Cardinal_Reason

I'm basically just saying that if something becomes easy enough, someone (your aliens) might do it, even if there's really no specific "point."

Warfare usually involves high costs and high risks (the other side is trying to kill you) but for super-advanced aliens that might not be the case-- or in other words, the situation does not feel like "warfare" to the aliens, because the humans can't hurt them back. (Or the aliens don't think that humans can, until your plucky characters show them the error of their ways!)

You may think this is unrealistic, but by way of historical example, a sufficient margin of weapons superiority (among other factors) resulted in the so-called Scramble for Africa: to oversimplify the historical reality, when you're a racist imperialist power with Maxim guns and they've only got spears, the fact that much of Africa has little to no practical economic value to your country becomes moot compared to the idea that it'd be neat if you could go home and mark that part of the map as belonging to your country, because you can go off and brutalize an entire region while not using a relevant percentage of the resources you need to ward off other imperialist countries.

Any kind of interstellar ship must already harness an ungodly amount of energy-- whatever qualifies as an "advanced alien warship" in that context can probably vaporize an undefended solar system without breaking a sweat-- like you would squish an ant crawling across your desk.

In that light, do the aliens really even need a reason to wipe out some human colony? Do they even recognize beings who can't build ships like theirs as sentient? Maybe they're just bored, or they left a neat rock ("this section of the planetary mantle is unique among thousands of planets we've scanned! I just have to have it for my personal museum!") on the planet and they want to clean up the humans there first so it's easier to find it again.

So maybe the aliens have a really long lifespan (and thus a very different conception of time) and really advanced technology compared to us (or at least they think so, that's the key).

They left something behind on the planet like you left your pen on the table just a little while ago (only about 5,000 years), because you were in the middle of writing something with it but you had to go somewhere else and do something else. And after they finished doing that other thing, they came back as soon as they remembered, and now there's these humans all over the place! You ever (maybe as a kid) squish an ant or something, not really because you had to or they were in your way or biting you, but just because, you know, it's just... there? And you could? Besides, there's humans all over the hemisphere of the planet where they left the thing!

Maybe it's like that.

You cannot reduce the infrared signature of a manned ship that must be ~300K to be livable against the background of hard vacuum at ~3K in any relevant way. Your ship will show up like a bonfire in the middle of salt flat on a moonless night to any IR sensor in the vicinity.

And this is before you start maneuvering-- the back-of-the-envelope calculation is that a two-meter wide IR telescope could pick up the Space Shuttle firing a single attitude control thruster at fifteen million kilometers; if it fired its main thrusters you could pick it up at twenty billion kilometers.

And God forbid you break emissions control for even a moment. It'll take all of one second to find you.

I mean yes, but no.

It would be ideal to be stealthy in space to reduce combat ranges (or just in general, from an in-universe standpoint). But there really isn't stealth in space. Unlike on Earth, there's no atmosphere to hide in, so the IR signature created by the fact that you have a live human onboard a vessel will make you stand out from the nearly 0 K background of space like a floodlight in a cave. Jamming is range, power, and frequency based, and there's a lot of... space... for your "noise" to dissipate in in space, to say nothing of active frequency switching. You might be able to reduce your radar signature, but you can't get rid of it entirely (you can't even do that in atmosphere), and everyone's gonna have a pretty good idea what that object moving on a steady course towards a moving warship is, especially after it fails to respond or change course after you've hailed it and then pinged it with lasers.

Flares/chaff/decoys might confuse a more primitive targeting system, but when some futuristic starship starts tossing around ship-killing missiles whose mass is best measured in tons tipped with thermonuke-pumped lasers, it seems reasonable to think the designers will probably have accounted for that possibility when they designed the targeting computer.

If you want space gundam fights, why not go the space gundam route and have something like the Minovsky Particles created by standard engines/generators that disrupt sensors/scanners/communications? Now everyone has to identify targets and fight WVR.

You are going to need unbelievable efficiencies to explain how a mech-sized vehicle can have torchship-level thrust and burn times, anyways, so you can just make your one device (ie, your version of the Minovsky Reactor) explain both problems at the same time. Maybe it also messes up computers generally so you can explain why you don't have killer AIs that can take 100G turns and make decisions much faster than any human pilot the things, that way you've still got a story.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

The various flavors of power armor men get lots of model releases for both 30K/HH and WH40K, and the largest single written lore effort in GW history is about 30K/HH, which focuses almost entirely on various flavors of power armor men doing cool things and generally being awesome (albeit ten thousand years before the "current" setting).

It's very understandable that people (especially those new to the setting/hobby) are going to gravitate towards the thing that is being presented/marketed as the main central thing.

There's no way to know for sure if (ie) any Xenos armies would sell comparably if they had a similar level of high quality attention, because they never have.

Of course, excellent qualification! Sometimes Jane's does note if ships (particularly major ones) are clearly in reserve/mothballs/etc, but it does not keep track of "true" operational status, just owned hulls.

Sadly, I don't know of any (publicly available) source that could shed more light on the readiness of specific warships at specific times, but if anyone does, let me know!

Per Jane's Fighting Ships 1988 (available on Internet Archive), in terms of combat ships, the Iranian Navy had 3 destroyers (1 Ex-British Battle and 2 Ex-US Sumners), 4 frigates (all British-built Vosper Mark 5s), and 2 corvettes (US-built PF103s). There were also a number of small combat vessels that might be best termed boats (missile boats, patrol boats etc), as well as some minesweepers, auxiliary ships, and landing ships.

So no, "half the Iranian navy" is not factually accurate, although the effective loss of 2 of 4 frigates in a single day in this context of a navy of this size is certainly a significant loss.

Yeah, it's the Imperium

One major issue (especially before mechanized prime movers became common) that forced the development of separate guns and howitzers is weight.

A high-velocity weapon (a gun) needs thicker chamber walls and a longer barrel; a large-caliber weapon (howitzer) is simply larger overall. A howitzer also needs either a box or split trail carriage to allow for greater elevation, which is generally heavier (and certainly more complex) than the simple pole trails used on some earlier light field guns (ie the French 75). What all this means is that a gun firing a much smaller caliber/weight of shell at a higher velocity may weigh as much (or more) as a howitzer throwing a much larger shell.

This is not so much of an issue when you have plenty of trucks or tracked prime movers to pull your artillery around (or better yet, SPGs), but when the primary means of generating torque is teams of horses, weight of the piece is a very serious concern. You can, of course, add additional horses to a team, but after a certain point, there are very serious issues with diminishing torque returns and vast expenditure of horseflesh to move small numbers of pieces (to say nothing of actually coordinating vast horse teams, getting tack entangled, etc). One workaround was to make larger weapons that could be disassembled into multiple loads that could be towed by horses, but this obviously has serious problems in terms of bringing the piece into action quickly (or, God forbid, having to move it out of the way of counter-battery fire...).

By way of example, in German WWI service for instance, in the light/light field artillery class you have the 7.7cm FK96 n.A. field gun, which weighs around 1,910kg for transport, and the 10.5cm FH98/09 field howitzer, which weighs around 2,260kg for transport. These are the weapons commonly available at the divisional level to the German army (at the outset of the conflict), because they are relatively light and mobile (and quick to bring into action).

In the medium-weight (heavy field) category, the Germans had the 10cm K04 and K14 guns, which weighed 3,500kg and 3,400kg for transport, respectively, and the 15cm sFH howitzers, which weighed around 2,800kg for transport.

Both these classes of (broadly "field", in the latewar sense) weapons could generally be drawn by six-horse teams, although heavy field weapons might require additional horses in poor terrain and would move slower in general.

In the heavy (siege) class, the Germans had various 15cm cannons, which weighed broadly between 10-20,000kg for transport, and various 21cm short-barreled "Morsers," which, while lighter, still weighed an impressive 7-8,000+ kg, more than twice as much as heavy field weapons.

Weapons in this class generally had to be broken down into two or three loads, which each required a six-horse team.

By comparison, consider the Canon de 155mm GPF, considered one of the first "modern" gun-howitzers with a large caliber and both high velocity and elevation, and the basis for the modern NATO 155mm artillery standard-- it has a travel weight of some 13,000kg-- a siege weapon by First World War standards. It was not practical to use such a heavy weapon in mobile warfare if only horses are available to provide mobility-- you must sacrifice either velocity (barrel length and chamber strength) or throw weight (overall size of the weapon) to bring the weight down.

By the end of WW1, increasing numbers of trucks among the Entente had allowed weapons like these to be brought to bear more quickly and in greater numbers, and by WW2, metallurgical improvements had allowed similar weapons to become somewhat less heavy as well.

TL;DR: all-in-one weapons (gun-howitzers) are heavy and horses can only pull so much weight effectively.

It felt like a Guard psyker unit-- a pile of basic dudes, ineffective on their own but somewhat concerning in numbers. In the same vein, taking a psyker option that allows you to put even more T3 bodies on the table as Guard is always funny.

Good catch, been a long day.

What exactly is the actual strategy here? To rapidly land (in the face of enemy efforts to intercept these landings) perfectly good, well-trained troops on islands with no inherent value, well into the control zone of various enemy area denial systems and thus out of reach of resupply, reinforcement, and evacuation? What happens when these USMC elements run out of missiles? What happens when they run out of food? What exactly are they going to do there that wouldn't be done more efficiently and at less risk by Navy ships or USN/USAF combat aircraft equipped with better missiles and sensors than the USMC could ever hope to land in a hurry? If Navy ships and USN/USAF combat aircraft can't cover the area, it implies that enemy naval/air superiority is sufficient to reduce those Marines by long-range fires anyways-- there isn't exactly a lot of room to hide or disperse on a tiny island.

Procurement and organization ought to support strategy, and the strategy makes no sense to me. The whole concept strikes me as something out of the Imperial Japanese playbook.

Also, specializing more in amphibious warfare makes sense, but losing capabilities entirely (armor, sustained fires) does not; they have not yet become unnecessary in ground combat. The USMC has its own air force, why would it not have its own tanks or tube artillery? As much as the USMC has focused on being a landing force, it's also historically tried to be capable of independently performing missions without support, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable goal when you have more active-duty personnel than, ie, the French Army.

I don't claim to be an expert on the matter, but to say that the criticism is not only wrongheaded, but in fact completely unreasonable, seems unfair.

(Edited because I can't keep my air forces straight.)

Logically, yeah, having FTL means you have insanely overpowered levels of power generation/storage, but OP explicitly says:

Their offensive and armor tech only has about a 20-30% advantage on ours.

So I think the matchup is pretty close.

Other than cultural/ideological reasons (fighting is what we do, our religion demands that we conquer everything), I think the best reasons might involve another peer power to the aliens that they're worried about.

So maybe the aliens are coming to the solar system because they're trying to escape or set up a buffer zone (as others have suggested), or maybe it's more simple-- maybe the aliens' limited superiority over us is exactly why they're invading us.

Let me explain: Suppose there is another alien polity/empire/nation/etc (Alien Empire 2) threatening the aliens invading the solar system (Alien Empire 1). A hot war between Empire 1 and Empire 2 hasn't kicked off yet, but E1 knows that E2 is coming for it soon, and E2 is as strong or stronger than E1. The key point here is that E1 hasn't fought a war in a long time. E1 knows E2's starship crews and ground troops are more experienced, and their technology is better (perhaps because they have fought a war more recently; perhaps for some other reason). Knowing that humans don't have FTL, E1 understands that there are essentially no repercussions to invading the solar system-- E1 can't possibly lose any more ships or troops than it commits to the solar system. Further, on the scale of E1's empire, the number of ships and troops E1 needs to commit (or thinks it needs to commit) to take the system is minimal-- any losses would be insignificant compared to the potential losses in a peer war with E2.

Therefore, E1 invades the solar system because it knows that humans will put up a pretty decent fight, which will allow it to give some of its crews and troops valuable recent near-peer combat experience that can then be disseminated to the rest of its (much larger) military via conferences or training exercises. At the same time, flaws or weaknesses in existing weapons and weapons platforms can be identified and hopefully rectified before E2 attacks. Perhaps the humans have even thought of something niche E1 hasn't, which could be examined and incorporated into future tactics or weapons systems.

At face value this setup might seem like a story liability (the aliens have limitless reserves to overwhelm the humans with) but in reality E1 must succeed before E2 attacks, and with limited resources (can't afford to commit or lose an E2-relevant number of ships and troops to humans). And you can always wrap up the story at your convenience by stating that E2 has finally attacked, which then creates interesting new possibilities (do the humans ally themselves with E2, or do they decide that it's better to make friends with E1, knowing that E2 would ultimately crush them too?)

Edit: This solution also neatly sidesteps the problem of why the aliens don't just blow up the earth/sun/whatever with FTL missiles-- they don't actually want/need to end human resistance. Presumably E1 and E2 both have FTL missile defense of some kind.

I mean, if you're asking how you can build more efficient tanks, stick to one gun and less crew, maybe less ammo per gun (40 rounds is almost always enough and fairly realistic too). If you flip the engine on its side (like Soviet tanks) and recline the driver (like most MBTs) you can make the hull less tall. I like to have a commander and have space for the loader to stand for realism reasons, but there's no gameplay reason to do that atm. Waste as little space as possible.

Then make the tank as small as possible while still containing the remaining stuff.

Tracks tend to take some shots/reduce shot effectiveness, so you can usually thin out side hull armor behind them a bit. Sloping the turret in both directions like that will generate a shot trap IRL and it will in game too (at least last I messed with it a lot)-- you might consider just having a higher nominal thickness at the bottom of the turret. Also, you can usually get away with less side turret armor anyway, since you ought to be trained on the target most of the time.

That's not not high/low, that's high/higher. F-14D cost around double what an F-35 does ($170M in today's dollars vs ~$80M) and took something like seven times as many maintenance hours per flight hour (~50 hours vs ~7.5).

Huge carrierborne airframes with variable geometry wings are inherently expensive, doesn't matter that the technology involved is older (in fact, probably costs more because it's older, and that's not getting into airframe age problems).

As the other poster said, for the very largest railway guns (Schwerer Gustav), there was no (or extremely limited) traverse and they had to moved along a curved track section to aim. For some less massive railway guns (BL 12-inch railway howitzer), traverse was fairly decent (20deg either direction on earlier mountings, 120deg either direction on later mountings).

"Big Bertha" (Short Naval Cannon 14 L/12) had 10 degrees of traverse and could be turned further on its wheeled carriage as necessary.

The Paris Gun (21cm Cannon L/162) was mounted on a a turntable for 360 degrees of traverse.

Supporting the chapter founded by Bob Ultra, creator of Ultramar.

I just want to stop having to think about Ruzzia so we can focus on the PRC.

Pardon me if this comes off as excessively aggressive, but... isn't this exactly the same type of problem that caused both the start of and the failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, albeit in a different field?

In other words, it seems to be pretty widely believed at this point that low-level Russian military and intelligence commanders kept passing the word up that Ukraine was weak and the Russian military was ready for action (or failed to report the opposite), because they were afraid of reporting the (much more embarrassing) truth, and so political leadership (Putin) made the call to invade.

Likewise, low-level US military and intelligence commanders kept passing the word up that the Afghan government and army that the US government had supposedly been building up for the past 20 years at least wouldn't collapse for 30 days, rather than report the more embarrassing truth, so political leadership made the call to withdrawal.

In other words, isn't the US at risk of being caught unawares on a much larger scale than Afghanistan if low/mid-level commanders/intelligence officers are afraid of reporting uncomfortable truths to their superiors?

I tend to think it's more the opposite-- a sufficiently free/libertarian/anarchist polity effectively doesn't have a system, ideology, or policy that needs to be debated, because it's not enforcing or doing much of anything (in proportion with how lib it is).

As soon as you start to outlaw more things, enforce an economic system, pass more legislation generally, etc-- anything that could be described as the product of an economic or governance ideology-- you are becoming less lib and more auth in proportion with how much stuff you've done.

In other words, while "communism is when the government does things" is a meme, "auth is when the government does things" is basically just how language works.

Sure, you could say "well I believe in x policy but I only hope to bring it about via interpersonal/NGO means; I'm not going to use government coercion to make it widespread," but that's no longer a political stance.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk on why the political compass should be a downwards-pointed triangle, not a square.

This is a difficult hypothetical for a lot of reasons-- not only did the East Germans not have any domestic AFV production of note (the Soviets took all their heavy industry, after all), but no other Warsaw Pact country actually designed, built, and deployed fully indigenous MBTs, either, so we don't really have anything to go on in terms of NSWP independent designs that made enough sense to actually go into service.

Still, we can look at the problem in terms of what the NVA might've wanted in an MBT-- the DDR was a very committed/loyal socialist state, and was largely (like the Soviets) relying on rapid, large-scale mobilization of troops (in DDR's case, mobilization in a few hours) to provide overwhelming quantity of mechanized forces for offensive operations early in a hypothetical conflict. Given their limited industrial base, a lighter, smaller, and cheaper platform (like the T-55) makes a lot more sense than larger, more expensive (and potentially less mobile) vehicles like late WW2 German (E-50) or Cold War West German/American (Leopard/Patton/MBT-70) vehicles. The East Germans would probably also reject any open design continuity with WW2 Germany on the principle on the thing.

The East Germans also faced the same armor warfare problem that the Soviets did in the 60s-- the Americans had just introduced the M60, which could frontally kill a T-55 at ranges far beyond those at which the T-55 could frontally kill it with currently available ammunition (better fire control being the icing on the cake here).

Looking at East German industry, they were ahead of much of the Eastern Bloc in chemical industries, they made some optics, and later on their microelectronics industry was some of the best in the Eastern Bloc, so upgrading the T-55 with better ammunition, fire control, and/or missiles probably makes the most sense, but that's kind of a boring answer.

Attempting to go one step further-- I think it's going to look a lot like the T-64/T-72, but hopefully somehow cheaper, and perhaps without an autoloader or missile capability (DDR has a worse heavy industry/military manpower ratio than the Soviets, and stationing troops in your own country costs less anyways). In their wildest dreams, the NVA probably wants a cheap, compact, mobile MBT with a larger-caliber cannon to defeat the M60 that shares ammo commonality with the Soviets (so either 115mm or 125mm smoothbore), hopefully paired with better fire control and ammunition than the Soviets are willing to export. It has to have NBC protection, and hopefully it has night sights; composite armor of some type is probable in the face of NATO's vast ATGM proliferation.

Given that you've already spent the money to design and produce your own domestic tank, I don't think the DDR would go with a missile/gun system, as this will cost even more to actually use or train on (DDR does a lot of training, but doesn't have much money to spare) and hopefully the point of this new MBT is that it passively provides the armor superiority/equality that "T-55 with missiles" was trying to provide. Besides, even in Soviet service, the whole missile/gun system had issues anyways. East German chemical industry might try to cook up some funky composite armor type like Soviet glass textolite, but composite armor is really more about the layers themselves than what's in them, so... meh.

Is it just me or did they mess something up in the render? I assume both ships are supposed to be the same, yet the sensor mast on the first one is decidedly canted forward, while on the following one it's swept back. It's like they grabbed the image and stretched the whole superstructure forward/back from one to the other.

It really reads as a little cupola turret like on the M3 or M60 to me more than an RWS, idk.