Playing Battlefleet Gothic and Ultimate General side by side, I notice that in the very far future when we have sorted our shit out and move into space, which brands of the military would be the main one?
Nowadays you can say the navy is already more important due to logistics and force projection, but in the future when the "world" becomes limitless border of space with some planets, I think the space navy would become the top utmost force, with the infantry just serving as garrison force or invasion force for the most part, the decisive, war-winning move would be met on space. Any planet that is encircled and besieged by a fleet is basically deadmeat, no matter how good the infantry there is.
Your first mistake was equating high fantasy logic to reality Your second mistake was taking your equated high fantasy logic and applying to to the far future, where we have no clue what (realistic) advances we'll see, making you double wrong Your third mistake was posting about it
I think the navy is useless without a ground component, and the navy is full of soy-based lifeforms, so the far future will fucking suck even if your speculation about doctrines which won't exist a thousand years from now is correct. Delete your thread and head on back to cuckchan, faggot.
Ayden Green
So how exactly would reality fare out?
Unless we discover inter-planetary transportation without spaceship i.e. Supreme Commander, I don't see any alternative than spaceship.
And if spaceship serves the main transportation method, they would become the focus, pretty simple.
Tyler Cox
Sure, you can't conquer a planet without ground force, but you need a navy to get your ground force there.
Aiden Rivera
But it's the far future, so teleporters exist! See the problem with your scenario yet?
Fine, provided a future with teleporter i.e. Supreme Commander, there's no need for focus on space navy.
I find that development to be far-fetched though.
Either ways, with or without space navy, I think the ground force is basically always needed for planet invasion/defense/colonization.
Brandon Moore
I'm not stupid enough to tell you how warfare will work in 1000 years. I also haven't said anything about things other than spacecraft. The time and scale of orbital mechanics and our current understandings of propellant and near-future propellant does not allow land or sea-naval based doctrine to be applied whatsoever. You can't encircle a planet the same way as you can encircle a city, even if you had hundreds of thousands of missile-carrying craft in perfectly spaced and timed orbits around it, ignoring any ground-based Verne gun-esqe things that may or may not eventually exist. Current reality is wide formations of cylindrical or coneish craft carrying a large number of missiles with essentially vulcan or possibly laser PD that take months to putt around the solar system and would take hundreds of years to get to another solar system.
Ethan Collins
Nuh uh! They have them in Star Trek, so they're totally gonna be real! Who needs a navy when you can just teleport across the galaxy? But you better watch out for the time travelers, space demons, alien kangz and godlike alien lifeforms which weaponize entire galaxies! Thankfully the Eldar, sorry, Aerfdairy came up with a conclusion, so we just need to copy them and we'll be fine! :DD
Jace Robinson
The real question is if the F-35 will be finally flyable?
Joshua Roberts
When you think about it, Supreme Commander tier tech is pretty cray and it destroys any need for space colonization or space conquest or whatever.
One Commander can turn matter into energy, then shape these energy back into robots and multiply its army until the planet is full of robots, within hours. And this Commander can teleport into other planets, no need for spaceship!
Sure a space ship can do space bombardment, but the Commander can just buy giant space gun that fires back OR just build giant trench to defend themselves. The only way to defeat the Commander at this point is to destroy the planet, which means a loss of resources on both sides.
Isaac Sanchez
I can't take this thread seriously, but if you want to discuss w40k on Zig Forums, then I can at least point out a few things. In w40k Imperial warships are very rare compared to merchant vessels. A whole sector might only have a battlefleet of a few hundreds ships, but there could be thousands of merchant ships going to-and-fro between two star systems. Those merchant ships don't have navigators, so they must follow (relatively) stable warp routes to go anywhere. Meanwhile the warships with their navigators are free to patrol the whole sector. Because of this the important star systems are the ones with stable warp routes, and so they are the ones worth fighting for. Sure, the Imperium can bombard the planets of that system until they crumble to dust, but then they will lose their most valuable planets. And even if they don't want to go that far, there is an upper limit of damage a planet and all the valuable resources (including people, industry, and even old temples) can sustain. So it's better to let the ground troops fight for them. As for the "besieging" part: if you are not willing to bombard the planet into oblivion, then your fleet will just quietly orbit it, and that's not a siege if the planet can sustain itself just fine.
Navies are already a logistic sinkhole, space navies would be a fucking nightmare to maintain amid the nearly absolute interstellar void no matter what technology and extent of "post-scarcity" technologies for self-sufficiency there might be. Even with relativistic and anti-matter weapons it's almost guaranteed that in a war of attrition a planet would beat a space navy every single time. Regardless of what sci-fi told you physics won't allow FTLT supply lines or one-shot'ing entire planets, the only viable option for spaceships to "lay siege" on a planet, planetoid or large moon is self-replicating biological weapons.
Luke Hughes
Why? Earth is currently beseiged by not knowing how to space travel and we're doing fine. Even orbital bombardment only makes life difficult and sends the inhabitants to the middle ages, but it doesn't really conquer a planet for you.
The sad and boring truth is that "conquering" a planet is absolute hogwash.
If you pause to think about it you would need billions of soldiers to threaten Earth and keep it occupied. Then you'd need ships to carry them…. ships to defend the ships that are carrying them so they don't get blown up in transit…. ships to carry their food, weapons, ground vehicles, fuel… It's fucking ridiculous. You need like 100,000 kilometer long ships to invade a single backwater world, who in their right mind would invest in that?
It's far easier to just slam them with a c-impactor and destroy their world if you don't like them. Or to ship a billion colonists plus terraforming machinery to any old rock if you need the space. Or to subtly affect them with propaganda if you want to change their minds about something.
Luis Wilson
The space force will become the dominant military branch.
LOL Anyways, talking about Imperial Navy & 40K, in the 1d4chan wiki article (1d4chan.org/wiki/Imperial_Navy) it explains well how does naval combat & strategy works in 40:
So in resume, because the Warp & the way to travel to it, it takes time & preparation for the fleet to go to its destiny, so there cant be fast responses to enemy attacks. So because of that, planets defenses are made to truly stand the enemy enough, in case they dont destroy the enemy. So once the fleet arrives, it can be engaged (That, or the enemy forces on the planet, exhausted from the siege). Ships are really big, because if you are going to send a ship to an enemy that may or not leaved the planet, or that got reinforcements, might as well send a bunch of 4-5 km long ships, instead of a dozen of >1 km ships, besides, that way you can put a lot of supplies & land forces onto them already to recover/supply the planet.
They can send in toxin virus to wipe out a planet out of organic while leaving the facility alive.
Admittely, planet defense can wear gasmask or construct barrier against that, but again, not having a navy that destroys the enemy navy in the first place is a bit of a problem.
But I also agree that without a worthy ground force, holding planet would be even harder, so the role of army + navy supplement each other. Maybe the future army would be something akin to marine, that is dedicated to help out the navy.
Brody Ortiz
Bioweapons don't work as well as people think either, you can wipe out all life with them, but it's hard to kill just a single species.
Elijah Reyes
For now, maybe not in the future.
But one might think the same virus would also have antidote in the future.
Either ways I agree that a healthy balance between army + navy would be more cost effective than just pure focus on navy. Planets would be the resource/trade hub and you can't take over a planet with a pure navy force, you need ground force at that. Even in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, the two most common side missions are to protect food cargos for your ground troops and support your ground troop from space via orbital bombing.
Angel Butler
Well if you already have a navy, you already probably have a planet from which that navy came. Therefore, you probably don't even need that other planet, and thusly, there is nothing preventing you from throwing rocks at that other rock until the society that defies your masters will has capitulated. You can't evade with planets you know, but you can throw things at planets.
Benjamin Rodriguez
Not really, You need really yuge quantities to scour the entire planet's surface, even more so if you need something to clear all organic life instead of something really specialized.
Theoretically yes but good luck developing sapient species that develop from open environment spores. Tyranids/zerg insectoids would be a better bet and still doubt you could make those from truly microspopic spores/eggs.
Christian Bailey
That's true, he same thing is true today.
Serbia is a country that had about 8 airworthy modern fighter aircraft (although six couldn't use modern weapons), and an army comparable in size to the New York Police Department. Thirteen world powers sent over a thousand bombers to pound Serbia for 78 days and over 30,000 sorties (not counting cruise missiles) until the sole global superpower literally ran out of modern munitions and had to use prisoners to build guidance kitsand it had essentially ZERO effect for their immediate military readiness.
To paraphrase a Greek general I forget the name of - a commander has not won the war until he can walk into the natives kitchens and expect a hearty lunch (he said hearths and wine i think).
Cooper Nelson
To translate that into spess:
Michael Richardson
Pretty sure if space fleets appears on the Earth orbit and blackmails Trudeau with nukes to pay tributes in gold and young virgins Canada would choose to surrender and pay such tribute.
Shouldn't you NUKE them first before you send in the men?
Parker Nelson
Radiation sickness tends to lower combat effectiveness.
Leo Reed
Not in a power armor, vacuum-sealed suit. Or you can wait till the radition is clear then goes in.
Justin Green
Not with pure fusion nukes, or kinetic energy bombardments.
Alexander Perez
That juyst makes me sagd
Nicholas Long
>not highjacking some luxury resort colony then threatening to drop it on the planet with the intent to severely deflate housing prices should the enemy refuse to surrender
For the cost of the entire F-35 program you could put 2 billion people in orbit permanently living on veggies grown in space.
Or 1 billion people all whites and a fucktonne of livestock then just virus bomb the niggerified planet
Carson Sanders
Obligatory video, for those who want to get cirrhosis.
Ryan Moore
Pretty interesting take (pic related notwhistanding), although I think close range combat may exist in a realistic space scenario in the case of capturing an enemy vessel. It's a niche use, but it may still be useful nonetheless.
Man, I am so sad I will die before mankind takes the stars.
At least there are vidya and the next life I guess.
Kayden Clark
From zero to third minute, those are basic truisms from Project Rho.
From third minute to fifth, he shows why lasers are useless in space and will never be used for space combat. Even point defense with them would be silly because lasers have neither the range nor punching power to take anything out and due to 20% efficiency of modern lasers it means that for every 1 degree of heat you raise on the enemys hull, you have to deal with 4 degrees of heat in your own hull
After fifth minute he tries to make the point that maneuvering doesn't work, but his math is flawed. Although you see someone all of the time, the image you're seeing is lagging based on the time it took to get to your sensors. But you can't make targeting decisions based on passive sensors, you need to have the range to the enemy, which means sending out a beam of something which reflects back giving you a doppler reading. And finally you're firing with a laser. That's 4 times that light has to travel between you and the target.
That's a 5.5 second lag shooting anything between earth and the moon, add processing times and it might add anywhere from 5-10 seconds depending on how much prediction you want your FCS to make (there's diminishing returns). Let's say 8 seconds total on average. Now look at video related. Think with an 8 second lag you can keep a laser locked onto this whirlybird continuously for longer than the 30 or so seconds the laser needs to melt through basic steel armor? This isn't even counting ablative armor which would take minutes. Yeah maneuvering fucking works especially considering that earth to moon distance is basically knife fighting range.
Unsubscibe from that guy and subscribe to pewdiepie.
Cooper Hall
Just make a space shotgun and fire bunch of shit at the fucking space plane. Besides lasers are gay. Rockets are where its at.
Oliver Cooper
Casaba howitzers for long range. Fission kinetic energy missiles for medium range. Guns for close range.
An other factor that travel time inside a space system is quite long, it might take months to get from the edge of it to the inner worlds. Therefore even if two fleets with thousands of ships are in the same system, they still have the space to completely avoid each other. Or even if they engage, it will be mostly a battle between small formations (just like how a ground battle between millions of people is usually just lots of small clashes between companies and battalions).
I like that game, but it has some issues. Two things it fails to convey are time and size. In the original tabletop game and the Rogue Trader RPG it was stated that a game turn is about half-an-hour, so even a small battle is actually hours long. Instead in that game you have to slow down the time, even though that slow-motion is still a few dozen times faster than "real time". And in the tabletop it was stated that if the ship models were scaled to the map, then they'd be about the size of a speck of dust. The models were markers, and in theory you were even able to stack them on top of each other. It was important for ramming, because you had to deliberately order your ship to ram into an other one, and you had a good chance to actually miss it. Meanwhile in the vidya you have the ships randomly crashing into everything, including their allies and random enviroment pieces. Because of these two factors the game makes space combat in w40k look like a wild race where you have to struggle to micro-manage everything. In the fluff it's a slow and elegant dance where you have all the time of the world to worry if the next broadside from that faint light that is the enemy ship will hit you or not.
Jordan Cooper
Agreed, but the game is still fucking phenomenal for putting Battlefleet Gothic rules on PC.
It's overall one of the best space naval strategy games, not that there are many of them, like Sins of a Solar Empire.
