Two groups of colonies, say French Martian colonies vs British ones on Mars, begin fighting against each other...

Two groups of colonies, say French Martian colonies vs British ones on Mars, begin fighting against each other. What does the conflict look like? What if it involves the colonies throughout the Solar System? No planet is unified under a single flag.

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well, depending on if we can get laser weaponry working, it would be a lot of really intense...nothing. something that gets hit by a laser will heat up at the spot hit, but there aren't visible laser beams unless its smoky or dusty.
if they are still using propellant-based projectile weapons, it wont look much different.
there wont be mechs, too expensive and too unweildy to work well unless we make signifigant advancements first, and its cheaper to make wheels or tracks anyways. there will be a lot of white, tank like vehicles. bubble cities that will be automatic targets, basically it will look very similar to earth based warfare.
the only places that will be different are something like titan or venus, and even those places are unlikely due to the hostile environments.

What a conflict looks like depends entirely on the technology and resources the belligerents have available to them and what the goals are (which will be based on the reason for the conflict).

You haven't specified any of this critical information.

Oh, did you see Aldenoah too?

assuming that technologically we don't have the resources to have super starships capable of casual orbital bombardment, then it's a proxy ground war of varying sizes, mostly skirmishes for valuable asset locations across the martian plane.

Do the space british and space french have the same tech?

Well, basically is to imagine a conflict less fancy than the typical interstellar war and closer to the "near"-future. No terraforming. A century or two post-colonization. You can imagine that the war started over a minor incident that escalated into a colonial war almost by accident.

More or less.

You haven't provided any useful information so it's impossible to speculate in a useful way.

For example, you didn't tell us how developed the colonies are, what their purpose or what their population is. So they could range in size from a small, but permanent base inhabited by ten or so people to fully established nations the size of modern day France and Britain. Also the relationship between them is totally unknown, in the space future France and Britain could be (or have previously) been on opposite sides of a massive war that devastated both nations and now they have a genocidal hatred for each other, or they could both be members of a federated Europe.

The consequence is that the conflict could range in nature and scale dramatically. In one extreme one side might try to sabotage the greenhouses of the other to try and force their space agency to abandon their mission, but they are noticed resulting in a scuffle involving no actual weapons, but one guy dies from suffocation when his helmet gets busted open when he gets hit in the visor with a big wrench. Another extreme would be a catastrophic nuclear war.

So could you please be a bit more fucking specific.

Who else is on Mars?
Are their other "Earth Nations" with Martian colonies, or any non-linked Nations as well?

Given the hugeness of martian geography there'd likely be cool canyon and mountain fights.

Not sure what the weaker gravity and atmosphere would mean for artillery

Assuming planetwide populations of a few hundred thousand to a few million...

Phase 1 of the war is MAD via kinetic weaponry from orbit. Phase 2 of the war happens centuries later between the American and Chinese colonies, which ironically have been built on Mt. Deimos and Mt. Phobos respectively to mine the old ruins for resources.

Alternately, you're looking at symbolic combat and raids in a manner politically similar to the Scottish marches or daimyo jostling during the bakufu, but likely with an even stronger preference for open-field combat.
Barring terraforming, light infantry and nonballistic aircraft can be ruled out, as can conventional firearms; you'd be looking at melee power armor or railgun and rocket-equipped low-crewed tanks, likely with an offensive bias towards towards the power armor as ideal for less-lethal trials by combat to resolve minor conflicts or as spotters for a long-range rocket corps in existential ones/a defensive bias toward the tanks as easily routing the EVA-suit-with-a-heat-spear infantry as long as they can engage away from potential collateral damage.

>What if it involves the colonies throughout the Solar System? No planet is unified under a single flag.
Hnng, love this. Mono-faction planets are kinda dull.

Squabbling over especially valuable asteroid claims would likely be common - possibly discovered by various daring explorers or space prospecting firms, either on their own or working for national "Solar Companies" - megacorps, some of which probably have their own armies.

Assuming the (fairly well-violated (on its other provisions), and it should be noted that France never signed) "no nukes in space" holds, as a fig leaf at least, total nuclear annihilation would be off the table, but fairly large destruction could well be possible, with orbital shots or small habs being vulnerable to even fairly weak hits.

On the other hand, if Mars is only light-medium colonised a stable and functional habitat in a key place might be so valuable that minimal damage is preferred, meaning a lot of storming space-forts

>A solar 100 years war.
Sort of want.

Earth-Britain is under embargo and has to surrender after the first famine starts, while France can still trade with all its European neighbours by land.

>Barring terraforming, light infantry and conventional firearms can be ruled out
How'd you figure?

With the colonies it's more like the 7 years war, though you could certainly use 100 years war motifs as well.

The colonial era is also when marine and amphibious assaults started gaining real traction in a modern way - there's even a bit in the 7 years war where a few such asymmetric attacks were termed "descents" - they were basically just raids on a French harbours, but still.
In a solar version of that war these might be literally descents, for orbital drop-raids.

Oxygen consumption. Even assuming the lower gravity ALL becomes headroom for increased carry capacity rather than having an inverse of the "fat dude leg press" effect, 150L/minute oxygen consumption is not unheard of during strenuous activity and that means 13 kilos of inertia and 5 kilos of Earth carry weight per hour of combat.
I was wrong about conventional firearms, though - checked what the US and Euros tended to use for frogman guns and assumed that the specialist propellants meant at least the primer for standard ammo required a separate oxygen source, but it apparently doesn't.

This makes the light fighting vehicles more attractive for all roles where the terrain cooperated, as they'd be able to mount standard weaponry and have only extremely heavily laden infantry for targets. If you absolutely have to have muh SF trappings, or expect uneven terrain, maybe wheeled or treaded armor with a rudimentary stride only for those situations?

I underestimated the consumption of oxygen there, and was going off the somewhat ironic concept that the light infantry are usually the ones carrying the most gear, man per man - I figured what's an extra couple of air tanks when you're hauling all your crap anyway?

I'd agree that it does make light fighting vehicles much more attractive though.
Wonder how heavy air production is, in a general sense - what the smallest equipment for sustaining small units can be.

One thing I have seen in a setting with Martian wars was the use of reciprocytes to help soldiers get by on much less oxygen, which was kinda cool.

>what's an extra couple of air tanks when you're hauling all your crap anyway

As a former light infantryman, it's a right bastard. You're already carrying your personal kit, and then someone has the great idea of piling on you a disposable anti-tank rocket, an extra belt of ammo for the section MG, maybe an extra battery for the radio...

Put your poor bloody infantry in exoskeletons or 2300AD style combat walkers.

>"eh, they're in 1/3rd G anyway, they can take more stuff!"
>neglects momentum mass, bulk, general inconvenience etc.

Such is the life of the poor bloody infantry.

I could see exoskeletons, but all-out walkers would probably not be a thing.
Air vehicles would probably be weird too, what with the very thin, low-oxygen atmosphere.
Maybe lots of high-altitude airships and rocket planes

On the other hand, it's Mars. Everything'll weight 0.376 times as much.

To be honest, I can't see humans fighting in this war. That would be a scary fling with the colony's phosphorus bottleneck, after all.

Also, the war would be pretty darn short, because the freely available resources would be extremely limited. I can see something like both colonies arming up a bunch of worker drones, and whoever wins the robo-battle wins the war because the other side is slipping into a cascade scenario because of the lost drones.

The most important thing to remember about such a war is that making reasonable assumptions about it is inherently flawed, because it can only happens if the people involved are insanely fucking stupid.

You know how MAD kept us from nuking each other in the cold war? Colonies on Mars or in Space are under a similar restriction, except that their infrastructure and artificial ecosystem are so fragile that literally anyone that can reach them is as dangerous as a nuke. An angry survivor with some mining equipment and access to your greenhouse for thirty seconds can kill half your population. They won't die today, but they are dead all the same.

>Put your poor bloody infantry in exoskeletons or 2300AD style combat walkers.
That just means they can carry even more gear.

>all-out walkers would probably not be a thing

The 2300AD combat walkers aren't mecha like from Heavy Gears, they're militarised versions of the Aliens power loader. Check pic attached.

Another 2300AD factoid: if your Mars is thinly populated, a single crack platoon of Foreign Legion paratroops is a force to be reckoned with.

>Empaquetage de Evolument de Operation Spatial
Who the fuck wrote that ?

An American. One of the problems with 1980s RPGs was the way the US writers mangled the Euro languages, what with bad French, Commando Comics style German and let's not start with Japanese and Chinese. 2300AD is an offender, though not as big as Battletech.

The first fight will be a bar brawl over alcohol on Mars.

Well, if anyone care for a proper translation it would be Paquetage de Manoeuvre en Opérations Spatiales.

youtu.be/kmFOBoy2MZ8

>a single crack platoon of Foreign Legion paratroops is a force to be reckoned with.
Sounds rad - one thing that doing future sci-fi conflicts inspired by past ones (say, the 7 years war in space), is that you can add cool stuff that's happened in the meantime - so british might be known as Redsuits, for camouflage reasons, the French might have the Foreign Legion, and in places might have a Resistance movement, Brit vehicles might be painted SAS pink etc.

Aircraft will have serious problems to flight in such thin atmosphere. Anything that can fly on Mars is going to have massive wings.

Or is very very fast

Plus if you really want to and have to, you can get tanks to where you want them. To cite (yet again) 2300AD, the various colonies rarely had anything more than a few light infantrymen and local militia, because that's what everyone else had - no need for tanks.

This bites humanity massively in the arse when Triumphant Destiny comes calling and brings heavy armour with itself. After the counterattack begins and humanity needs to clean the Käfer off the occupied planets, they need tanks and boots on the ground. It ain't easy, but it gets done because you don't want to fight a Deathsled or a Behemoth tank with a shoulder launched ATGM.