In a setting where orbital bombardment is an option...

Nigga you ever had to foot the bill for an orbital bombardment then the cost to rebuild infrastructure in order to make said planet useful?

>orbital bombardment completely destroys cities
You could make missiles/projectiles that slow their velocity to "normal". Basically MRLs and (I)CBMs, but they are stationed in orbit. So orbital bombardment doesn't necessarily need to completely obliterate everything.
Of course ground troops and everything else that comes with a CA approach is absolutely necessary.

>to make said planet useful?
And why would I want it?

Why would the rock take 30 years to reach its target, but not the nuke? Unless you are trying to imply this a war between two factions inhabiting the single planet they have in which case either option is beyond retarded and can only result in mutual destruction. If we're talking about a war between two factions sharing a sun then the rock will probably be the faster of the two since you can fit more engines/propellant on an asteroid than a missile. You also get more band out of your buck as far as civilization destroying ability is concerned. If we're talking about an interstellar war than whatever excuse you use for FTL would also apply to dumb rocks as they do to nuclear missiles. Nukes have their place in a war in which at least one side wants to persevere some land for conquering, but in a war of extinction (which is what I was talking) all you need is something to perma fuck the biosphere of the planet and you're good to go. Fighting a machine-like race complicates this a bit, but it isn't like you'll run out of rocks anytime soon.

Why would you bomb it in the first place then?

Not to mention bombing is not a guarantee, you still need to sweep out complexes that dont get leveled.

>war is only about killing and destroying everything

I could forgive the ignorants for holding such a position, but many are supposedly "informed" miltary wankers that just want to jerk off the newest hardware.

Because you need to mount the engines to the kill rock first which would probably take a lot more time than an alpha strike with your stockpile of nukes

I didn't say that it did? I was talking about massed conventional warfare compared to a war of extinction in which you don't really care about keeping the cities intact, you just want the inhabitants dead.

Why is building and mounting engines on a rock any slower than building and launching a nuke? You'd also need a few hundred of them, or more like a few thousand, to get the effect of a single well picked asteroid. I was talking about a war of extinction in my post after all.

I've been wondering about such a setting, where currently, orbital bombardment is used as an anti-fortification/infrastructure/last resort/denial attack. In this setting, widespread peace with low tension amongst nations was the reigning state of all humanity for close to a century, and there were/still are many regulations in place to preserve the ecosystem of a colony planet; having gone on for so long without mass devastation, the only thing regarded as worse than unrestricted orbital bombardment is unrestricted mass mining.

Also because an example sits in space near Earth, created a century ago, and it has remained blackened and lifeless ever since. A portion of the Earth Guards fleet is always set aside to patrol this place, nowadays largely for historical and ceremonial reasons.

There are uses for it in combat, but they used to be reserved for highly contested systems. In the current conflict, most commanders have skirted the law by pulling off low-orbit precision runs in support of ground troops, but one such orbital bombing mission, done from high orbit onto muddied frontlines around and within a city while the bombing fleet was under heavy fire and mixed into combat, basically became a rallying call for the receiving faction because of the high civilian death toll.

Some argue that the city outskirts held facilities vital to the defending faction to continue their defence and prolong the siege, but the general viewpoint in the setting is that the fact that the vast majority of the rounds struck city areas and shelters without some kind of target trend and pattern reflected poorly on the bombing fleet. From then on, the threat of increasingly devastating back-and-forth produces two main schools of thought amongst the factions; one is to return the punch and keep at it with stronger weapons, the other, not wanting anymore empty husks in space, seeks to end the conflict with a decisive strike before it can reach that point.

Tell me how you gonna capture that city there with only Nukes? That one, singular city which you desire and which would be your empires crown jewel. That city, which if destroyed would plunge your vassals into fit of rage and your ministers to plot coup for your incompetence, how will you achieve that conquest with orbital bombardment on that city?

If you start to stockpile weaponised asteroids you're begging for a preventive first strike. If you're already at war then sure go ahead and make then, but it might cut into how many ships you can output. Nukes and asteroid KKVs don't really use the same manufacture facilities though so you can make both.
And the nuke wouldn't take 30 years to get where you want because presumably you aren't retarded and fire them from a ship in orbit of the planet you want razed.

how to solve the weaponized asteroid thing

>If the planet has a moon, use your shitty doomsday device weapons to demolish a part of it
>enjoy the meteor shower and fucked up tides

You might not want to bombard the place you're taking, for any number of reasons.

Why does Orbital Bombardment weapons always have to be so powerful? Mega laser, nuclear warheads, large-bore rail guns. While not something as simple as our modern mid-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads?

This is the same argument that was made by some DoD officials in the 90's about air power. It ignores a few realities though:
>you don't always want to destroy infrastructure, you want to control it
>an enemy force can just hunker down/hide during a bombardment, then go back to doing whatever they we're doing.
>while that certainly disrupts them, it doesn't necessarily get rid of them
A combination of both air(space) and ground power would ultimately be better in most conflicts.

Didnt the usa lost the vietnam war because it relied too much on aerial bombardment?

I assume future-nukes are all dial-a-yield like some of the models (can't remember their name) in the current US arsenal. There's nukes can go from very big boom fuck the environment to surgically remove only the military

I had to go look up my copy of Starship Troopers to be sure I got the quote right, but quote it I will:

>War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is
controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your
government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just
to be killing him... but to make him do what you want him to do. Not
killing... but controlled and purposeful violence.

There were a lot of factors but that was arguably one. This was the beginning of "all ya need is air power" movement.

Here's an explanation that you can use in your setting

>the air Force is, at least on paper the strongest military force in the world
>They receive tons of funding
>In reality, most of their commanders are horribly corrupt
>Most of the funding is siphoned away
>Supplies are bought at 300x the market price and the difference is split 50/50 between the admirals and the guys who own the factories
>The air Force is unable to conduct a full bombing campaign
>Admirals and Marshalls publish reports saying they launched 50 air raids x day during the previous month
>In reality they only launched 2 or 3 and published that number for propaganda purposes
>The amount of bombs dropped is also exaggerated
>Ammunition is of poor quality and sometimes fails to explode

Thats where you're wrong kiddo

Also stuff like this was exposed during the libyan war in 2011 so it's not that crazy... iirc near the end of the war the French air Force had run out of ammunition and were dropping duds or straight up faking the amount of attacks. I don't have any links though since this happened 6 years ago.

While all of that is interesting, OP's basic proposition ignores several core realities of war.

As others have said, orbital bombardment might not be a viable solution for several reasons:

- Ruins infrastructure and may seriously affect the atmosphere if done with certain weaponry or on a large enough scale
- Doesn't kill all the targets in the zone - some might survive and mess up the follow-up occupation
- Political/legal reasons: Your civilians might support a war to teach the Other Folks a lesson, but your nation might have rules against causing mass civilian casualties, or the photos of smashed in cities full of dead civilian bodies might upset some folks back home.

So you need stuff other than orbital weaponry.

Orbital stuff is a great tool to have in the military toolbox but it's not the right tool for every situation.

My favorite part of the Libyan war was the US buying weapons from rebel groups after the fall of Ghadaffi and sending them to Syria via Turkey.

I'd say because planets are stupid fucking massive and it would take an ungodly amount of time and ammunition to take out every strongpoint which your ships could be using to take out other vessels. That and without boots on the ground you have no real way of knowing if the enemy is dead /controlling the planet. And biospheres and inhabitable worlds are always in huge demand (probably) so you'd lose more destroying it in a fit of autistic rage than preserving it and using it's resources.

You need infantry to hold territory.

Artillery and air power are useful, and they seem really cool. Kill your enemy from a safe distance! Big, bright explosions! But shelling and bombing just make rubble, they don't take and hold. They can't move into a city and supplant the government you oppose with your own government.

War isn't about killing, it's about control. And you don't have control until you've got your guys in their city, directing traffic on their street corners, telling their civilians what to do.

Unless you’re engaging in a total war scenario and are willing to burn the entire planet down, troops are essential for actually taking territory that you want to keep.

So for conquest rather than genocide

They were dropping concrete duds on fixed structures. Turns out dropping 500lbs of concrete in the shape of a bomb from a few thousand feet up works pretty well even if it doesn't explode and only costs a fraction of a conventional bomb. The concrete bombs they use for testing guidance systems generate enough force on impact to mission kill a tank.

It wasn't really directed specifically at you, more to the anons who assume that orbital bombardment can only mean utter destruction of massive areas.

It lost because:
>The Vietnamese had a reliable supply line from China
>The were ridiculously selective about what to bomb

Why occupy a planet when you're going to rip it apart for raw materials.

I'm just going to leave this here.

youtube.com/watch?v=-XDFWA83Li8

>When you can simply win the space battle and then proceed to bombard your enemy from orbit, what's the point of having hundreds or thousands of guys with rifles?

Unless your goal in a conflict is just to completely obliterate a place and kill every single innocent non-combatant, then yeah, it works fine.

It's a lot like nuclear warfare, with the only real dangers of nuclear warfare being overuse- something just as dangerous when it comes to orbital bombardment.

But if your goal is to actually just get the opponent to agree to your trade agreement, stop certain policies, remove the current government from power, secure their resources, etc, you need people on the ground to actually police shit, fight house to house in the trenches, and get stuff done.

No ammount of shooting shit from the air will solve that. We dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped in the entirety of WWII on all sides of the conflict, and it wasn't enough to get them to surrender.

>Why does Orbital Bombardment weapons always have to be so powerful? Mega laser, nuclear warheads, large-bore rail guns. While not something as simple as our modern mid-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads?

because once you reach a certain velocity (3km/s), any object contains the destructive potential its own mass in terms of TNT. Reentry velocities regularly exceed that.

So basically, anything going fast enough to get from orbit is already an explosive in an of itself.

That and whatever you make has to be able to stand up to the heat of reentry, so it's going to need to be dense or have a heat shield or something. The simplest way is really to just make a really dense rod of some kind. Packing chemical explosives onto a hundred+ kilogram tungsten rod traveling at several km/s it is just window dressing.

The next step up is nuclear weapons.

>Why occupy a planet when you're going to rip it apart for raw materials.

Why bother with fighting a war to render a habitable planet inhabitable for its resources when you can rip apart all the inhabitable ones that have even more resources?

If you want to take the ground then you can bombard the shit out of the people. But if you want to conquer the people then you need people on the ground to do it.

You can't take ground with bombardment.

That's like asking why foot soldiers are needed in our world where atom bombs are a thing

So what's with all the single government planets?

You'd figure that after so many million/billion people on an entire planet that eventually someone is going to decide they don't like living under the exact same set of rules as their neighbor, so they'll bugger off or rebel or something.

I can't imagine most planets with populations that you usually see in sci-fi being singular entities.

So if you go to war with someone on that planet, you aren't necessarily at war with the entire planet. Just like if the US had a spat with the Federation on Mars, it doesn't mean that China and Russia or the Free State of Phobos or the Ares Republic have to join in.

>When you can simply win the space battle and then proceed to bombard your enemy from orbit, what's the point of having hundreds or thousands of guys with rifles?

Because no matter which way you slice it, you can't conquer a city with Ortillery.

Like all common banalities of scifi, such as alien monocultures, Human or anthro aliens, single-biome planets and artificial gravity flooring: a combination of laziness and the author being a Trekkie in his youth

Yeah but even the hardest of hard sci-fi that defies all of those conventions still falls victim to this pretty much every single time.

Read what happened with YuJing and their orbital bombardment when the Combined Army appeared.

tldr: They bombarded an egg repository for one of the alien races thinking it was an High-Value Target like a general there. They didn't even try diplomacy before. Whole situation went to shit, lost a lot of cities to the CA going nuts, totally pointless because no HVTs were there.

It's probably easier and plays on the progression of slow but more assured unification(in governance anyway) that human society has undergone.
>individuals
>families/clans
>tribes
>city states
>nations
>unions of nations
Though it would be by far more interesting to see different plants made up of different nations and possible even different species.

This is basically the old "hurr the second amendment is pointless because guns are useless against drones and nukes" argument.

Bombardment is useful for weakening fortifications, or for destroying key strategic assets. It is useless when it comes to actually holding ground, or seizing assets, or keeping a populace subjugated. Otherwise we would've just glassed Vietnam instead of throwing kids into a hostile jungle so they could develop PTSD.

In Empire Strikes Back, the whole reason why there was a battle of Hoth was because the rebels had a big ass Ion cannon that could fire all the way beyond the planets orbit. The Empire was intercepted as closing in by the Rebels, which is why they had to do a ground assault otherwise they would have blasted them from space.

The reason was that the Rebels had a shield generator that made orbital bombardment infeasible. The only way was to physically walk through the shield and THEN shoot it.

That's why they sent the At-Ats: they walked through the shielding eventually blew up the shield generator.

The Ion cannon was just back up.

Well if we're talking about intergalactic war usually the end goal is to capture livable planets, ie the most valuable things in the fucking galaxy, and re-purpose them for your own use/habitation, so just nuking them into dust is usually not an optimum strategy. Justifiable in certain instances such when you're trying to completely exterminate a hostile alien race or contain a disease, but an empire that uses extensive orbital bombardment as their go to tactic will rule over comparatively little in the long run.

Because it's easier. Keeping track of nations means keeping track of people, and the more nations you have, the more people with cross-purpose agendas you have to keep track of. Easier to go Federation vs Zeon or UN vs Martian Congressional Republic.

Law of Conservation of Detail.

It it doesn't matter to the story, it doesn't matter.

Why would war in space be for resources? They're everywhere. If I'm fighting a war it's to prevent a possible threat. If that means ensuring civilization on some particular rock never passes the stone age until I'm ready to dismantle it, so be it.

Not bad, but i see your Op image is apparently relevant.
If only this much actual thought and world development had been put into Gundam SEED CE setting it might have been good.

>Why would war in space be for resources?
I think it'd be less for the possibility that there aren't enough resources, and more about controlling access to those resources. Like, there's enough minerals in the asteroid belt to build entire cities and space is big enough that everybody could just fuck off to their own corner, but are you really gonna let your jackass neighbor mine those asteroids?

The problem is, you are bombing what you want to keep. Same reason we don't just rain fire on enemits until the world outside the US is a cinder.

It depends on if you actually want it, or if you want to prevent your enemy from reclaiming it.

Scorched Earth tactics baby

Russia is still suffering from that though.
It might actually lead to a famine soon.

If both forces are in space then the planets are pointlessly obsolete anyway meaning no ortillery needed was my line of thinking.
A proper war between 2+ spacefaring groups would be MAD imo, meaning that once a race does leave their home system they've already had the groups that would fight over resources like that get themselves wiped out.

>relativistic kinetic kill vehicle (RKKV)
>RKKVs have been proposed as a method of interstellar warfare, especially in settings where faster than light travel or sensors are impossible. By traveling near the speed of light, an RKKV could substantially limit the amount of early warning detection time. Furthermore, since the destructive effects of the RKKV are carried by its kinetic energy, destroying the vehicle near its target would do little to reduce the damage; the cloud of particles or vapor would still be traveling at nearly the same speed and would have little time to disperse. Indeed, some versions of the RKKV concept call for the RKKV to explode shortly before impact to shower a wide region of space.
Don't even need FTL. You get that bitch traveling near light speed and by the time any conventional means have spotted it it's already gone. You could theoretically use multiple sightings to plot a course and intercept it but that would require an FTL and assumes you have enough time to do it. RKKV's are the ICBM's of the future.

The same reason the US didn't win the Vietnam war in 30 minutes using nukes.

>If both forces are in space then the planets are pointlessly obsolete anyway meaning no ortillery needed was my line of thinking.

It can have uses.

Say, for instance, the Federation and Olympian League on Mars are having a conflict over which one of them rules the city of New Shanghai. The Federation claims it belongs to them because of long standing ties to the government while the Olympians support a recent separatist uprising that has taken control of the city. What was originally a proxy conflict has escalated into a shooting war and the Federation has better space assets than the Olympians.

The Olympian League has ties to the EU back on Earth and asks them to assist it. The EU responds by sending a couple craft that assist Olympian forces in maintaining orbital superiority, providing surveillance, harassing whatever else is up there, and taking out a couple targets from orbit (ASAT sites, anti-aircraft sites, runways, armored columns, etc).

What about the guys who are hiding from your orbital strikes inside buildings or underground?

This is essentially the debate that happened immediately after WWII.

A bunch of armchair generals in the government were trying to claim that the rest of the military was useless since you could just threaten to nuke the enemy.

This kinda fell apart when you didn't necessarily want to kill millions and the enemy called your bluff. And then the Russians got the bomb too.

And then again in Vietnam and the conflicts in the mideast.

Air power is a force multiplier for ground forces. 1000 multiplied by 0 is still 0. You need ground forces.

Same for spaceships, unless you're happy glassing everything and never expect to fight a defensive battle.

Why do you think countries with a nuclear deterrent have conventional militaries? Do you think the UK was going to glass Argentina over the Falklands?

The same reason we don't resolve every military conflict with a nuke.

If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?'
Why . . . no, sir!'
Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence.

Robert Heinlein.