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Post by EshaNas on Oct 15, 2017 13:29:40 GMT
If the solar system is relatively sparse yet filled with interplanetary powers -as I hold it to may be one day- fighting over assets might ensure without the destruction of the assets due to their relative cost. These assets may, realistically, be naught more than a vulcanoid asteroid or a antimatter facility or some Dihydrogen monoxide extraction facility, especially in the Inner System, valuable and costly enough that throwing men to fight over it is more reasonable than 'blowing it up'. This can extend to spacecraft and boarding actions - would a poorer power really blow up one of their few rapid-reaction, high D/v interplanetary cruisers when they can suffer a defeat now, utilize all the propaganda imagery from it, and possibly in a future action - peaceful or not - re-obtain that asset?
And of course if for some reason you have thousands or millions of people living in artificial habitats, the potential for armed conflict increases thereof. The spats between princes are the same that emerge between two cottage neighbors, the princes just have more armed men to throw at the other.
Align this with the common, modern trend of making one infantryman the equivalent of 10 or 100 grunts-in-fatigues, I could see a few number of space infantry. Their role of course is very specialized or at the least they are not numerous....
Also, remember to use frangible ammunition.
Of course, if you have a rich and accessible solar system where resources come in droves then assets become a lot more replaceable with the tactics thereof.
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gun
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Post by gun on Oct 15, 2017 15:10:48 GMT
If the solar system is relatively sparse yet filled with interplanetary powers -as I hold it to may be one day- fighting over assets might ensure without the destruction of the assets due to their relative cost. These assets may, realistically, be naught more than a vulcanoid asteroid or a antimatter facility or some Dihydrogen monoxide extraction facility, especially in the Inner System, valuable and costly enough that throwing men to fight over it is more reasonable than 'blowing it up'. This can extend to spacecraft and boarding actions - would a poorer power really blow up one of their few rapid-reaction, high D/v interplanetary cruisers when they can suffer a defeat now, utilize all the propaganda imagery from it, and possibly in a future action - peaceful or not - re-obtain that asset? And of course if for some reason you have thousands or millions of people living in artificial habitats, the potential for armed conflict increases thereof. The spats between princes are the same that emerge between two cottage neighbors, the princes just have more armed men to throw at the other. Align this with the common, modern trend of making one infantryman the equivalent of 10 or 100 grunts-in-fatigues, I could see a few number of space infantry. Their role of course is very specialized or at the least they are not numerous.... Also, remember to use frangible ammunition. Of course, if you have a rich and accessible solar system where resources come in droves then assets become a lot more replaceable with the tactics thereof. Yeah, this is what I'm getting at. Also, Shattered Horizon (which is my inspiration for this thread) is set in 2049, while COADE is set in 2249. Today, there are no military space drones or robots, or nuclear space warships. As I've argued, I think we're going to see people shooting at each other in space before they make war machines designed for space. For reference, Planetes, which is also reasonably realistic, is set in 2075, while The Expanse is set in 2350 and Star Citizen in 2945.
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Post by bigbombr on Oct 15, 2017 15:43:34 GMT
If the solar system is relatively sparse yet filled with interplanetary powers -as I hold it to may be one day- fighting over assets might ensure without the destruction of the assets due to their relative cost. These assets may, realistically, be naught more than a vulcanoid asteroid or a antimatter facility or some Dihydrogen monoxide extraction facility, especially in the Inner System, valuable and costly enough that throwing men to fight over it is more reasonable than 'blowing it up'. This can extend to spacecraft and boarding actions - would a poorer power really blow up one of their few rapid-reaction, high D/v interplanetary cruisers when they can suffer a defeat now, utilize all the propaganda imagery from it, and possibly in a future action - peaceful or not - re-obtain that asset? And of course if for some reason you have thousands or millions of people living in artificial habitats, the potential for armed conflict increases thereof. The spats between princes are the same that emerge between two cottage neighbors, the princes just have more armed men to throw at the other. Align this with the common, modern trend of making one infantryman the equivalent of 10 or 100 grunts-in-fatigues, I could see a few number of space infantry. Their role of course is very specialized or at the least they are not numerous.... Also, remember to use frangible ammunition. Of course, if you have a rich and accessible solar system where resources come in droves then assets become a lot more replaceable with the tactics thereof. Yeah, this is what I'm getting at. Also, Shattered Horizon (which is my inspiration for this thread) is set in 2049, while COADE is set in 2249. Today, there are no military space drones or robots, or nuclear space warships. As I've argued, I think we're going to see people shooting at each other in space before they make war machines designed for space. For reference, Planetes, which is also reasonably realistic, is set in 2075, while The Expanse is set in 2350 and Star Citizen in 2945. www.space.com/25275-x37b-space-plane.htmlAnd then there are also ASAT missiles.
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Post by thorneel on Oct 15, 2017 21:35:43 GMT
Shattered Horizon is an interesting case. Due to a rather spectacular Kessler cascade (and they got lucky, last time I checked (*), Earth wouldn't get away with only a few meteorite showers - then again, the Moon only partially blew up this time), most space-launching infrastructure is unavailable, with no near-terms plans to build more nor much of a focus on space in general. So those that are up there will have to fend for themselves and sort their problems with what they can cobble together. Namely, giving guns to their EVA-workers and sending them shoot at the other suddenly-gun-armed-EVA-workers they disagree with. Which is a good explanation on why space infantry with little to no support is the main weapon of that conflict.
Without the Moon partially blowing up, this could happen, say, if two back-water polities decided to get at each-other with what lies on hand, which would probably look like glorified gang wars.
(*)https:// jasmcole .com/2017/09/20/the-moon-blew-up-without-warning-and-for-no-apparent-reason/
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Post by shiolle on Oct 18, 2017 11:13:02 GMT
Science fiction authors (and fans) are like those generals that always prepare for the last war. Carriers and fighters in space, WW2 in space, stealth in space, modern society in space, etc. Space Opera is riddled with ideas taken directly from today's world and implanted into the future as-is. Star Citizen is an epitome of this. Marines in cool suites rushing into a hole in the hull just made by an explosive and into a firefight in a dimly lit corridor is much more evocative to the contemporary person than a war between distributed nets of hundreds of small robots and smart munitions no matter what the arguments for either of those realities are. Boarding became largely a police action since the time of ironclads even though many of the arguments in favor of boarding spaceships could also be applied to naval warfare.
I personally think that infantry in space would have the same role as military police. No boarding pods, no doctrine of which boarding is a major part. You don't need more than a single person with a personal computer and a communication device to take over a ship or an installation once space superiority is achieved. If they are still not cooperative after you made your threats, it's still better to pepper their habitat with shrapnel before sending troops in, because they will make holes in it anyway. If you want some piece of information, kill the crew. A memory chip is much smaller than a person. If you want the crew, your troops will kill them anyway if they open fire. If you want the station or ship, the habitat is still just a small and replaceable part of it; its crew can likely do more damage to various machinery while your troops are fighting to take control than if you just detached the habitat and towed it away.
EVA workers with guns is a nice scenario, but how fast would that escalate into threatening habitats with some makeshift missiles? Why put your people under a threat when you have the technology to escalate? And once you are not averse to using guns in your own habitat (which will immediately lead to loss of atmosphere inside), you might a well use small mines. In narrow corridors full of machinery so they are hard to spot. That's why I don't think these forces will look anything like today's infantry.
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gun
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Post by gun on Oct 18, 2017 11:48:16 GMT
Science fiction authors (and fans) are like those generals that always prepare for the last war. Carriers and fighters in space, WW2 in space, stealth in space, modern society in space, etc. Space Opera is riddled with ideas taken directly from today's world and implanted into the future as-is. Star Citizen is an epitome of this. Marines in cool suites rushing into a hole in the hull just made by an explosive and into a firefight in a dimly lit corridor is much more evocative to the contemporary person than a war between distributed nets of hundreds of small robots and smart munitions no matter what the arguments for either of those realities are. Boarding became largely a police action since the time of ironclads even though many of the arguments in favor of boarding spaceships could also be applied to naval warfare. I personally think that infantry in space would have the same role as military police. No boarding pods, no doctrine of which boarding is a major part. You don't need more than a single person with a personal computer and a communication device to take over a ship or an installation once space superiority is achieved. If they are still not cooperative after you made your threats, it's still better to pepper their habitat with shrapnel before sending troops in, because they will make holes in it anyway. If you want some piece of information, kill the crew. A memory chip is much smaller than a person. If you want the crew, your troops will kill them anyway if they open fire. If you want the station or ship, the habitat is still just a small and replaceable part of it; its crew can likely do more damage to various machinery while your troops are fighting to take control than if you just detached the habitat and towed it away. EVA workers with guns is a nice scenario, but how fast would that escalate into threatening habitats with some makeshift missiles? Why put your people under a threat when you have the technology to escalate? And once you are not averse to using guns in your own habitat (which will immediately lead to loss of atmosphere inside), you might a well use small mines. In narrow corridors full of machinery so they are hard to spot. That's why I don't think these forces will look anything like today's infantry. The American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East weren't won in a day. But, that's what they thought. McDonnell Douglas thought the future was all BVR when they designed the F4 and for a while, some thought it would be all nuclear. I think easy answers like "there will be no x in the future, because anything can be nuked from space" are just as bad, if not worse, than the ones thinking there will be no change. People also tend to overestimate the growth of new technology (in general) and think it's always going to change exponentially, but how much has war (or anything) changed in the last 80 years, compared to the 40 years before that? I think technological advances are typically more logarithmic.
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Post by Enderminion on Oct 18, 2017 12:11:23 GMT
Science fiction authors (and fans) are like those generals that always prepare for the last war. Carriers and fighters in space, WW2 in space, stealth in space, modern society in space, etc. Space Opera is riddled with ideas taken directly from today's world and implanted into the future as-is. Star Citizen is an epitome of this. Marines in cool suites rushing into a hole in the hull just made by an explosive and into a firefight in a dimly lit corridor is much more evocative to the contemporary person than a war between distributed nets of hundreds of small robots and smart munitions no matter what the arguments for either of those realities are. Boarding became largely a police action since the time of ironclads even though many of the arguments in favor of boarding spaceships could also be applied to naval warfare. I personally think that infantry in space would have the same role as military police. No boarding pods, no doctrine of which boarding is a major part. You don't need more than a single person with a personal computer and a communication device to take over a ship or an installation once space superiority is achieved. If they are still not cooperative after you made your threats, it's still better to pepper their habitat with shrapnel before sending troops in, because they will make holes in it anyway. If you want some piece of information, kill the crew. A memory chip is much smaller than a person. If you want the crew, your troops will kill them anyway if they open fire. If you want the station or ship, the habitat is still just a small and replaceable part of it; its crew can likely do more damage to various machinery while your troops are fighting to take control than if you just detached the habitat and towed it away. EVA workers with guns is a nice scenario, but how fast would that escalate into threatening habitats with some makeshift missiles? Why put your people under a threat when you have the technology to escalate? And once you are not averse to using guns in your own habitat (which will immediately lead to loss of atmosphere inside), you might a well use small mines. In narrow corridors full of machinery so they are hard to spot. That's why I don't think these forces will look anything like today's infantry. The American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East weren't won in a day. But, that's what they thought. McDonnell Douglas thought the future was all BVR when they designed the F4 and for a while, some thought it would be all nuclear. I think easy answers like "there will be no x in the future, because anything can be nuked from space" are just as bad, if not worse, than the ones thinking there will be no change. People also tend to overestimate the growth of new technology (in general) and think it's always going to change exponentially, but how much has war (or anything) changed in the last 80 years, compared to the 40 years before that? I think technological advances are typically more logarithmic. the american wars in Korea Vietnam and the Middle east weren't won at all, I also don't think there were any guns kills in the middle east (one enemy fighter was crashed by smart EF-111 pilots and another was bombed... in the air) last 80 years would be 1937, WW2 saw naval combat change from Battleship superiority to Carrier Superiority, Armor becoming effective enough to defeat infantry in the open, aircraft going from annoyence to threat, semi-auto and full auto rifles gave the infantry man more firepower. 40 years before that would be 1897, the end of the era for light infantry, the machine gun has come and in a few years the tactics of old will be slaghtered as millions of soldiers are cut down by machine guns. the French 75 was made in 1897, best cannon in the world, firing dozens of rounds a minute able to sweep the field of soldiers, breach loading weapons have been replaced as standard issue rifles with bolt action repeaters, aircraft and tanks were introduced in 1914 and 1916 changing the shape of warfare, civilian targets were bombed from the air, we reached space with artillery, gas, the Dreadnought battleship, the Battlecrusier, the Submarine, the Aircraft carrier vs Pre-dreadnoughts. you picked a bad era to make this point, warfare has changed compleatly from 80 years ago (from what defense planners thought 80 years ago would be) and the fourty years before that changed MORE. technological advances are typically more exponetial. a better argument would have been changes in combat from 1200-1300.
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Post by shiolle on Oct 18, 2017 12:35:24 GMT
The American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East weren't won in a day. But, that's what they thought. McDonnell Douglas thought the future was all BVR when they designed the F4 and for a while, some thought it would be all nuclear. I think easy answers like "there will be no x in the future, because anything can be nuked from space" are just as bad, if not worse, than the ones thinking there will be no change. People also tend to overestimate the growth of new technology (in general) and think it's always going to change exponentially, but how much has war (or anything) changed in the last 80 years, compared to the 40 years before that? I think technological advances are typically more logarithmic. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I never said there won't be any boarding actions at all. I said they will mostly be relegated to police operations or when little resistance is expected. If you attempt to board a ship that can still fight, you will suffer the same fate as Paraguayans in the Paraguayan War. There is no reason to say, and no technologies on the horizon that could make boarding a viable tactics again. Military organizations move on when something becomes ineffective. I don't think you would want to bring back infantry square as a viable combat tactics, would you? Or a cavalry charge? P.S. The American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East weren't won in a day. Korea was a partial victory. Sorry for the offtopic.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Oct 18, 2017 12:46:28 GMT
I would say (and this is my opinion. It is a somewhat informed opinion, but an opinion non the less) that infantry in space are the equivalent to knives for modern infantry: they are there and they are usefull in very specific situations, but they aren't particularily relevant to how combat works in the relevant era.
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Post by ironclad6 on Nov 3, 2017 23:26:57 GMT
Humans always find a way to adapt to fighting in their milieu. There is no question of whether there will be infantry in the future. The only questions concern doctrine, equipment and culture. People have been predicting the obsolescence of the fighting man since at least the 13th century.
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Post by SevenOfCarina on Nov 4, 2017 1:16:41 GMT
Humans always find a way to adapt to fighting in their milieu. There is no question of whether there will be infantry in the future. The only questions concern doctrine, equipment and culture. People have been predicting the obsolescence of the fighting man since at least the 13th century. You'll have to admit though, that eventually, the fighting man will be obsoleted by the fighting hyperturing ASI.
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Post by Kerr on Nov 4, 2017 1:25:59 GMT
Humans always find a way to adapt to fighting in their milieu. There is no question of whether there will be infantry in the future. The only questions concern doctrine, equipment and culture. People have been predicting the obsolescence of the fighting man since at least the 13th century. You'll have to admit though, that eventually, the fighting man will be obsoleted by the fighting hyperturing ASI. Artificial super intelligence? Shouldn't they be capable of creating a post-scarcity civilization?
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Post by ironclad6 on Nov 4, 2017 1:37:14 GMT
Humans always find a way to adapt to fighting in their milieu. There is no question of whether there will be infantry in the future. The only questions concern doctrine, equipment and culture. People have been predicting the obsolescence of the fighting man since at least the 13th century. You'll have to admit though, that eventually, the fighting man will be obsoleted by the fighting hyperturing ASI. So you're asking me to admit that the infantry man will become obsolete right around the same time that the human race does?
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Post by SevenOfCarina on Nov 4, 2017 2:00:32 GMT
You'll have to admit though, that eventually, the fighting man will be obsoleted by the fighting hyperturing ASI. Artificial super intelligence? Shouldn't they be capable of creating a post-scarcity civilization? Meh. For as long as the lightspeed barrier exists, there will always be resource scarcity in some form, at least as a function of time. If we ever end up in a situation like OA, with multiple competing hyperintelligent entities each ruling over a frustum of the human expansion sphere, merely superintelligent entities turn into the 'lesser' powers, frequently serving as the agents of the aforementioned AHIs, particularly when lightspeed lag negates any advantage offered by superior strategic analysis and prediction capabilities. Conflict will eventually emerge as these entites attempt to expand their dominions in the face of ever-increasing resource demands.
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Nov 5, 2017 15:58:47 GMT
Humans always find a way to adapt to fighting in their milieu. There is no question of whether there will be infantry in the future. The only questions concern doctrine, equipment and culture. People have been predicting the obsolescence of the fighting man since at least the 13th century. Naturally, the fighting man will never truly disapear (on a timescale we are interested in). Humans evolved to be incredibly adaptive, effective and efficient over a period of, arguably, 4 billion years (around 252 million years if you want to consider just mammels). That human enginuity, as amazing as it may be, has been unable to find a better solution to the problems face on the battlefield in the 100,000 years it's been around is hardly surprising. The catch is that humans are only incredibly adaptive, effective and efficient in the environment they evolved the traits in. This is clearly seen in navel and arial combat. In space, human infantry will still be the go to for earth like environment, but since space as a whole is not earth like, they will not play much of a role in millitary conflict. Police (or occupation force), sure. Specialist millitary units, yes. Piracy/crime rings, very probably. Querrilla warfare, maybe. Mainstream millitary, definitely not.
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