So Fractal about the repulsortanks do you think they are more practical than tread wheel tanks if the people set in any sci-fi have got repulsor tech? (I know for the fact that with the current tech we have the repulsor tank will not be possible to be made)
Weird gravitational situations is one thing, and endurance I guess might be another, but other than that, hell yes. They are fast, allow insane maneuverability, have low emissions, are cheap and compact (to the point that civilian taxis and second hand farm vehicles and such use them). Magically good.
I could have sworn I JUST had a comment about not being an RPG book. You can guess as well as I can. Modern day tread life is known, repulsorlift is magical fuel endurance and whatever you want it to be.
Right guess I’l be more careful when asking you questions that you might know or not. I guess sometimes I have either underestimate or overestimate your knowledge on tech, vehicles and spaceships depending on what type of it I’m asking you.
Anyway Fractal since you said that repulsor-vehicles are superior to wheel-vehicles then would the A6 juggernaut benefits from being a repulsor type instead of being a wheel type? Unless the juggernaut is too big to be one.
Of course, magical fuel endurance can do interesting things with wheels and treads, too. What if the magnetically sealed wall tech from the Death Star garbage compactor could be applied to vehicle tech, using coterminously generated magnetic fields on wheels and treads to “magically” increase their tread life?
Dan
5 years ago
can you make a speeder bike that has good armor aand guns while being pretty fast, if possible? It drives me nuts how the main bike of the empire is a glass cannon with 1 gun. I mean, there are franchises with cool bikes, like wh40k, but not the empire.
Well Dan the closest thing I found so far is the MTV-7 light vehicle which look quite armoured and very fast but like the speeder bike it also have one gun.
Here what is look like:/revision/latest?cb=20161220234912
Rhad
5 years ago
What do you think power generation is for this? Somewhere around E17 level?
I try not to stat ground vehicle reactor power. They are not starships and my personal betting is that they generally do not operate anywhere close to what a similarly sized starship would operate at. A lot of metal, but not a lot of expensive high-power-density parts. So a ground LTL wouldn’t be doing a few rounds per second, more like a modern tank main gun firing rate, with burst fire from capacitor.
Cdr. Rajh
5 years ago
Those side-mounted laser cannons can rotate up and down? If so this is one mean beast I certainly wouldn’t want to be facing!
I’d be surprised if they didn’t have some lateral flexibility as well-seems less awkward than having to swivel vertically *and* aim the whole vehicle. Then again, repulsortanks might have easier general 2-D handling than their track-borne counterparts.
The flank guns can rotate in z 360 degrees. They can also swivel so that the vertical axis of rotation is perpendicular to either dorsal or ventral hull facing. So they can actually sweep the entire ventral surface on either side. This is important because the vehicle doesn’t have a “head” to aim guns below it, and needs to keep the bottom clear for repulsorlifts and such, but routinely will fly above targets.
That makes a lot more sense than the guns on the Disneyboot TX-225A Occupier tank, and their comparatively pathetic traverse, although the tank commander armor from that film was the most aestheticlly appealing armor to date.
If Han Solo’s speeder performance is anything to judge by, repulsortank 2-D handling may be up to nausea-inducing levels of rotation and acceleration.
I wonder if there might be any room on this tank for ERA bricks, smoke canister launchers, or a pintle-mounted light repeater for the tank commander’s hatch.
I think the TX-225A is somewhere between a cheap-ass garrison vehicle (like an up-armored HMMV) and a combat engineering light vehicle (ground contact, flatbed for equipment). It’s not a field combat vehicle per se – the guns are more for infanty-support/assault gun roles in built up areas. They would not take the field against repulsortanks or fast combat walkers. Agreed about the dope tank commander armor.
ERA bricks/smoke and pintle guns are I think taking things a bit too literally. Repulsor would have shields, ERA doesn’t make sense vs energy bolts, and the tank is so much above infantry scale that the commander has better things to do than muck around with a pintle gun (as it is I’m guessing the thing will have 3 gunners already – turret/main gunner, and one per side for auxiliary weapons). I think these cues would look good but they wouldn’t make much sense. Maybe decoy launchers…I guess? Though we’ve never seen analogues on anything in SW before.
The TX-225 was pretty disappointing to me as well, and I agree with the assessment as a low end combat-engineering vehicle. I blame ILM for building it on an Alvis Stormer chassis when they could have used one of the several privately owned Chieftain tanks.
The reason I believe ERA might have a role to play comes from the same film. Infantry-portable ATGMs were canonized by Baze although predictably lackluster against the front of an AT-ACT. That vehicle’s squadron mate was then knocked out by fighter torpedoes, which an advanced ERA brick could provide some protection against.
Decoy launchers for smoke just make too much sense to leave out. We don’t really see them on Clone Wars vehicles because droids can presumably see in too many wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to easily fool that way.
Regarding pintles, I’ve just always thought they looked really good on Imperial hardware after seeing some concept art of an AT-ST with one. There’s nothing wrong with blatantly appropriating modern military hardware design elements when Star Destroyers share superstructure components with the HMS King George V, and the Stormtroopers carry Sterling SMGs and MG34s.
ERA only works because of the mechanisms of HEAT and APFSDS rounds. I don’t think we know enough about SW warheads to say that they work the same way at all. Armor tech is in itself pretty robust – perhaps more of it would’ve been fine but because the TX-225 was a low power vehicle it just couldn’t carry enough to make it fully survivable.
Clones fought against a lot of organic Separatists too – and a sensor for a droid would just as easily be a helmet cam for an organic trooper. Plus there’s just not much you can do to visually hide a 6m tall vehicle flying at low altitude. You’d think the TX-225 would’ve had them if they were considered useful?
I agree pintles look good, but I’m not for adding them for purely aesthetic reasons. It works for small vehicles, but not for flying near-aircraft designed to be fought in a high-threat environment (i.e., closed up and under shields).
I am reluctantly swayed to your side on pintles after seeing the Juggernaut ventral blasters instead. I still think ERA might be viable in SW for a couple of reasons. No one really knows exactly how the physics of Proton Torpedoes work, but they are clearly shaped charges that discharge a directional blast. Otherwise these megaton yield torps would be leaving mushroom clouds, and onscreen evidence isn’t giving us that.
ERA basically works by throwing a moving plate of armor at about a 45% angle to the incoming round, whether that be kinetic or chemical, which approximates a far greater armor thickness by forcing the round to chew through more of the flying plate. Replace the RHA front plate of your ERA brick with whatever neutronium-infused durasteel composite that Star Wars uses, and then you should have increased protection simply by putting more armor in the way of a hit. Perhaps you could even put a cheap repulsorlift unit onto the ERA bricks so that they fly themselves at the ideal angle to intercept an incoming attack.
It’s already designed, but I would argue that those elements make more sense on the Broadsword with it’s infantry support role…? Advanced sensors being what they are, smoke shouldn’t be an issue, but we all know how accurate stormtroopers are and how ineffective their armour so they could use every advantage when opposing enemy infantry/troops AND, maybe more importantly, who cares about how functional it is when we know how awesome it’d look for a squad of troopers to stalk quietly out of that smoke as they beat down on defenceless civies…
JAMESMCGR
5 years ago
I like it. I wonder how many of these would be in an Imperial Armored Division…
The old Imperial Sourcebook has 318 tanks in an armored battlegroup, which is the army equivalent to a division. Disney doesn’t seem to really care enough about ORBATs to publish an update.
I’m probably going to have to game this OOB out a bit. 300 AFVs is pretty normal for a modern division but I’d think the numbers might end up quite different when individual vehicles are platoon or company equivalents.
SW combined arms is also likely going to look REALLY different from what we think about today. Infantry/armor coordination is critical even in the field in a modern sense, but infantry is not particularly useful vs or in support of things like a repulsortank formation advancing at 200kph a few hundred meteres up. So the high degree of specialization in the old sourcebook ORBATs might actually make sense (though I think entirely by accident).
There’s a bit of somewhat mediocre evidence in the contrary. The entirely repulsorlift-mobile TPM era Trade Federation army’s roadmarch from the landing points to Theed was done no faster than a Prius on a highway, and their advance on the Gungans was done at walking speed.
Had speeds comparable to Cloud City cloud cars or even Luke’s landspeeder been available, even the Neimodians would have used that kind of mobility to their advantage. You could make the cost argument, but even they couldn’t have been too cheap to spring for military-grade repulsor drives if moisture farmers can afford faster vehicles.
Perhaps there’s an exponential inverse relationship between mass and speed when using a repulsor drive. Starships would simply overcome that by dumping in more power, but a heavily built tank or IFV covered in dense armor using a much less energy-dense engine than a fighter might be limited to speeds not significantly above a 21st century MBT.
So the crew of this particular tank is maybe 6 guys? Tank Commander, 3 gunners, driver, and perhaps a shielding/ECM systems technician? Since the power output is dialed down from the cutting edge of space combat, reliability is probably decent enough to not require that many support staff, making it on the large side of squad equivalent. AT-ATs seem large enough to be platoons in themselves, while an AT-SP is definitely a company level command.
Imperial ORBATs seem designed to win the Clone Wars again with mass formations of heavy armor, but most of the action in the Galactic Civil War is probably a lot more like the Jedha insurgency or the Turkish incursion in Northern Syria, where infantry-armor coordination is crucial to conducting a police action against irregular forces. Mass tank-on-tank combat is probably much more of a Post-Endor phenomenon.
Speaking of the old sourcebook, I wonder if you could get in contact with Greg Gorden and talk about these things. He might appreciate seeing some of his ideas in 4k.
Yeah, crew of 6 – commander, pilot, 3 gunners, comscan. Room for casualties or small infantry detachment (like Merkava). Command tank would add formation commander, maybe extra comscan tech. No problems with space for extras in a vehicle this size, but probably cut the casualty/infantry space.
I agree with Imperials doing police action mostly. I also think that even for Clone War type action infantry and armor are probably deliberately kept separate. They just fight at very different scales and speeds. Ad hoc combinations for specific missions but I wouldn’t say there’s much in the way of heavily-mixed-arms formations like some modern OOBs.
The problem with the separation of infantry/armor idea in the Clone wars is cinematic. Unlike the Original Trilogy, we get a reasonable sample size of what should be higher-end ground combat in the Prequels. On Geonosis, Kashyyyk, Felucia, Mygeeto, Utapau and Saleucami, all we see are lots of mostly troop-transport walkers, and infantry in close support. These are planets deemed strategically important enough to deploy the most powerful and senior Jedi, so they should be crucial enough for very high resource investment from both sides.
While I think mass formations of repulsorlift heavy armor are cool as hell, there have to be mitigating factors that prevent them from being deployed after theater shield breakthrough. Perhaps the CIS deploys multiple layers of shielding like an onion? Maybe they have ground based MTL batteries that can pick off anything not hugging the ground with relative ease? Perhaps repulsorlift jamming from the old EU is in use by any polity tough and rich enough to warrant the deployment of heavy armor. Perhaps there are low-signature droids with high yield MANPADS hiding behind every bush and rock. Whatever your chosen explanation, there is a reason why walkers in close combination with leg infantry are the tactical mix of choice.
I don’t think any of that is strictly contradictory to what I’m thinking of. When I say separation of infantry and armor I mean in terms of organization – you’d get mixes as appropriate for any situation by exchanging formations. They’d train together and be used together, but you’d have formations on paper that are largely one or the other, rather than the mixed model seen today. That way you don’t have infantry deployed when they’d be useless because their parent units are there (i.e. pure vehicle combat in extreme environments) and you wouldn’t have armor of limited use (i.e. very heavy armor in urban warfare, or repulsorlift when you’re trying to breach a shield). So division may grab a battalion of armor and a few battalions of infantry and form an ad hoc group, but the individual units are almost “pure” in terms of composition. Basically combined arms from top down, rather than organically in small formations.
In terms of cinematic examples:
Geonosis field battle – very easy to imagine theater shields are up. I have no idea why tactically you’d need marching infantry, unless they were to clear some unseen underground warrens/city spires on the way to the launch fields – this is early enough in the wars that the clone troops hastily grabbed by Yoda simply don’t have repulsor besides LAAT also.
Kashyyyk – close in action in built up area – naturally you want close cooperation
Felucia – this is basically jungle warfare, so you’d mix them naturally and combat wouldn’t involve large fast formations
Mygeeto – see Kashyyyk
Utapau – see Kashyyyk
Saleucami – we actually don’t see this at all in the movies, where all you get is a patrol lance or something
Mass repulsor armor I’d imagine would take the field after an initial shield breach, and by breach I mean a walker getting under and destroying a shield generator. That’s a prerequisite for that kind of use of repulsorlift. If it were as simple as dragging a tank on its belly across the shield layer, then what we see makes no sense. We also don’t really have an idea of where the Clone Wars battles are in this progression – either side might be making the initial breach with assault by leg infantry and surface contact armor, for example, or infiltrating to do the same (Felucia).
In modern terms, repulsorlift may be strictly second echelon troops, poised for breakthrough, while walker and contact armor are the shock action that makes the first (shield) penetration that makes exploitation possible.
So somewhat like the separation of Infantry and Cruiser tanks in the British model, or the shock armies vs the Operational Maneuver Group in the Soviet model? Sure, that makes sense from an ORBAT standpoint.
Regarding Geonosis, if theater shields were up, presumably the Separatists would be smart enough to extend coverage to the arena where all their political leadership is. The presence of Acclamators that close to the front line and LAATs passing only meters away from Core Ships seems to indicate that the CIS shield is down, and rather the only theater shield being projected is Republic. You can probably explain that by having the Jedi sabotage the planetary defense grid before they show up in the arena though.
At Kashyyyk there was a massive lake/sea immediately before the site of the battle. If the Republic had access to mass repulsor armor, it might have made sense to take on the CIS armies at sea, before they made contact with population centers in order to avoid collateral damage. Droid repulsor gunships and troop transports were able to make a very close approach, which should indicate the lack of or downing of a Republic theater shield, which is odd in itself.
On Mygeeto, the UT-AT Trident tank/transports with the three heavy guns were repulsorlift vehicles. However, they were also advancing at an infantry pace only inches above the surface, so I don’t really know what’s going on there.
I still have a couple of issues regarding the idea of exploitation following shield breach though. If the walkers have destroyed the shield/power generator, it follows that they have already broken through the primary line of resistance, reached the main tactical objective, and probably deployed infantry to secure it. Perhaps there is a niche for relatively light repulsortanks like the Broadsword for mopping up secondary and tertiary objectives, but it doesn’t seem likely that a competent power would locate their main shield/power generating complex anywhere else than the most fortified and thus important nexus of military significance. That role of mop-up also seems to suit the LAAT or your own infantry gunship more than a tank.
I think sabotage of Geonosis’ defenses has been in some EU material – didn’t Republic Commando have a mission like this? Kashyyyk – if I remember right the Separatist army landed and then the fleet got run off or something. So the local defenses in the ROTS battle might have been damaged by the Separatists, then the ground forces seesawed back and forth across it trying to finally take the place and throw the other side into the water, and each battle would have been near built up areas. Mygeeto was street fighting – the UT-ATs seemed to be acting sort of like StuGs. They might not be that mobile to begin with, if they are close infantry support vehicles. Naboo – wasn’t Theed an open city sort of situation? That column might have just been saving fuel and taking a slow route their because the city was open anyway and there was no resistance.
Exploitations – I suspect it’s all only going to make sense with some overarching theory of ground combat that gets to write its own retcons and such, which I suspect will never happen in the new canon. But here’s how I think exploitation would be important – taking out a prime shield generator requires basically a decisive battle, but after an invading force gets under the main planetary shield there’ll be a series of battles over local generators whether the main shield is up or not. A walker force that makes it to each might have gone a decent ways already from the edge, and not be easily reinforced without high speed repulsor units and otherwise still get wiped out by local superiority in defenders. You can use assault ships to deal with this but ground artillery, blah blah. Even once a shield falls a walker force is not quick enough to bag enemy units that were sheltering under the erstwhile bubble before they withdraw to the next shielded area, and you might not want to deal the collateral damage intrinsic to wiping them out with capital ship fire.
Ground warfare in SW is a remarkably interesting worldbuilding challenge.
The StuG analogy for the UT-AT is pretty apt, although I’m skeptical that the Trade Federation would hesitate to limit the speed of their armies due to vehicle fuel cost. That should be a drop in an ocean when compared to the hypermatter expenditure it took to deploy hundreds of Lucrehulks to Naboo and the opportunity cost of not having them deliver cargo on the normal trade routes. Besides, even if a city is open, securing it quickly to apprehend VIPs, limit document destruction and prevent infrastructure sabotage is pretty important.
The role of exploitation depends on how well protected a shield generator can be. Hoth seems to be an exception due to how absurdly exposed the main power generator was, but most forces that don’t happen to be plucky insurgents should be locating their power generator under several hundred meters of ground and duracrete. The enormous Endor shield dish also seems extremely vulnerable to even fairly light walkers, but the key question is if defenders can build a theater or planetary shield that isn’t a skyscraper sized exposed dish.
Powerful warship shield generators are unexposed but are only projecting shields meters from the surface of the ship, so perhaps there is a relationship between shield dish size and the distance of the shield being projected. However if an unexposed theater shield generator built and hardened to warship standards can be installed, any attacking force of walkers would find such a shield generator almost impossible to eliminate at range without first dealing with all conventional ground opposition, securing the site, and deploying combat engineers with highly specialized breaching equipment. Such a task would perhaps analogous to a modern armored brigade with the task of taking and securing entry to a site like Cheyenne Mountain. In such a scenario, I don’t see much use for repulsor armor, but if theater shields must be giant exposed, and unarmored towers à la Endor, I agree with your concept for hovertank exploitation and reinforcement.
On populated worlds, fleeing defenders might not be targeted by teraton level HTL, but capital ships should have a variety of force options by dialing down their LTL batteries yields or even using point defense guns to pick off individual vehicles from low orbit without risking massive civilian casualties.
Given the speed at which attackers can reinforce via hyperdrive, even local superiority would be very difficult to attain for defenders faced with attacking armies numbering in the millions. A polity like the Empire wouldn’t conduct a ground assault on a defended world without overwhelming numerical superiority in walkers, although I’m sure in the chaos of the real Post-Endor civil war, there must have been some far more contested ground battles.
All SW ground combat I think always happens at the edges of the actions of capital ships one way or another (needs capital ship action to make possible and only proceeds until capital ships are able to intervene directly). But a ship shooting at vehicle targets might have a hard time being super precise – there might be thousands of targets moving potentially very fast and still under mobile ECM – and shooting back with mobile SPHA fire too. It’s like a fighter swarm problem targeting wise. Under that scenario massive collateral damage even with megaton firepower may well be likely. I think the warship (if big enough) would generally win, if nothing else by melting the continent under the enemy army group, but then… Of course ground combat can also deal massive collateral damage, but it’s better aimed fire if it happens at visual range and intrinsically more limited in scope.
Generators:
Endor didn’t have to be buried because it generated the shield projection for DS2 and the moon’s planetary shield itself – it was only vulnerable because the ground team had already inserted. But regardless of how physically vulnerable a generator or power complex is, that’s separate from reinforcement in my model – the walker group might be annihilated even if they are successful in destroying the shield if they cannot be reinforced fast enough (i.e. by repulsorlift) – if they were a big enough force to annihilate the defenders AND the shields, then fine, but that may not always be the case. Sort of like paratroopers – they can seize something, but they live or die by how fast reinforcements can get to them.
I don’t think either repulsor or contact armor are going to be dominant; the old ORBATs suggest they are both maintained, and I suspect because they have complementary roles and would impose crippling restraints on operations if not used in combined arms. ISD stromtrooper units seem to be pure spearhead/assault units, so are largely walker.
If the USAF has considered kinetic bombardment from orbit via project Thor, I would think that the Imperial Navy with vastly superior computers and lightspeed (?) turbolasers should be able to deliver fairly accurate firepower from orbit onto tank column sized targets with no more collateral damage than a 21st century airstrike. ECM and jamming in general seems to be massively effective against standoff fire-and-forget missiles, but you can’t jam away an irritated 2nd Lieutenant with a kiloton laser pointer and an itchy trigger finger looking down on you from a few dozen miles up.
The limitation of paratroops vs walkers are inherently different, because you just can’t drop an MBT or a large self-propelled howitzer out of a plane, although the Russians have certainly tried. However, you can scale up walkers until you get to monstrosities like your AT-SP. Airborne units are also limited by trained personnel willing to jump out of planes and airlift capacity, but neither should matter for a galaxy-spanning empire that is landing walkers via Titan barge and Acclamator. From a doctrinal standpoint, if you’re able to land walkers in the first place, then it follows that the attackers should be able to just land more walkers/conventional tread tanks in follow-up waves rather than invest resources and personnel into separate hovertank units to exploit possible but not guaranteed breakthroughs.
The point that I was trying to make about the vulnerability of shield generators is that walkers can’t be reinforced by repulsorlift armor unless they destroy the generator. Thus, if defenders make the generator significantly harder to eliminate than the armies surrounding it by building generators to warship standards and then digging them deep into the ground, then there will almost never be a case where the walkers manage to knock out an exposed shield/power generator, but are also surrounded by enemy mobile forces and will require immediate reinforcement.
However, everything about this is somewhat nullified if you can just drag a repulsortank under a shield with a towed barge, which might be possible. If we operate under the assumption that the CIS would be just be fine with glassing the Yoda and his Wookies, surely the Republic would have erected a theater shield over Kachirko City on Kashyyyk to force them to land troops. The presence of repulsorlift HMTs and troop transports might signify that the Separatists were able to bring them through the shield threshold while grounded. Hoth is harder to explain from a purely military point of view, but perhaps Veers just didn’t want his Imperial Army repulsorlift armor comrades getting the glory of taking Echo Base when he could secure the renown for his own walker crews in a classic case of inter-service rivalry.
My understanding of Star Wars has repulsorlift armor as predominantly garrison units deployed on surface bases to respond to walker assaults and to then police the locals, which suits the Imperial Army versus Stormtrooper Corps dichotomy. Perhaps the Stormies are just the Marine Corps as ECR would have it.
I was going to make a point-by point but I don’t see the point. We have a central issue to making SW ground combat make sense:
What is the actual permeability of a theater shield? Repulsorlift can clearly get across (or assaults will be more like a glacial game of Go with mobile theater shield bubbles – how would you respond to walker assaults if walkers have mobile theater shields with them?), but clearly not TOO easily (or repulsorlift armor trivializes walker armor, because walkers are so immobile and weight inefficient in comparison, and you sort of inevitably spiral to just starship warfare in atmosphere).
All arguments circle back to this point of how theater shields can be breached at their edge. Solve this and we have a viable model that makes it all work. And I don’t think this needs to work the same way as starship shields.
So Fractal about the repulsortanks do you think they are more practical than tread wheel tanks if the people set in any sci-fi have got repulsor tech? (I know for the fact that with the current tech we have the repulsor tank will not be possible to be made)
Weird gravitational situations is one thing, and endurance I guess might be another, but other than that, hell yes. They are fast, allow insane maneuverability, have low emissions, are cheap and compact (to the point that civilian taxis and second hand farm vehicles and such use them). Magically good.
Sweet and as for endurance how big is the endurance between repulsortanks and tread wheel tanks on average?
I could have sworn I JUST had a comment about not being an RPG book. You can guess as well as I can. Modern day tread life is known, repulsorlift is magical fuel endurance and whatever you want it to be.
Right guess I’l be more careful when asking you questions that you might know or not. I guess sometimes I have either underestimate or overestimate your knowledge on tech, vehicles and spaceships depending on what type of it I’m asking you.
Anyway Fractal since you said that repulsor-vehicles are superior to wheel-vehicles then would the A6 juggernaut benefits from being a repulsor type instead of being a wheel type? Unless the juggernaut is too big to be one.
It’s not a knowledge issue, it’s more of an annoyance issue.
Of course, magical fuel endurance can do interesting things with wheels and treads, too. What if the magnetically sealed wall tech from the Death Star garbage compactor could be applied to vehicle tech, using coterminously generated magnetic fields on wheels and treads to “magically” increase their tread life?
can you make a speeder bike that has good armor aand guns while being pretty fast, if possible? It drives me nuts how the main bike of the empire is a glass cannon with 1 gun. I mean, there are franchises with cool bikes, like wh40k, but not the empire.
Yes. But not right now.
thanks
Well Dan the closest thing I found so far is the MTV-7 light vehicle which look quite armoured and very fast but like the speeder bike it also have one gun.
Here what is look like:/revision/latest?cb=20161220234912
What do you think power generation is for this? Somewhere around E17 level?
I try not to stat ground vehicle reactor power. They are not starships and my personal betting is that they generally do not operate anywhere close to what a similarly sized starship would operate at. A lot of metal, but not a lot of expensive high-power-density parts. So a ground LTL wouldn’t be doing a few rounds per second, more like a modern tank main gun firing rate, with burst fire from capacitor.
Those side-mounted laser cannons can rotate up and down? If so this is one mean beast I certainly wouldn’t want to be facing!
I’d be surprised if they didn’t have some lateral flexibility as well-seems less awkward than having to swivel vertically *and* aim the whole vehicle. Then again, repulsortanks might have easier general 2-D handling than their track-borne counterparts.
The flank guns can rotate in z 360 degrees. They can also swivel so that the vertical axis of rotation is perpendicular to either dorsal or ventral hull facing. So they can actually sweep the entire ventral surface on either side. This is important because the vehicle doesn’t have a “head” to aim guns below it, and needs to keep the bottom clear for repulsorlifts and such, but routinely will fly above targets.
That makes a lot more sense than the guns on the Disneyboot TX-225A Occupier tank, and their comparatively pathetic traverse, although the tank commander armor from that film was the most aestheticlly appealing armor to date.
If Han Solo’s speeder performance is anything to judge by, repulsortank 2-D handling may be up to nausea-inducing levels of rotation and acceleration.
I wonder if there might be any room on this tank for ERA bricks, smoke canister launchers, or a pintle-mounted light repeater for the tank commander’s hatch.
I think the TX-225A is somewhere between a cheap-ass garrison vehicle (like an up-armored HMMV) and a combat engineering light vehicle (ground contact, flatbed for equipment). It’s not a field combat vehicle per se – the guns are more for infanty-support/assault gun roles in built up areas. They would not take the field against repulsortanks or fast combat walkers. Agreed about the dope tank commander armor.
ERA bricks/smoke and pintle guns are I think taking things a bit too literally. Repulsor would have shields, ERA doesn’t make sense vs energy bolts, and the tank is so much above infantry scale that the commander has better things to do than muck around with a pintle gun (as it is I’m guessing the thing will have 3 gunners already – turret/main gunner, and one per side for auxiliary weapons). I think these cues would look good but they wouldn’t make much sense. Maybe decoy launchers…I guess? Though we’ve never seen analogues on anything in SW before.
The TX-225 was pretty disappointing to me as well, and I agree with the assessment as a low end combat-engineering vehicle. I blame ILM for building it on an Alvis Stormer chassis when they could have used one of the several privately owned Chieftain tanks.
The reason I believe ERA might have a role to play comes from the same film. Infantry-portable ATGMs were canonized by Baze although predictably lackluster against the front of an AT-ACT. That vehicle’s squadron mate was then knocked out by fighter torpedoes, which an advanced ERA brick could provide some protection against.
Decoy launchers for smoke just make too much sense to leave out. We don’t really see them on Clone Wars vehicles because droids can presumably see in too many wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to easily fool that way.
Regarding pintles, I’ve just always thought they looked really good on Imperial hardware after seeing some concept art of an AT-ST with one. There’s nothing wrong with blatantly appropriating modern military hardware design elements when Star Destroyers share superstructure components with the HMS King George V, and the Stormtroopers carry Sterling SMGs and MG34s.
Has anyone already thought of making a star wars version of twin-mounted MG42s with a pair of dlt-19s ?
ERA only works because of the mechanisms of HEAT and APFSDS rounds. I don’t think we know enough about SW warheads to say that they work the same way at all. Armor tech is in itself pretty robust – perhaps more of it would’ve been fine but because the TX-225 was a low power vehicle it just couldn’t carry enough to make it fully survivable.
Clones fought against a lot of organic Separatists too – and a sensor for a droid would just as easily be a helmet cam for an organic trooper. Plus there’s just not much you can do to visually hide a 6m tall vehicle flying at low altitude. You’d think the TX-225 would’ve had them if they were considered useful?
I agree pintles look good, but I’m not for adding them for purely aesthetic reasons. It works for small vehicles, but not for flying near-aircraft designed to be fought in a high-threat environment (i.e., closed up and under shields).
I am reluctantly swayed to your side on pintles after seeing the Juggernaut ventral blasters instead. I still think ERA might be viable in SW for a couple of reasons. No one really knows exactly how the physics of Proton Torpedoes work, but they are clearly shaped charges that discharge a directional blast. Otherwise these megaton yield torps would be leaving mushroom clouds, and onscreen evidence isn’t giving us that.
ERA basically works by throwing a moving plate of armor at about a 45% angle to the incoming round, whether that be kinetic or chemical, which approximates a far greater armor thickness by forcing the round to chew through more of the flying plate. Replace the RHA front plate of your ERA brick with whatever neutronium-infused durasteel composite that Star Wars uses, and then you should have increased protection simply by putting more armor in the way of a hit. Perhaps you could even put a cheap repulsorlift unit onto the ERA bricks so that they fly themselves at the ideal angle to intercept an incoming attack.
It’s already designed, but I would argue that those elements make more sense on the Broadsword with it’s infantry support role…? Advanced sensors being what they are, smoke shouldn’t be an issue, but we all know how accurate stormtroopers are and how ineffective their armour so they could use every advantage when opposing enemy infantry/troops AND, maybe more importantly, who cares about how functional it is when we know how awesome it’d look for a squad of troopers to stalk quietly out of that smoke as they beat down on defenceless civies…
I like it. I wonder how many of these would be in an Imperial Armored Division…
The old Imperial Sourcebook has 318 tanks in an armored battlegroup, which is the army equivalent to a division. Disney doesn’t seem to really care enough about ORBATs to publish an update.
I’m probably going to have to game this OOB out a bit. 300 AFVs is pretty normal for a modern division but I’d think the numbers might end up quite different when individual vehicles are platoon or company equivalents.
SW combined arms is also likely going to look REALLY different from what we think about today. Infantry/armor coordination is critical even in the field in a modern sense, but infantry is not particularly useful vs or in support of things like a repulsortank formation advancing at 200kph a few hundred meteres up. So the high degree of specialization in the old sourcebook ORBATs might actually make sense (though I think entirely by accident).
Speaking of speed Fractal how fast can the Broadsword Heavy IVF can go?
No idea, but pretty fast. If repulsorlift doesn’t confer strategic mobility on the surface, what the hell?
There’s a bit of somewhat mediocre evidence in the contrary. The entirely repulsorlift-mobile TPM era Trade Federation army’s roadmarch from the landing points to Theed was done no faster than a Prius on a highway, and their advance on the Gungans was done at walking speed.
Had speeds comparable to Cloud City cloud cars or even Luke’s landspeeder been available, even the Neimodians would have used that kind of mobility to their advantage. You could make the cost argument, but even they couldn’t have been too cheap to spring for military-grade repulsor drives if moisture farmers can afford faster vehicles.
Perhaps there’s an exponential inverse relationship between mass and speed when using a repulsor drive. Starships would simply overcome that by dumping in more power, but a heavily built tank or IFV covered in dense armor using a much less energy-dense engine than a fighter might be limited to speeds not significantly above a 21st century MBT.
Sorry about all the contrarianism today.
So the crew of this particular tank is maybe 6 guys? Tank Commander, 3 gunners, driver, and perhaps a shielding/ECM systems technician? Since the power output is dialed down from the cutting edge of space combat, reliability is probably decent enough to not require that many support staff, making it on the large side of squad equivalent. AT-ATs seem large enough to be platoons in themselves, while an AT-SP is definitely a company level command.
Imperial ORBATs seem designed to win the Clone Wars again with mass formations of heavy armor, but most of the action in the Galactic Civil War is probably a lot more like the Jedha insurgency or the Turkish incursion in Northern Syria, where infantry-armor coordination is crucial to conducting a police action against irregular forces. Mass tank-on-tank combat is probably much more of a Post-Endor phenomenon.
Speaking of the old sourcebook, I wonder if you could get in contact with Greg Gorden and talk about these things. He might appreciate seeing some of his ideas in 4k.
Is he still kicking!?
He’s still writing for dnd and tweeting, so presumably yes unless he got in a car crash this morning.
No idea about the old sourcebook people.
Yeah, crew of 6 – commander, pilot, 3 gunners, comscan. Room for casualties or small infantry detachment (like Merkava). Command tank would add formation commander, maybe extra comscan tech. No problems with space for extras in a vehicle this size, but probably cut the casualty/infantry space.
I agree with Imperials doing police action mostly. I also think that even for Clone War type action infantry and armor are probably deliberately kept separate. They just fight at very different scales and speeds. Ad hoc combinations for specific missions but I wouldn’t say there’s much in the way of heavily-mixed-arms formations like some modern OOBs.
The problem with the separation of infantry/armor idea in the Clone wars is cinematic. Unlike the Original Trilogy, we get a reasonable sample size of what should be higher-end ground combat in the Prequels. On Geonosis, Kashyyyk, Felucia, Mygeeto, Utapau and Saleucami, all we see are lots of mostly troop-transport walkers, and infantry in close support. These are planets deemed strategically important enough to deploy the most powerful and senior Jedi, so they should be crucial enough for very high resource investment from both sides.
While I think mass formations of repulsorlift heavy armor are cool as hell, there have to be mitigating factors that prevent them from being deployed after theater shield breakthrough. Perhaps the CIS deploys multiple layers of shielding like an onion? Maybe they have ground based MTL batteries that can pick off anything not hugging the ground with relative ease? Perhaps repulsorlift jamming from the old EU is in use by any polity tough and rich enough to warrant the deployment of heavy armor. Perhaps there are low-signature droids with high yield MANPADS hiding behind every bush and rock. Whatever your chosen explanation, there is a reason why walkers in close combination with leg infantry are the tactical mix of choice.
I don’t think any of that is strictly contradictory to what I’m thinking of. When I say separation of infantry and armor I mean in terms of organization – you’d get mixes as appropriate for any situation by exchanging formations. They’d train together and be used together, but you’d have formations on paper that are largely one or the other, rather than the mixed model seen today. That way you don’t have infantry deployed when they’d be useless because their parent units are there (i.e. pure vehicle combat in extreme environments) and you wouldn’t have armor of limited use (i.e. very heavy armor in urban warfare, or repulsorlift when you’re trying to breach a shield). So division may grab a battalion of armor and a few battalions of infantry and form an ad hoc group, but the individual units are almost “pure” in terms of composition. Basically combined arms from top down, rather than organically in small formations.
In terms of cinematic examples:
Geonosis field battle – very easy to imagine theater shields are up. I have no idea why tactically you’d need marching infantry, unless they were to clear some unseen underground warrens/city spires on the way to the launch fields – this is early enough in the wars that the clone troops hastily grabbed by Yoda simply don’t have repulsor besides LAAT also.
Kashyyyk – close in action in built up area – naturally you want close cooperation
Felucia – this is basically jungle warfare, so you’d mix them naturally and combat wouldn’t involve large fast formations
Mygeeto – see Kashyyyk
Utapau – see Kashyyyk
Saleucami – we actually don’t see this at all in the movies, where all you get is a patrol lance or something
Mass repulsor armor I’d imagine would take the field after an initial shield breach, and by breach I mean a walker getting under and destroying a shield generator. That’s a prerequisite for that kind of use of repulsorlift. If it were as simple as dragging a tank on its belly across the shield layer, then what we see makes no sense. We also don’t really have an idea of where the Clone Wars battles are in this progression – either side might be making the initial breach with assault by leg infantry and surface contact armor, for example, or infiltrating to do the same (Felucia).
In modern terms, repulsorlift may be strictly second echelon troops, poised for breakthrough, while walker and contact armor are the shock action that makes the first (shield) penetration that makes exploitation possible.
So somewhat like the separation of Infantry and Cruiser tanks in the British model, or the shock armies vs the Operational Maneuver Group in the Soviet model? Sure, that makes sense from an ORBAT standpoint.
Regarding Geonosis, if theater shields were up, presumably the Separatists would be smart enough to extend coverage to the arena where all their political leadership is. The presence of Acclamators that close to the front line and LAATs passing only meters away from Core Ships seems to indicate that the CIS shield is down, and rather the only theater shield being projected is Republic. You can probably explain that by having the Jedi sabotage the planetary defense grid before they show up in the arena though.
At Kashyyyk there was a massive lake/sea immediately before the site of the battle. If the Republic had access to mass repulsor armor, it might have made sense to take on the CIS armies at sea, before they made contact with population centers in order to avoid collateral damage. Droid repulsor gunships and troop transports were able to make a very close approach, which should indicate the lack of or downing of a Republic theater shield, which is odd in itself.
On Mygeeto, the UT-AT Trident tank/transports with the three heavy guns were repulsorlift vehicles. However, they were also advancing at an infantry pace only inches above the surface, so I don’t really know what’s going on there.
I still have a couple of issues regarding the idea of exploitation following shield breach though. If the walkers have destroyed the shield/power generator, it follows that they have already broken through the primary line of resistance, reached the main tactical objective, and probably deployed infantry to secure it. Perhaps there is a niche for relatively light repulsortanks like the Broadsword for mopping up secondary and tertiary objectives, but it doesn’t seem likely that a competent power would locate their main shield/power generating complex anywhere else than the most fortified and thus important nexus of military significance. That role of mop-up also seems to suit the LAAT or your own infantry gunship more than a tank.
I think sabotage of Geonosis’ defenses has been in some EU material – didn’t Republic Commando have a mission like this? Kashyyyk – if I remember right the Separatist army landed and then the fleet got run off or something. So the local defenses in the ROTS battle might have been damaged by the Separatists, then the ground forces seesawed back and forth across it trying to finally take the place and throw the other side into the water, and each battle would have been near built up areas. Mygeeto was street fighting – the UT-ATs seemed to be acting sort of like StuGs. They might not be that mobile to begin with, if they are close infantry support vehicles. Naboo – wasn’t Theed an open city sort of situation? That column might have just been saving fuel and taking a slow route their because the city was open anyway and there was no resistance.
Exploitations – I suspect it’s all only going to make sense with some overarching theory of ground combat that gets to write its own retcons and such, which I suspect will never happen in the new canon. But here’s how I think exploitation would be important – taking out a prime shield generator requires basically a decisive battle, but after an invading force gets under the main planetary shield there’ll be a series of battles over local generators whether the main shield is up or not. A walker force that makes it to each might have gone a decent ways already from the edge, and not be easily reinforced without high speed repulsor units and otherwise still get wiped out by local superiority in defenders. You can use assault ships to deal with this but ground artillery, blah blah. Even once a shield falls a walker force is not quick enough to bag enemy units that were sheltering under the erstwhile bubble before they withdraw to the next shielded area, and you might not want to deal the collateral damage intrinsic to wiping them out with capital ship fire.
Ground warfare in SW is a remarkably interesting worldbuilding challenge.
The StuG analogy for the UT-AT is pretty apt, although I’m skeptical that the Trade Federation would hesitate to limit the speed of their armies due to vehicle fuel cost. That should be a drop in an ocean when compared to the hypermatter expenditure it took to deploy hundreds of Lucrehulks to Naboo and the opportunity cost of not having them deliver cargo on the normal trade routes. Besides, even if a city is open, securing it quickly to apprehend VIPs, limit document destruction and prevent infrastructure sabotage is pretty important.
The role of exploitation depends on how well protected a shield generator can be. Hoth seems to be an exception due to how absurdly exposed the main power generator was, but most forces that don’t happen to be plucky insurgents should be locating their power generator under several hundred meters of ground and duracrete. The enormous Endor shield dish also seems extremely vulnerable to even fairly light walkers, but the key question is if defenders can build a theater or planetary shield that isn’t a skyscraper sized exposed dish.
Powerful warship shield generators are unexposed but are only projecting shields meters from the surface of the ship, so perhaps there is a relationship between shield dish size and the distance of the shield being projected. However if an unexposed theater shield generator built and hardened to warship standards can be installed, any attacking force of walkers would find such a shield generator almost impossible to eliminate at range without first dealing with all conventional ground opposition, securing the site, and deploying combat engineers with highly specialized breaching equipment. Such a task would perhaps analogous to a modern armored brigade with the task of taking and securing entry to a site like Cheyenne Mountain. In such a scenario, I don’t see much use for repulsor armor, but if theater shields must be giant exposed, and unarmored towers à la Endor, I agree with your concept for hovertank exploitation and reinforcement.
On populated worlds, fleeing defenders might not be targeted by teraton level HTL, but capital ships should have a variety of force options by dialing down their LTL batteries yields or even using point defense guns to pick off individual vehicles from low orbit without risking massive civilian casualties.
Given the speed at which attackers can reinforce via hyperdrive, even local superiority would be very difficult to attain for defenders faced with attacking armies numbering in the millions. A polity like the Empire wouldn’t conduct a ground assault on a defended world without overwhelming numerical superiority in walkers, although I’m sure in the chaos of the real Post-Endor civil war, there must have been some far more contested ground battles.
All SW ground combat I think always happens at the edges of the actions of capital ships one way or another (needs capital ship action to make possible and only proceeds until capital ships are able to intervene directly). But a ship shooting at vehicle targets might have a hard time being super precise – there might be thousands of targets moving potentially very fast and still under mobile ECM – and shooting back with mobile SPHA fire too. It’s like a fighter swarm problem targeting wise. Under that scenario massive collateral damage even with megaton firepower may well be likely. I think the warship (if big enough) would generally win, if nothing else by melting the continent under the enemy army group, but then… Of course ground combat can also deal massive collateral damage, but it’s better aimed fire if it happens at visual range and intrinsically more limited in scope.
Generators:
Endor didn’t have to be buried because it generated the shield projection for DS2 and the moon’s planetary shield itself – it was only vulnerable because the ground team had already inserted. But regardless of how physically vulnerable a generator or power complex is, that’s separate from reinforcement in my model – the walker group might be annihilated even if they are successful in destroying the shield if they cannot be reinforced fast enough (i.e. by repulsorlift) – if they were a big enough force to annihilate the defenders AND the shields, then fine, but that may not always be the case. Sort of like paratroopers – they can seize something, but they live or die by how fast reinforcements can get to them.
I don’t think either repulsor or contact armor are going to be dominant; the old ORBATs suggest they are both maintained, and I suspect because they have complementary roles and would impose crippling restraints on operations if not used in combined arms. ISD stromtrooper units seem to be pure spearhead/assault units, so are largely walker.
If the USAF has considered kinetic bombardment from orbit via project Thor, I would think that the Imperial Navy with vastly superior computers and lightspeed (?) turbolasers should be able to deliver fairly accurate firepower from orbit onto tank column sized targets with no more collateral damage than a 21st century airstrike. ECM and jamming in general seems to be massively effective against standoff fire-and-forget missiles, but you can’t jam away an irritated 2nd Lieutenant with a kiloton laser pointer and an itchy trigger finger looking down on you from a few dozen miles up.
The limitation of paratroops vs walkers are inherently different, because you just can’t drop an MBT or a large self-propelled howitzer out of a plane, although the Russians have certainly tried. However, you can scale up walkers until you get to monstrosities like your AT-SP. Airborne units are also limited by trained personnel willing to jump out of planes and airlift capacity, but neither should matter for a galaxy-spanning empire that is landing walkers via Titan barge and Acclamator. From a doctrinal standpoint, if you’re able to land walkers in the first place, then it follows that the attackers should be able to just land more walkers/conventional tread tanks in follow-up waves rather than invest resources and personnel into separate hovertank units to exploit possible but not guaranteed breakthroughs.
The point that I was trying to make about the vulnerability of shield generators is that walkers can’t be reinforced by repulsorlift armor unless they destroy the generator. Thus, if defenders make the generator significantly harder to eliminate than the armies surrounding it by building generators to warship standards and then digging them deep into the ground, then there will almost never be a case where the walkers manage to knock out an exposed shield/power generator, but are also surrounded by enemy mobile forces and will require immediate reinforcement.
However, everything about this is somewhat nullified if you can just drag a repulsortank under a shield with a towed barge, which might be possible. If we operate under the assumption that the CIS would be just be fine with glassing the Yoda and his Wookies, surely the Republic would have erected a theater shield over Kachirko City on Kashyyyk to force them to land troops. The presence of repulsorlift HMTs and troop transports might signify that the Separatists were able to bring them through the shield threshold while grounded. Hoth is harder to explain from a purely military point of view, but perhaps Veers just didn’t want his Imperial Army repulsorlift armor comrades getting the glory of taking Echo Base when he could secure the renown for his own walker crews in a classic case of inter-service rivalry.
My understanding of Star Wars has repulsorlift armor as predominantly garrison units deployed on surface bases to respond to walker assaults and to then police the locals, which suits the Imperial Army versus Stormtrooper Corps dichotomy. Perhaps the Stormies are just the Marine Corps as ECR would have it.
I was going to make a point-by point but I don’t see the point. We have a central issue to making SW ground combat make sense:
What is the actual permeability of a theater shield? Repulsorlift can clearly get across (or assaults will be more like a glacial game of Go with mobile theater shield bubbles – how would you respond to walker assaults if walkers have mobile theater shields with them?), but clearly not TOO easily (or repulsorlift armor trivializes walker armor, because walkers are so immobile and weight inefficient in comparison, and you sort of inevitably spiral to just starship warfare in atmosphere).
All arguments circle back to this point of how theater shields can be breached at their edge. Solve this and we have a viable model that makes it all work. And I don’t think this needs to work the same way as starship shields.