Armies of the Fifth Frontier War, Impressions Not Errata

[Anstett]

For a fictional description of how devastating orbital bombardment might be, refer to Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. The Moon gets broken up and its shards come tumbling into the Earth's atmosphere. I'm not sure how if that's exactly how it would play out, but knowing what I know of Stephenson, I'm sure he did due diligence in his research.

It is a very good book... until the last third and the twists at the end.
I do believe that the first third of the book is solid science used for fiction, the middle part is good solid theory.

 

[MasterGwydion]

My guess is that it would depend on the size rocks used.

 

[MonsterX]

For a fictional description of how devastating orbital bombardment might be, refer to Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. The Moon gets broken up and its shards come tumbling into the Earth's atmosphere. I'm not sure how if that's exactly how it would play out, but knowing what I know of Stephenson, I'm sure he did due diligence in his research.

Obviously, you can totally turn a planet into lava, or even break it to bits, if you've got Traveller level TL, lots of ships and the time to do it. Under a certain set of assumptions, this becomes the standard operating procedure. You can even do it from another star system: just accelerate an object for months or years until it is near light speed and then smash it into an enemy planet.

However, that does not make a fun space opera. You want the Space Patrol boarding enemy blockade runners and gunfighting through the ship corridors. Battledressed space marines fighting their way across the icy surface of Jovian moons to destroy the enemy missile base so that your battlecruisers can refuel, while long-range fighters patrol deepspace ensuring that your fleet is not caught by surprise, occasionally getting in dogfights with enemy patrols. You want marines in drop pods securing landing zones so that your troop shuttles can land safely. These tropes are fun, and have lots of opportunities for PCs to do heroic, or villainous, stuff. Getting smashed to death by an asteroid doesn't really do that very much. Maybe once.

Since this is all make-believe and we don't really know how all this tech will play out in practice - which also requires thinking through how the TL matches with the societies, and military doctrines - we can make a set of assumptions that give us "Hammers Slammers", rather than "The Dark Forest". (Dark Forest is a much better book, but Hammers Slammers would make for a better game). So let's do that instead. It is not necessarily unrealistic or at least more unrealistic than the rest of this.

It is ok to assume that many smart people in Charted Space have been thinking about how to asteroid bombard each other, and also how to stop from getting bombarded, and the bombardment stoppers have won this round, so here we are with armies and navies invading planets, and bombardment that is militarily useful but dangerous to do and expensive and limited in effect .

 

[MasterGwydion]

The more I learn about Charted Space, the more I think that the only viable settlements are those 10s of kilometers below the planetary surface. Deep enough that rocks and other orbital bombardment won't work without cracking the planet in half. (and tons of meson screens because meson guns are a threat no matter where you are. )

Edit - Settlement-scale Grav Screens as well, including deploying these grav screens as decoys where there are no unground settlements to protect.

 

[paltrysum]

Getting smashed to death by an asteroid doesn't really do that very much. Maybe once.

True, but escape from a place that's about to get smashed might make for an exciting scenario.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Chewie died getting a moon dropped on him while the Falcon barely got away. So, yeah, that tracks.