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By all appearances, ground vehicles appear to not be very much stronger than current ones. This means that a Millenium Falcon size ship could hover under a shield and smash AT-ATs with ease. Why doesn't this happen?

You think the AT-AT's are just going to sit there and let the Falcon shoot at them?

Also, I'll need some evidence for 'not very much stronger than current ones'.

They don't appear to have shields, and if they had the same power density as an ISD, they'd be generating 10^18 or 10^19 watts. They clearly do not. Therefore they are far weaker than ships of the same size.

Rhadamantus wrote:They don't appear to have shields

if they had the same power density as an ISD, they'd be generating 10^18 or 10^19 watts. They clearly do not. Therefore they are far weaker than ships of the same size.

There is a world of difference between "having the same power density as an ID" and "no stronger than current vehicles".

Whatever you're on, it's probably highly illegal. We see shields on the droid level. Also, I don't recall seeing any ISD-sized ground vehicles.
Also there's a fuckton of leeway between 'modern day' and 'isn't 1E18W'.

And why would ground vehicles need the same power density as an ISD? A lot of that power demand is going to be the drives, and unlike the ISD a ground vehicle needs neither the ability to accelerate at 1000s of gees nor to travel FTL.

One might also add that if ground vehicles DID use 1e18W, there wouldn't much of a planet left worth taking over.

'Not much of a planet left' may be a bit overboard, but 1E18W is about 239MT/sec so not much use if you want to actually take over instead of annihilate.

With that said, it's actually true that starships can defeat arbitrary numbers of ground forces (see BDZ)... assuming they aren't covered by planetary shields, which can be and are built to starship power scales, if not beyond. So basically all Rhadamanthus has done is repeat the whole premise for ESB.

As far as firepower goes, it bears considering that you cannot simply outright annihilate a ground target if you actually want to take prisoners, gather intelligence, and so forth. As a demonstration, certainly, and if you don't need the target afterwards for said reasons, but in general it's easier and less expedienture of resources to not bother causing more damage than you have to.

Then also, when you're using firepower in an atmosphere, carried by a ground vehicle which is of necessity not as large or well armoured as a Star Destroyer, you're going to be dealing with atmospheric effects. It wouldn't do much good for an AT-AT to shoot at a target and then get knocked over by the blast. Note that IIRC General Veers' walker came to a halt and braced its legs before they fired upon the shield generator at Hoth. I don't recall if he made some order like "cannons to maximum power" or some such; it's been a while since I watched the movie.

Point of order though: While a starship can *defeat* ground forces, without ground forces of its own it can't *hold* the ground taken unless it wants to sit there for the duration. As such, any victory would be temporary.

So essentially the crux of this thread is "why haven't helicopters displaced the tank?"

Esquire wrote:With that said, it's actually true that starships can defeat arbitrary numbers of ground forces (see BDZ)... assuming they aren't covered by planetary shields, which can be and are built to starship power scales, if not beyond. So basically all Rhadamanthus has done is repeat the whole premise for ESB.

No, I'm saying why don't militaries hover corvettes under shields.

1) Because they can't get through the damned shield?
2) The whole point of ground vehicles is to take territory, not turn it into a radioactive wasteland.

Purple wrote:So essentially the crux of this thread is "why haven't helicopters displaced the tank?"

Well, in the real world, helicopters don't have the endurance to stay hovering for long enough - this doesn't seem to be an issue in SW. There could be some issue with creating vehicles that can operate in a planet's atmosphere, which are heavily armored - we haven't seen a canon depiction of a capital ship covering at low altitude AND engaging in combat - only carrying out landing operations.

Purple wrote:So essentially the crux of this thread is "why haven't helicopters displaced the tank?"

Honestly no, it's more like "why haven't flying battleships armed with nuclear cannons displaced the tank?" Which at least makes sense.

There are probably several elements to the answer. One may be cost- it may well be that even big, heavy ground units are cheap relative to spacecraft of the same tonnage, at least once you get into mass production. If things like hypermatter reactors (required for ISD-level power density) and FTL drives are costly enough, then by sending your corvettes to hover around at ground level you're exposing a very expensive asset to easy destruction by cheaper assets- in particular, any ground-based platform armed with, oh, surface to air proton torpedoes.

Another may be navigation. If you try to fly a hovering corvette through a deflector shield, you might simply fail for some reason (say, interference with the shield). We know that theater shields like the one on Hoth have to be opened at least briefly to let transport-sized vehicles fly out, so it seems likely that you can't fly in through them either. We also know (now) that even a ship as small as the Millenium Falcon can't fly through a planetary shield. Shields porous enough to slip a corvette through may be the exception rather than the rule. And even if you do get your corvette through, the act of firing starship-scale weapons in atmosphere will generate blast waves. Unless your hover-engines are ludicrously over specification, it's possible that your craft will get smacked and buffeted around by the blasts, until your ship either hits the ground or the shield itself.

Then there's collateral damage. I would speculate that there are three separate tiers of weapons involved here- personal-scale, fighter-scale, and starship-scale. The weapons on AT-ATs and other heavy ground vehicles are fighter-scale, as are those on (naturally) snowspeeders, X-Wings, and the Falcon. These represent in all probability the heaviest feasible weapons that can be 'dialed down' far enough to use on or near planetary surfaces when you don't want everyone near the target burned to death, blinded by flash, or irradiated.

Anything much bigger would be so hazardous that it would only be worthwhile to employ it in 'scorched earth' attacks, in which case you might as well just stand off and blast the target from orbit altitude anyway.

Batman wrote:1) Because they can't get through the damned shield?
2) The whole point of ground vehicles is to take territory, not turn it into a radioactive wasteland.

I don't think they're asking why the attacker doesn't put starships under the shield. I think they're asking why the defenders don't have ships hovering inside the shield blasting any vehicles that come through.

When exactly have we seen scenarios that would have the defenders have vessels available to hover under the shield and blow away the oh so puny ground vehicles?

The Romulan Republic wrote:

Batman wrote:1) Because they can't get through the damned shield?
2) The whole point of ground vehicles is to take territory, not turn it into a radioactive wasteland.

I don't think they're asking why the attacker doesn't put starships under the shield. I think they're asking why the defenders don't have ships hovering inside the shield blasting any vehicles that come through.

Yes, thank you.

Because they provoke disproportionate retribution. A frigate won't contribute meaningfully to a planetary siege (since we saw what ground-based weaponry can do in ESB), and any fleet that brings down a planetary shield will have no trouble whatsoever swatting the defending ships. In doing so, any missed shots - and these will be capital-scale cannon - will be smashing up the planet below, exactly what the defenders didn't want happening in the first place.

Meanwhile, if the defending fleet were powerful enough to defeat the besieging one in the first place, it wouldn't have been under siege at all. There's no situation that's improved by using space-scale firepower on ground targets. Picture Hoth, except now there's a Nebulon-B hovering under the shield to shoot up any AT-ATs that appear; the Imperial fleet now has no choice but to melt the planet around the shield perimeter, cooking everybody under it. At least by restricting ground targets to ground-scale weapons you don't make planetary annihilation a reasonable military action.

That makes sense.

A topic about ground warfare in a Star Wars forum and no one has even mentioned the Battle of Geonosis yet.

Another underlying point is that all Star Wars miilitaries are air mobile. Which means they can drop their army on top of the other guys populations centers, forcing them into a ground war. The defender can't use strategic weapons because it is their own territory. For the attacker, if they aren't interested in taking territory, they wouldn't deploy a ground army in the first place.

This is loosely similar to a potential Soviet attack plan in Cold War Europe. If they made it to France before anyone was willing to authorize nuclear weapons, would NATO destroy Germany rather than let it fall into Soviet hands?

Simon_Jester wrote:Honestly no, it's more like "why haven't flying battleships armed with nuclear cannons displaced the tank?" Which at least makes sense.

No more than the question of why nuclear weapons in general didn't make ground armies obsolete. The answer is politics.Your flying battleships may obliterate any potential enemy ground forces, but if they also obliterate civilians in the process, you can't easily use them in cities.

What I meant was that the question made sense, it wasn't outright stupid.

There actually was a time when people thought heavy tanks were obsolete because of nuclear weapons, and the focus was on light and super-mobile in some countries, for instance. This turned out not to be very practical, so large tanks remained in play and we still have 70-ton beasts like the Abrams and Merkava.

The problem here is what I generally call "RTS-mentality" though it predates RTS or any Computer games for that matter, it's the fact that some people seem to think that "killing the enemy" is the only thing that's important in a battle/war. Bare in mind if "killing the enemy" was the only to be conserned about in war countries like Finland could never have an effective deterrent (one can argue about how effective of a deterrent the Finnish Defense Force is atm but it can in theory act as one) since the potential enemies have several times the number of men so they could easily zerg rush Finland if kill counts were only thing that mattered.

However military actions are about achiving an objective and if possible do so with minimal casualities on both sides (it's in theory possible to neutralize an opposing army without firing a single shot though it's not common or even probable) and more importantly with minimal collateral damage (as I said in the other thread that sort of had similar theme, "also said vital infrastucture is often the very reason you want to invade in the first place (especially if you're the aggressor) so you want to avoid damaging it as much as possible, after all a factory is no use to you if it's just a pile of rubble, a road is no use if it's full of craters or workers aren't very usefull if you're currently breathing in their remains cause you vaporized their homes.").

Also using a corvette or similar small(ish) capital ship as close in air support also brings the problem that when that thing is destroyed it's gonna crash (what goes up must come down) and even a correlian corvette that's one the smallest cap ships there are, is huge when it's nothing but a twisted piece of metal crashing on top of you.

to put this rambling back into focus, what's important in military actions is achiving your objective without it costing you too much (whole concept of pyrric victory is an engament you technically speaking won meaning the enemy wasn't able to achive their objective but the victory was so costly that it was practically a defeat for you).

Rhadamantus wrote:By all appearances, ground vehicles appear to not be very much stronger than current ones. This means that a Millenium Falcon size ship could hover under a shield and smash AT-ATs with ease. Why doesn't this happen?

Because your initial assumption is wrong.



AT-ATs are proof, at least on their sides, probably not the neck and other weak spots, against weapons mounted on tramp freighters, including blasters and concussion missiles. They can also hit tramp freighters in return. The engine-wash of a large transport can topple them, however.

Considering how utterly ineffective the rebel artillery and T-47 blasters were against the AT-ATs on Hoth, I can't help wonder what they were expecting the Empire to deploy against them. After all, the rebels identified the AT-ATs on site as Imperial walkers so it's not like they were some unfamiliar new superweapon, but Luke seemed surprised to discover that their armor was too strong for blasters.

It just seems paradoxical to me that they'd be so well-prepared at defending Echo Base against an Imperial bombardment, and yet so ill-prepared to mount an effective defense against an Imperial ground assault.