Fort attacking

[sabrina]

[member="Valiens Nantaris"]

I would like your considered opinion, if [member="Draco Vereen"] decide to attack this fort, with drop pods landing inside it.
What do you think would happen, he would be using close air support and electronic warfare, and other things to protect them pods. He would be better explaining it than me, as I kinda think it would be suicide.

As even if the targeting system was compromised, landing drop pods in that area, above such a tight artillery formation. Would see heavy casualties on the way down. Then when they land, I would just open up with grenade fire into them the second the pods opened up.

Yes I would agree with him, if he tried to do this in a populated area, as the defense would be lighter, and solider would have less time to react.

Please let draco put his opinion on it, before anyone comments, as we both see this differently on ooc level and that is only fair.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Assaulting a fortified position is always difficult, but in modern warfare static defenses in general have been shown to always be a surmountable obstacle. This ain't the Greeks with no siege science coming to terms because they literally have way to take the walls besides treachery, after all.

Close Air Support flying a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) mission is exactly what's needed to reduce the effectiveness of AA guns. It's not an exact science, you're going to take casualties whatever you do, but generally speaking people are not fond of having high explosive fire rain down on them and tend to stick to places where said high explosive fire isn't as likely to hurt them.

That's the whole purpose of SEAD, you're trying to reduce the effectiveness of the enemy ability to hurt you incoming forces. Throwing electronic attack in simply doubles down on the same idea. Now those AA guns have to target manually AND they're getting shot at while they point at the drop pods (or else they target the CAS aircraft and aren't shooting the droppods at all).

There's also orbital fire support to consider. Blaster fire from a gunship might be one thing, but turbolasers from a frigate in orbit would be another thing altogether.

The landing troops would certainly face very heavy casualties in the initial waves. The best example for that would be amphibious assaults. Look at Omaha Beach, I suppose (more casualties there as at the other four beaches combined). But even then numbers, fire support, and simply dogged perseverance carried the day for the Allies.

Also it seems that there's nothing stopping him from simply landing some distance away, advancing overland, and just assaulting the place that way.

Heavy casualties, yes. Suicide? Nah.

My main point here is that no fortress is unassailable, especially not in Star Wars.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Alright, first the Fort in question has Planetary Grade Shields defending it. This is a blessing and a curse. Blessing in that its very, very difficult to disable, offers excellent protection. A curse, in that it needs to be shuddered in order for the AA guns to fire out. Shuddering shields when faced by a battle-cruiser where one shell landing is going to cause mass destruction is not wise. So AA Guns yes, but they aren't able to fire out without risking the fortress taking heavy hits.

Second, there is a lot of Electronic Warfare at play, specifically those designed to muddle sensors and targeting computers. This compounds that risk, as those on the ground don't know what they are being attacked with, so their AA weapons are reduced to visual targeting, greatly reducing their effectiveness, and once again, unable to tell if that battle cruiser is firing, means dropping even a small section of that shield to fire out could be a death sentence.

Next, lets move on, assuming the soldiers have taken the safe route and not shuddered the shields to fire, and can see drop pods in the sky. Why are they turning weapons upward to fire at drop pods that the shields should stop? I know that these particular ones bypass shields, but, that is a relatively new thing, and its never been deployed in this way to my knowledge. Since they are on visual targeting, why would they know to be waiting to fire on ships that the shields should stop? Even ignoring that, there isn't a lot of space between the bottom of the shield, and the ground, so there just isn't a lot of time to hit them.

Alright, dangerous path, even if one of those big shells slips through while the drop pods are in route and you are firing at them, that is a Super Heavy Mass driver shell. It will hurt.

Next, Close Air Support, in the form of gunships, currently equipped with IDF's to bypass shields and get underneath, in which they have lots of weaponry. A healthy mix of Proton Torpedo Launchers and Laser Cannons. Those aren't going to be fun for AA guns. And with EMP/Ion Hardening (Not immunity, but resistance) Ion shells aren't going to be effective against those.

Now, I didn't say it would be easy, I didn't say it would be bloodless, but that ain't gonna be a thing about just shooting them down.

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"]
[member="sabrina"]

 

[sabrina]

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"] [member="Draco Vereen"]

Fair enough, but would you risk some many lives as it would cost you lot. Why would you not just besiege it.
Your problem with omaha is the German Field Marshall Rommel, had Hitler on his back denying him reasonable resources.
She would not have that issue.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

[member="sabrina"]
If I was going to besiege it, I'd just orbital strike it to death and be done with it.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Draco Vereen"] shields would protect from that, as mentioned in a thread with @captain laaraq, when he threatened to nuke Coruscant

 

[Laira Darkhold]

[member="sabrina"]
Not indefinitely, not against a full fleet, not when the area right beside the fort is suffering 6.0 earthquakes. I didn't want to do that, as that just wipes you off the map.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Draco Vereen"] true, but you would have a lot of collateral damage, which would not bode well for liberator.
Which icly would play into my hands.

Edit just checked my sub, yes you be at it for ten years, it designed to work for under constant pressure of a siege.

 

[Captain Larraq]

Why perform a direct "beachhead" operation when you can just shell and bombard the terrain NOT covered by the protective shield? Weaken the terrestrial foundation the fort is built upon with repeated mass-driver and turbolaser fire until you have created a few nice sized craters... Then volley Seismic 7 Warhead equipped missiles at those craters until the whole thing sinks into the earth.


I mean... It's not like you want it intact or anything.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

[member="Captain Larraq"]

Shit like that is why the had to write a rule for you. <_<

 

[ADM. Reshmar]

Edit just checked my sub, yes you be at it for ten years, it designed to work for under constant pressure of a siege.

what? I can turn your planet into a molten pit of despair in 15 minutes if I had a mInd too. You are shielding it sure but that will not last long. A torp sphere would bring down those shields in oh minutes not hours and lay waste to anything on the ground in less than that.

I have no idea where you are getting a ten year thing from because at the longest your defense would last against a fleet would be oh 6 to 8 hours with a planetary shield projector. less if your dealing with something made to break them. A ship with Hyper velocity cannons would wear down a planetary shield in minutes. There is no ten year defense, heck a single frigate could wear it down in a mater of a couple days by itself if it was not opposed.

Sure you can make it hard for someone to assault but really they do not have to. Most sieges just sit there and waited for the people inside to starve. You would be cut off from supply and dependent on what you had stored. Even if you have years of supply's the fact that you are cut off will cause panic and eventually people will try to escape and most likely in the process let forces in.

Bottom line is if you own space you own a planet, there is no way around it. Nothing you do will matter. Sure you can sit there and fight the good fight but in the end once a fleet has moved into orbit your fight is lost. Unless a fleet comes to break the siege.

But this ten year silliness is not correct in any way. Nothing and I mean nothing will stand if the assaulting force wants it to fall. Its not like the middle ages when you could hold up and defend against trebuchet's. Heavy torps and assault missiles are basiclly nukes. Sure we do not allow them that power on chaos for obvious reasons, but that is the realization of it. And a turbolaser is near nuke level also. These things incinerate asteroids in less than half a second. Certain things can help and sure there are things that could disperse the energy but not that and kinetics weapons.

 

[Gir Quee]

If you can find it, there's actually a whole article written about Star Wars space-ground siege warfare called "A World to Conquer" in an old Star Wars Adventure Journal. I've seen it show up several places online. It gets into a lot of the intricate points getting talked about here, but I wouldn't use it as a sole source.

Like many other examples of Star Wars technology, planetary shields are one of those things aren't consistently portrayed in how they work or in the strength of their power.

For example, the somewhat impromptu shield at Hoth wasn't deemed penetrable by Vader's Death Fleet, which is really has sizable amount of firepower. An actual quote from the movie from a certain Imperial officer:

The field is strong enough to deflect any bombardment

A similar example on a larger scale could be made of the shield protecting the 2nd Death Star in Return of the Jedi. We can see similar levels of strength suggested with Coruscant's shields in the Thrawn Trilogy and the X-wing series of books.

However, as several posters have mentioned above however, this does not make them impervious. It seems that simply penetrating from the ground is the easiest and most practical solution, but specialized bombardment weapons and battle stations like the Torpedo Sphere can negate their power.

To add another wrinkle into this, part of this power differential could be from the different types of planetary shields: encasing shields (example: WorldArmor 9 versus shutter shields)(example :Nyalsan II Planetary Shield). Shutter shields are described as being weaker than encasing shields, but also much more flexible with outgoing fire whereas encasing shields tend to be stronger, but have much limited firing lanes.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Gir Quee"] [member="Reshmar"]
I was going of weapons like this
This is a specialized ship, that does it.
Also for the price tag of 327,830,000credits could buy a fleet, I did mean any normal ships.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Heh, that's a fraction of the cost of shields themselves. Whoever writes the fluff for Star Wars needs to check their cost-benefit.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"] agreed but the point was as far as I can tell from wookie, standard ship weweapons do nothing to Planetary shields.

 

[Gir Quee]

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"] agreed but the point was as far as I can tell from wookie, standard ship weweapons do nothing to Planetary shields.

That's dependent on the shield strength, and model versus the size of the fleet and ships on it. If you can find a copy of Star Wars: Rebellion (I believe it's called Star Wars Supremacy in the UK), and play it, there are a lot of interactions between fleets and planetary defenses, especially planetary shields. Against small fleets, single planetary shield generators tend to work pretty well. Against large fleets however, they can fall to an orbital bombardment against fleets of Corellian corvettes.

If you look WEG stats for the shields, we can see the same thing. The lightest planetary shield generator, the Nyalsan II has 10D of shields at a capital scale. To put this in perspective, a classic Imperial Mark I-class Star Destroyer has 3D of shields. In other words, on the lower end of the spectrum we're talking about several star destroyers worth of shields, which while they are hard to beat, aren't unbeatable even with standard capital ship weapons.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Gir Quee"] may I ask the shield used on hoth by the rebel alliance, would that be considered normal.

As that is what I was thinking of, as that forced Darth Vader to land troops.

 

[Gir Quee]

[member="Gir Quee"] may I ask the shield used on hoth by the rebel alliance, would that be considered normal.

As that is what I was thinking of, as that forced Darth Vader to land troops.

That's hard to say, the DSS-02 used at Hoth does show up in a few other places. However, most of the time we don't really hear a lot about the exact model of planetary shield generator being used to protect various worlds. Hideouts & Strongholds states that they "vary greatly in strength", which leads me to think that there isn't any specific standard.

Given how much they cost (the Nyalsan II costs 500 million credits, and the WorldArmor 9 costs 12 billion credits), the exact strength is probably based on how much money they have available to spend on the system. It's also worth nothing that there is also local base shielding, such as the MerrSoon Guardian-class shield generator, which costs around 60,000 to get shielding roughly equivalent to two ISDs, but at a much reduced radius.

 

[sabrina]

[member="Gir Quee"] So it is basically anything up for grabs, as far as canon is concerned then for planetary shields go.
As if you have super weapon of a sort, you can just break it.
Though if you have not, then it could be up to ten years until the power supply fails, if it of decent enough quality.
Though if it some cheap thing, then a corvette could overload it.
It is sub dependent.

[member="Draco Vereen"]

 

[Laira Darkhold]

I went for the super easy route of Underground Detonation via heavy ordnance laden Mole miners. Lots of them. And Shield bypassing drop pods filled with napalm to light the whole fortress under a heavy weight of fiery liquid.