Before I start this topic, I thought it'd be good to lay a little groundwork and define terms so that there will be as little confusion as possible 1.Strategy When I mean strategy, I'm refering to a classical military definition, not strategy as in chess. It is a big picture determination of what you think it will take to defeat your opponent 2.Operational This refers to choosing the correct tactics to fulfill your strategic goals. 3.Tactics Tactics are the small scale operations or actions that small sized units use to obtain objectives. For example, running for cover, firing, or going hull down are tactics. However, deciding whether to fire or hold fire (to remain unseen) is operational. Most decisions fall under operational concerns (and sometimes strategy if the concern is on a large enough scale) not tactical ones. Okay, now that that's out of the way, I'm going to focus on the background so that certain technological aspects are covered. 1. FTL travel- Faster Than Light Travel exists, and uses a technology so that travel is instantaneous no matter the distance. Travel does not require "gates" or "tunneling", merely probability calculations. Ramifications: a- Takes several minutes (10-30) for ship to calculate next jump, can not be "predetermined" for multiple jumps b- Gravitational factors prevent dropping a ship to a certain distance from the planet surface...high speed burns are then necessary to drop ships into orbit c- there is no way to detect ships attempting to jump to a planet until they arrive in solar system 2. Communications- Communications exist that allow for point to point communications that are either relayed through satellites (or warships) or directly point to point. Broadcast communications exist as well with encryption technologies. Ramifications: a- PTP commlinks are vulnerable to eliminating the satellites or physical obstructions (severe weather). Limited jamming is still possible b- Broadcast communications very susceptible to man in the middle attacks 3. Weaponry- Weaponry has not necessarily become more destructive, just more accurate. Lasers, gauss guns, advanced kinetic guns, and plasma guns are the main combat weapons of choice for direct fire weapons. Guided missles still exist and mostly use optical tracking rather than wire or radio. 4. Power Source- Cold Fusion energy has been mostly perfected along with advancements in superconducting technologies. However, Fusion plants are large still and suitable only for warships. MHD (magneto hydro dynamic) turbines have become the power source of choice for other vehicles except aircraft which still require the high energy output of chemical fuels. 5. Mobility- Capital ships use atomic detonation drives to quickly propel themselves with a minimal amount of reaction material, but with standard exhaust (oxygen/hydrogen) for fine manuever thrusting. Ground vehicles still utilize tracks, wheels or hover. Combat walkers exist but are specialized and not all-pervasive, they are also small 4-6m. 6. Defenses- Special molecular engineered alloys combined with crystal and ceramic composites have created fairly lightweight yet incredibly resistant armors. Powered exoskeletons exist for infantry but are very bulky (think ALiens cargo loader). Stealthing in thermal/UV and optical ranges exist as well as against radar emissions. 7. Specials- I've included the concept of ARtifcial Intelligence, Genetically enhanced humans with some freaky powers (ala Jedi's, but not quite that powerful), The final considerations are with how the different factions themselves are structured. I'm thinking of the typical, large country fighting the little guy type of war prevalent in sci-fi literature. However, whereas the big is usually an oppressive tyrant that is evil, in my view, they are not so much evil as just overprotective. The little guy is just fighting for freedom, not an overthrow of government. The battles will be fought on different planets intra-solar and extra solar. The war will in many ways be a civil war. Okay, now for the fun part...extrapolate how you think war will be fought in the future given the above information. If anyone has their own backgrounds I'd like to hear how you see combat takes place. The reason I'm putting this in game design rather than GDnet lounge is because I want to see how people feel war will be fought in the future so as to look for design considerations. Edited by - Dauntless on March 24, 2002 4:49:31 PM

I''ll give my own thoughts on how I think war will be conducted given the constraints listed above.

The primary military targets will be Naval Assets. If you find and hunt down the Warships and Troop Transports, it becomes very diffucult to wage war. However, given that ships can go wherever they please with no means of detection makes it very hard to defend certain areas.

Naval superiority for the large side means that the smaller force must conduct small hit and run raids. Drop troops down as fast as possible to take out the enemy''s capabilities. Troops then need to be extracted as quickly as possible before the larger Naval power can assert Naval Superiority. Now that I think about it, I may have to tweak the time required for jump calculations from 10-30 minutes to several hours.

The trick for the smaller power is in their Strategy. They are fighting a war of independence, not a war of overthrow. They simply have to make the fighting too costly for the other side to continue the fight. So choosing what targets to hit will be very important. If he chooses city targets, then the populace will be filled with righteous anger, but there will be the advantage of taking out manufacturing centers as well a having the advantage of holding the city "hostage" to avoid bombardment in case they can not be extracted in time.

Another strategic option is to take out military targets, but this will be very diffucult to do given their limited numbers and limited time. However, they will avoid public wrath, and may wear down public opinion if enough of their boys get killed.

Another strategic option is "infiltration" for the smaller side. Since it is a civil war, they will have an easier time spying and sabotaging.

As for Operational concerns, again, Naval control will be the most important consideration. When a side has Naval superiority, the ground troops are essentially dead meat unless they are undersea or perhaps have some sort of planetary defenses. The Larger side must find the operating cells that support the rebel factions war machine and eliminate them as quickly as possible. If they kill too many rebel civilians, the public opinion may also look bad, so they have to tippy toe as well on what targets to take out.

Isn''t it a bit backwards to lay out the technology first and then decide how wars are fought? My feeling is that the technology has to be evolved from the present in order to achieve consistency. What I mean is that you should think about how the way wars are fought will evolve as new technologies are introduced, and consider what new technologies and methods will be demanded at each step. You will end up with a range of technologies that will perfectly match the way that they are used. What you are suggesting is like the cart leading the horse.

Having said that, I do like the scenario you have layed out. I like the limitations you have placed on FTL travel, but allow me to make one suggestion. In Peter F Hamilton''s "Night''s Dawn" trilogy, ships came out of their FTL jumps with the same velocity as when they entered. This velocity was relative to some absolutly fixed reference point, so that after a particulary long jump they end up traveling sideways relative to their destination, because of the rotation of the galaxy. They had to compensate with a good burn, which they usually did before jumping. If you apply the same principle, your ships could get up to speed before jumping, jump to a point quite far away from a planet, and coast stealthily toward the planet during the time it takes to recalculate for the next jump.
Those books also featured the same limitation regarding jumping in a gravity well, but had a brilliantly simple way around it. They were allowed to jump in the Lagrange points, where the gravitational feild is essentially neutral. Implementing this would create strategically useful points in space that would be fought over, and would be the obvious place to locate planetary defences.

Is this the strategy game you have been talking about in so many other threads? I didn''t expect it to have a sci-fi setting.

About the MHD turbine, um, so where exactly do you intend to get the plasma to run them?

Actually, there is a real answer to that, there''s such a thing called a self-contained plasma.(Plasmas generate and are affected by magnetic and electric fields, so it was thought that they might be able to contain themselves. Anyway, the plasma is charged through simple electromagnetic coupling-this means they zap it with microwaves of the appropriate wavelength.)

Wait, it gets better, since you say that in this setting superconductors have advanced, have a look at
http://superconductors.org/
Superconductors can mean stupendous power transmissions, motors of equivalent power at 1/5th the size(and if you read that the other way that''s five times as powerful as now at the same size and what I believe will lead to Gundam and Robotech capable robots), some wickedly powerful gauss guns, and some wickedly powerful generators.

Easy to upgrade this kind of stuff, an upgrade would be a new upper limit on size, stability, and maximum energy storage of self-contained plasmas and various levels of superconductedness.

(In my post I refer to the larger player as the Naval side and the opposition as the smaller player.)

I''d just have a few questions about the smaller player engaging in Naval Warfare with a larger opponent. You say that it will be possible for ships to travel anywhere at all, this is an interesting proposal, but it will lead to one or two minor problems.

1) The inability to jump close to a planet will lead to the smaller player having to deploy some distance from the target. This makes planets natural choke points for fleets. The Naval player would simply surround his most important and strategic planets with large orbital defence networks that would pulverise any smaller fleet before it had time to land.
2) The prohibitive limit to jump calculations. This isn’t a problem in itself, but how fast is the communication speed? If it is faster than light then a planet under attack could signal the nearest Naval patrol. The time taken for the smaller player to arrive, dispose of the garrison forces and turn to leave would suddenly find themselves surrounded by a hideously large battle fleet.
3) Not being able to detect an incoming fleet would be advantageous to the smaller player, but it would also help the larger player, assuming that the Naval player has a fully fledged and extended intelligence organisation, one slip and the entire navy of the larger player would arrive, without warning and smash the smaller players fleet construction yards all at once and in one go.

The idea is good, I often like the thought of a small force taking out a larger better equipped opponent. However there would be little use of a naval fleet for the smaller player until very late in the game. The initial sections of the game would be staying alive, gathering support and avoiding the larger players Psi-Corp (after all the Government would know about and utilize such assets). The mid sections would be making clandestine strikes and covert operations, bolstering public support and the like. Only in the end game section would the smaller player be able to bring up their closely guarded, secret fleet. Even then, victory would surly only be possible with defections from the Naval side.
Nice idea, but like all ideas it needs tweaking.


"Making it up! Why should I be making it up. Lifes bad enough as it is without wanting to invent more of it."

If Naval forces dominate the war and if it''s hard to defend against them (because of FTL travel and all its implications), then the logical next step would be that battles would be fought over the construction sites of these Naval forces.

Each side will of course heavily defend their construction bases.

Weaker side would have to somehow get through the defenses, close in on base, perhaps destroy it from inside out.

Interesting suggestions so far guys

Plasmadog
Yup, my thoughts for a RTS have actually been for a sci-fi game. It''s set in the not too far future, but I wouldn''t call it near future either. Check out the post here, or my own very humble webpage (please don''t make too much fun of it )

Actually I think it is a better idea to lay out technology first. In the real world, you have a technological base which determines how you fight. Once the war progress, then it reverses, and how you want to fight determines the areas of technology that get invented. So that''s why I''m trying to extrapolate that having a given set of technology...how would a war be fought? The reason I wanted some feedback was that it''s really hard to pin down what kinds of features and technologies will exist in the future. I doubt anyone in anybody''s wildest imaginations thought the Americans would boll over the Iraqi''s and Afghans like we did. The face of war has very much changed, and I didn''t want my game to feel like any other RTS or be modeled on a style of warfare that is stuck in WWII.

Zarquon
Good points. As for the Communication question, I don''t see why it shouldn''t be possible to have space relay stations that could "Quantum jump" packets of information in the same manner that the ships do. In my incredibly vague pseudo-science, basically a ship disguises itself to the universe as a QWF (Quantum Wave Function) and probability jumps itself to another location (via some obscure reference to Wigner''s theorem). I don''t see why information can''t be relayed the same way, with one caveat, it must be relayed only through a special relay station. The communications technology would be slightly different to "package" information than it would be to package an entire ship though the technologies would obviously be related. So these communication centers could then become targets.

Also, even if communication could get out fast enough for the larger power''s fleet to arrive in solar system, it still has to catch up with the smaller fleet, which is why I imposed the time limit on making calculations. Say I bumped up the calculation times to 2hours. That gives the invading fleet a 2 hour window to work in. The larger fleet still has to worry if it''s a dummy invasion. I have "WIld Weasel" designs, so that the planetary defenses couldn''t really tell without visual inspection. And if the larger fleet decides to smah the enemy once and for all, it is leaving other planets defenseless. I''m still not really sure how to deal with planetary defenses. Orbital platforms and space stations could exist I suppose, but if they are immobile, they are kind of useless unless they defend the planetary SURFACE.

Actually, I didn''t make the point clear in the first post, but just like in today''s world, there are more than just two factions. Actually, there is one very powerful one, and there are several smaller ones. If all the smaller one''s joined forces, they would still be outnumbered, but nowhere near as badly and could pose a threat to the largest force. So the Larger side has to watch what they are doing.

Anonymous
Do you know any good sites for future technologies? Does like Popular Mechanics or Discover have websites? Just wondering since you seem keen on the possibilities of new technologies (something I admit I haven''t been looking into too much)

Silvermyst
I was thinking that the smaller side has to wear down the opponent''s will to fight. Since having Fleets come in and orbitally bombard your troops with impunity makes battles very short, there has to be a new style of fighting. I think the key is that orbital bombarding something is very indiscriminate even with very good technology. So the trick will be hunkering your forces down in a place that bombarding isn''t such a good idea.

For example, capturing manufacturing centers, cities or bases themselves. The trouble is that once your troops have landed, they are now committed, and with a vastly superior Naval Fleet watching over them like a Hawk over a mouse hole. There are still a couple of options, but they require crackerjack timing and very good distraction skills.

For example, they could throw diversionary fleets at neighboring planets, or could threaten other targets to pull the fleet off. However, as you said, the equalizer will need to be equalizing the Naval threat. In my game world, actually the smaller forces have some advantages that the larger forces does not. Mainly the use of specially augmented troops and better AI.


Actually, although I''ve gotten specifically into my own game background, on a more general sense, I wonder if in the future there will really be much close up fighting anymore? With long range weapons becoming more accurate, I''m not sure how much of a role ground forces will come into play anymore.

Dauntless-
I like the idea of communication relays. This does of course mean that the relays themselves will become critically important. Any war is reliant on communication. The smaller fleets can interrupt the transmissions, tamper with the data or in desperation destroy an entire relay. All of these are plausible actions for an outnumbered force.

On the subject of the time delay between jumps. The solution presented is sound, but this still provides the problem of a tight window of opportunity. But hey what game would be fun without a little pressure.

On the last point you made, I believe there will always be a necessity for some ground forces. After all how can you pacify a planet’s population without utilizing ground assets, and what about ‘those pesky rebels holding out in our irreplaceable drive building facility’. At the very least there would be marine units for ship to ship boarding.


"Making it up! Why should I be making it up. Lifes bad enough as it is without wanting to invent more of it."

I read through your web site, although there were some broken links preventing me from reading more about the technology. I also read through the previous thread (I remember it now). There was a good point made about the 8 hours to impact thing. You didn''t respond to it, so maybe he was right about it being pushed?
One thing I don''t understand about the history though, is why did the Outer Colonies have so much trouble pacifying Earth? You say that the Earth factions had not been concerned with the OCs, so presumably they would have had neither the motivation nor the capability to build up a significant presence in space. So the OCs would have had complete space superiority, wouldn''t they? And they had just arrived, so they had no assets on the ground to worry about. Why not simply bomb the crap out of anyone who didn''t simply accede to their demands? Especially when you consider that anyone born in the outer colonies would have grown up in low gravity, and would find Earth''s gravity too oppressive for effective soldiering. Or had the power suits already been developed by this point? You''re going to have to think of a compelling reason for the colonial forces to have gone down to the surface.

Getting back to your original request for ideas, it occurs to me that dropships in the upper atmosphere would be very vulnerable to attack from the ground, and would have to be protected from above. These dropships (or spaceplanes, whatever you decide to use) would not, and could not, be stealthy, due to the incredible speed at which they enter the atmosphere, and the heat thus generated. Because they would have some ability to maneuver during reentry, the great altitude at this stage of the flight, and the enormous thermal signature, the obvious weapon to deploy against them would be some sort of heat seeking missle. Anything else could be dodged. But a single missle can be destroyed by the lasers of the vessels above. So the guys on the ground would have to launch a large number of these missles, in the hope that they won''t all be shot down. As a result, any attack on a planet would require a fleet large enough to deal with the number of expected anti-dropship missles, and would require them to be in orbit, and unopposed. In other words, the naval battle would have to be over, and space superiority established, before any attempt to land was made.