The Stars Our Destination

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The story is "Flat Tiger", by Gordon R. Dickson. It appears in the March 1956 issue of Galaxy Magazine.

Completely tangential, but my uni roleplaying club was the successor to the uni's sci-fi club, and the dinky little library had a large number of original Galaxy magazines, among others. I do hope they still survive there.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

=

But now we're talking about a total war between vast galactic empires? Yeah, it depends on the type of FTL. Perhaps FTL is short range and requires gas giant refuelling every couple of light years, then all those empty systems become strategic assets and launch pads for assaults- it's war in the Pacific. In that case, indeed, garrisoning everything you can afford to is necessary.

.

Um...not so much. Because the thing is scattering small defensive forces all over interstellar space against a force that can attack at any angle in three dimensions accomplishes nothing except to invite defeat in detail. The reason why it works in land warfare is because it's easy to screw up an invader's logistical tail if they don't eliminate enemy forces to the right or the left, cutting them off from supply, leading them to run out fuel, food and ammunition.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Um...not so much. Because the thing is scattering small defensive forces all over interstellar space against a force that can attack at any angle in three dimensions accomplishes nothing except to invite defeat in detail.

Perhaps..... (spitballing for the sake of argument) the FTL range is so short that any one system only has 3 or 4 connecting systems. This reduces the number of incoming attack vectors.

I was imagining warp drives before that refuelled after every short hop, but instead let's say they're jump drives that only link to nearby solar mass gravitational wells. Fuel tanks can provide fuel for a few hops, but then need a gas giant or fuel depot.

When an expeditionary force arrives, you meet it with light defenses, either delaying for a larger reinforcement force to arrive (from the large base a few hops away), or just harrying before falling back to the next defensive position.

Would that meet the necessary criteria?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Perhaps..... (spitballing for the sake of argument) the FTL range is so short that any one system only has 3 or 4 connecting systems. This reduces the number of incoming attack vectors.

I was imagining warp drives before that refuelled after every short hop, but instead let's say they're jump drives that only link to nearby solar mass gravitational wells. Fuel tanks can provide fuel for a few hops, but then need a gas giant or fuel depot.

When an expeditionary force arrives, you meet it with light defenses, either delaying for a larger reinforcement force to arrive (from the large base a few hops away), or just harrying before falling back to the next defensive position.

Would that meet the necessary criteria?

To justify a form of defense in depth? Yes. But that still ends with with the vast majority of systems and objects being not worth developing or defending because they're economically uninviting and don't happen to be on one of the high traffic routes that would make them strategically useful.

So yeah, you put outposts in high traffic routes that can provide repair and refueling services for passing ships that have their tigers go flat. Possibly with fleet units attached for security and communication.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Perhaps..... (spitballing for the sake of argument) the FTL range is so short that any one system only has 3 or 4 connecting systems. This reduces the number of incoming attack vectors.

I was imagining warp drives before that refuelled after every short hop, but instead let's say they're jump drives that only link to nearby solar mass gravitational wells. Fuel tanks can provide fuel for a few hops, but then need a gas giant or fuel depot.

When an expeditionary force arrives, you meet it with light defenses, either delaying for a larger reinforcement force to arrive (from the large base a few hops away), or just harrying before falling back to the next defensive position.

Would that meet the necessary criteria?

Not really. It provides a space in which such a defense could be conducted, but doesn't supply a motive for defense in depth rather than border pickets and some mixture of a unified battlefleet and system fortifications.

You'd need to provide a reason that it's better to fight a multi-stellar delaying action rather than a single decisive battle.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You'd need to provide a reason that it's better to fight a multi-stellar delaying action rather than a single decisive battle.

It gives you a thick layer of defense cushioning your inhabited and developed systems from attack?

ETA: Sorry, that's what you meant by border pickets. Maybe..... there's also a superjump drive which can jump deep into enemy territory, but is wildly inaccurate. Attackers can blunder somewhere into behind the lines, but then use the smaller jumps to hone in on a target system.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

It gives you a thick layer of defense cushioning your inhabited and developed systems from attack?

ETA: Sorry, that's what you meant by border pickets. Maybe..... there's also a superjump drive which can jump deep into enemy territory, but is wildly inaccurate. Attackers can blunder somewhere into behind the lines, but then use the smaller jumps to hone in on a target system.

The border pickets are just to make sure the attacker doesn't get to hit your systems with the element of surprise, and perhaps to detect trade-route raiders coming in. They're not a layer of defense, just of warning.

Skipping over the border just means that you have to picket all of your space instead of the perimeter. Or, quite possibly, that you have to abandon the idea of controlling a large volume of space rather than a small perimeter around each key system because the cost of picketing is unsupportable.

[AlexanderHowl]

The problem with not maintaining bases in uninhabited systems is that an enemy can find out the patrol schedule and build around it. If a system is visited once a month, then an enemy force has a month to set up a defensive position, which is more than enough time at TL10. When your patrol next came back, it would find an enemy military base in 'friendly' territory, with more than adequate defenses, capable of providing support to any enemy FTL units that wanted to harass your shipping.

[Anaraxes]

If shipping is easily harassed from behind enemy lines, then there's no way for the enemy to support their outpost, because they have no way to stop the first empire's FTL ships doing exactly the same thing, but from a better position. The proper owner just cuts off the outpost's supplies and goes on about their business.

It would certainly happen, so long as the raiding outpost were cheap enough that you'd get a net return on the investment in your harassment, and more effective than just launching the commerce raiders from back in your own space. But it's not a fatal flaw in the defense or an insightful attacker "I WIN" button, any more than WW II was poorly fought because neither side had soldiers linking hands from coast to coast, or that the British lost control of the seas in the Napoleonic wars because they only blockaded ports, not garrisoning every hundred nautical mile square portion of the Atlantic with a floating base and fleet for "defense in depth". (Or "of depth", in this case...) You can't physically occupy all space on a single planet, much less a chunk of galaxy. So you observe (with patrols if that's the only way tech lets you get eyeballs on the space) and respond.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

My thinking is that establishing military bases in uninhabited systems would allow for a 'defense in depth' strategy. In addition, enemy states would have to send large forces to destroy each base or risk suffering counterattacks from starships stationed at the military bases. Since defense is cheaper than offense in GURPS, due to the cost of FTL drives and STL drives, each base could have substantial defenses at a fraction of the cost of a comparable battle group.

Of course, the exact capabilities of the military bases would depend on the investment by the polity. If each base possessed 100,000 military personnel and an equal number of civilian personnel, they could each support the equivalent of an aircraft carrier battle group. If each base possessed 1,000 military personnel and an equal number of civilian personnel, they would be hard pressed to support the equivalent of an FFG.

If your FTL allows free travel over arbitrary distances, forces stationed in otherwise useless systems are just crumbs to be ignored or defeated in detail, as the invader desires. Also, they won't be defensively strong if they are to have the capability to 'counter attack' in force.

For defence in depth like this to work, the FTL drive has to be limited in some way so that the invader must advance through these systems, rather than just flying on past them, or such that FTL ships can be detected and intercepted from a system.

At this point we have a good reason for most systems to be occupied, rather than ignored if there's nothing interesting in them - they are stepping stones on the way to somewhere else.