O-12 helps maintain the status quo and Downfall points to how even in the face of O-12, PanO gets away with a lot. They are the Hyperpower.
This is a good discussion, I think what you describe is PanOceania in the first neocolonial wars, a superpower that technically had the recourses to win but had decayed to a state of entropy because they were the biggest one around and were assaulted by the Yu Jing who were ready for it and prepared, and PanOceania lost big, in contrast the second Neocolonial wars found PanOceania still have access to its vast recourses, but not only with actual combat experience from the first NeoColonial wars, but also in a state of mobilization and preparation for total war, PanOceania did not sit idle between the two Neocolonial wars they prepared, vastly expanded the fleet and the army and were in a constant state of alert, they even fast tracked resurrections to bring competent but dead officers back to life. I think this is why the two Neocolonial wars have such a vastly different outcome.
To answer the original question on orbital bombardment; I like how dropfleet commander handles it. You're firing a slug at relativistic speeds, into a curved atmosphere of differing densities, with multiple changes of wind direction and speed at a moving target, from a moving platform using a photo sent to you a few seconds ago from someone on another planet. The chances of hitting are very very very low! Area suppression would be possible but you'd need a huge amount of firepower and all that heat, atmospheric disturbance and muzzle flash would light you up on sensors and make you easy prey for retaliatory fire. You'd be much more likely to affect a suppressive effect with conventional artillery through massed weight of fire from the planetary surface
Heavy Gear talks about ortillery, but only in that sense of area denial or hitting prepared defensive positions in something akin to carpet bombing, never as battlefield precise.
Has the course of the NeoColonial Wars changed with N4? I don't have the book handy for a consult, so refreshing from RPG material the second NeoColonial War also saw Yu Jing take lead early on, in space particularly, which seems to indicate either PanO was not in fact totally mobilized and war ready, or they were and Yu Jing could still beat them in space battles? What secures PanOceania's victory in that war is changing HOW wars are fought (quantronic war on a total not local scale), rather than superiority of troops and ships. Maybe a power with that sheer level of resources is the only one who could have developed the technology, and its a game-changer which the StateEmpire simply cannot deal with so its forces just get rolled over by PanO, they sue for peace. Yu Jing's ascent to its rightful place as leader of the Human Sphere is of course inevitable, but in that moment I'll grant PanOceania could have pushed to end that particular rivalry permanently, Yu Jing could have been terminated. The resulting occupation an immense strain on even PanO's extensive resources, but you'd face neoJapan and neoThailand and neoGuangzhou, not the unified East Asian power, it IS a very different Sphere! But no one wants a Hyperpower with a hyperweapon, every non-Yu Jing power wants to curb the clear threat to themselves which just emerged, do you have time to end Yu Jing before the Nomads hit you, before O12's Circulars stop shipping your civilian goods between your worlds? Can you Metatron everyone who'd oppose you so fast Haqqislam doesnt just light Bourak and the Silk key to resurrection on fire as their inevitable defeat becomes clear? You look at your clearly dominant position, and then look at the costs associated with the victory both in dealing with the defeated foe AND with other threats whose response would also have costs (in the case of Haqqislam the cost of bringing an end to immortality). And, realistically, you don't press your advantage, you settle, its the more advantageous move.
NATO found that counterinsurgency is far harder work than war. A decade in Afghanistan and Iraq taught them all they needed to know about "winning" a war and subjugation of conquered people. And that's one small region of the planet which is sparsely populated, being subjugated by several of the most militarily developed on the planet. Didn't end well.
I disagree. I don't think most players even know what's going on. PanO's entire existence isn't particularly realistic, so I don't see your point. Also, they never really showed the actual implications of how much resources China/Yu Jing would have access to by going after the asteroid belt and Mars and so on after the wormhole to Dawn collapsed. There's very much a finger on the scale for PanO on the fluff level, and I'm not really sure what Gutier intended by it. In any case, having space-based weapons is an incredibly advantage, whether on Yu Jing's part during the NeoColonial Wars or the Human Sphere's part during the conflict with the EI; the fact that it isn't portrayed as importantly as it should be is an issue that leaves me scratching my head.
It is, as long as you do not care much about occupying the surface bellow in a relatively intact and usable state, kinetic mass strikes are devastating for the ground, especially the civilian infrastructure (and civilians), but I am not sure it would deal sufficiently with the ground forces. IIRC neither the Human Sphere nor CA engage in scorched earth tactics on planetary engagements.
Yea, that makes even less sense since the CA is an existential threat to the Human Sphere. They should be hurling everything at them to prevent their advance, civilian infrastructure be damned. You can always rebuild, but not if the aliens kill everyone and enslave the rest.
Certainly there's a level of propaganda work done to keep the general population of the Sphere from realizing the true threat the Combined Army poses, but for things like lack of bombardment really do point to the leadership of humanity's various factions ALSO not recognizing the extent of the threat. The Combined Army is a new danger, but in the Hexahedron its one more thing on the list that includes Yu Jing and the Nomads and Nigeria (same in the halls of Zenifi Tower, etc). Which is definitely an element required for the wargame with its numerous factions fighting each other, and could also be taken as 'unrealistic', but I think humans individually and institutionally can be pretty bad at risk assessment: the Combined Army is a problem, but its a problem solvable without making too much change to how the Sphere works, without wasting the fertile lands and miracle-cure-filled flora of Paradiso by dropping ten tungsten rods from orbit onto the CA beachhead. The Tohaa have the information on what the EI is and does which could maybe convince the Sphere's leaders of the real threat, but I'd suspect they carefully curated exactly what was conveyed: the invasion needs to be threatening enough to fight and force the CA to keep funneling in resources, but not so dangerous that humanity considers the two extreme options to save itself from a real existential threat: a) negotiating absorption into the CA; b) finding a way to blow up wormholes and cutting off the EI from the Sphere .
Ah yes, because everyone knows it takes more kilojoules per unit mass to vaporize soldiers vs. civilians. It doesn't matter, though; they could be using fairly precision airstrikes or orbital weapons. Collateral damage wouldn't stop them from doing everything. Plus YJ probably wouldn't give a shit (except for the fact that Gutier has "always write this faction as incompetent" at the top of their entry in his notes). You remembered wrong. The Umbra commit genocide on the regular. The Morats are the one segment of the CA noted for *not* using nukes widely because they like to keep local ecosystems intact for hunting later. So it's very incongruous.
It does. Civilian buildings are usually not built to withstand any amount of explosions while military (non-administrative) buildings tend to be built to withstand at least lighter bombardment while the bunkers are built to withstand anything short of direct hits. Civilians tend to live in civilian buildings and only got to bomb shelters (which tend to be built on the assumption that they won't be intentionally targeted) when absolutely necessary, while militaries have a greater tendency to assume they will be targeted during an open conflict and thus live in military bomb shelters or trenches for a much greater period of time. So yes. It does take both more accuracy and more kilojoules to destroy soldiers.
Some time between WW2 and the Afghan War, the private sector figured out how to monetize critical infrastructure and sell necessary Government services to the local government instead of assisting them in building & running the service themselves. I'm not sure where exactly the difference comes from, when it evolved and ofc how the surrounding economics of a central European node between east and west and a relatively isolated country in Asia without a lot of economic value impacted things. But Afghanistan was destined to fail and crumple without the incentive of US government payed contracs for the private sector to keep things running at very profitable margins. If anything today's nations are further away from having the knowledge of how to conquer and integrate one country into another than ever. Partially because it hasn't been done much successfully in the last 70 years. On the contrary, most of the colonial empires fell apart in that time.
They also lost the appetite for feeding meat into the grinder of counterinsurgency too and that's one small rural place with poor access to infrastructure. Can you imagine something like a planetary invasion and suppression of something as big as dawn or any of the YJ held planets? Crazy amount of resources and manpower needed
The Morale and Political Ramifications of Firing on O-12s home planet are enough to keep Humans or the Tohaa from doing it, and the CA have been denied the opportunity. in a more mechanical and perhaps slightly cynical answer, CB don't make a space combat game, its an infantry focused skirmish game...
That's true, but Raveneye is over Concilium Prima. In more generic terms about why its not done, the cynical answer still fits, but also you have to consider that if you're putting a ship close enough to accurately hit something dirtside, chances are you're close enough to get hit back, probably by more powerful and/or plentiful weaponry, since even the biggest ship carries less payload than a planetary defense system. Also Intel is a lot harder to gain from craters than prisoners,
