War

Summary:

What's it good for?

War

Pneumonica 20 May 2008 15:46

It's good for a great deal, actually, but that's not the point.

Warfare is a major part of any multicultural setting (and what is SA if not multicultural?), but the question of the actual ways and means of war does come up. The methods and material for war are interesting discussions in a setting where you can actually reliably implement a starhammer tactic. While the machines of war can be spoken of (as I did with the Army of One, among others), the methods are also of importance. So, first and foremost, we have the most pivotal aspect of this discussion. Feel free to add to this in replies, or in subsequent threads.

War

"I get there the fastest with the most men."
-Nathan Bedford Forest

War is a mechanism by which one franchise force exerts its will on another. That franchise might be corporate, democratic, oligarchal, collective, popular, or any other, provided it has the vital resources needed (large-scale, organized forces capable of fighting). The primary mechanism falls under the principle that if someone can destroy something someone can control that thing. The aggressor takes physical possession of desired or critical resources from the enemy (indeed, this may be the entire purpose behind implementing this technique to begin with). The same technique is used to prevent the same.

Many, many more advanced techniques are developed around the basic concept of war, but the fundamental principle is to simply physically control or destroy, or at least position yourself to be able to destroy, resources that are either desired by you or critical to the enemy. At that point, memetics can be used to issue demands, or you can simply use what you've taken possession of and let the enemy believe it ot be unfair. One of the briliant aspects of war is the ability to then designate those who have succeeded as "heroes" - since the victors have dominance over the battlefield, they are the ones in the position to paint the picture of the victorious soldiers, typically using memetics to produce a universal view of the victors as having been right to do as they did (thus cutting off opportunities for retaliation).

Tech Levels: Metatech 2 (troop coordination and movement), and whatever technologies are used to outfit the forces. Note that advanced military doctrines are separate technologies.
Cost: Severe unless you have a considerable excess of population and weaponry
Descriptors: Procedure

Re: War

Pneumonica 20 May 2008 15:53

And, because this is one of my favorite wargaming tactics:

Area Denial

As a war tactic, area denial is the attempt to force an enemy into limited mobility. This involves making it dangerous, difficult, or outright impossible to enter certain areas. While this is theoretically the basic purpose of war (to deny resources to the enemy), area denial tactics seek to deploy very few resources to limit a large number of enemies. It involves manipulating lines of sight so that emplaced weapons of suppression (snipers, sentry weapons, etc.) can keep a maximum area under control.

Most area denial mechanisms are "stupid" (autonomous and unintelligent) because "smart" systems can be fooled. Thus, minefields are common choices, as are irradiated environments and, in space, the ubiquitous antimatter cloud (this is especially dangerous since gravity will cause parts of the cloud to "drag along" with any passing vessel). This is considered by some to be an unethical mechanism, because "dummy" area denial techniques are, by design, eternal (or at least they cannot be deactivated without triggering them or going through a painfully intricate and dangerous proccess of disarming them).

Tech Level: Cognitech 3, Nanotech 2 or Stringtech 2 (Nanotech for emplacements like sentry guns or snipers, Stringtech for dummy minefields and the like), plus War and whatever weapons are being used for the area denial.
Cost: The price of the weapon.
Descriptors: Procedure

Re: War

TauCeti 02 Jun 2008 17:31

Warfare is something I use in my games pretty often, either as a main point in the story or as backdrop that the characters are influencing. As such, I have some incentive to get SA's warefare described in a bit more detail.

I was thinking of doing a full write up of the effects of SA technology on warfare, but there are so many things that I'm sure to miss many of them, so I'm just going to describe what I've thought of in the hopes that the forum can squeeze out all the other effects from elsewhere.

Wormholes and Interdictors
A nation with wormholes attacking one without will win /very/ quickly. The attacker must focus on espionage to determine what targets to hit, but it can complete an operation within the reaction time of the defender. This means that every militarily important point can be taken and either removed (such as a state leader) or destroyed (such as a missile silo) almost instantly, all at the same time.

When both nations have wormholes and wormhole interdictors aren't available where the war is being fought, the war becomes one of lighting raids and lighting responses, where skirmishes can escalate to full scale engagements in seconds, and be over in minutes. In such a war, it is infinitely easier to destroy a target (wormholing a bomb, or wormholing the target elsewhere) then trying to capture anything.

When the defenders have interdictors, the attackers are forced to wormhole their forces away from military targets. With weapons that can shoot through the curve of the horizon, this tends to result in highly lethal wars with the same hyper-fast reactions as above.

When the defender has most or all of the planet under interdiction, the attacker is forces to engage from somewhere else entirely. In this case, orbital control and landing, or simply firing on the enemy from high orbit. Similarly, if the attacker has high enough Stringtech, they can wormhole deep in the planet and burrow up to the surface. This sort of engagement takes longer (weeks?) and is much more risky to the attacker.

C
The speed of light is slow. Incredibly slow. If you wanted to shoot someone on the moon, and they knew to dodge, they'd have two seconds to get out of the way. This is reduced to one second if you have some way to see them instantly (eyes there hooked up to an ansible to tell you where they are standing). At astronomical distances, near-c weapons almost always miss (unless the target isn't trying to dodge). Given the speed of light, a warship can wormhole a few light minutes from a target, fire, wormhole closer, fire again, and repeat, then wormhole as far away as possible. The target sees several copies of the same ship appear at the same time and hit it with near-c weapons (can't see them coming) all at once, then disappear. Nothing to shoot at. The best solution to this sort of thing is fields of sensor drones giving data on the enemy movement at FTL (via ansible). While you're at it, you might as well make the drones mines or inversion beam platforms or both.

The invulnerable defense
Whenever someone comes up with “invulnerable armor” my response is to put it on the end of a bullet. The decay induction field has some of that effect (sending it at near-c through a wormhole at an enemy ship/planet/city would make a large amount of dark matter very quickly). The downside is (1) the wormhole is expensive, (2) the field generator can be shot or disabled while it is incoming if it's any slower than near-c, (3) I suspect that the field generator feels “resistance” from the conversion and would rapidly lose velocity as it ate up conventional matter. Still, it does sound like a pretty powerful weapon.