Cheb wrote:[puts away his long prepared "MOAR!" motivator] Yay And right when I was ready to despair
I see my timing is perfect as always.
Pale Wolf wrote:So in theory they could jump out to there, but unless they wanted to risk ceasing to exist, they'd have to do a serious exploratory mission and it'd take months of minijumps to make it?
A case of 'sure, we can explore the galaxy, but the space we're already in suits our needs and it's a huge blow of resources to potentially come up with nothing, or potentially come up with feral drones'?
More like years. That sort of thing basically amounts to a logistical impossibility unless somebody wants to cough up the cash to fund the equivalent of another Stargazer Program - that was the big, UN led project to establish contact with all the longshots in the late 21st century. That's just to reach one system. Finding a planet that is or can be made technically habitable wasn't so much of an issue, but, well... like you say, why bother? They had enough real estate anyway, and it isn't like settling such a remote world would gain them anything economically; they can't get out into the Deep Rim practically anyway - you can tell exactly where Earth's logistics can support stuff, because there's an area of dead colonies which were evacuated in the early days of the Breakdown; the virus never made it beyond that, because there's effectively no Core communications outwards from that point on. Therefore, nobody coughed up the funding. Of course, plenty of those unconnected worlds got longshots, because the earliest longshots were sent out before practical first-gen reusable drives existed, and there wasn't a comprehensive map of the jump network until after the Stargazer Program in the 2130s.
Added to all of that, the Breakdown basically killed human colonisation; it was dying off anyway due to lack of easy real estate, although people were still looking at various systems between the Core-controlled arms. There's basically no infrastructure to support such an expedition now though, which only adds to the cost. Nobody wants to rebuild it, because nobody with the resources (ie, the Core) wants another bunch of rebels they'll have to fight a war with a century down the line, especially since the new colonies would have to be on marginal worlds of dubious value that were the bottom of the barrel last time around. With mass effect drives, that could well change, but it'll also probably make things cheap enough for ZOCU and even individual Expanse planets to get in on the act, not to mention make it easier for ZOCU and similarly positioned powers to start trying to absorb nearby Rim planets, with already developed, if technically obsolete, infrastructure and tens of millions of people. Given the loose, cooperative nature of ZOCU - in a lot of ways, they're a lot more like a military alliance or the pre-Maastricht EEC than an actual nation - the Zocs are pretty ideally placed to capitalise on that, especially since the whole alien invasion thing is going to blow the Treaty of Sirius out of the water.
Most understandably. (Saren's brother = awesome)
If I were in his position, and if the people responsible weren't already dead, I'd be strongly considering shooting them.
Hm, let's hope they launch the damn things before the turians blow the runway to shit - unless, at least, they can launch off the railways and roads. I suppose the best the MSes can do is serve as some anti-air gun nests and then IFVs inside the domes - and penetrating those domes is gonna be murderous, while they get to choose their choke point, they are going to end up having to funnel infantry through choke points against, pretty much, everything the PLA has.
Pretty much. The Chinese do have some surprises in regards to how effective their GTO artillery is, but the only effective weapons like that they have aren't really designed to cover against orbital bombardment; they're to stop LPD landings right on top of towns. Missiles are for attacking ships in orbit, so those GTO particle cannons are operating right at the edge of their maximum range, with all the problems that sort of thing produces. And, yeah, the Chinese fighters do have rough field capability - they're specialised towards fighting occupation wars on dozens of Space Afghanistans, since China is fighting it's own version of the ZOCU war, except they have the political will to actually invade and occupy the dozen or more worlds their military strength can actually sustain. Of course, they had a lot more colonies pre-Breakdown, so they've still got loads of 'Little Taiwans' at the end of their arm, and the Russians are actively trying to sabotage them. The problem is, those fighters still need fuel, they still need ammo, spare parts and all the rest of it. Standard doctrine is to disperse all of that stuff during a war, but nobody's had time yet; it's been about a day since the turians arrived at the edge of the system.
As for the MSes, various people have various doctrines on how to use them on the ground. Some people use them as gunships or light armour (Haraway and Kanon are the big PC examples of that, but China will use them the same way by fiat of me!), others don't use them in anything other than a starfighter role, and some people use them as what amounts to parachute tanks (New Mercia does this, meaning that their 'paratroops' are some of the heaviest formations in their army, given that the 'infantry' are all in power suits - for which you should think 'landmate'). They aren't useless, especially inside a dome where they don't need to worry about fixed wing aicraft, and using them in a 'gunship' role has some advantages - mostly due to the fact that they can land and fight on the ground if they have to - but they aren't as good as a dedicated gunship and a dedicated light tank would be.
Places like Haraway use them like that because they don't really have the industrial muscle to produce suits and gunships and light tanks, so they settle for the option that can do all three jobs, even if two of them are sub-optimal performances. China uses them like that because they have all three in copious quantities, and there's no point in leaving all those suits sitting around doing nothing when they could be making themselves useful. New Mercia, on the other hand, basically ignored space combat altogether, so they don't have all that many suits, but have a lot of gunships and light tanks, given that they were the largest ground campaign in the ZOCU war (technically, it was a separate but parallel civil war, but it had the same sides, so...), and racked up a combined civilian and military death count well into the millions as a result of biological and nuclear warfare. I'm actually pondering having them launch their own opportunistic revanchist war on the EU client state that was split off from them at the end of the war while the Core is distracted; it's totally the sort of thing they'd do.