Mega City One vs the Draka

[Srelex]

Through an act of Q, Mega City One of the Judge Dredd comics as of the more recent comics is transported to its geographical place in the Drakaverse as of 1994--if changing the variables here around would make for a more balanced or interesting scenario, feel free. From there, Q will either force the Judges of Mega City to go to war against the Draka, or simply sit back and watch how things go--discuss whichever scenario you prefer.

In regards to Mega City quantification, MC1 possesses considerable anti-nuclear laser defences and a substantial nuclear arsenal itself, including a number of very powerful 'TAD' warheads (there is a panel from the comic's Apocalpyse War' storyline that displays about two dozen of these warheads cracking open an alternate Earth--readers can verify me here), some level of space forces, and makes extensive use of anti-gravity vehicles. How would things turn out in the posited scenarios?

[The Grim Squeaker]

So, a city of 500 million with a very large military, extensive robotic forces, an airforce that's also a space force, psychic divisions, a massive extremely well trained and heavily armed paramilitary police force (the Judges), a huge strategic arsenal, huge amounts of well meaning cannon fodder (PDF) and very little compunction about using all of the above vs, what, a bunch of half lizard blonde racists with laser pistols?

[Imperial Overlord]

The Draka at this point control all of Africa and Eurasia, have orbital battle stations, a space fleet, and colonies on Mars. Only members of the most recent generations are genetically augmented, they're on the cusp of making man portable beam weapons, and their computers suck.

[DocHorror]

The Draka at this point control all of Africa and Eurasia, have orbital battle stations, a space fleet, and colonies on Mars. Only members of the most recent generations are genetically augmented, they're on the cusp of making man portable beam weapons, and their computers suck.

The Judges win, with or without Dredd.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The last time something like this came up, I was involved and I think we floundered trying to come up with useful quantification for the Big Meg, and the thread got zeroed out before we got closer than a rough order of magnitude- let's see what can be spelled out this time. I know sod-all about the Draka except what I read on the internet, so I'm not going to speak to that side of it.

The specific year this happens could be critical, because of the semi- regular catastrophes and crises that disfigure the Big Meg; 2105 is the critical point, the year of the Apocalypse War. Mega-City One's strategic and conventional forces are, I reckon, at an all time high before the war, an all time low- so much having been destroyed or expended- immediately afterwards.

Domestic rebuilding is fairly rapid, but with so much of the population and industrial potential gone- a city of eight hundred million people before the war, three hundred and sixty million afterwards, rising to four hundred million by 2117. "Now", in the Dredd timeline, is the early 2130's, so the Apocalypse War may not be such a great guide. Although it is just about time for another nuclear war- the war that brought down the American government and resullted in the rise of the Judges to power was in 2070. (I gave up on the comic long ago- the trade paperbacks are only up to 2116-17.)

So yes, it's a young population, hungry for change, with enormous trauma in it's recent past and fairly frequent major disaster smaller than war, and I think the unemployment rate for the Big Meg is still quoted as something around eighty- seven percent? hihg industrial potential in the hands of a relatively few citizens, thanks to robotics, and few working class jobs, thanks again to robotics.
'Stir Crazy' is an understatement, with Dredd himself saying things like "until we see sense and disarm Citi-Def"- gung ho militia idiots are the source of many of the City's disasters, and they are of limited use in war without proximate Judge leadership.

How many judges? Three hundred and five sector houses, certainly, plus specialist branches, iso- blocks that probably outumber the sector houses- are given higher numbers, anyway- military units and the Grand Hall of Justice- hard to tell. The one good source for an estimate is actually a strip that ran before the Apocalypse War, an account of an average night in the big city.

Now this contains wild- ass assumptions, but it's what there is to roll with until something more explicit comes along. One major disaster and numerous riots, murders, traffic accidents, minor disasters, etc, that killed about a hundred and fifty thousand people- reinforcing the idea that the birth and death rates in the city are very high, and it's a generally young population; and twelve judges.

Granted that Judges are much more highly trained and less likely to die than normal citizens, they're also more directly exposed to danger- and training isn't much use when a city block falls on you. That was probably worse than an average night, though; wouldn't have been featured in a strip otherwise. Still, it means the Academy of Law is going to have to graduate twelve new judges- and if that actually was an average night, that's forty-four hundred dead and replaced judges a year. Probably less- but then there's the day shift to worry about. I feel reasonably sure calling the annual turnover a mid four digit number.

How long is an active career? Dredd himself is the exception here- he was describing himself as getting old and slowing down in 2110, that's after almost thirty years on the street, and he just kept on going. The man has more true grit than the road- maintenance depots of every council in the northern hemisphere put together. Most Judges won't last that long; twenty-five, thirty years?

Putting that lot together, the probable number is somewhere from one to two hundred thousand Judges and more likely towards the low end of the scale, for the old, eight hundred million strong, city. A lot got killed in the Apocalypse War, and the pool of citizens to recruit from shrank drastically as well. Sixty to eighty thousand, by the latest point in the comic timeline? Less?

[Solauren]

Doesn't Mega City One have rather advanced cloning and robotics technology?

Plus, the rest of the world isn't a wasteland anymore, so they can spread out and find resources really is.

I have to say Mega City One will take this one.

[Srelex]

So, a city of 500 million with a very large military, extensive robotic forces, an airforce that's also a space force, psychic divisions, a massive extremely well trained and heavily armed paramilitary police force (the Judges), a huge strategic arsenal, huge amounts of well meaning cannon fodder (PDF) and very little compunction about using all of the above vs, what, a bunch of half lizard blonde racists with laser pistols?

Well, as I said, if putting this further in the Draka timeline makes for a more interesting setup, by all means.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

There's no direct quantification of the forces of the Apocalypse War- there are a few percentages mentioned, but percentages of what? In the last atomic act of the war, three heavy unitary warheads- fired with minimal warning time from within their own outer defence shield- are enough to obliterate (B ring?) a mega- city that stretches across what looks to be most of Ukraine and Belarus.

Strangely, the best set of numbers there are are for an artifact of the previous generation, a damaged and abandoned (and subsequently claimed by pirates) Sea Fortress, Carib, a mobile underwater missile base of the war of 2070; five hundred missile tubes, directly stated (collected volume 4), at least thirty of which are strategic, 'firing tubes one through thirty', each missile directly stated by the narrator to be carrying fifty independent manoeuvring warheads, the single one that gets through the laser defence system is enough to wipe out one of Mega-City One's eight hundred sectors. Low multi- megaton, that should be.

Saturation attacks, throwing hundreds of missiles at the defence so a few get through, of high strategic yield warheads; later replaced or supplemented by a relative handful of high performance missiles supporting dinosaur- killer yield bombs- the judges are that ruthless, their world is already ecologically ruined so that's a non-consideration; the draka had better be very, very good at strategic missile defence.

[Srelex]

Outside of nuclear war, what do we think of MC1's other military strategic options? They do have space forces of some kind, but to my knowledge they hardly ever play a part in Earth crises. Citi-def units often have more spirit than training, and otherwise they appear to have a very light actual military discounting the Judges (probably because of their clash with the US army during the 2070 war; amusingly, it seems to apply to the other cities, what with the Soviets using their own Judges as frontline troops, lol). How is a Judge likely to fare against what the Draka have to offer on the ground anyway?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I'd agree with reservations about Citi-Def- they are well equipped for the most part, an unpredictable proportion of them quite skilled, but they are not, by any stretch of the term, well disciplined. How many of them are there? Every time they come into sharp focus, there aren't that many of them, from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred, for a city block the usual quotes are sixty to seventy thousand population.

Treat these as order of magnitude estimates, but a majority of the population (being generally young and mad) are draftable- level fit, maybe one in five having done enough rumbling as a juve to be any good at it, but only one in twenty to fifty being even part- time CitiDef and only one in a hundred to two hundred really committed.

In one of the early strips, Judge Dredd's hell-trek across the cursed earth, we see the monument to the Battle of Death Valley, commemorating the deaths of ten thousand Judges and a hundred thousand Mega Troopers- the only hint there ever is of a professional military for the Big Meg. Speculating, but- disbanded after the war, those who made the grade being folded into the Judges and the rest released to civil life?

The overwhelming majority if not totality of President "Bad Bob" Booth's troops that they fought, and I'd have to say the backbone of a modern MegaCity army- look at the Sentenoids for instance- were robotic.
I don't think the sov Judges were front line; the strato-Vs were manned, as were the Big Meg's H-wagons, but the actual flesh and blood did more tactical control of, and mopping up and occupation duties after, the robotic leading edge. It was only during the guerilla and counterattack phases of the war that many of them found themselves being shot at directly.

We know there were and are ABC warriors (although not the ABC Warriors, it would be fun watching Dredd try to arrest Hammerstein, don't think they ever did that particular internal crossover)- I'd have to suspect a Mega-City One expeditionary force would be mainly infantry and larger war robots and manned armour, mostly hover armour at that.

[Srelex]

I'm not so sure; I remember that the Soviet Judges were riding atop the robo-tanks and marching alongside the Sentenoids during the first stages of the invasion, so it's far to say that they were at least relied upon as a substantial support. Furthermore, in Origins, weren't considerable numbers of organic US army troopers depicted as being the Judge's main opposition in MC1? I suppose the robot forces could have been an emergency reserve or something. Furthermore, I remember reading Judgement Day and seeing the main defence of MC1 being the Judge force and very large heavy tanks, with air support being negated by magibabble. How does that impact things here?

[Simon_Jester]

As Stuart pointed out in a different context (I think it was him), any aspect of warfare affected by electronic warfare will be totally dominated by Megacity One; the hardwired Draka computers may be able to (somehow!) defeat Alliance hardware in their own setting, but the lack of programmable flexibility makes them abso-bloody-useless against an unknown threat, especially one in advance of their own technology.

So as ECR notes, the Draka need to be very, very good at strategic missile defense... and they probably aren't.

How long is an active career? Dredd himself is the exception here- he was describing himself as getting old and slowing down in 2110, that's after almost thirty years on the street, and he just kept on going. The man has more true grit than the road- maintenance depots of every council in the northern hemisphere put together...

I like this.

[Srelex]

If it appears that MC1 would whup the Draka in the 90s, how about other times, as I suggested? In what era would the Draka be able to offer the best fight to the Judges?

[Imperial Overlord]

If it appears that MC1 would whup the Draka in the 90s, how about other times, as I suggested? In what era would the Draka be able to offer the best fight to the Judges?

There's a little issue with that in that the series jumps from the Final War in the 90s to the 25th Century where the Draka have all sorts of totally brutal tech (and redesigned computers). Personal battle armour of super materials with barely sub kiloton personal beam weapons, low kiloton antimatter grenades, reactionless drives, etcetera. I don't know much about Mega City One, but I imagine they would stomp it flat.

[iborg]

As Stuart pointed out in a different context (I think it was him), any aspect of warfare affected by electronic warfare will be totally dominated by Megacity One; the hardwired Draka computers may be able to (somehow!) defeat Alliance hardware in their own setting, but the lack of programmable flexibility makes them abso-bloody-useless against an unknown threat, especially one in advance of their own technology.

So as ECR notes, the Draka need to be very, very good at strategic missile defense... and they probably aren't.

Except they are. Both sides actually (Alliance and Draka) were so good at it that ICBMs/SLBMs were obsolete and the only missiles with a chance of succeeding to hit their target were those hypersonic skimmers launched at close range from submarines. And even those were near useless if a battlestation was overhead.
The thing about computers doesn't make sense. They must have some amount of flexibility or they just wouldn't work, and obviously they do in-universe. Most likely IMHO, they're like the milspec battlefield computers in Falkenberg's Legion : OS and programs in ROM but data and temporary settings in rewritable memory. It doesn't prevent them from doing things like frequency-hopping, on-the-fly encryption and such.

[Samuel]

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8&start=25

[iborg]

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 8&start=25

Yeah, I' ve already read it. Basically Stuart pitting his own 'verse against what he wants the Drakaverse to be so his 'verse can win easily.
Which is my beef with most of the Drakafics BTW. They rely less on curing the Drakas' opponents from the Stupid Virus (which would be enough in almost every case), than on making the Drakas stupid or outright modifying their canon abilities/behavior (like that planetary governor in the Star Trek inspired Drakafic acting in ways that would normally guarantee his expedited demise at the hands of the SD - just neglecting his physical fitness as he did would be enough).
I'm a bit doubtful of Drakaverse computers being slow. After all they did things like crack the human genome and develop hypersonic flight... in the sixties. Using space-industry made components and superconductors.

[Sarevok]

I'm a bit doubtful of Drakaverse computers being slow. After all they did things like crack the human genome and develop hypersonic flight... in the sixties. Using space-industry made components and superconductors.

You don't get it. Draka computers are not reprogrammable. This tremendously restricts their flexibility in military applications such as signal processing for radar and ECM.

[Samuel]

They rely less on curing the Drakas' opponents from the Stupid Virus (which would be enough in almost every case),

The Draka do not use mechanized agriculture. There is no way to make the Draka remotely realistic because every feature of their society is unstable. There is a reason we don't raise children in brutal boot camps- while it turns out people with high pain tolerances they are useless for everything else.

I'm a bit doubtful of Drakaverse computers being slow. After all they did things like crack the human genome and develop hypersonic flight... in the sixties. Using space-industry made components and superconductors.

Yeah, and Freehold is a stable economy. Draka technological progress is physically impossible.

[iborg]

If we start complaining about impossible things we'll have to dump 99% of science-fiction
About the issue of programming : I don't think (but maybe I'm wrong) ECM-EW operators actually reprogram their hardware in flight - not in the sense of rewriting the software inside the hardware. What they do is change parameters and modes of operation (also, software radios are a fairly recent development). The equivalent would be Joe Computer User actually rewriting and recompiling Photoshop and the underlying OS just to apply a filter. If your software's versatile enough it doesn't matter if it's burned in ROM or loaded on a slot-in chip, what the end-user modifies is data and parameters and selecting different functions of the program.
Of course, this design philosophy makes update cycles longer (you can't just download an update, you have to swap hardware components). Then again, military operators don't apply updates are liberally as Joe Computer User on his PC. There's a lot of testing involved and it's a deliberate, planned process.

[Simon_Jester]

If we start complaining about impossible things we'll have to dump 99% of science-fiction

The problem is that while most settings simply invent impossible technologies, the Draka setting does impossible things with stuff that really exists. To those making the complaint, it's as if someone wrote a novel in which bullets fired from a Colt .45 could curve to shoot people around corners.

That's a slightly different category from the 'usual' breed of impossible SF technology.

[iborg]

If we start complaining about impossible things we'll have to dump 99% of science-fiction

The problem is that while most settings simply invent impossible technologies, the Draka setting does impossible things with stuff that really exists. To those making the complaint, it's as if someone wrote a novel in which bullets fired from a Colt .45 could curve to shoot people around corners.

That's a slightly different category from the 'usual' breed of impossible SF technology.

Eh, yeah, I see what you mean. The fact that the Drakaverse more or less sticks to real world physics makes their wankery all the more jarring (add the ridiculous rate of advancement...). As a society they're not realistic - or plausible, at least them surviving and succeeding to conquer the world isn't. But that's what they are... In a VS debate I think we ought to take the sides as they are described with their canon abilities and behavioral patterns even if it stretches belief.
Now to get back on the actual vs : having read the Dredd comics they seem like a pretty powerful entity, and most of all are absolutely ruthless. This alone should make them perform better than the Draka's canon adversaries
That said, the war will be decided in space. I'm not sure about the Dreddverse space capabilities but unless they can prevent the Drakas from shooting their orbital lasers and particle beams at everything looking remotely man-made on the ground and lobbing rocks from the asteroid belt... All the talk of ECM means jackshit if the Draka gunners in the battlestation can do passive visual/IR targeting on huge groud fixed targets or very fast and glowy atmospheric movers.

[Samuel]

All the talk of ECM means jackshit if the Draka gunners in the battlestation can do passive visual/IR targeting on huge groud fixed targets or very fast and glowy atmospheric movers.

First you can jam IR emissions. I'm pretty sure knocking down asteroids won't be too big of a problem for the city given their nuke strength. Secondly:

[Srelex]

That map's a bit out of date; MC1 in the comics is now about half of that size. Don't know if that makes any difference.

[Junghalli]

like that planetary governor in the Star Trek inspired Drakafic acting in ways that would normally guarantee his expedited demise at the hands of the SD - just neglecting his physical fitness as he did would be enough.

For what it's worth, if you're talking about the story I think you're talking about most of my work from that period is an Old Shame for me now.