Ground Forces are nearly meaningless in ST vs. SW

[Admiral Mercury]

The main site has a large amount of focus on comparing Star Trek ground troops and equipment to Star Wars ground troops and equipment, and while that's neat from an academic sense, Mr. Wong seems to use ST's overall lack of ground forces as a bludgeon with which to preach the Imperial dogma. This shows an incredible short sightedness on his part, in that when it comes to these sorts of Sci-fi/Space Opera universes, ground forces would be almost completely a non-factor in a war. Starfleet's emphasis on its navy is mocked, yet that's all together rational. It's the Empire's frivolous spending on large ground army's that doesn't make any sense, unless they do it as some sort of full employment economic policy. Not only is a strong naval focus necessary, I maintain that canon evidence shows that both powers, the Federation and the Empire among others, understand this fact and base their military policy around it. Let's begin by looking at why a navy is so important and an army isn't:

First thing to understand is orbital bombardment != aerial bombardment. While it is true that one can't win a terrestrial war through the use of air power alone, this is largely due to the nature of modern aircraft. They have limited weapon capacity, they can't remain above a target indefinitely, they tend to have few crew members, etc. A starship in space as almost none of these problems. They can remain in orbit directly over a target, depending on the ship they can have nearly limitless Phaser/turbolaser use, large numbers of crew means that the ships can carry out their tasks for weeks, months, even years depending on the ship.

Second, in any battle between a ship or ships in orbit and a planet, the planet is at a major disadvantage. Any anti-ship defenses can be easily overcome by having the ship move out of range. Unlike a planet which has a predictable orbit, ships have nearly free range of movement. The options ships have for attack are near infinite, while a planet is incredibly limited in its responses. There's no shield that's completely immune to orbital bombardment. Once that's down and if the planet has no navy of its own to defend itself, the battle has already been lost. A ship in orbit can take its sweet time if it wants, chucking lasers at farmlands, industrial facilities, cities, etc.

Third, as I alluded to above, ground troops aren't completely unneeded, but the large million man armies that the Empire seems to love are. All you would need to secure a planet after bombarding it is a small contingent of soldiers to secure only the most vital facilities. At most you'd need a few thousand. "But wait," the warsies say "you couldn't destroy the entire defending army with just orbital bombardment!" Well sure you could, but for the sake of argument let's say that any defending units are super shielded from bombardment. That's fine, because the planet wouldn't be at that point. Any defending force could be infinitely harassed from space. You could destroy their means of travel such as roads and bridges, deny them cover by burning jungle and forests, deny them food and equipment by destroying farms and factories, etc. Any defenders could be kept at bay until the war is won and their ordered to surrender by their superiors.

The same holds true when attempting to liberate an occupied planet. Any ground forces could just as easily be destroyed from space. Any power that leaves a massive army on a planet is dooming those people to die. Frankly, those soldiers can be put to a much better use than cannon fodder.

Now on to the good stuff. The canon evidence:

Star Trek:

DS9 episode, Paradise Lost: When the Federation is tricked into believing they are under imminent threat of Dominion attack, the USS Lakota transports small teams to various areas on Earth. Large military formations are not seen.
Analysis: This is completely logical. You would only need ground forces to defend vital areas on the planet. What we mainly see on screen is a small "away team" in New Orleans. While there may have been vital Federation facilities there, it's more likely that this small team was tasked with maintaining security for Captain Sisko's family. It's not a leap to assume that high ranking Starfleet officials would have teams to protect their loved ones.

DS9 episode, The Siege of AR-558: A small Federation garrison defends a captured Dominion outpost.
Analysis: The small number of ground troops is to be expected. The real problem is that they're left alone without space support, in a clear violation of the above outlined doctrine. This seems to be an out of the ordinary situation since people complain of being there beyond their normal rotation. The situation is helped when Sisko and the Defiant provide material aid from space.

TNG episode, Unification: A Romulan muses that they could subjugate the planet Vulcan with a mere 2000 ground troops.
Analysis: The ground combat section of this website claims that this line is the Romulan showing contempt for Starfleet's terrestrial army capability. I disagree. When viewed in the light of the outlined doctrine, it's clear that this is meant to be taken at face value. The Romulans would need only about 2000 troops to secure the most vital areas of Vulcan. The rest of the planet could be brought to heel by threat of naval power. This also goes to show that other major Alpha Quadrant powers use a similar military doctrine.

DS9 episode, For the Uniform: Captain Sisko launches biological weapons on a Maquis outpost. The Maquis soon after abandon it.
Analysis: The Maquis don't attempt to hold their position. They evidently don't have any NBC bunkers to protect themselves. They know that once they've been found out they don't have the means of protecting themselves. All the AT-ATs in the universe couldn't have saved them.

Star Wars:

The Phantom Menace: The Trade Federation launches an invasion of Naboo. After the initial invasion, we see that they leave only one ship in orbit. During a critical battle with the Gungan forces, only one droid army is present.
Analysis: The powers of Star Wars are nearly the same as the powers in Star Trek. The Trade Federation successfully holds an entire planet with only one ship in orbit. Their battledroid armies largely remained within important areas they needed to secure like Theed. Evidently there weren't very many droids on the planet, since the Theed garrison was the one that attacked the Gungans. If the Naboo invasion was so massive as warsies maintain, any number of droid armies should have been able to intercept the Gungans, thus leaving the Theed droids to intercept Padme and her infiltration team.

Attack of the Clones: CIS battledroids engage Republic clone troopers outside the CIS production facilities on the surface of the planet Geonosis. The CIS are routed and key members of their leadership flee.
Analysis: The CIS' willingness to retreat off the planet and not to another part of the planet is indicative that they only had the one facility. And that makes sense. Dispersing your productive capacity would be a waste of time and resources if you believe that they would just be obliterated from space. Instead, those resources are better used on one super factory. This facility would be too tempting of a target to destroy from orbit, and thus result in a ground campaign. They lost due to a combination of surprise and better equipment on the part of the Republic.

Revenge of the Sith: The CIS stronghold on Utapau is attacked by the Republic. Leaders of the organization retreat and regroup to Mustafar.
Analysis: This is a theme through the movies. A power concentrates their forces in a single area of a planet and then flees when they lose it. They never regroup a few kilometers away or even a continent away. They never have reinforcements from other areas of the planet help them. Once they've been defeated in space they realize there's no point in fighting on the planet and leave.

The Empire Strikes Back: Imperial forces attack and take the rebel base on Hoth.
Analysis: Similar to above. Instead of having maybe a hundred or even a dozen rebel outposts on Hoth, they've concentrated their forces, and when attacked they flee the planet. Again, this is logical when taking into account the massive orbital power doctrine.

EU Content, Torpedo Spheres, Base Delta Zero, Galaxy Gun, Eclipse-class Star Destroyeretc: It should be noted that the largest and most prestigious weapons of the Empire are not ground equipment, they're spacecraft. What's more, they're spacecraft designed for the purpose of bombardment. Tell me, if the Imperial army is so well equipped and so professional, why not use a Hoth-like invasion for every conflict? Why would the Empire sink massive amounts of money into building giant spaceships for the sole purpose of bombardment? The answer is clear. It's more efficient and cost effective than invasion. Even the Empire, which maintains a massive ground force, knows that what matters most is space power. And this brings us to...

The Death Star: The Death Star is the logical endpoint of this doctrine of overwhelming space power. There's no need to invade and take a planet when you can just destroy it. And while the Empire intended to use the Death Star as a weapon of state terrorism, the CIS could have only intended it as a weapon of war in its inevitable fight with the Republic.

Stardestroyer.net: While not a part of canon per se, this method of war is implicitly accepted by a number of users here. I've read several debate threads that always end with something along the lines of "The Death star comes out of hyperspace and blows up X." Ground combat is such a non-thing that specific debate parameters have to be set to make it a viable aspect. With this in mind it's clear that the whole "Star Wars vs. Star Trek ground combat" page on the site is just so much meaningless bluster. You might as well make a section about how Star Wars uniforms look better for all it matters in the overall versus debate.

tl;dr those cute little AT-ATs won't be saving the Empire when Galaxy-class starships are blasting away their cities from orbit.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Sigh...

Ok, first, simply leveling a planet from orbit or outright destroying it is fine if that's the objective. If, however, you want to actually capture/i] a planet, it's population, it's infrastructure etc then you do need ground forces.

Also, you're TPM and TESB examples suck. The Trade Federation kept only one ship in orbit and their troops concentrated in the cities because a) they are not soldiers and don't think like them, b) they are not expecting a liberating army to come from space since the Republic doesn't have one and c) they are most concerned with an uprising from the occupied populous.

In TESB the Rebels have only one base because they are trying to stay covert and have limited resources. Having one base means just one position to defend rather than dozens. Also, that very same battle shows why ground forces are needed and orbital bombardment is not everything. Vader wanted to capture the Rebel leaders, not merely kill them. Also, the Rebels have a shield that is, according to General Veers, "strong enough to deflect any bombardment" from a flotilla that includes a damn Star Dreadnought no less. So a terrorist organization can set up a shield to render useless the Imperial naval advantage, and so can any number of worlds, like Alderaan or Coruscant or any other world with a planetary shield.

Geez, did you even watch the films?

As for Star Trek, the AR-558 example is used as evidence for Starfleet's poor ground combat not because they don't have orbital support (which the Jem'Hadar lacked as well) but because these supposedly well-equippped ground troops did not have weapons up to the task. No automatic weapons, no mines, no body armour, no mortars or support weapons.

Yes, a naval focus is understandable given the situation in Star Wars. The existence of planet-busting weapons does not invalidate ground forces as TESB showed. Hell, the entire Clone Wars shows this. Both sides were fully capable of simply annihilating contested planets from space, no question. But each side wanted to capture planets. It's the same reasoning why modern militaries don't simply say "well, we're invading this country and they might resist, so ;et's jkust nuke the place and be done with it."

You really are a total moron.

[Admiral Mercury]

General Veer's comment is clearly only meant to be relevant to that particular fleet of ships, not that it was literally impossible for any form of bombardment to overwhelm the shields.

Capturing a planet intact, sure everyone wants a planet. But do you really think an invasion of a planet is anymore likely to keep a planet's infrastructure intact than selective bombardment? Invasions are some of the most destructive types of military operations. If anything, it would result in even more destruction. It's well known that people, at least people in the SW universe, will readily surrender at the mere display of force. It's been said that some systems don't bother fighting once they witness a single Star Destroyer, the Empire's planned usage for the Death Star was essentially this. It's not a stretch to think that most planets would surrender once they've lost control of their local space.

Your comments about the Trade Federation not thinking like soldiers doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Yes, the Trade Federation is a business and its leaders obviously do not have military training. But do you really think they wouldn't have some military advisers who actually maintain or set up their armies for them? At least a contractor? They all but certainly had some credible military thinkers on their side, therefore their actions on Naboo are illustrative examples.

All the evidence points to the necessary supremacy of the navy at the expense of the army. Hell, it even seems like the Empire is reluctant to use their vast military might. Case in point, A New Hope. Where was the Imperial Army on Tatooine to aid in the finding of the Death Star plans? With the ludicrous speeds that starships are supposedly capable of in SW the Empire should have easily been able to get enough troops there to, I don't know, shut down all the planets spaceports? And yet the Empire doesn't.

The more I think about it, the more it seems like the Imperial Army is little more than a Keynesian public works program to help prop up a bloated and unsustainable capitalist economy. They couch it in the language of defense and war, but they're reluctant to ever use it in these massive planetary invasions, instead preferring the more efficient means of orbital bombardment.

[gigabytelord]

Have you ever actually read anything related to Star Wars? You realize there's an entire EU built up around the movies? I've only read a very small amount of it but it was enough to convince me that there's nothing pathetic about the ground forces of really any major power in SW. They may not go as overboard as WH40K or get as GRIMDARK, but they're generally pretty effective (Depending on who's writing). Same goes for warships or space warfare in general in the universe.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The flotilla General Veers referred to included one of the five or six (depending on how many Executors had been built by then) ships in the entire damn galaxy. If that can't crack the Rebel's shield you'll be hard pressed to find something that can that won't just annihilate the planet.

As for the invasions causing plenty of damage, sure they will. But some infrastructure remaining is better than none.

My comments about the Trade Federation do hold up. They may have had advisors and contractors on hand, but even they clearly weren't soldiers. The Trade Federation's actions on Naboo are not illustrative of SW ground forces.

As for why Vader didn't call up reinforcements in ANH, he did. There was at least one, maybe two additional ISD's present during the Falcon's escape. More to the point, each ISD carries just under 10,000 Stormtroopers, so additional troops were not needed. 20,000-30,000 stormtroopers with two or three wings of TIEs in support is clearly plenty of force for searching Tatoine for the plans. That they failed is more because they did not expect droids to be able to find a way off-world than any lack of forces.

Now, I am not saying the Empire prefers ground invasions to orbital bombardment. If bombardment is what is required to get the job done (cowing a shieldess planet into submission, wiping out rebellious worlds etc) then they use it. However, when the task calls for capturing something like, say, the Rebel leaders on Hoth, or for rescuing prisoners from Geonosis, or for assassinating General Grievous on Utapua without the massive collateral damage a bombardment would produce, they use their well-developed ground forces.

Nice job totally ignoring my points on ST by the way.

[Lord Revan]

and there's 2 things to remember about the ANH situation first that during that time Darth Vader had no official authority within the imperial military so he couldn't just order high command to send (insert number here) ships to his location. Also while cocky Anakin Skywalker (and by extension Darth Vader) was fairly good general and would know that if the droids were at the hands of a rebel agent and it's not an unreasonble assumption to make, even if it proved to be wrong, then should empire make anything too overt said agent would go hiding until he found a way to get the info off-world (by for example thru rebel agents inside the imperial forces sent to stop the info from getting to the rebels).

and another thing it's not enough to take control of a star system one must also be able to hold control and that's not effectivly done by fleets, so you're gonna have to land ground forces at some point or another.

[Admiral Mercury]

The flotilla General Veers referred to included one of the five or six (depending on how many Executors had been built by then) ships in the entire damn galaxy. If that can't crack the Rebel's shield you'll be hard pressed to find something that can that won't just annihilate the planet.

As for the invasions causing plenty of damage, sure they will. But some infrastructure remaining is better than none.

My comments about the Trade Federation do hold up. They may have had advisors and contractors on hand, but even they clearly weren't soldiers. The Trade Federation's actions on Naboo are not illustrative of SW ground forces.

As for why Vader didn't call up reinforcements in ANH, he did. There was at least one, maybe two additional ISD's present during the Falcon's escape. More to the point, each ISD carries just under 10,000 Stormtroopers, so additional troops were not needed. 20,000-30,000 stormtroopers with two or three wings of TIEs in support is clearly plenty of force for searching Tatoine for the plans. That they failed is more because they did not expect droids to be able to find a way off-world than any lack of forces.

Now, I am not saying the Empire prefers ground invasions to orbital bombardment. If bombardment is what is required to get the job done (cowing a shieldess planet into submission, wiping out rebellious worlds etc) then they use it. However, when the task calls for capturing something like, say, the Rebel leaders on Hoth, or for rescuing prisoners from Geonosis, or for assassinating General Grievous on Utapua without the massive collateral damage a bombardment would produce, they use their well-developed ground forces.

Nice job totally ignoring my points on ST by the way.

I think you're slightly misunderstanding my notion of orbital bombardment. I'm not saying to glass every planet you come across, rather I'm saying that strategic bombardment is capable of removing a defending power's ability to resist by destroying various infrastructure vital to them, and that that's a more efficient and effective way of subduing a planet than invasion.

As for AR-558, my point was not a specific rebuff to the website. I'll concede that with heavy weapons such as machine guns the Federation would have been in a much better position, I wasn't trying to state otherwise. My point was that had the Federation stuck to the doctrine of strong orbital presence, those weapons wouldn't be needed. The episode essentially shows this to be true, since the power that won was the one that had gotten support from space. Had the Dominion arrived first it wouldn't have mattered how many machine guns the feds had.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Strategic bombardment is a powerful tool, if the planet lacks a shield. Cracking planetary shields is clearly beyond the abilities of single or small groups of ISD's or else they would not invest such sums in Torpedo Spheres.

And since a rebel organization can get their hands on a sufficiently powerful theater shield (as opposed to a full planetary shield) to protect against Death Squadron as well as ground-to-space weaponry able to disable ISDs the ability of a rich core world to defend itself will be much greater. Wookiepedia describes w-165 planetary turbolasers, a turbolaser version of the v-150 ion cannon seen at Hoth, that is apparently able to tear through Star Destroyers in a single salvo. Even a small number of such weapons, protected by a planetary shield will make a world virtually unassailable.

Oh, and as for AR-558, the Jem'Hadar having orbital support woudl not have helped since they wanted to capture the comm array, not merely destroy it. This is the fundamental difference you do not seem to understand, bombardment is only useful if you have already decided there is nothing in the target zone you want. If you do require anything in the target area to survive, say prisoners, resources, computer cores, factories, you have to do it the old fashioned way.

It's much the same as the modern situation with nuclear weapons. Consider the second Gulf War, the US and it's allies had nuclear arms and could have obliterated Irag without taking a single casualty, but since they fought the war for objectives (removing Saddam, securing oil supplies etc) they had to invade with conventional forces to secure the objective. Just like a Star Wars commander would have to do.

[Lord Revan]

something we remember is collateral dmg, espcially since most military targets would be hard targets, so even if there's nothing at the target itself there might be something you don't want to hit too near to the target.

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.

often times you can avoid damage to infrastructure more easily by capturing it (after all the defenders don't want to damage it either) then by orbital bombardment as you can strip the enemy of their infrastructure without needing to destroy said infrastructure and while some damage is unavoidble the less damage you inflict the better.

[atg]

something we remember is collateral dmg, espcially since most military targets would be hard targets, so even if there's nothing at the target itself there might be something you don't want to hit too near to the target.

In the Vision of the Future/Spectre of the Past duology books one of the planetary shield generators for Bothawui is located in the middle of the capitol city, so there is canon evidence for this point.

I'm pretty sure that having spaceports/military bases in cities is common in the EU as well.

[Eternal_Freedom]

It is, and not just for collateral damage purposes, but having the spaceport in or close to the major city is just common sense, saves time travelling everywhere.

[biostem]

Is there any data or evidence for why, for instance, an invading force, (assuming there was no or a disabled theater/planetary shield), couldn't just bombard the area with ion cannon shots to disable tech and neutralize the defending force? The tech hit by ion cannons don't seem to be irreparably damaged, as the star destroyers from Hoth weren't totally lost...

[Lord Revan]

Is there any data or evidence for why, for instance, an invading force, (assuming there was no or a disabled theater/planetary shield), couldn't just bombard the area with ion cannon shots to disable tech and neutralize the defending force? The tech hit by ion cannons don't seem to be irreparably damaged, as the star destroyers from Hoth weren't totally lost...

Ion weaponary is highly inconsistent on how much damage it actually inflicts from next to nothing, to fair bit though obviously not enough to truly harm something like a Stardestroyer by the damage dealt alone. The other characteristics are far from consistent with Ion weapons sometimes ignoring shields and sometimes not for example.

And that's assuming there's no way what so ever to protect targets from ion weaponary.

[Eternal_Freedom]

There is a passage in X-Wing Isard's Revenge involving Wedge firing ion cannons at a repulsotruck full of troops. The truck falls to the ground and the men climb out shaking off the side-effects, one had clothes that were smoking. Since that was a fighter-scale ion cannon I would think ISD-grade ion cannons would be lethal.

Heck, in X-Wing Rogue Squadron an X-Wing is completely vaporised because it got in the way of a planetary defence ion cannon.

And generally, since factories are going to be computer-controlled and droid-operted, using ion cannons would be just as detrimental to production as bombing it. Possibly more so since bombing it would leave some droids available to repair the place.

[Connor MacLeod]

The opening argument is silly because it operates from the premise that 'Orbital bombardment is an unbeatable gamewinning strategy', without actually proving it, and likewise ignoring vast political/cultural, economic, military, and technological aspects (because for whatever bizarre reason they're irrelevant.) Its poorly researched at best and horribly contrived at worst. (well not the worst, since the worst would get into actual dishonesty, but I digress..)

Is there any data or evidence for why, for instance, an invading force, (assuming there was no or a disabled theater/planetary shield), couldn't just bombard the area with ion cannon shots to disable tech and neutralize the defending force? The tech hit by ion cannons don't seem to be irreparably damaged, as the star destroyers from Hoth weren't totally lost...

How are you defining 'damage'? If burn out and fuse electronics or mechanical components (which is how ion cannons have been described 'disabling' stuff) its still a sort of physical damage even if you aren't blowing holes in the hull in the process. What's more, some systems might be rather, you know, volatile because they're reactors or capacitors or whatever. crippling or otherwise disabling those could be rather catastrophic I'd think if they end up releasing whatever energy they store/generate and any safeguards (if any) fail.

Nevermind that it IS a beam of charged particles probably travelling at a significant fraction (perhaps near) lightspeed - eg a particle beam. In outputs sufficient to overwhelm shields its quite likely they would do physical damage even if in purely thermal terms.

[Eternal_Freedom]

As a ghetto edit t my post about ion cannon damage, I recall a line from "The Bacta War" where Lusankya engages an ISD-II, the Freedom, exclusively with ion cannons in an attempt to capture it. The passage describes a series of secondary explosions amongst the ISD's guns and several crew are stated to be killed from equipment overloading on the bridge alone. The starboard (I tihnk ti was starboard that got hit) battery was a total write-off and the ship required considerable time in dock to fix it.

[Connor MacLeod]

The EGW&T listed the KDY-150 ion cannon as being like 1/4 as powrful as a KDY-165 turbolaser - both being planetary defense weapons (actually the 165 had 4x the output of the 150 but it works out the same.) So yeah, 1/4 of a turbolaser's output would still be considerable damage. Heck, 1/10th would still be.


Mainly though its just when we think of 'damage' we often think of 'melting/blasting/vaporizing fuckoff huge holes in the hull or blowing chunks out of the hull' even though damage mechanisms can be more complicated than that. Particle beams for example can be highly penetrative to matter - indeed penetration means its NOT interacting with matter (and thus not losing energy) so it could actually get deep inside a ship before inflicting any actual damage. That it does not blast huge holes in the hull or might inflict a highly localized/specific sort of damage does not make it any less damage.

[Eternal_Freedom]

This raises one of the problems I have with the planetary defence weapons. We know that these enormously powerful weapons that will one-shot ISDs exist, so why aren't they mounted on the really big ships? The V-150 at Hoth was powered by a salvaged reactor from a Star Battlecruiser but the standard planetary defence mounts are 50 metres across and self-contained. So, if you have you big 12km (for the sake of argument) dreadnought, why not mount a few of these big guns?

[Lord Revan]

The opening argument is silly because it operates from the premise that 'Orbital bombardment is an unbeatable gamewinning strategy', without actually proving it, and likewise ignoring vast political/cultural, economic, military, and technological aspects (because for whatever bizarre reason they're irrelevant.) Its poorly researched at best and horribly contrived at worst. (well not the worst, since the worst would get into actual dishonesty, but I digress..)

the OP and the following arguments defending it by the orginal author seem to suffer from an RTS mentality where it's OK to utterly destroy the enemy infrastructure without any negative effects to your goals as long as you capture the "zone", in fact in most RTS games any surviving enemy structures are useless at best, but as always reality is not that simple.

[Connor MacLeod]

The opening argument is silly because it operates from the premise that 'Orbital bombardment is an unbeatable gamewinning strategy', without actually proving it, and likewise ignoring vast political/cultural, economic, military, and technological aspects (because for whatever bizarre reason they're irrelevant.) Its poorly researched at best and horribly contrived at worst. (well not the worst, since the worst would get into actual dishonesty, but I digress..)

the OP and the following arguments defending it by the orginal author seem to suffer from an RTS mentality where it's OK to utterly destroy the enemy infrastructure without any negative effects to your goals as long as you capture the "zone", in fact in most RTS games any surviving enemy structures are useless at best, but as always reality is not that simple.

It also ignores magnitude of firepower needed to achieve orbital dominance. Nevermind planetary shields. What if your population decides to live belowground, or inside ocean cities, or whateveR? Are you going to boil the oceans to get at them, or blow fuckoff huge craters in the ground?

I'd love to see this guy try to argue 'orbital dominance' over a planet like Tallarn in 40K, where the surface is basically irradiated wasteland and everyone lives in sealed habitats belowground.

[Crazedwraith]

Heck, in X-Wing Rogue Squadron an X-Wing is completely vaporised because it got in the way of a planetary defence ion cannon.

And generally, since factories are going to be computer-controlled and droid-operted, using ion cannons would be just as detrimental to production as bombing it. Possibly more so since bombing it would leave some droids available to repair the place.

On the other hand, the same source. Rogue Squadron describes the bombardment of the base on Borleais in the first attack. They do stop using turbolasers and exclusively use ion cannon as the shields get the something like 15% so that if it fails unexpectedly. their fire won't damage the base.

I mean yeah an Ion Barrage isn't harmless. But its a lot less damage than using turbolasers. And it may be the result of when you've got the stuff you only have to swap out the fuses or replace some burned out comptents, wires. You end up with a lot more intrastructure left than turbolaser bombardment or going in on ground and blasting everything.

[Connor MacLeod]

This raises one of the problems I have with the planetary defence weapons. We know that these enormously powerful weapons that will one-shot ISDs exist, so why aren't they mounted on the really big ships? The V-150 at Hoth was powered by a salvaged reactor from a Star Battlecruiser but the standard planetary defence mounts are 50 metres across and self-contained. So, if you have you big 12km (for the sake of argument) dreadnought, why not mount a few of these big guns?

Volume constraints (how much do the systems that make up the weapon occupy inside the hull.) Recoil considerations (because you have to brace those weapons, given the consequences mentioned in Slave Ship), cooling issues.. those are just the technical reasons off the top of my head.

Volume is a particular concern as even if there was enough volume to mount the weapon inside the turret the volume constraints could limit the number of weapons mounted. Less weapons means less redundancy and coverage. If you have 8 HTL turrets the enemy has to destroy all eight to knock out your offensive capability, whereas if you could only mount one or two of these guns they would require far less effort to cripple you offensively.

Also, I'm not sure the 150 or 165 actually 'one shot' ISDs. The 150 at Hoth fired four shots IIRC and only disabled the ISD (knocking its shields out) whereas the 165 is stated to only destroy an ISD with sustained volleys (and then only by penetrating the hull armor to hit the reactor.)

[Eternal_Freedom]

Still it's certainly a powerful weapon. And I was thinking more like a spinal mount but it doesn't really matter. There's clearly a good reason why planetary defence weapons are not adapted to starship use.

[Connor MacLeod]

Who says they aren't? The huge spinal mount turbolasers the Munificient frigates mount might very well be planetary defence weapon analogues, but they clearly have drawbacks to their usage.

Actually now that I think of those, you could add recharge rates and fuel usage to possible limiting factors, because those are HUGE drawbacks to the spinal mount on the Munificient, despite its purported firepower.

[Lord Revan]

I'd love to see this guy try to argue 'orbital dominance' over a planet like Tallarn in 40K, where the surface is basically irradiated wasteland and everyone lives in sealed habitats belowground.

then there's the thing he assumes you can control a planet by small force by controlling few "key locations" well that might work on planets that are dependent on imports on off-world goods for survival, but if the planet is like modern day earth aka self-sufficient with population in the billions and spread more or less all over the globe you might in act end up with an occupation force that's greater then the initial invasion force due the area they need to cover to maintain control.