StarDestroyer.Net BBS

If we take the 25,000 star destroyer number at face value, how does the Empire (or anyone else) invade planets? Fractal's Evakmar was an awesome corps transport design, but it was also bigger than an star destroyer. Even if they cost half as much, the empire can't have more than, what, ten thousand. Ten thousand corps is a hell of a lot from a Terran perspective, but it's also only 300 million troops on your first landing (total, across the entire empire.) A single sector would only be able to land 300,000 troops in the first wave. Is a world of ten or a hundred billion people really going to fall to that? Because even if they're way less militarized than modern day earth, they should still have millions of troops. How does that work?

The next waves can be sent on civilian ships or otherwise non-military shipping (paid for by the military) when the landing zones are pacified? Those initial "small" numbers of say 300 million initial waves would be for the primary high value targets or just establishing presence in the landing zone. Those hyperspace-capable transports will most likely be going back and forth from the Imperial-held staging point planet to the front-line disputed planet, ferrying the subsequent waves of more millions day after day.

Also, 25.000 Imperator-class Star Destroyers aren't the only warships the Empire has. Venators, Acclamators, Victories if they are still canon, plus the sub-star destroyer-type capital ships. Not all enemy worlds require ISDs, after all. Even in SW Rebels, most of the Imperial actions involved non-ISD warships.

But if you're landing 300,000 soldiers in the first wave, and the defenders have ten million soldiers, it seems that you won't have a chance to get a beachhead inside the shield.

Rhadamantus wrote:But if you're landing 300,000 soldiers in the first wave, and the defenders have ten million soldiers, it seems that you won't have a chance to get a beachhead inside the shield.

Those ten million will be spread out covering the entire planet, while your forces will be concentrated. In 1944, the German Army had close to a million men in the west, awaiting the allied invasion, against a D-Day assault force of 130k.

If you have a shield, you'd concentrate all your soldiers under it.

Rhadamantus wrote:If you have a shield, you'd concentrate all your soldiers under it.

Which either a) covers the entire planet or b) allows an unopposed landing outside the shield a la Hoth.

An Acclamator that can land or even hover near-land or even splashdown on the surface of the ocean as we've seen in some televised media (involving Kit Fisto love-fisting Seperatist amphibious squadrons) and extend its shield bubble to cover surface troops... or just stay at a higher altitude and act as close and not-so-close air support... would make for an awesome makeshift repulsor tank.

I really think those "paltry few" hundred million or billion ground troops are just there for seizing things that they'd rather spare from orbital bombardment.

Holy crap... imagine landing an Acclamator on waters outside the Hoth-style shield coverage... and the Acclamator (or more!) just sailing on the water's surface, going THROUGH the shield borders... just as the AT-ATs did on Hoth... and then lifting off and flying under the shield-umbrella and ruining people's shit!

Or doing that on a desert! With a Space Werner Herzog doing a Space Fitzcarraldo with a deranged Space Klaus Kinski! AT-ATs *dragging* a ship across the landscape, taking it through the shield-border, and then the ship lifts off and starts turbolasering everyone!

Rhadamantus wrote:If we take the 25,000 star destroyer number at face value, how does the Empire (or anyone else) invade planets? Fractal's Evakmar was an awesome corps transport design, but it was also bigger than an star destroyer. Even if they cost half as much, the empire can't have more than, what, ten thousand. Ten thousand corps is a hell of a lot from a Terran perspective, but it's also only 300 million troops on your first landing (total, across the entire empire.) A single sector would only be able to land 300,000 troops in the first wave. Is a world of ten or a hundred billion people really going to fall to that? Because even if they're way less militarized than modern day earth, they should still have millions of troops. How does that work?

You build more than 25,000 ships. Witness the resources it took to invade Naboo; Hoth was a small raid on a military target, not an occupation force. Naboo was attacked by at least 19 trade federation ships which had upward of 329,600 B1s each; six million two hundred thousand troops. That's for a planet of pacifists.

Captain Seafort wrote: Those ten million will be spread out covering the entire planet, while your forces will be concentrated. In 1944, the German Army had close to a million men in the west, awaiting the allied invasion, against a D-Day assault force of 130k.

Yeah, that. Though if you count all the people making the planes work the allied invasion was way bigger then German forces in the west. The Earth has 200 million square km of land surface, and 10 million fully equipped mechanized troops would basically only be enough to cover Europe against sudden invasion. Even then an enemy could land a whole army many places and it'd still take some amount of time to seriously oppose them. Even 24 hours to deploy is an awful long time when the enemy is hypersonic airborne in flying mile long battleships.

Your only plan I can see would be to dig in light forces around key strategic defenses, and make as much of your force mobile as possible by a means not dependent on space transport. That could mean anti gravity vehicles, very large nuclear hovercraft or deep underground vacuum subways, or ideally all three. If you've had a planetary government for centuries the subway option might get pretty damn far built. Tonnage throughput though would have to be huge to matter.

It seems like though that Wars would have no trouble tech wise making 500mph 10,000 ton capacity freight trains, and a qaudruple track line of this with trains every 30 minutes moves 960,000 tons. That's a lot of armies worth of vehicles. If it's all 8,000ft underground the only way the enemy could knock it out would be employing weapons more effective then 100 megaton earth penetrator nukes. This seems to be taboo as a general tactic. Wars tech might be able to go deeper if it wanted too, the top of the mantle would be the limit since that stuff is moving too much and absurdly hot. Giant hovercraft might be useful within theaters, like 50,000 ton wars tech air pressure hovercraft. I assume these could pass through shields unlike repulsor craft. Carry an anti ship artillery battalion around at 150 knots.

The idea would be to feed more ground troops to your strategic defense zones without getting them all killed in transit, one assumes shield generators and strategic scale artillery would already be grouped together with industry and population centers as strong points. You can't just spread all your guys around trying to shoot dad every last enemy spacetrooper as he parachutes from orbit. On the other hand its also not out of the question that a planet only as developed as earth is could field 100 million troops in its own defense, most of them with only rifles and shoulder weapons, but that's fine for defending urban areas against sudden space raids.

Not sure if I'm understanding the question...just like any military operation, you identify your objectives, prepare the necessary forces, and then go.

The ground attack on Hoth?

[Primary Objective] Capture the Rebel Base.
[Secondary Objective] Destroy the Rebel Base's shield generator.
[Preparation] Ground forces under the command of General Veers are prepared as a first-strike force. A larger, less mobile ground force is readied in the second wave, directly under Vader's command.
[Execution] Veers 'Blizzard Force' lands, penetrates the shield zone, and blows up the shield generator. Vader's ground forces then land nearly directly on the base itself, attempting to cut off and trap inside any Rebels.

End


Even in the Phantom Menace, when the Trade Federation blockaded Naboo, they likely spent weeks using their sensors to collect relevant information on population centers, etc. Within the same day that Sidious gave Nute Gunray the order for them to invade, Thebes, the capital city of Naboo, was entirely overrun and occupied.

We also have some very visible (if, imho, poorly planned and executed) scenes of the Clone Army landing and invading Geonosis.

The Star Wars Clone Wars TV series even shows various planetary invasion (again, small in scale looking, due to it being TV and a smaller budget than a movie).

In Revenge of the Sith was see the Outer Rim sieges taking place. Republic forces are embattled upon planets, having already landed troops, but are merely in the process of taking over those key locations necessary to the pacification of the planet in question. Those types of battles are, naturally, much more fierce and lengthy than the Battle of Hoth.


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Now, if by your question you meant to ask was closer to: "If we take the 25,000 ISD number at face value, why does the Empire (or anyone else) actually invade planets?" then, that's a whole other topic.

My question is "If there are only 25,000 ISDs, how does the empire land enough men to effectively invade planets?"

NecronLord wrote: You build more than 25,000 ships. Witness the resources it took to invade Naboo; Hoth was a small raid on a military target, not an occupation force. Naboo was attacked by at least 19 trade federation ships which had upward of 329,600 B1s each; six million two hundred troops. That's for a planet of pacifists.

That's also a good example of tactical vs non tactical landing methods. Because Naboo had no shield and no army they could unload the whole force slowly from those huge LSTs. Against someone who could fight back you'd need to use a much larger number of smaller craft, increasing your attack price and overall transport requirements. Naboo was a pure occupation, and the slow march on the capital seems to have been calculated to avoid provoking a battle. If the Naboo fighters had attacked the invasion force it seems pretty clear they would have blown up a lot of those LSTs with proton torpedoes. They thought they might destroy the droid control ship after all. Probably a one hit kill on the LST.

The other option is just land directly from an ISD like ship that's much more self defending, which seems to be far better against opposition, if creating some rather huge risks in its own right should you have the ISD blown up (the enemy might not dare). But it gives a high probability of zero losses because the ISD shields and hull should hold up to any weapon the enemy can actually conceal in the first place. But warship as transport would be really expensive. Sure you can build more then 25,000 ships, but you still need loyal crews, and occupation forces would consume absurd amounts of manpower every time you did carry out a full scale invasion. All those guys standing around on the ISD are kinda wasted if they really do have big ship crews, and not 99% droids like logic would seem to dictate.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Rhadamantus wrote:But if you're landing 300,000 soldiers in the first wave, and the defenders have ten million soldiers, it seems that you won't have a chance to get a beachhead inside the shield.

Those ten million will be spread out covering the entire planet, while your forces will be concentrated. In 1944, the German Army had close to a million men in the west, awaiting the allied invasion, against a D-Day assault force of 130k.

Also, it's not just if you can get a beachhead, it's whether you can keep it. If you land 300,000 men vs their 100,000, but then six hours you managed to get 300,000 more, and they have their whole ten million, you're screwed. This is different from D-Day because there, the germans were further from Normany on average, if anything. Does it take longer to move a corps halfway across the world than across a sector? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.

I think the Empire's primary objective would be capturing or disabling any surface defenses capable of repelling an orbital bombardment.

With that accomplished, the Empire would then be able to establish aerospace dominance and conduct punitive aerial strikes against any resistance forces until they cease hostilities.

After that, the Empire would probably set up heavily fortified garrisons on the ground from which they can send out troops to beat up old ladies, kick puppies or do whatever the hell they invaded the planet for in the first place.

Galvatron wrote:I think the Empire's primary objective would be capturing or disabling any surface defenses capable of repelling an orbital bombardment.

With that accomplished, the Empire would then be able to establish aerospace dominance and conduct punitive aerial strikes against any resistance forces until they cease hostilities.

After that, the Empire would probably set up heavily fortified garrisons on the ground from which they can send out troops to beat up old ladies, kick puppies or do whatever the hell they invaded the planet for in the first place.

Oh, sure, if they just want to exterminate a planetary populace, the Empire can do that, with enough firepower, and their's probably no one else that can stop them if they really commit the forces at their disposal to that goal. But their are plenty of places where that is counterproductive. Anywhere you want to capture a high-value resource or prisoner intact, for example (like Hoth).

Planetary shielding just further complicates the issue- sure, you can blast through it with enough firepower, but probably not without slagging everything in the vicinity.

Where are you getting "exterminate the populace" out of what I just said? It's essentially the Tarkine Doctrine without a Death Star, which means the Empire would cow the populace with the threat of extermination in the form of an ever-present Imperial warship and fighters patrolling the skies.

The Death Star simply gave the Empire a means to do so with impunity against even the most heavily defended worlds.

Even if we take the 250000 ISD number at face value, it's just one ship class. There's Force knows how many Victory-class or Venator-class star destroyers left over from the clone wars, not mention other ship types. A full on invasion of hostile world is a lot more complicated then small raid to eliminated Echo Base (bare in mind the empire knew that Echo Base probably was among one the few settlements at Hoth and they shouldn't expect stiff resistance).

Galvatron wrote:Where are you getting "exterminate the populace" out of what I just said? It's essentially the Tarkine Doctrine without a Death Star, which means the Empire would cow the populace with the threat of extermination in the form of an ever-present Imperial warship and fighters patrolling the skies.

The Death Star simply gave the Empire a means to do so with impunity against even the most heavily defended worlds.

My point, which I'll acknowledge was rather clumsily expressed, was that while people often treat orbital bombardment as the be-all and end-all of Star Wars warfare, it really is a very limited tool if their's anything you want to take intact. So while the Empire has a great deal of raw firepower, that alone isn't going to win a battle for them if they need a given area to be in something resembling one piece.

For example, suppose someone started an insurgency on Coruscant, or some other wealthy, industrial city world where simply slagging the area wasn't an option (or, at least, not a sane option, though that admittedly might not stop the likes of Tarkin and Palpatine).

The Romulan Republic wrote:My point, which I'll acknowledge was rather clumsily expressed, was that while people often treat orbital bombardment as the be-all and end-all of Star Wars warfare, it really is a very limited tool if their's anything you want to take intact. So while the Empire has a great deal of raw firepower, that alone isn't going to win a battle for them if they need a given area to be in something resembling one piece.

Granted, but the Empire probably counted on fear of an orbital bombardment a great deal. They needn't raze the entire planet to demonstrate the futility of resistance, so how many Hiroshimas do you think it would take before a populace decided that the cost of opposition was too high?

Coruscant would obviously be a special case since it's the Imperial capital. If fact, I imagine that most of the inner systems were relatively safe from Imperial subjugation thanks to Senate oversight of the military prior to ANH. I doubt it's a coincidence that most of the worst depictions of Imperial atrocities take place on the Outer Rim.

Most invasion in the TCW seems to be decapitation strikes against an enemy. Capture the enemy general, knock out their shield generators and etc. The Republic doesn't seem interested in fighting to control every square inch of the planet.

Likewise, it's possible that the Empire doesn't need to occupy the entire planet with stormtroopers if they simply install a puppet regime and let them run the place under the auspices of an Imperial governor.

My suggestion is quite simple, that most Star Wars planets are extremely sparsely populated. I would assert that a planet with the population of Earth or larger is extremely rare. Naboo is stated to have a population of a mere 600 million, and I suspect it is far more representative of worlds in the galaxy than Coruscant. While there are undoubtedly other ecumenopolis in Star Wars, they are likely much smaller than Coruscant. Christophsis, as shown in Clone Wars, had a population of a mere 35 billion. As was done historically, the way to take cities is a siege rather than a direct invasion. That seems to be what we saw with a reference to the outer rim sieges in the Clone Wars. Not to mention the ultimate siege weapon of the Death Star.

While it is no longer canon, I suspect KOTOR is representative of what happened before planetary shields were seriously developed. When the Sith arrived at the ecumenopolis of Taris(though it was a dying world even before the Sith attack), they did not land massive invasion armies. They instituted a blockade of the planet and made deals with those in power from a position of strength. With shields and strong defenses, it would be about a blockade and negotiation, with the only strong military option being the Death Star. Why do you think the Empire built a second one?

On smaller and less densely populated worlds, once an attacker is able to control the skies, it is only a matter of time before they take the world outright. The reason that no one pours major resources into ground defenses is that if the orbital defenses fail, the planet is already all but lost conventionally. Look at how easily Geonosis falls once the Republic takes control of the skies over the world, despite housing massive droid factories and their corresponding armies, as well as a population of 100 billion. The same thing can be seen in Rogue One with Rebel Alliance air support over Scarif decimating the AT-ACTs. Air and orbital power in SW dominates even more heavily than in reality. The only defensive ground forces worth having are those that protect your anti-orbital defenses, as was shown at Hoth.

As for invasion forces, they all seem to be extremely air mobile, and use that mobility to take objectives as efficiently as possible. Even the AT-AT is air mobile as shown in Rebels, and its primary purpose is assaulting theater shields. As noted by Ray above, their strikes are often about decapitation strikes. While in the Clone Wars this was especially true due to the nature of CIS droid armies, it is also true with conventional enemies.

(All population numbers came from the Star Wars Atlas book, which while Legends, gives an idea of what most writers in SW are thinking. Though it gives a population for Coruscant at a mere 1 trillion, giving it a similar population density to South Korea, it is actually more consistent with the lights as seen from orbit. )

This is why I'm actually quite forgiving of the stormtrooopers in Star Wars Rebels; yes, they're not 'super elite soldiers' but they don't need to be - they need to be politically reliable occupation muscle to protect the government from the people, like so many real world armies.

They don't need to fight droid armies, they need to stop peace protests and make sure that people pay their taxes.

NecronLord wrote:This is why I'm actually quite forgiving of the stormtrooopers in Star Wars Rebels; yes, they're not 'super elite soldiers' but they don't need to be - they need to be politically reliable occupation muscle to protect the government from the people, like so many real world armies.

This is one theory for why that legion of Palpatine's best troops performed so poorly on Endor, as well. That "best" meant "most politically reliable", not "most competent".

I would guess, though, that their was a wide range in quality among Imperial troops. Their'd be legions of cheap, second-rate garrison troops in the Outer Rim, who's only real requirement was that they be loyal muscle, and legions of "elite" troops in the Core, who lacked much actual experience and were their for spectacle and ideological purity. And then a few legions of actually semi-effective troops, probably veterans of the Clone Wars and mobile offensive forces who were sent from hot spot to hot spot and got the most actual combat experience, with the 501st. Legion and Death Squadron being perhaps the foremost examples.

Edit: In the case of those particular examples, as well, you had Vader in command, which probably helped a lot. Vader seems like someone who much prefers competent subordinates over toadies, as seen in his choking officers to death for failure, while having a reasonable discussion with the officer who questions his plans with regard to Leia at the start of A New Hope.

The Empire couldn't have existed if it didn't have a pretty high compliance level at the planetary level. A lot of them probably had their own military forces too, if not necessarily naval fleets, to enforce local order, and basically to keep the Empire out of direct control even if they suffered a local rebellion. Many people would profit from the empire, or at least face fewer space pirate attacks, the Dark Side would change none of that.