"RORO," Rusty said simply.
The acronym, short for Roll On/Roll Off, was near meaningless without the proper context. It was also the culmination of the Shard's short term planning, in terms of sales and marketing.
Just about every government, from nation-state to planetary to interstellar, had need for the means to rapidly deploy troops in a hostile environment. The easiest way, from the perspective of a military force conducting an incursion on a potentially hostile planet, was via dropships. That catchall designation covered everything from troop transports designed to haul a squad of infantry to hulking beasts designed to handle heavy walkers and tanks. This decentralized, swarmlike approach had a number of distinct advantages. For starters, it ensured that no one ship being hit by hostile fire would or could disable an entire force. Small pieces might be damaged or destroyed, but the chances of the majority making it to the ground were higher. It also gave a tactical commander a certain flexibility when it came to deploying troops and equipment.
The downside was, it wasn't especially efficient at creating concentrations of force in any one spot. In that sense, its greatest strength, decentralization, was also its greatest weakness. Coordinating largescale assaults became as much a matter of ATC, or Air Traffic Control, as anything else, and that necessarily diffused the strength of a landing force in order to avoid messy collisions.
For military historians, the classic example of a dropship invasion was the Old Republic's initial invasion of Geonosis, at the outset of the Clone Wars. Republic forces had indeed been able to land massive troop concentrations in short order, but the diffusion of its tactical strength had created an unnecessarily complicated and costly battle that was largely won by weight of numbers and surprise, rather than tactical brilliance. To be sure, the cost in clone lives was inconsequential to the morally bankrupt but monetarily wealthy Republic, who could just buy new troops off the assembly line. The fact that the war had been designed from the outset by a Sith Lord to create the necessary circumstances to seize absolute power wasn't lost on military historians either. Despite that, the Geonosis Campaign's outsized influence on military planning still continued to this day.
Rusty sought to change that, or at least, update it. The concept of Roll On/Roll Off predated space travel by a significant margin, and was developed on many worlds in parallel. The basic gist was simple: a single vessel, large enough to contain a significant fighting force, could be landed on hostile shores under escort, and then disgorge an intact fighting element, complete with armor, artillery, stocks of ammunition, and other vital supplies. To load, you rolled the equipment on (everything was either loaded in trucks or palletized) in the reverse order in which it would need to be unloaded, and then rolled it off when you reached the destination. Roll on, roll off.
The same concept worked equally well when applied to dropship philosophy. Rather than spreading one's tactical strength out across a large theater of operations, a RORO ship could land under escort, and its fighting complement could be unloaded in short order. The size necessitated by the RORO ship increased the ease with which it could be targeted, to be sure, but that also meant that it could boast much stronger protection, both active in the form of shielding, and passive in the form of armor, than the smaller ships typically used.
The advantages went beyond merely tactical considerations, as well. From a logistical standpoint, a handful of larger ships were easier to transport and operate than a swarm of smaller ones. Fewer hulls meant fewer engines burning less fuel. Supplies could be concentrated in fewer locations as well, cutting down on the number of administrative personnel, and unit integrity could be maintained in transit, making last minute training and rehearsals much easier to conduct. And since Oxidation Industries was set to provide everything from the ships, to the armor, artillery, gear, weapons, even training aids and simulators. All the customer would have to do was supply the bodies.
To someone who knew their stuff, the implications would be clear. Rusty's response, and the datapad he passed over with the same written on the surface, was a litmus test of sorts. Anyone who dealt with him knew that eccentricity and fantastic arrogance were two of his calling cards. If
John Locke
knew his stuff and was interested, maybe they could do business. If not, well, it wouldn't be the first time Rusty's intransigence had cost him clients.
Runar Ulfsson
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Var Talon
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Srina Talon
