel and who wasn't. Aside from Thrawn the entire imperial structure seemed to buy into that premise. Or at least not be willing to buck the superiors who did.
Star Destroyers are colossal wastes of resources and man power, but they look impressive parked in orbit over your planet.
In practice AT-ATs are slow easy targets, but visually they look neat and are kind of impressive.
And also. "nobody has marines" is wrong. There are, in fact, specialized storm troopers that are trained and classified as marines. starwars.wikia.com - Imperial Marine
I'm not sure what it means that no one has "marines". I thought that's what the Stormtroopers were. In particular, those AT-ATs are apparently designed to be troop carriers. Think Trojan Horse, but everyone knows it's stuffed with troops and it can walk by itself.
ReplyDeleteIf the Rebel's hadn't put up their shield, the AT-ATs could have just dropped almost on top of the Rebel Base rather than walking in from beyond the shield.
The Rebels have troop transport ships, but we never see them use them as part of an attack. Instead, we see them use Imperial ships to sneak troops in. This seems like the only sane strategy for them, since any sort of clearly Rebel assault craft would get blasted out of the sky.
But in any case...I'm just making silly post-hoc excuses. The scenes in Star Wars were designed around what would look cool and fit the story they wanted to tell. Any fit with strategic sensibility is just coincidence.
So, the west point faculty who wanted this book apparently uses Star Wars in classes, because it is a war story everyone knows -- better than gilgamesh.
ReplyDelete