So what do ground troops do?

[GrafKeks]

I mean, not to nitpick but in a universe with interstellar capable warships can't you just win wars by throwing down nuclear warheads (or asteroids or even big pieces of concrete) down into the gravity well of a planet and wait for them to surrender?

It is way better to use non-ballistic weapons with high-level of damage control. Think lasers or remote controlled nanites.

This serves two purposes te planet will be easily colonizeable, and your soldiers do not have to come in contact with the disguisting xenos!

 

[birincikalite]

Maybe your people wouldn't be happy with that. See it like "human rights defenders" in this case it's not just humans though.

 

[TheDungen]

It is way better to use non-ballistic weapons with high-level of damage control. Think lasers or remote controlled nanites.

This serves two purposes te planet will be easily colonizeable, and your soldiers do not have to come in contact with the disguisting xenos!

Beam weapons perhaps but lasers aren't useful for energy transfer.

 

[nexvinco]

Considering how crap humans treat other humans I get the feeling that one species wouldn't care if you obliterated a completely different species.

 

[TheDungen]

Considering how crap humans treat other humans I get the feeling that one species wouldn't care if you obliterated a completely different species.

How crap we treat each other? Most of the crap we've done to each other have been done with the best of intentions (such as imperialism).Or out of negliance more than malice (such as allowing the poverty created by imperialism to continue existing).

 

[nexvinco]

How crap we treat each other? Most of the crap we've done to each other have been done with the best of intentions (such as imperialism).Or out of negliance more than malice (such as allowing the poverty created by imperialism to continue existing).

Not quite sure if your being sarcastic or not, but yeah humans are fairly awful to one another.

 

[TheDungen]

Not quite sure if your being sarcastic or not, but yeah humans are fairly awful to one another.

That seems to be the consensus but it actually doesn't fit the facts. People are bastards is a false truism. Truth is we've been imroving the quality of life for everyone pretty much constantly through history, the cases when people do horrible things are well known because they are exceptions.

 

[RaptorCommander]

Guy Guys you are forgetting about

planets are just really big space ships with no engines. Plus Raise the shields.

Also the best "siege" tactic for a planet is to construct a giat shade cloth

 

[nalivayko]

If you don't think the future has any place for planetary occupation you first need to convince me why the present ( with exactly the same destruction potential and elimination by force options available ), doesn't have a place for ground forces and occupation.

I don't need to do jack - let's dispense with logical fallacies.

 

[nalivayko]

What makes you think that nuking will be any more acceptable in the future than it is today?

Nuking, bombing, what have you. Blasting things to pieces.

It would be used as implied threat. As for the morality of it... if it's physically possible, humanity/alien race would find a way to justify it.

 

[nalivayko]

Taking the discussion somewhat off the path... ground occupation should only be considered if another planet can support the occupying force... as in, not every planet is Earth-like. You can only do so much occupation in space suits and from the stationary bases on the ground. Much cheaper to rule from above.

 

[Mattimeo78]

Simplest argument in favor of ground invasions and against planetary annihilation is the following.

Committed Mundicide: -47 (+1.6 Yearly)

 

[Rubidium]

The thing is, that unlike a country, a planet can be indefinitely blockaded for minimal cost (vastly less than it would be to invade). Going from surface to orbit is massively inefficient, so odds are pretty good that your ships won't use planetary bases anyway. Once any planetary defenses are neutralized (and whatever you think about bombing cities, no one would have a problem bombing a Star Wars-esque planetary ion cannon), all it takes is a single ship in orbit to drop a bomb on anyone looking to build a spaceship or an anti-space weapon, and the planet is essentially neutralized.

The reason you can't do that today is that land borders are naturally more porous; it's hard to stop the flow of people and goods across a border without some sort of occupying presence, and it's easy to hide a weapon that can threaten a helicopter flying overhead. On the other hand, distances in space are sufficiently vast that your one patrol ship could easily see any smuggler coming with more than enough time to spare, and building a weapon capable of seriously threatening a ship in high orbit would be much more difficult to camouflage.

A better comparison would be island-hopping in the Pacific during World War II. Unimportant islands can and were bypassed with no problems, and their garrisons left to starve. It's true that there was plenty of hard fighting over various small islands, but it generally came down to either securing bases or denying bases to the enemy. In a universe where a base doesn't have to be (and honestly probably won't be) located on the surface of a planet, fighting on the planet itself would be ridiculously inefficient.

Don't forget that invading and occupying a planet would be a massively expensive undertaking; most occupation forces in modern times seem to have historically been on the order of 1% of the population of the area they were occupying. So for occupying earth, we'd be talking about roughly 100 million soldiers for occupation duty. That's a massive undertaking, and really hard to justify. And that's just the occupation force; the actual invasion would probably require more troops initially. Much better to leave a few ships in orbit, and keep the planet under guard. It's not like it can slip away.

 

[Dr.Livingstone]

The thing is, that unlike a country, a planet can be indefinitely blockaded for minimal cost (vastly less than it would be to invade). Going from surface to orbit is massively inefficient, so odds are pretty good that your ships won't use planetary bases anyway. Once any planetary defenses are neutralized (and whatever you think about bombing cities, no one would have a problem bombing a Star Wars-esque planetary ion cannon), all it takes is a single ship in orbit to drop a bomb on anyone looking to build a spaceship or an anti-space weapon, and the planet is essentially neutralized.

The reason you can't do that today is that land borders are naturally more porous; it's hard to stop the flow of people and goods across a border without some sort of occupying presence, and it's easy to hide a weapon that can threaten a helicopter flying overhead. On the other hand, distances in space are sufficiently vast that your one patrol ship could easily see any smuggler coming with more than enough time to spare, and building a weapon capable of seriously threatening a ship in high orbit would be much more difficult to camouflage.

A better comparison would be island-hopping in the Pacific during World War II. Unimportant islands can and were bypassed with no problems, and their garrisons left to starve. It's true that there was plenty of hard fighting over various small islands, but it generally came down to either securing bases or denying bases to the enemy. In a universe where a base doesn't have to be (and honestly probably won't be) located on the surface of a planet, fighting on the planet itself would be ridiculously inefficient.

Don't forget that invading and occupying a planet would be a massively expensive undertaking; most occupation forces in modern times seem to have historically been on the order of 1% of the population of the area they were occupying. So for occupying earth, we'd be talking about roughly 100 million soldiers for occupation duty. That's a massive undertaking, and really hard to justify. And that's just the occupation force; the actual invasion would probably require more troops initially. Much better to leave a few ships in orbit, and keep the planet under guard. It's not like it can slip away.

I can see a problem with this though. If you plan to exploit the economy of a planet, you do need to send people (or robots) down to the surface, whether its to work in factories or to extract resources. Once you do that, you expose yourself to risk. Therefore, a garrisoning force might be necessary.
Another scenario wherein a garrison would be to keep the populace of your empire obedient to your laws. No matter how benign you are, there are those who simply wish to do wrong, aka criminals, terrorists, and the like. Even something as simple as levying taxes requires the use of force to ensure compliance. The presence of troops and law enforcement in such scenarios often prevent such events before they occur.

 

[Holy.Death]

Why so many people assume it'll be effortless to bombard planet from orbit? Planets could have their own defenses; cannons, shields, shelters, starships, etc. making orbital bombardment potentially costly. You also can't starve population if planet is self-sufficient and can defend its assets thanks to planatary defense.

 

[lwarmonger]

Don't forget that invading and occupying a planet would be a massively expensive undertaking; most occupation forces in modern times seem to have historically been on the order of 1% of the population of the area they were occupying. So for occupying earth, we'd be talking about roughly 100 million soldiers for occupation duty. That's a massive undertaking, and really hard to justify. And that's just the occupation force; the actual invasion would probably require more troops initially. Much better to leave a few ships in orbit, and keep the planet under guard. It's not like it can slip away.

So that isn't necessarily true. Most of the colonial empires that Europe possessed were "occupied" with substantially less than that percentage of occupying forces, through good old balance of power politics. And I have to think that with surveillance, drone and computer technology that is several centuries more advanced that an occupying force without conventional military opposition could be even more efficient about combating an insurgent force and/or policing a restless population. I really would only see a large enough ground force to destroy the enemy government and ground forces (and that wouldn't have to be big, because enemy ground forces that mattered wouldn't be large either... masses of conscripts are no obstacle and could be easily neutralized... the effective troops would have to be very will trained and well equipped, even more so than today)... once they are out of the way, the computer controlled drones can do their work unimpeded.

 

[FelixG]

Why so many people assume it'll be effortless to bombard planet from orbit? Planets could have their own defenses; cannons, shields, shelters, starships, etc. making orbital bombardment potentially costly. You also can't starve population if planet is self-sufficient and can defend its assets thanks to planatary defense.

To play devil's advocate if you observe a planet for a few days you will have it nailed. It can't dodge, its orbit is highly predictable and so is its spin. You could sit well away from any cannons reach (And you can dodge) while slamming weapons home onto the planet.

Plus if you are wanting to bombard from orbit it means you don't care about the state of the planet after. You could slam nukes into places without shields or defences to create enough dust in the air to block out the sun freeze them all.

Alternatively if you are a true bastard you can drop airburst shells with bio or chemical weapons into the atmosphere and murderize the population that way.

 

[lwarmonger]

I guess it kind of depends if you want to use the planet afterwards... or how hard you want it to be to make peace with the planets owner... or how effectively they can retaliate against your worlds... or how your own population will react to your government committing genocide against that population. All of these questions are typically what limit freedom of action for every nation on earth. Whether or not they would in an interstellar war depends on who is doing the fighting and why. I would think in many cases they would matter though.

 

[Fledi]

With replicators it would come down to which side has the ones that are better able to autonomously convert a planet's resources. Drop them in some remote area and wait for them to multiply until there are enough of them to take over the population centers.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Why are you not considering the amount of energy a single planet could produce being vastly superior to that of an orbiting fleet. Sure... an orbiting fleet could try to nuke a world but why could they not have defenses in place to counter dropping nukes and have ground to space fighters able to overwhelm and swarm any star-ships. These fighters don't need interstellar engines and with anti-grav fields or other powerful power generation leaving the planets gravity field will be a very easy for smaller crafts. Or why not just fire thousands upon thousands of ground based nukes at the orbiting fleet... with replicator technology you could probably produce these nukes in the thousands every day on a largely industrialized planet in deep underground secret facilities.

It is also very impractical to use anything but bombs on a planet due to how an atmosphere will reduce the effectiveness of beam, power and kinetic weapons fired into it. Firing missiles from a planet will be easy enough if the power and engine technology is advanced enough.

Most likely a bombardment would destroy most of the civilian base but not the military base which would continue to fight and destroy bombarding ships. In reality I believe scenarios like these large planets would be extremely dangerous to approach with an enemy fleet for the reason I mentioned above. Then you have the potential of enemy fleets trying to break any siege or invading force.

I think it all comes down to politics and philosophy. If both you and the enemy possess the capacity to destroy entire planets then you might not want to use that capability in fear of being retaliated someplace else. This is the same problem with nukes today, nobody use them since they know it would most likely be a huge death spiral.

Anyone who thinks war is as simple as they are portrayed in most games are just being very naive and only look at the numbers game (so called meta gaming). You completely forget that war is highly controlled by politics and have all kinds of regulations, rules and limitations put on them.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Taking the discussion somewhat off the path... ground occupation should only be considered if another planet can support the occupying force... as in, not every planet is Earth-like. You can only do so much occupation in space suits and from the stationary bases on the ground. Much cheaper to rule from above.

Except for the simple little detail that it is impossible to do any meaningful ruling from above. Unless your idea of ruling is sitting with very big binoculars and watch how the people on the ground scramble to build hidden weapons that can swat you out of space, bunkers to protect them from your bombs and prepare weapons to combat your inevitable invasion once you realized you can't rule from above.

You can't even interrogate anyone to find out who is against you, and if you "call them" you don't even know if they will "pick up the phone" and answer, and why should they answer? They hate you and want nothing to do with you, so as long as you stay up there and drops bombs on them that situation won't change...

Even if they officially "surrender" to buy time and stop the bombing, how do you enforce your rule once your back up there? You basically can't, shortly your back to the binocular situation with an impossible job of trying to spot from a-far who is acting against you and who is not, and with a population that hates you and rather builds weapons to use against you then builds what you want them to.

and building a weapon capable of seriously threatening a ship in high orbit would be much more difficult to camouflage

No, it would be even easier to camouflage given how vast a planet is and how much other activity is going on everywhere on a planet, and how little control you have over that activity without any boots on the ground. A weapon powerful enough to threaten a ship in high orbit isn't much larger then a large SAM missile today due to more advanced tech...