Military Ground Vehicles of Your Nation Mk X

[Purpelia]

Would the tank and other armored fighting vehicles survive the transition to interplanetary warfare? I honestly don't think so. Since anyone in the high orbits could use KEWs or nukes to eliminate centers of resistance, the only use for ground troops would be as garrison troops or for surgical strikes against targets located in proximity to some sort of limiting terrain feature that renders the use of kinetics or nukes unacceptable, such as a civilian population center or a major mineral resource deposit.

It all depends on a myriad of factors that are ultimately up to you as a writer. Examples include but are not limited to:

• What is the purpose and nature of warfare in your setting? Is it to capture and hold territory or is simply denying those assets to your opponents enough. As in, are you going to be landing on each planet with an intent to capture it or are you content to glass or siege worlds and move on. This directly ties into a number of factors such as how fast you can travel (thus limiting how far you can go and effecting resource scarcity).
• How important are planets even in your setting? Are they even what you fight over? In my own setting the extender periphery of a start system is really where all the resource extraction and processing is at with planets being manufacturing hubs. So taking either is equally important or unimportant depending on your goals.
• What are planets in your setting? Are we talking mostly earth like worlds inhabited by normal people? Or perhaps these are rare and you are mostly fighting on smaller worlds, semi-terraformed planets etc? Or perhaps the opposite and the valuable stuff you'd be fighting over are massive hive cities and industrial planets? All of these and any other will heavily effect what tactics and thus weapons are used in planetary warfare.
• What is the state of technology in your setting? Any number of things from magical sounding energy shields to more mundane stuff like jamming outpacing sensor technology might render orbital support semi-obsolete.
• How liberal are you with the use of WMD's? If your strategy involves glassing every fortification and large formation on the planet with tactical atomic weapons (or similar) that is going to produce quite different terms of warfare than if you shy away from that sort of thing.
• How large and powerful are your ships? What sort of weaponry do they use? Again, this plays a factor in the calculations for obvious reasons.

I could think off more but these should serve to demonstrate my point which is that you can justify pretty much anything from not having armies at all to having massive WW2 style ground wars on even the most uninhabitable of space rocks just by tweaking your setting. Also since this topic is near to my heart and I have worked endlessly on it in my past if you want to expand the discussion feel free to. I will happily oblige.

[Arroyo-Abeille]

How liberal are you with the use of WMD's

Well hopefully he's cool enough to just use WMDs to propel his warships. Like me.

[Purpelia]

How liberal are you with the use of WMD's

Well hopefully he's cool enough to just use WMDs to propel his warships. Like me.

In that respect he does not really have a choice. Any method of propulsion which has enough power to make war practical in space short of something like a stargate is a WMD in its own right.

[Triplebaconation]

Imagine getting kicked out of a spaceship and having to walk everywhere.

[Gallia-]

Would the tank and other armored fighting vehicles survive the transition to interplanetary warfare? I honestly don't think so. Since anyone in the high orbits could use KEWs or nukes to eliminate centers of resistance, the only use for ground troops would be as garrison troops or for surgical strikes against targets located in proximity to some sort of limiting terrain feature that renders the use of kinetics or nukes unacceptable, such as a civilian population center or a major mineral resource deposit.

No one has ever wanted to capture a city in modern warfare which is why the tank never survived the nuclear bomb.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Would the tank and other armored fighting vehicles survive the transition to interplanetary warfare? I honestly don't think so. Since anyone in the high orbits could use KEWs or nukes to eliminate centers of resistance, the only use for ground troops would be as garrison troops or for surgical strikes against targets located in proximity to some sort of limiting terrain feature that renders the use of kinetics or nukes unacceptable, such as a civilian population center or a major mineral resource deposit.

No one has ever wanted to capture a city in modern warfare which is why the tank never survived the nuclear bomb.

So you would say that the weight penalty of a 40-ton armored vehicle is acceptable for a military that is transporting this army across interplanetary distances before landing that army on a hostile planet?

[Gallia-]

Why do you need to bring a 40 ton tank to capture a Tethys methane mine? A go-kart or militarized forklift will probably do fine.

[Triplebaconation]

Dropping infantry is fine if your mission is murdering civilians with terror weapons or falling into anthills like Starship Troopers. The most obvious reason you'd want to bring along vehicles is mobility since planets are fairly big. Sufficiently advanced vehicles can even double as drop pods a la Traveller or Renegade Legion.



This is an unresolvable debate that depends entirely on fictional parameters like the infamous "are missiles or lasers better?"

I've mentioned this before but probably the best example of orbital assault is in the source material for Attack Vector: Tactical. In this setting dropping things is (relatively) easy, but moving large masses back into orbit requires large laser launch facilities that by their very nature are fairly good defenses - and you can't just nuke them because then you're stuck on the planet.

The one nation in the setting capable of orbital assault has a "Drop Brigade" that lands outside the range of the lasers and relies on rapid maneuver to capture them intact. Of course it requires conscripting nearly all their merchant shipping to use.

[Gallia-]

h e f l y

[The Manticoran Empire]

Dropping infantry is fine if your mission is murdering civilians with terror weapons or falling into anthills like Starship Troopers. The most obvious reason you'd want to bring along vehicles is mobility since planets are fairly big. Sufficiently advanced vehicles can even double as drop pods a la Traveller or Renegade Legion.

(Image)

This is an unresolvable debate that depends entirely on fictional parameters like the infamous "are missiles or lasers better?"

I've mentioned this before but probably the best example of orbital assault is in the source material for Attack Vector: Tactical. In this setting dropping things is (relatively) easy, but moving large masses back into orbit requires large laser launch facilities that by their very nature are fairly good defenses - and you can't just nuke them because then you're stuck on the planet.

The one nation in the setting capable of orbital assault has a "Drop Brigade" that lands outside the range of the lasers and relies on rapid maneuver to capture them intact. Of course it requires conscripting nearly all their merchant shipping to use.

I imagine that you could do something like the space marine drop pod from 40k or the ODST pod from HALO to improve survivability for the drop troopers. If you can't land troops close enough to the target that some sort of transport would be needed, then you could drop smaller teams to take out defensive positions and secure a landing zone for the large dropships to offload the main body of troops, akin to an amphibious operation where a first wave is helo'd in before the main body lands in the AMTRACs.

[Gallia-]

If you're going to copy the 1950s at least copy the cool parts idk.

[Triplebaconation]

Dropping infantry is fine if your mission is murdering civilians with terror weapons or falling into anthills like Starship Troopers. The most obvious reason you'd want to bring along vehicles is mobility since planets are fairly big. Sufficiently advanced vehicles can even double as drop pods a la Traveller or Renegade Legion.

(Image)

This is an unresolvable debate that depends entirely on fictional parameters like the infamous "are missiles or lasers better?"

I've mentioned this before but probably the best example of orbital assault is in the source material for Attack Vector: Tactical. In this setting dropping things is (relatively) easy, but moving large masses back into orbit requires large laser launch facilities that by their very nature are fairly good defenses - and you can't just nuke them because then you're stuck on the planet.

The one nation in the setting capable of orbital assault has a "Drop Brigade" that lands outside the range of the lasers and relies on rapid maneuver to capture them intact. Of course it requires conscripting nearly all their merchant shipping to use.

I imagine that you could do something like the space marine drop pod from 40k or the ODST pod from HALO to improve survivability for the drop troopers. If you can't land troops close enough to the target that some sort of transport would be needed, then you could drop smaller teams to take out defensive positions and secure a landing zone for the large dropships to offload the main body of troops, akin to an amphibious operation where a first wave is helo'd in before the main body lands in the AMTRACs.

I imagine you could just teleport grenades directly into the defenses.

It doesn't matter - this is an unresolvable debate that depends entirely on speculative parameters.

[Gallia-]

Use the FTL to plant atomic bombs underneath the future defenses before the planet was inhabited by humans and blow them up 3,000 years later when the enemy builds a fortress over your nukes.

Repeat this process with varying yields until you achieve surgical atomic strike. (:

[Triplebaconation]

Go back in time from the end of the universe Xeelee-style and alter the fundamental constants of the universe so when they build a bunker the concrete is really fragile because of a reduced Sommerfeld's constant.

[Gallia-]

We don't have enough black holes to compute the n-order effects of Romans never discovering concrete aqueducts rippp.

[Purpelia]

Or you could just do as I do and say that fighting on planets mostly does not happen at all because all the stuff worth taking is in space. And boarding individual space habitats and mining ships just isn't reasonable. So what happens is typically you show up with a fleet, blow up any defenders and leave an occupation force of starships to keep order whilst you zoom off to the next system all the while hunting for the decisive fleet battle that will inflict enough losses to your enemy he can't recover.

[Danternoust]

My tank shell loadout is 10% XM943-equivalent, 80% HE, 10% PELE. Is this wrong or can improvements be made?

[Gallia-]

it would vary based on mett-t obviously if you expect to fight tanks you will load sometimes as much as 80% apfsds and if you expect to do close support you can load HE or smoke

the certified lunatic loadout is all STAFF of course

tho an HE shell might hurt like two guys i guess it would be OK against bunkers or something

loading the main gun with nothing but APFSDS is probably sound considering tanks generally have laser guided machine guns which are the real ammo suckers and infantry killers tho

i dont think the us army has ever encountered a situation where it ran out of main gun rounds but had plenty of machine gun ammo left; even in desert storm it stopped and resupplied before main gun rounds ran out (although TOWs were in short supply for some CFVs probably)

a woke future MBT of the late 1980s would probably just carry ~20-24 rounds for the main gun in an isolated autoloader and >20-30,000 rounds for the machine guns, and assume it gets a single resupply every 24 hours for fuel, water/food, and ammo

[Austrasien]

Would the tank and other armored fighting vehicles survive the transition to interplanetary warfare? I honestly don't think so. Since anyone in the high orbits could use KEWs or nukes to eliminate centers of resistance, the only use for ground troops would be as garrison troops or for surgical strikes against targets located in proximity to some sort of limiting terrain feature that renders the use of kinetics or nukes unacceptable, such as a civilian population center or a major mineral resource deposit.

Keeping in mind this is like Diomedes asking the oracle what role the Pharaoh Saddam's chariots will play at 73 eastings...

Spacecraft are not separated by a horizon from combat on the ground like naval warships are/were. If an astronaut looks out the window of a space dreadnaught with a big enough pair of binoculars he can see they guys scurrying around on the ground. Spacecraft will be direct participants in the surface battle, finding and killing individual targets, not just wiping cities off the map.

In places open to the sky, spacecraft will be the main factor in surface combat, they have a much better view of the action. The only places it will likely be safe to do *battlefield things* will be where it simply isn't possible to see things from above: inside buildings, underground and underwater and possibly in some alien mega jungle (good luck im beneath seven canopies).

This still leaves plenty of scope for surface fighting, on worlds with marginal atmospheres, ocean worlds, ultra-mega xenojungles, artificial orbital habitats, aerostat settlements in gas giants, planets where the entire population lives in enormous arcologies and so on. And in some of these places there is a plausible role for something which could be described as a tank, like pushing down the lava tubes under the Sea of Crisis during the 2nd Lunar Clone Revolution, but it will probably have only a very fuzzy relationship to what we now call mechanized warfare. Just as there is a very fuzzy relationship between modern mechanized warfare and bronze age chariot fighting.

It might literally drive across the seabed for example to deliver troops to deep-sea habitats. But then it might also be a big pseudo mechanical bug scampering over the roots of km tall trees. AFVs would likely encompass the full range of what we recognize as AFVs now and also far beyond to accommodate the demands of exotic environments.

[Gallia-]

Speaking of airplanes and commandos I guess...

You can see something similar to this in Genocidal Organ. Sorta. The US Army doesn't even bother with tanks or anything. They just have this giant flying fortress B-2 that acts as a mobile command center and helicopter carrier. It has literal tons of drones, JDAMs, CBUs, etc. and some stratosphere glide pods that clear landing zones with robot machine guns. The big airplane just kills like 30 tanks with CBUs and then anything else is vaporized in the immediate area by the drop pods. Something like six dudes and a couple little helicopter drones with machine guns end up vaporizing a tank battalion and some child soldiers basically right off the bat, then they liquidate another tank-mechanized unit that tries to attack them a few minutes later with snipers and BMPs.

The only thing that ends up being able to actually hurt the commandos (and even then they literally kill one dude and lost like a dozen of theirs even then) are similar special forces troops with Chinese knockoffs of the American thermal camouflage and helicopter gunships.

I could see the Genocidal Organ guys using a little Packbot with a SAW or something as a "tank". Or a MULE drone with a folding 25mm Bushmaster or 12.7mm and some Javelin missiles. The latter would let them drive around at least, although in the first part of the movie the commandos just steal a Toyota after killing some genocide Stakhanovites.

Aside from the bizarre and poorly explained Full Skull Mask Mode ending (in the LN apparently it's "better" explained although it's still kinda kooky) it's an OK movie I guess.

Also in Star Soldier the SPI authors abstracted "tank" to be "platform that carries inordinate amounts of firepower", so "tanks" turn into "hovering robots that shoot antimatter nuclear missiles". The only other unit in the game is the actual infantryman who flies around with a laser gun and nuclear rockets and duels other infantrymen. That said Star Soldier probably had a bigger influence (and Titan Strike, its baby brother) on FT!Dumbla than Genocidal Organ because I literally just watched the movie the other day though.

And of course for Dumbla in the Far Future of the 27th century there is just two AFVs: laser beam and big gun. More "beats walking" than "actually necessary" since everyone has nukes though, but unlike in Star Soldier they actually have thermodynamic limitations and can't just cruise around at Mach 6 in a anti-gravity bubble. It might get condensed down into a single vehicle if I feel like drawing a big enough tankii tho. Or the big guns become teletank robots or something.

[Danternoust]

tho an HE shell might hurt like two guys i guess it would be OK against bunkers or something

but, if I was RPing against someone that was a mudhut fortress state (adobe is pretty close), I would need HE to level fortified walls.
This person has a lot of ideas of how to make conventional construction and technology pretty wanky. Probably not worth invading, it is a well forested Afghan-Albania embroiled in a perpetual Balkans-type conflict.

In places open to the sky, spacecraft will be the main factor in surface combat, they have a much better view of the action. The only places it will likely be safe to do *battlefield things* will be where it simply isn't possible to see things from above: inside buildings, underground and underwater and possibly in some alien mega jungle (good luck im beneath seven canopies).

That's not true, smoke has always been used as camouflage, the moment we figured out how to generate enough of it. Being able to estimate hunting patterns would be excellent for countering living off the land.


This gives me a fair amount to ponder about.

[Gallia-]

oh god oh fuck

white phosphorus on suicide watch

tho an HE shell might hurt like two guys i guess it would be OK against bunkers or something

but, if I was RPing against someone that was a mudhut fortress state (adobe is pretty close), I would need HE to level fortified walls.

a .50 cal did it fine in afghanistan and iraq?

the only time the us army encountered mudhut fortress states was in aachen when the sherman's dinky 75mm couldnt punch through the THICC ASS GIRTH of GOTHIC CATHEDRALS

they used a howitzer instead

in the modern case, you'll need to first find me a wall that can't be defeated by sustained 25mm Bushmaster or multiple successive TOW rounds but can somehow be defeated by a 120mm shell

youd be hard pressed to find architecture like that anywhere in the world

[The Guvithean Confederation]

Spacecraft are not separated by a horizon from combat on the ground like naval warships are/were. If an astronaut looks out the window of a space dreadnaught with a big enough pair of binoculars he can see they guys scurrying around on the ground. Spacecraft will be direct participants in the surface battle, finding and killing individual targets, not just wiping cities off the map.

In places open to the sky, spacecraft will be the main factor in surface combat, they have a much better view of the action. The only places it will likely be safe to do *battlefield things* will be where it simply isn't possible to see things from above: inside buildings, underground and underwater and possibly in some alien mega jungle (good luck im beneath seven canopies).

The converse of this is that there's no horizon separating the ground from the spacecraft. And for any reasonable setting, a warship will have a much higher signature across all bands than a tank made with comparable technology, just because it is larger (hence larger radar and visual signature) and requires/uses more power (hence greater thermal signature). Moreover, things like smoke and large swarms of centimeter scale drones (perhaps with limited vonNeumann capabilities) would allow surface combatants to mask their position with at least enough effect to make any weapon with subkiloton yield ineffective. Comparable methods to mask a warship's position would require unreasonable amounts of smoke or propellant (for those that attempt to use drones). Surface combatants can and will be direct participants in the space battle.

Any mechanism to launch reasonable amounts of stuff into orbit will be weaponizable. Whether it be directly so, such as in the case of a laser launch facility, or indirectly so, such as in the case of a Lofstrom Loop used to launch munitions. Even if the forces in orbit can withstand these, and are willing to destroy a major part of the infrastructure that makes the planet worth fighting over, simple rockets can be hidden on camouflaged, mobile launchers, and used to send munitions in the direction of the enemy. Any defenses the spacecraft employ - point defenses, shields, thermodynamics-defying signature reducers, etc. - can just as easily be employed by and in defense of ground assets. In the case of shields and point defenses, the resources and power available to the ground forces will far exceed that available to the fleet under most circumstances. And, being always in open space, the warships will always be vulnerable to surface weapons.

For these reasons, I think that having the high orbits will not be as overwhelming an advantage as generally suspected.

[Gallia-]

Spacecraft are not separated by a horizon from combat on the ground like naval warships are/were. If an astronaut looks out the window of a space dreadnaught with a big enough pair of binoculars he can see they guys scurrying around on the ground. Spacecraft will be direct participants in the surface battle, finding and killing individual targets, not just wiping cities off the map.

In places open to the sky, spacecraft will be the main factor in surface combat, they have a much better view of the action. The only places it will likely be safe to do *battlefield things* will be where it simply isn't possible to see things from above: inside buildings, underground and underwater and possibly in some alien mega jungle (good luck im beneath seven canopies).

The converse of this is that there's no horizon separating the ground from the spacecraft. And for any reasonable setting, a warship will have a much higher signature across all bands than a tank made with comparable technology,

This is how ISIS was able to shoot down all those American satellites that saw their tanks! The satellites had a much higher signature than the tanks...

Oh, wait. That's not right.

For these reasons, I think that having the high orbits will not be as overwhelming an advantage as generally suspected.

It will be about as decisive as maintaining command of the air was in Desert Storm. Which is to say it will win a war before any ground combat begins. Utterly and completely. Saddam will probably still hide in a bunker or something and a few might even get uprooted but they won't be able to stop the spacemans from stepping on any field formations they put on the ground that's exposed to the sky.

I'm sure the futuristic hyper armies of starship future will still wring their hands about fingertip splinters and stubbed toes literally though because that means the Celestial Meh[estan] will be chopping some figurative heads.

So maybe the spacemans will just camp out outside the giant bunker gates and try to siege it down or something. But only because they don't want to go through the room-by-room and hall-by-hall slog that would be required for fighting over it. Or maybe they have wall penetrating radars or some sort of UWB induction sensors and just don't give a shit because they know where everyone in the bunker is in real time and can just vaporize the defenders as they're rousing from their beds with heat seeking rocket guns or something. I guess the giga bunker budget was too small to include carbon walls and fiber optics instead of steel and copper cables.

I prefer the space siege but it's more modern.

[The Guvithean Confederation]

The converse of this is that there's no horizon separating the ground from the spacecraft. And for any reasonable setting, a warship will have a much higher signature across all bands than a tank made with comparable technology,

This is how ISIS was able to shoot down all those American satellites that saw their tanks! The satellites had a much higher signature than the tanks...

Oh, wait. That's not right.

I'm making two assumptions here.

1. There are two forces in combat, one in control of the planet with no (or very limited) space assets (which we may call the defender), and one in control of space with no (or very limited) ground assets (which we may call the attacker).

2. The two forces are peers, with equal technological capabilities.

In the case you provide, we have an asymmetrical conflict, where one side had a significant technological edge. Moreover, in addition to having complete control of space, that side had all of its command and control assets on the ground, where they were separated from the actual conflict by the horizon. In such an instance, that side has all of the advantages of controlling the high orbits, while also having none of the disadvantages.

It is worth noting that there are concerns about the vulnerability of the US's satellite network to near peer asat technologies (and other things, such as GPS jamming and electronic warfare).

That being said, I will grant that observation satellites may have a low enough signature to escape detection in a variety of circumstances, and that they will provide a substantial advantage to any command and control assets deployed to the planet. Large armed or manned platforms in space, however, are a different story.

It will be about as decisive as maintaining command of the air was in Desert Storm. Which is to say it will win a war before any ground combat begins. Utterly and completely.

I disagree. A planet-spanning nation with a defensive doctrine will be all but invulnerable to an opponent with comparable resources dedicated entirely to attack.

Consider that the use of airpower in Desert Storm relied on two things: electronic warfare and stealth technology. There is no stealth in space, and an IR signature can't be masked efficiently by means available to the space-farers. Flares are perhaps a possible means of "electronic warfare" in the expanded sense, but they would be a limited resource, and would cut into the mass available for crew accommodations, weapons systems, and payload in general. They would only really be good for terminal defense against missile weapons, and would provide no protection against large aperture lasers (the other primary weapon of a planetary defender).

As for offensive capabilities, a fleet of deep-diving submarines with large aperture lasers would be able to decimate an incoming fleet of warships, and would be able to surface and strike with absolute surprise and near impunity. Laser launch facilities would be more vulnerable, but also more dangerous. Attaining a 10:1 or even 100:1 advantage in nuclear munitions would be relatively easy for the defender.

In general, the defender has the resources of an entire planet, while the attacker only has what they can carry. That alone is a huge advantage.