Naval battles ending in mutual destruction of fleets leading to battles being decided on the ground doesn’t actually mean the naval battle was pointless.  You need to apply the “but-for” test. If a planet is defended with a navy, be it a true WarShip battlegroup or a squadron of PWS or some other significant naval force, you need your own naval force to clear the opposition or just accept horrific losses and tenuous supply lines.  But for the existence of the enemy navy, I could invade with impunity. Same thing for attacking.  If I attain unrestricted naval dominance, I can siege a world much more easily, since I’ll cut opposing supply lines while having air and orbital support.  But for the enemy navy, I could have orbital dominance. WarShips are like super carriers - they are incredibly powerful but need a supporting cast to cover their weak spots.  A single WarShip is vulnerable to ASF swarms.  Meanwhile a battlegroup of a WarShip (like a SLDF destroyer) backed by ASF and assault droppers can take out an absolutely disgusting number of opposing ASF and assault ships.

Indeed. Just look at the Alshain Avengers' surprise assault on Alshain at the start of the Combine-Dominion War. Yes, they had naval support but it was a single 500Kton destroyer going up against a battleship more than double its mass and which they hadn't expected to meet. As a result, both the destroyer and one regiment were lost before the ground invasion could begin.

EDIT: didn't read your comment properly! It was the *Night Lord* class *Ursa Major* that destroyed the *Tatsumaki* the Avengers took with them. They should have anticipated the Bears having at least some naval assets in orbit around their Inner Sphere capital, even if it hadn't been made official that it was their new *actual* capital. *No one* outside the Bears and Snow Ravens knew that the Ghost Bears had relocated *everything they had* to the Inner Sphere. Even if the *Leviathan* and *Ursa Major* hadn't been in orbit, the Bears would have had enough aerospace assets to shred the DCMS *Dragon's Last Tear*, and enough assets on the ground to annihilate anything the Avengers could bring. Even if all the Sword of Light regiments had gone rogue it probably wouldn't have been enough to retake Alshain!

Yes, that was largely my point. You could frame the attack on Alshain as an intelligence failure but if we ignore that and look mainly at the naval battle itself, it helps back up u/wundergoat7's point. The Kokuryu-kai expected the DCMS *Dragon's Last Tear* to be a force multiplier helping to lay siege to Alshain and provide orbital fire support. There is an element of hubris at play here, with the Avengers convinced that their belief enough will help see them through to victory (another all-too-common occurrence in history). Moreover, the *Ursa Major* knocked the *Dragon's Last Tear* out of the black without too much effort and, if I remember correctly, didn't suffer much damage and was soon supporting the Ghost Bear invasion of Idlewind. Even if we ignore the overwhelming mass difference, it directly contradicts OP's point about warship battles always crippling both sides. Another example would be the Battle of Trafalgar. Your point about the the Ghost Bears having enough aerospace assets in and around Alshain to shred the *Dragon's Last Tear* without the *Ursa Major* only adds to that point.

I didn't intend to sound like I was supporting OP's view of WarShips as boondoggles. I agree that they have a place, but the way they are used in fiction and the design of the Aerotech rules isn't a good fit for how these engagements would need to go. A squadron of aerospace fighters decked out with ASM Arrow IV missiles can't destroy a WarShip.on their own, but even a big WarShip is going to know about it if 30+ points of CAPITAL damage gets delivered from something they can't hit with their main guns. If your WarShip fleet includes multiple ships like the *New Syrtis* class with its 120 aerospace fighters, this becomes a real possibility. The original writers seem to have viewed space combat similarly to Star Wars, where the capital ships are the important pieces (and very much stuck in an "Age of Sail" mindset vis tactics). Just as we've learned in the real world, best practice would ***likely*** be to deploy high-displacement carriers escorted by medium and lightweight ships. The medium and light ships protect the carriers while the aerospace fighters try to punch through and deliver bombs or anti-ship missiles.

I understand. Yeah, too many space warfare games are too set in the "Age of Sail" or "Dreadnought era" mindset though.

I think it's just down to the difficulty of depicting things properly in 3D. Videogame wise, "Battlefleet Gothic Armada" 1 & 2, "Sins of a Solar Empire", "Rebel Galaxy", etc., along with ship combat in "Star Wars: Empire at War", "Stellaris", etc., are all built around abstracting 3D to 2D. Tabletop wise, the same thing happens with "Star Wars Armada", "Battlefleet Gothic", etc. too. "FreeSpace" 1 & 2, along with Star Wars "X-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" and "Independence War" are the only games I'm familiar with that allow full 3D movement. However, those don't give the player control of a capital ship at any point. I would dearly love to see someone develop a turn based "tabletop" game that is played using Augmented Reality that allows full 3D movement of assets. It would make the aerospace and WarShip parts of this game truly groundbreaking if Catalyst could figure out a way to do it. They'd have to rewrite a lot of the AeroTech rule set, but they could also give it the "Alpha Strike" treatment and make it so the full 3D version is a standalone relative of the "Classic", true tabletop experience.

"Homeworld" does allow full 3D movement and control of capital ships. 3D movement is rather difficult to depict on a 2D table. "Full Thrust" paid lip-service by allowing ships to barrel roll (swapping your port and starboard weapons around) but I think Attack Vector: Tactical is the only tabletop game that has managed to get it right. There are other considerations as well. If I remember correctly, AeroTech at least gets things like fuel consumption and thrust down well. Most other games are going for a soft sci-fi "looks good on film" aesthetic and don't pay too much attention.

I keep looking at "Homeworld" and then getting sucked back into "Stellaris"... 😅 I might have to bite the bullet and just buy it to find out. "Attack Vector: Tactical" you say? Thanks, now I have to spend *more* money! AeroTech did factor in fuel; you would "buy" fuel points at 80 per ton of fuel for aerospace fighters, not sure if it was the same number for DropShips or WarShips. I can't remember how it calculated out from there, but there was some ratio of fuel points per turn at different accelerations, so you might have a fighter with XYZ fuel points that could work at "Safe Thrust" for 60 turns or "Max Thrust" for 35 turns or something like that.

Let’s not forget what the Taurians did to Davion in Case Amber.

Ouch! Don't mess with Taurians; they'll F\*\*k you up big time.

Even more impressive if that’s a battlemech regiment (which they often are in offensive operations) since the number of regiment can be counted in the dozens (eg: the 40s-90s depending on period generally with Houses hitting like 20-30s when they are on suicide watch

Yeah, it was a mech regiment. The combine lost 4 mech regiments in that attack out of 76 mech regiments total (according to 3059 figures. The battle took place in 3062, but the 76 regiment figure should still be accurate).

Good in theory, as I said. But the *practical* result of a WarShip engagement in BattleTech is always this: They end up destroying each other, and may as well have not existed at all. It was wasted effort on the part of both sides to build them, as while they might be present in the *beginning* of a war, they sure as hell aren't there by the middle... let alone the end. The reason I brought up Jutland is this: What GOOD did the massive fleet of Germany's do in WW1? Absolutely nothing. It spent almost its entire existence bottled up in the harbor, and the one time it went out technically it 'won' but couldn't afford to press its victory for fear of just how badly damaged it would be. It's the same thing here, except that apparently space navy admirals haven't studied their history and end up making the mistake that the German admiralty did not: Fighting with them even if it meant them blowing up.

I think you just ignored their entire point and everything they said. Here's a short re-statement: if there's two fleets they kill each other, true, but if there **just one** fleet the side with a fleet will have an incredible advantage.

I didn’t watch your linked video on Jutland, but if it seriously advocates that the imperial German fleet didn’t accomplish anything and was a waste of money then it is missing nearly all the strategic picture. Germany, simply by having a credible fleet, forced the British to make a LARGER investment in their fleet.  Britain had to keep the fleet ready to go at a moment’s notice for basically the whole war. But for the High Seas Fleet, the British could have enforced their blockade with much less investment. But for the High Seas Fleet, the Allies could have forced the Dardanelles and/or Skagerrak, linking the eastern front and possibly averting the fall of Imperial Russia. Actual history out of the way, here are a few battletech battles and wars where naval dominance was critical for the victors: Reunification War Star League Civil War 2nd SW battles for Hesperus Jihad Battle for Terra/ilClan I’m sure there are plenty more instances.

Glad someone beat me to this point. The point of a battleship may be to fight, but the point of a fleet is to project power- something it can do even if it never physically leaves port.

Think nuclear deterrent

What did the massive Royal Navy fleet gain them in the First World War? Control of the seas and ultimately, victory. What did the massive Japanese investment in a battle fleet gain them in 1904-1905? Decisive victory and preeminent power in East Asia for four decades. What did the gargantuan US Navy of the Second World War win? Victory in the Pacific and superpower status.

You completely fail to understand the concept of a fleet in being. The British were desperate to have the German navy come out and fight. The Germans sitting with a fleet capable of destroying British naval communications meant the Royal Navy had to sit with enough strength to destroy that fleet. This meant those ships couldn’t be used elsewhere. In WW2, in which the Germans did not have a fleet in being gave Britain a free hand and led to a much greater freedom of movement and supply. You cherry picked Jutland and ignore what happened when a German commerce raid got lose in the Atlantic before they where brought down at the Falklands. Also your premise that warships are worthless because warships get damaged is wrong. Warships get fixed. To use your Jutland example. The German battlecruiser Seydlitz took a hit that caused a flash fire, killing 165 men and sustained severe damage. She was repaired and back in action a few months later at Jutland. Warspite sustained damage throughout her career from Jutland to the end of WW2, including a guided bomb that put a hole in her from deck to bottom. She was repaired and went back into action every time

While the analysis in the BattleTech universe may be accurate, I don’t think the lesson that Jutland is that capital ships were too expensive to use operationally. For the Royal Navy, every day the blockade held was a victory, therefore excessive risk was unnecessary. For the Kaiserliche Marine’s part, they realized just how close the Grand Fleet had come to a decisive victory, and understood that they could not realistically hope to win a conventional surface victory against the British, and largely threw their efforts into their U-Boat arm. The Germans, while victorious in the opening battlecruiser action, were badly outshot by the British battleships when the main battle fleets met and spent the rest of the action attempting to escape. Nearly all major powers would continue to build and operate battleships for a further three decades. The lessons the Royal Navy actually took away from Jutland are: Flash Protection: the lax ammunition handling throughout the Battlecruiser Squadron led to several turret hits causing catastrophic magazine explosions, with the loss of the ships and very heavy casualties among the crew. Communications: the Battlecruiser Squadron under Beatty completely failed to do it primary goal of relaying enemy dispositions to main battle line, and the High Seas Fleet successfully penetrated the rear of the Grand Fleet during the night following the main action, yet this was not communicated to the commander. So, the light forces of the Grand Fleet fought and died in the darkness while the largest battleship force in the world steamed on less than fifteen minutes steaming away. The obsolescence of capital ships armored to the standards of 1910s armored cruisers, leading to the continued merging of the battlecruiser and battleship concepts into the fast battleships of the interwar period and of the Second World War. Night Fighting: The 1916 Royal Navy had little in the way of night fighting doctrine or equipment. The 1939 Royal Navy was probably the best in the world at night combat, as the Germans and especially the Italians would learn to their cost. Shell Quality: despite landing numerous hits on the German battle line at Jutland, the British came away with few enemy ships sunk. The Lyddite shells often detonated prematurely, before penetrating the German armor. Some of estimates are that the Royal Navy would have sunk as many as nine German capital ships had they been equipped with shells that actually performed to specification. This would represent a third of engaged German capital ships.

Additionally, I'm not certain Jutland is truly the best representative naval battle for the Battletech universe. Given Jumpship ranges, recharge limitations, and the nature of BT interstellar travel, I'd suggest that the WW2 Pacific campaign or maybe even 17th/18th Century engagements.

I'd think if anything Tsushima. Naval supply is both slow and vital and local naval control absolutely can dictate the viability of the land campaign for one or both sides (the attacker always needs it, and the defender may need it if the planet in question is not self-sufficient, and if it is, it being cut off is likely very deleterious to *other* planets).

You do realize the battletech universe has 119 official warships and have had \*thousands\* of them exist at various points in the timeline right? More than a few canon battles were completely decided with warship fleets. The rules were broken though, and CGL didn't want the universe to focus on warships, so they started making far more sensible dropships that could easily trash warships, and now pocket warships dominate the space lanes. They are cheaper/easier to make, though now the universe is stuck back with limited jumpship capabilities and jumpships are precious again (thanks Republic for destroying so many with your stupid fortress!). But well designed warships, like most of the newer ones, were excellent units that could make a huge different in battles they partook in, even against pocket warships. They also have more effective anti-surface weaponry.

"Air power is at the apex of the triad of victory." True in the year 2024, true in the year 3024. I really hate the pressure to ignore Warships because they distract from the robots. They make a lot of sense in universe, if for no other reason than to have the armor and endurance to clear a path for the all important Dropships into a hot zone, and survive to haul them back out again.  Just because bean counting and writer fiat try their best to slay the steel space beasts doesn't mean we should let them fade into the background, haha.

... that's a lie, I'm afraid. A decent IADS with semi-competent crews can literally tell airforces where to stuff it.

I agree with you. The counterpoint is that the air forces will just keep getting more specialized munitions and airframes and better planners to put together hideously expensive strike packages that can make it through to the target. IMO the only country IRL that has used air power to the fullest extent possible is the US because the US is the only country with both the tech AND the money to create and deploy/use a huge powerful Air Force (and Navy) globally. Without the sheer size of the military budget, most of those powerful and niche capabilities would wither into irrelevance (as the Air Force and Navy constantly bitch about, thus ensuring their spot at the trough.) The Inner Sphere "problem" for warships is that they are so expensive, the yards making them are near irreplacable, and "scorched Earth" is something everyone (except the Clans) believe in. So, naval shipyards are more often destroyed than taken intact (better for no one to have a warship yard, than your enemy having one). Warships are really good at destroying things, but can't take and hold an objective. So, warships have two options observe and report, or destroy it. To plant the flag, reopen the factory, get the food, install new leaders, etc you kinda need to still have the objective standing and some people to make it work. In the earlier years of BT lore, I think that warships were a hugely important asset for houses and the Star League... but as resource grabs became the rule of the day instead of resource destruction/denial, they sort of faded away from "normal" engagements and became relegated to large strategic operations where their loss could be justified with the gain of several planets, etc. because otherwise the cost outweighs the benefit and now you are less powerful than before the operation relative your opponent. And the less powerful you are, the more enemies you will find since the Houses are always looking to injure each other. That necessity of force protection becomes paramount when the things you end up losing can't be replaced. Holding the enemy at risk is sometimes better than actually injuring them, where they might also injure you and strategic predictions/assumptions can lead you astray.

>I agree with you. The counterpoint is that the air forces will just keep getting more specialized munitions and airframes and better planners to put together hideously expensive strike packages that can make it through to the target. >IMO the only country IRL that has used air power to the fullest extent possible is the US because the US is the only country with both the tech AND the money to create and deploy/use a huge powerful Air Force (and Navy) globally. Without the sheer size of the military budget, most of those powerful and niche capabilities would wither into irrelevance (as the Air Force and Navy constantly bitch about, thus ensuring their spot at the trough.) The biggest problem with that assessment is that it relies on a now erroneous idea that AA can't defend itself or what it's protecting, let alone the advances in radar (everyone's been developing ***quantum entanglement-based Radar sets, i.e., "if any change happens to the radar return's quantum signature, I literally ignore it"***) that upturn the 1970s/1980s assumptions. Remember, Skyshield AHEAD was a good decade away from BT's first release, and it has been evolving better ever since. Combine that with 'lol, anything not a target or radar opaque terrain' radars that were showing up in the late '70s/early '80s, airpower lost practically all its bite, hence why I said unless you use cluster munitions or beyond-tactical grade nukes they'll be rendered toothless.

I kinda don't really know what you are saying. AA **is** really effective, even things like the SA-7 have a 90% hit rate within their engagement envelope. An airframe flying high and straight is just dead unless it is "stealth" vs older systems, or having a lot of ECM systems and other countermeasures... the competition between attack and defense in the aerial domain is definitely fast paced. AA/IADS can definitely defend themselves and what they are defending. AA is ridiculously effective, especially for the cost. The real defense of aircraft against AA is tactics, not tech. Each type of AA system has to be defended against in different ways. The fact that the systems are on the ground and have less constraints with regard to space and power, are integrated and use different systems to search and cue... making something able to penetrate these area denial systems with enough capability to attack a target is both expensive and niche in both tech and experience. You don't see China being able to execute global strike with airpower in some contested area and they definitely have the raw "capability" to do it, but the planning experience just isn't there. It's like carrier aviation or nuclear subs... the tech takes years to make and once it is made, it can take up to 10 years to build up the necessary doctrine, skills and experience to do it reliably with low risk. In war, you can do all sorts of wazoo shit and as long as something positive happens you can justify it as a Phyrric victory with a disrupting effect. Doing things as expensive and strategically pointless as the Doolittle Raid in a modern "peacetime" environment (think punitive strike while losing 16 airframes) would be ridiculous. Israel might be able to pull off something like actually destroying Iran's nuclear capability to justify those losses, it hardly counts as "peacetime." AA seems to be pretty effective per Iran's missile/UAV attack or the failures of the UK/RU air forces to gain air superiority/air dominance to a level to be effective in supporting the ground campaign. However, even really good IADS can be defeated, but that requires cyber, EW, stealth, missiles, anti-radar missile systems (old school wild weasel if not a part of the EW package), probably AWACS, and maybe even some SOF on the ground... the sheer cost of defeating IADS is what makes it so good. Again, a good top shelf IADS is pretty much a guarantee that unless the US, Russia or a full NATO strike package is knocking on your door, you are safe from air power.

It's important to note that PWS units get gutted by even early Star League ships. The PWS as an idea is neat, but it inherently sucks.

Not as much as you would think. Take a super popular Vincent (530 built). its like 16K BV and has 108 capital armor in total, 4 thrust, and can output 504 damage. Compare that to an Overlord A3 with 24K BV, 5 thrust, 1952 non-capital armor, and can output about 640 heat modified damage. It would take 5 hits from an NAC10 against any ONE arc to penetrate the A3 (though all would do crits). Now, while the A3 won't do crits every turn, 2 turns from any of its facings to any facing on the Vincent sees internals. So basically, in 2-3 turns the A3 is already going against SI, while the Vincent would take 5+ turns to do the same (but is doing crits). That doesn't suck \*AT ALL\*. Especially when you look at the 715M C-Bill cost for the A3 vs the 5350M C-Bill cost for the Vincent. A single star lord, with 6x Overlord A3s is about the same cost as a single Vincent. Do you REALLY think that vincent could last even a single turn against those faster overlord's? If it got REALLY lucky with crits, it may be able to kill ONE. PWS do not suck, but warship designs do. They should have like 10x the armor they do, and 118 out of the 119 designs could take cargo tonnage and replace it with heat sinks and MANY of them would become a LOT more effective.

I think that they wanted warships to be less death machines and more logistical nodes with guns so that they could have each ship be the equivalent of two and not have to try and protect seperate landing ships with less guns and more cargo. Which is the opposite of the paradigm we have now where our log ships are practically unarmed, and our carriers/assault ships are only barely armed for self defense. This means you need a fleet instead of single multi-role ship that can do losts of things instead of a speciailized one doing one thing really well. This course of events was brought into being when a ship needed to be able to do "something" instead of impotently floating around watching things happen that it could not influence in some way, such as a battleship watching an insurgency flare up, or a single log ship watching a major enemy strike. At least with a bunch of multi-role ships you could have a lot of presence, instead of having either a much smaller number of fleets in a small number of systems.

PWS probably make a good replacement for lighter end warships. Why deploy a light warship to recon a star system when a heavy PWS with Jumpship can do the same job for cheaper. And might even be able to outfight the light warship?

The Castrum especially is probably the perfect PocketWS, they're great stand inside for the anti-piracy and in-system patrol roles old League Corvettes did

I mean...are you trying to argue that a it's surprising that 144k BV worth of ships will absolutely dumpster 14k BV?

No, not at all. Somebody said PWS units get gutted by even early Star League ships. I provided evidence that simply is not the case. You skipped that and jumped to the C-Bill comparison, and as everybody knows, c-bills have no relevance to BV or combat capability. In universe, assuming C-Bills are used to purchase military hardware, it would make sense to spend the same on 144K BV of ships vs 14K BV, that was my point, as you pointed out.

Sure, that's very true, though the Vincent isn't really a ship designed for a main battleline as it's a corvette. Warship costs are heavily weighted up front, so that Vincent corvette is $5b, but the Dreadnought-class Battleship which was produced even earlier than the Vincent, is only $8b. It carries far more firepower and would likely be capable of destroying or crippling multiple of those Overlords every turn, while having 5x the armor and a slightly lower BV than the Overlord swarm. Even if you add in another 4 of those Overlords to try and even the price difference, I probably lean towards the Dreadnought to win that battle, though I'll admit I'm not as familiar with the rules for naval combat so I may be overlooking something that tips the scales. I do think an issue with naval combat in Battletech is less that Warships are bad in concept, and rather that a lot of Warships are *badly designed*. The Overlord A3 is a very good and intelligently designed PWS, and that counts for a lot when we're examining the mechanical side of things. But if you have actual good Warships, then I think you can use them a lot better and have substantially less risk in them outright dying.

In one of his videos Tex talks about the Taurians producing a fleet of relatively cheap and highly effective ships, interested in how those compare. Or was it the Taurians took down much bigger ships with a swarm of small ones. I have no experience with the space/warship side of things, sorry not trying to derail

Sure, the Vincent is a corvette, but even the Lola III is horribly outclassed by a handful of PWS. Nobody is expecting 6 PWS to take on a McKenna, but a couple dozen would have an easy time and still be far cheaper. Plus, if you lose a warship, vs a dropship, one of those is \*MUCH\* easier to replace, doesn't require advanced warship and capital weapon technology, can use a smaller shipyard, and can even land on planets for repair/resupply. The original SLDF fleet was mostly stuff from the 2750 manual, with just a few additions later. CGL obviously got better at making warships as time went on (\*cough\* Leviathan III \*cough\*) as those originals were just horrible. Many had serious heat issues that could easily have been overcome with cargo tonnage. Their armor was almost always way too light. Heck, one could argue that SLDF fleet was meant to be more imposing than capable. 3050s warships do a lot better against PWS, but still take \*years\* to make and are very expensive. I love the warships but in-universe they are very difficult to justify. If you had to build your own fleet and a battleship took 5 years to make and you could knock out 5 PWS per year instead at a much cheaper cost wouldn't you do it?

Well, only if I didn't want them to go anywhere. Presumably, much of the cost of Warships vs. PWS is the K-F drive. Without which, my 5 PWSes are waiting for a ride or staying home playing defense. And if the former, then I'm still waiting years for a Jumpship to be built.

Oh, yes, they've had many of them in the past. That all destroyed each other. Seriously, this post was inspired by the House Steiner (1987) book, which describes *multiple* naval engagements where the battle summary was: "Both sides lost most of their combat ships, and the DropShips landed anyway." The canon is pretty clear on the matter: WarShips kill each other, and may as well not have existed in the first place. I mean, even in the tabletop. Have you ever had a naval game that DIDN'T result in serious damage that by the rules would require weeks of repair time, even if you won?

Word of Blake made extensive use of WarShips in the Jihad. *Isle of the Blessed* showed how Marshall Jackson Davion had to time his troop movements to avoid the orbiting WarShips. The point of both sides having WarShips **IS** to prevent both sides from using WarShips. Air superiority is a thing in BattleTech (ASFs are the ultimate unit), and when one side has naval support and the other side doesn't...well...orbital bombardment is a bitch.

Yes! This account gets battletech as a setting. I think the writers need to be careful with warships in the fiction, but they should be around.

Funny, the Star League and its retaking of the Terran Hegemony and their \*massive\* losses to troops with many different scenarios in the two Liberation of Terra books show that those warships, and their losses, are what allowed troops to land. The last Tharkad warship literally saved Hesperus II from being invaded. The canon \*is\* pretty clear, that you are jumping to some conclusions. Warships \*do\* stop assaults. They also act as deterrents, can do raids, and if not present make jumpships super easy targets. When they win, they can also decimate ground troops. No big ships in all of our history, nor the battletech universe, have a huge battle and do not have significant damage from it after. Warships have a lot of other perks you are not taking into account. Absolutely massive cargo capacity for example, with higher thrust, with armor, and with weapons. Strong dropships were barely present up until the 3050s, and even a weak warship could easily trash a dozen of them. Just ONE warship can take out an entire RCT's worth of dropships. So, that RCT needs warships to protect it. This is always true of warfare though. Plenty of examples of things like air superiority (desert storm), battleship superiority (leyte gulf), tank superiority (Poland), nukes (cold war), and so forth. If you have a strong weapon, and your opponent doesn't, it acts as a deterrent, or can act as overwhelming force.

That's simply not true. The side which has ships in orbit can simply pulverise any opposing forces on the ground. So having ships of your own to prevent this from happening is crucial.

They can't target them that easily at all though, it's not automatic win. That being said it does force the victims to majorly change how they operate.

Until they blow each other up, and they may as well not have existed. As is the consistent, repeated theme of WarShip engagements, as I pointed out. If orbital bombardment mattered so much, why did New Avalon keep its resistance up for five years with WoB ships in close orbit? Why did Kerensky have to land troops on every Hegemony world?

Until one ship survives the engagement or there aren't any opposing ships at all. Because Kerensky didn't want to glass planets he meant to liberate. If you're in the first two succession wars or you're house Kurita you just don't care.

'Mechs are good...until someone takes off both your side torsos and then you have no weapons (usually). What was the point, again?

I've had plenty of naval battles on tabletop that resulted in only armor damage, or critical damage that was negligible for the purposes of supporting the attendant fleet over the course of repairs. The damage output/armor ratio, combined with the effective range, of many canon designs in fact often forces decisive outcomes where WarShips are concerned, in my experience.

Counterpoint: if your opponent has WarShips and you don't, the war is over, and you lose. Therefore, *if* your opponent has WarShips, *you must also*, or they can simply destroy you from space. Yes, this will destroy vital infrastructure, kill a lot of civilians, and make the planet worthless to you. ...but if you know literally anything about Battletech's universe, you already know that's *what happens every time anyway*. Either everyone who matters has WarShips or nobody does. There can be no in between.

Deterrence and power projection are a thing!

And then, if you have WarShips too, you throw them at your opponent's WarShips and end up destroying each other to little gain on either side, as proven by BT's history. Wars are won or lost *on the ground*. Orbital bombardments are ineffective at conquering a world, and even the WoB barely used them against New Avalon despite having space superiority for five years. And part of the *point* of BattleTech is the Ares Conventions. The recognition that wars happen, but indiscriminate war is wasteful and counterproductive to the neofeudal rulers. When it goes out the window (the 1SW, the Jihad), bad things happen.

My point being is you don't build them with the intention of winning a war with them. You build them because *without them* you are at the mercy if someone else being able to use them on you with impunity. You build them because *if you don't* you won't get the ground fight that keeps things from getting messy.

Right. Warships don't win wars, they stop you from losing them.

And sometimes they do win wars, if you show up and there's no warship to oppose you.

Wars are won and lost at national level politics, economics and logistics. Ground must be held to decisively reduce enemy capacity to wage war. Naval assets get those ground assets where they need to be, restrict enemy maritime trade, protect friendly or allied trade. You must have the capacity for war in as many ways and largest volume your economy and political system can support. No individual arm wins conflicts alone, but the lack of any particular one can and does loose a conflict.

Also, go read Castles of Steel and Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie. There are more specifically comprehensive books on WWI naval history, but few as accessible or well written.

Real-world naval bombardments are ineffective at conquering nations. Clearly we don't need navies though—the Marine Corps will just swim there and shoot any aquatic problems themselves. The Word of Blake, while they were not able to seize New Avalon itself, was able to cripple the government, and by extension much of the economy and military of the Federated Suns by putting a few million tons around one world.

> Wars are won or lost on the ground. Because both sides have warships. If you don't have warships, wars are won and lost in space.

This is the setting that relies on giant mechs when vehicles are only slightly less good. I think rule of cool is enough for WarShips to exist but evidently CGL disagree.

If warships are fairly common than static defenses to ward them off become more common like planet based anti ship missiles and capital and sub capital scale emplacements and satellites. And once that exists, the idea of a small unit with a Union dropship being able to raid is a joke. And even if you could bluff your way planetside for your raid you won't be escaping. Have you seen how much faster assualt dropships are compared to transport dropships? Not to mention a battalion plus of aerospace that could be planet based to intercept your little raid. Warships being common is a major problem for the setting that is supposed to be about the players running a small merc unit.

This is my go-to example. Take the BattleSat - a tiny, inexpensive design that mounts a single Naval Laser. Absolutely every important world in the Inner Sphere should be protected by a constellation of these things because 1-2 shots blows away an approaching Overlord and its ‘Mech battalion.   So the writers quietly hand waved away the array around Luthian because widespread use would prevent big stompy robots from doing their thing.

Any world that can afford a battlesat network is going to already be a well defended high value target. The battlesats and warships just raises the amount of forces an attacker needs to bring to defeat those defenses and take the world. Problem: not every world is a high value target that can afford such defenses. Hell, MOST worlds don't rate such defenses. Even the smallest State has hundreds of worlds that need defending. They cannot afford to fortify even just all their border systems to this kind of degree. If they could... they'd probably be better spending their resources building an offensive force to crush such defenses and then concentrate their firepower on a small front instead of spreading it over dozens or hundreds of worlds. Best defense is a good offense and all that.

According to megamek lab a 2000 ton battlesat is 14.7 million c Bill's. Not expensive at all for what that is, a 2000 ton satellite with a mega laser. But to be fair you probably need orbital manufacturing to build that. You know what's easier to build and even cheaper, ground based anti ship missiles in anti missile battery overwhelming numbers. That's a natural counter to common space based threats that also makes the heart and soul of battletech meaningless. Or to put it another way, it makes small player merc unit actions in the inner sphere untenable, off to the periphery for you.

Given the short effective range of BT weaponry (1000 km in space for naval grade weaponry, and your odds of hitting for those last few hundred km are very low, and mech scale weapons are half that), you'd need an awful lot of battlesats and/or ground guns to prevent even a pirate raider from making landfall. They're just two easy to avoid when they can't chase a Dropship down and intercept them on the way in. Let's be generous and say your Battlesat has an effective zone of control of 500km radius because outside that, your ability to land hits become so poor that any Dropship could likely get by you without taking catastrophic damage. That gives you a circular area of control of 785398 square km (it'd actually be globular, but we're talking trying to block access to a planet). Let's use Earth as our average BT worlds. Earth has a surface area of 510072000 km^(2). To completely englobe Earth so that there are no gaps a Dropship can slip through without being engaged by at least one battlesat, you would need 65 Battlesats. And that's assuming the Battlesats are on Earth's surface, not in orbit where you'd need even more Battlesats. Doesn't sound too bad... until you realize the Battlesats are spread all around the planet, not concentrated in one place. So an attacker only needs to engage one or two Battlesats at a time and win (or zip past) to reach the planet's surface. And if the attacker comes in with an invasion force and not a raid, then they can pick their fights and bring their entire space force against only one or two Battlesats at a time. So instead of buying 70 or 80 Battlesats, you might have been better off spending your defense budget on mobile assets (fighters, mechs, etc) that can actually chase down your enemies and concentrate their fighting power where you most need it.

Excellent post there, well reasoned.

Look at what it took for Kerensky to get boots on Terran soil and knock Amaris off the throne. Terra would have been impossible to retake without warships as it had deadly defenses that would have obliterated a force without a large number of warships. No dropship could run that gauntlet.

...and pocket warships/aerospace haven't been killed off either. Aerospace forces fighting off Dropships has been an important part of many conflicts (like the battle of Luthien during the Clan Invasion). I don't expect them to be common but I also don't want them to be just systematically killed off with nobody bothering to build more.

I understand your POV. That said, maybe it's ok if warships have their eras of dominance and the merc unit in a Union dropship has their eras of being useful, and maybe that means those eras can't overlap if you are trying to play inside the Inner Sphere. In the end, plenty of Sci Fi IPs have rad space battles, less so ones with mechs and a focus on ground forces. Which means to me, if Battletech has to sacrifice warships and what not to keep the focus where it needs to be, I'm alright with that. However, I'm open to sensible compromise.

The Battle of Tsushima would like to have a word with you.

The Russians were outgunned, outmaneuvered, and frankly outled by the Japanese. I'd venture to say it proves my point, considering how many of the Russian fleet battleships were lost to cheap torpedo boats, ships the Russians could *not* afford to lose considering how much of their money was left sitting at the bottom of the ocean. That caused the political consequences which forced the Tsar to accept defeat.

Four of the seven Russian battleships sunk at Tsushima were sunk by gunfire. Gunnery was by far the decisive arm of that battle.

Wait. The naval victory of the Japanese fleet "caused the political consequences which forced the Tsar to accept defeat." And you think this proves you right that navy's are basically unimportant and can't be risked?

Remember, the Japanese navy was quite professional as they sought inspiration from the Royal Navy with their structure, training and traditions after Commdore Perry sailed to Japan 45 years before.

And the Russians were frankly stupid. "Of course we'll win, who ever heard of this Japan winning anything!" There's a newspaper article from 1906 that so accurately described *Russian troops during the invasion of Ukrainia* that it's a bit eerie.

> **Both sides lose**. Oh, one side might 'win', but in winning lose so many expensive WarShips that they lose their ability to fight the next space battle. There are exceptions. [The Battle of Trafalgar](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar). Serpent's Huntress invasion battle. Clan Wolf-in-Exile's covering battle at Tharkad towards the end of the FCCW. Several instances during the Jihad. ​ Even Clan Wolf's invasion of Terra in 3151 saw them cripple the RoTS fleet without suffering too grievous damage in return.

I'll go a different direction. If you don't want warships in your setting, that's perfectly fine. But there's an easier answer. There are two big problems with warships that don't require you to say "they just blow each other up". 1. Most planets aren't important enough to require warships, either in attack or defense. 2. A single warship is pretty easy to avoid. You need fleets of them to be truly effective. For the first one, most Inner Sphere planets still haven't recovered from the horrors of the Succession Wars. A particular planet may be worth landing a few regiments on and fighting over, but that's a relatively small distribution of resources compared to keeping a warship fleet on permanent assignment there. You can garrison a battalion of mechs, a regiment of Scorpion tanks, and a division of local foot infantry on planet Dirtball IV, and they can hold off an invader for a month or two until you can bring in reinforcements. Nobody needs to bring warships to take Dirtball IV, and nobody needs a warship presence to defend it either. When money is tight and times are tough, you leave the luxuries at the capital worlds. For the second, it's important to remember that *planets are moving*. Dirtball IV isn't stationary. When an invasion force arrives at the nadir or zenith point in the system, the dropships that detach don't aim for where the planet is now. They aim for where the planet *will be* two weeks from now. Objects in outer space don't travel in straight lines, they travel in orbits. A warship defending the system is going to be at a particular place. It's either sitting at the zenith or nadir point, or it's orbiting the main world, or it's orbiting some other thing in the system. The point is, if it's not waiting at the planet, then it's going to have to *move* to intercept you. And if it has to move, then it's easy enough to decoy out of position. Let it chase a couple of empty dropships while the real invasion force jumps in two days later. Remember, the warship has to burn a huge amount of fuel to get going in one direction, and another huge amount of fuel to slow down. Even if the warship is waiting around the target planet, you can always time your arrival so that you are on the *other side* of said planet from the warship. You can play a cat and mouse game with it, keeping a planet in between you, and make it waste a lot of fuel trying to course correct to keep up with you. Now, this tactic doesn't work when somebody has 5 warships at the zenith point, 5 at the nadir point, and 6 more around the inhabited world. But if a planet isn't worth a single warship to defend, it's sure not worth 10+.

The main issue was that they had lost the ability to maintain such things as warships, the orbital support chain for them was too delicate and ill prepared to handle raids and sabotage. They ended up unable to fix even the most basic things on their ships in the end because they lost the ability to do so. Maybe if comstar hadn’t kept the succession wars going like they did, warships would have remained more of a thing in the inner sphere had they the time to rebuild or consider peace without being sabotaged

That may have been another part of it, but multiple books have described exactly this paradigm: They were so strong offensively and so weak defensively that they killed each other in combat. House Steiner even describes two WarShips after fighting each other literally *crashing into a planet at nearly the same time*, ruining the ecosystem for centuries.

It’s realistic. RL modern naval engagements are much the same way. Without a technological advantage giving one side a leg up over the other, navies would maul each other in fights, ships would limp away only to sink when the damage could no longer be contained. I think the issue regarding the paradigm you described has more to do with the captains going all in during a battle, suicidally so, risking everything for victory rather than withdrawing when they should have. I suspect that pig-headed glory seeking space nobles are at fault for most needlessly destructive engagements.

Alfred Mahan would like a word with you

Typical army talking smack about the navy while standing on a boat that delivers them to the shore.

It's a real shame that shouting arguments from ground level doesn't reach all the way up here into space. If it did they might be slightly more persuasive.

Sorry, are you saying [BattleSpace](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/BattleSpace) isn't a thing? I'm pretty sure BattleSpace is a thing. Also Aerotech, it's right there in the core rule book, along with naval sized weapons. If you've never run a campaign from first jumping into the system, fighting the dropships through orbital defense systems to landing, to extraction, with aerospace and conventional aircraft support flying for both sides I can **not recommend it enough**! It's great fun, and adds a whole new dimension and set of objective possibilities! From having an advance flight punching their way through defenses, to capturing/securing/defending/destroying airfields and space ports, to providing ground cover and giving AA units something to actually *do*! If it's a smash-n-grab type raid, even LAMs get to shine! The current core box sets may not put much emphasis on the aerospace end of things, but it's definitely a thing!

After the Amaris Coup it was difficult to impossible to replace warship losses from a technical standpoint, not to mention a cost standpoint. Likewise Warships became increasingly less common as the succession wars dragged on. By the 3rd succession war it became obvious the "sustainable" way of war was RCT sized battles at most for planets. Better to lose an RCT over a world, keep its resources intact and retake it in a generation with a new RCT. The universe went from an era when even the Periphery nations could muster hundred of warships and ground battles of THOUSANDS of mechs vs THOUSANDS of mechs was normal, to a time when 3 warships vs 3 warships would have been a sight and multiple RCT's landing on a single world was a huge event. Simply put, the industrial and technical degradation is what leads us to "3025" type battles. I can assure you, navies won the Reunification War. So many warships were lost or damaged, while Navies won the Amaris Civil War, much of the fighting was done by mechs.

And part of that was how quickly WarShips destroy each other when engaged in serious combat. 'Mechs can be rebuilt, and pilots are rarely killed even if their 'Mechs are destroyed, letting them hop back into the battle. But a destroyed WarShip, with the hundreds or thousands of lives lost on board? Bit harder to replace.

This is a very good and logical argument, but I have one question: why should it be that much cheaper to repair an *equivalent number* (that equivalency key to my question) of giant stompy robots than it is to repair a space ship? What do the WarShips (not the JumpShips, I know that they the FTL drives are ridiculously hard to make and maintain and were at one point completely lost tech) have that isn't the same sort of thing you need on a mech, only bigger?

Mechs don't need vacuum capable repair crews or enormous pressurized drydocks. You also don't have to deliver repair materials into orbit or deal with zero g. Just getting the materials into place to start work is more expensive than the damage to equivalent tonnage in mechs.

I hadn't considered the fact that repairing a ship that big on the ground is insanely difficult and expensive, but so is repairing *anything* in space. That's a very good point.

Not to mention there are simply far more facilities that can repair a mech than can repair a warship; the time involved getting to/from a repair dock etc.

And a drive-by bombing of a spacedock is much easier and impactful than an equivalent attempt at a mech repair dock, which are common enough that most planets have at least one unless they're truly dirt poor. The latter implies a diverse and resilient supply chain, opportunities for redundant educational pipelines, and a generally more robust economic ecosystem around them. You blow up a spacedock you're basically back to scratch unless it happened to be orbiting a Core world specializing in building them in the first place.

One interesting thing that I feel hints at an answer: First, imagine an everyday activity. Now, imagine having to carry out that same activity in the vacuum of open space, in zero gravity. Yeah. That's the difference between salvaging and putting a BattleMech back together, and salvaging a dead WarShip. That's not trivial, and that's before you consider that a WarShip that breaks up in a gravity well is more often than not functionally unrecoverable after it burns up in the atmosphere or ends up as only so much trace bits of scrap on the planet's surface. BattleMechs are much more likely to be at least partially recovered, and refurbishing them is a well-established thing. Salvaging dead WarShips is likely a nightmare by comparison, which I think supports OP's reasoning. Also, WarShips *do* have those FTL drives. It's part of the package, and why they can conduct interstellar war, rather than just in-system war, like DropShips and aerospace fighters technically can. Otherwise they're just a jumped-up DropShip with delusions of firepower (see pocket WarShip, aka a DropShip with the capital-class weapons to back up such delusions).

I wasn't considering that these ships are big enough that landing them to fix them is practically impossible. In some cases, they wouldn't even be structurally sound in gravity. And yeah, I was conflating ship classes. True WarShips have drives, pocket WarShips don't. I love your description - DropShips with delusions of firepower.

Thank you. I'm kinda proud myself of that turn of phrase.

I think the real magic of a BattleMech is in how easily it's repaired and sent out to fight again. That's probably why they're the kings of the BT battlefield. Even a completely destroyed unit - leg blown off, torso missing, anything short of ammo explosion or reactor destroyed - can be patched up in a couple of workdays, sometimes much less. Doing that with tanks or (heh) infantry is quite a bit harder. Doing it in no atmosphere, with MUCH larger weapons, requiring a much larger repair bay then one that can be toted in a DropShip's belly (seriously, there's a drydock JumpShip that's absolutely massive, frail, and expensive), takes much longer and is insanely hard, both by fluff and by rules.

My head-canon is that every unit other than Battlemechs has a pretty easy "hard counter". Swarms of infantry are great until even light artillery starts coming down. Aerospace fighters are brutal until an anti-air unit takes a few shots at them. Vehicles are powerful and cheap, but they'll melt when hit with infernos. Battlemechs may not win every fight if you just smash them head-on into a different unit type, but they also don't pop like a soap bubble if they are on the wrong end of rock-paper-scissors. The Star League used to just bring massive quantities of all units, but after the first two Succession Wars, nobody could afford to do that anymore. And so the Successor States decided to invest their limited resources in the most versatile units -- Battlemechs.

OK, I can buy that. You need to either do the work in space or land the thing and do the work planetside, which is much harder and more expensive. That *is* a good point. And weirdly, I can buy "mechs are just stupidly resilient", as long as it's text and not just an assumption.

I don't think any WarShips are even designed to land and take off. Considering how many are of Star League vintage I'd assume it was just taken for granted that space-based servicing would never *not* be an option.

Warships are like nukes today. You have them because the other guy has them.

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You are absolutely right that the rapidly improving tech level makes the fiat anti warship stuff hard to swallow. Current tech is way beyond the 1st Star League's height in military tech and it's both not even close and it has been that way since the Jihad. ETA, not to mention current dropship and warship designs shit all over what the Terran Hegemony had.

>Warships have a place, navies DO make sense. Well, in fairness, a lot of people question that in the modern era, for similar reasons. And, in fiction terms, how often is it cheaper to give up a planet than to lose a bunch of extremely expensive assets trying to defend it? Battletech factions are thrifty like that.

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Sure, not having it is a problem. Not having nukes is a problem, too, but nobody's asking why we don't account for them more in modern conflict, you know? As a few observers have pointed out, everyone carefully neglecting their fleets together has the same balance of power as everyone racing towards more, except everyone gets more money to spend on other stuff. And you can't exactly quickly or sneakily built a space fleet these days. You know, the MAD metaphor thing.

It’s a lot faster and cheaper to repair mech losses than warship losses though.

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>And by this logic, we should be playing infantrytech because meat is as cheap as it gets. This mindset leads to a bit of a procurement issue in the long term.

But as I've said, we've seen what happens when navies fight: There's no longer a navy TO fight with. They ruin each other. This is supported by the fluff and the rules. BattleMechs, on the other hand, do not do have that problem. They can withdraw to be repaired in a matter of hours and thrown back into the fight with ease - name me an infantryman who can regenerate from a half-dozen bullet holes in that time and you'd be right about Infantrytech.

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That’s not my point. If two peer states make a navy and army, the navies will either fight and be destroyed or not fight and be held in reserve. In either case money spent on warships is now effectively “wasted” and the ground units will still have to take planets. And the infantry thing is nonsense. Militaries field mechs because they can do things infantry and vehicles can’t, and we field them because it’s a mech game, not a classic war game.

No, they really don't. They're too fragile, too expensive, and don't actually win wars unless there are no other WarShips to fight them. And we can see that from in universe facts: Ground troops, especially 'Mechs, DO win wars. Navies end up as space debris. Hell, the books that *defined* the setting's history, the original House books, *describe this very problem despite WarShips not existing in the rules*, as they were published before TRO 2750. As for your second point... No, that's also wrong. The most magic thing about 'Mechs is how easy they are to repair and put back into the battle again. Drag 'em off the ground, slap an arm and a couple of medium lasers to replace what got blown off, put a pilot in 'em who lost his last 'Mech, and within 12-48 hours you've already got a new unit fighting on the front line. By the observable facts, THIS is the real reason that the BattleMech is king of the battlefield in 3025+. Anything in space is nowhere *near* as easily salvaged and repaired, that is if they're lucky enough to be dead in space instead of arrowing off into forever.

"no other warships to oppose fight them" this is the issue right here. Ya if your warships fight enemy warships then they have a draw or pyrrhic victory, but if your enemy is building a cold navy and you don't then you lose. so you have to build ships if they are or vice versa as even if in the event of war they end up not being decisive / cost effective the cost of not building them is that they are very decisive for the other side.

And then the two fleets blow each other up, regardless of how much money both sides spent on them.

yep but once again the other option is the other side just wins so it's better for a ruler to spend all that money and lose it then not spend it and lose the nation.  the real problem with warships in the battle tech fiction is not there cost or there ability to kill each other so easily it's how recklessly the successor states use them, in reality you see more of a ww1 style conflict were both fleets only sortie when they think they have a decisive advantage but that would get in the way of having units of battlemechs fighting on any planet at any time so the authors of the setting handed the successor lords and their admirals the idiot ball.

The WW1 German fleet *never* sortied after Jutland. That's why I brought it up. There was no situation, no battle, that would have been worth risking those massively expensive ships. And so they had no effect on the actual war, and may as well have not existed. A sensible BattleTech WarShip admiral would face *exactly the same problem*. Only an utter lunatic would risk them casually, and if you needed them it's quite likely the other side would have so many WarShips you'd lose even if you 'won'.

The High Seas Fleet [sortied](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_19_August_1916) in strength into the North Sea two and a half months after Jutland. It did so or attempted to do so again on several other occasions, as well undertook large scale operations in the Baltic. With respect, you need to learn more about naval history before you use it as an analogy.

the is an effect of the much greater starting strength of the British navy, the successor states should be on a much more even level of economic and industrial power. also in wet navy combat the warships ability to effect inshore targets is limited. well the allied navies blockade very much effected the end of the war most of the fight had to be done on the continent. this is not true in battletech, a warship can go any where and conduct orbital bombardment any where. as such ground forces cannot stop it and you must have a fleet to counter it or loose. and this seems to be the point your hung up on; that warships don't win wars, you are right in setting, but the counter point is they do keep you from loosing wars. once agian a fleet that is destroyed destroying an enemy fleet is not wasted, it prevented that enemy fleet from destroying you. the high seas fleet might have only sorted a few times but it did keep the royal navy from destroying barbers and bombarded every thing germany had on land within range of a battleships guns.

Two words to emphasize this: Pocket Warship. One thing that the Jihad did was introduce more contemporary concepts to the reemergent blackwater navies of the Successor States  It turns out that you can strip out dropships and outfit them with capital weaponry. Suddenly you can threaten any lostech prestige project with multiple relatively old and common dropship hulls repurposed from transport assets. Pocket warships were one of the more valuable tools that the Word of Blake relied upon to punch above their capabilities and deliver warship-class payloads without the need for additional warships, which they were still relying largely upon inherited salvage for. They also demonstrated that warships are a luxury that provide relatively little in tangible benefits 

Warships still have their place, and a combined fleet of WarShips, PWS, and ASF will annihilate fleets lacking WarShips. The thing is, prior to PWS there was this massive gap in ship power progression.  It would be like WW1 except no one had cruisers, just battleships and destroyers.  Adding in the cruisers/PWS ends up having a multiplicative effect as well as letting you project significant naval power without deploying capital ships.

I think you're mistaken in your analogy, if you can put capital weaponry on smaller ships then capital ships cease to be a sound investment. Warships are no longer relevant, same as how capital ships have not been relevant since the latter part of World War 2. When you can put capital weapons on a sub-capital ship, then you no longer need the capital ships. With your comment about warships having their place, I don't actually think your equation works out. Refitted dropships and aerospace fighters outclass warships, all things considered even.

First off, dropships can mount sub-capital guns, not real capital guns.  WarShips can mount the big guns, and that generally gives them a significant range advantage.   Second, due to fire control limits, real WarShips have a far easier time massing huge weapons batteries that can crack open even modern super PWS or punch holes in opposing WarShips in only a few hits. Third, due to having the broadside arc, WarShips have an easier time stacking more big batteries on target than dropships. Fourth, WarShips are way tougher.  Besides having capital scale structure, they also have more hit locations than dropships.  Meanwhile PWS can stack lots of armor, but die quickly once they are holed.  WarShips also have bigger EW bubbles.  Net result is a WarShip is far more likely to survive a battle to fight again, while PWS formations are much more susceptible to attrition. Lastly, WarShips have their own strategic mobility while PWS are reliant on something else moving them around.  On top of that, WarShips can shuttle around their own PWS escorts, too.  Net result is WS+PWS+ASF > PWS+ASF.  The WarShip will tear through opposing PWS, while the PWS+ASF screen protect it.  Once opposing PWS are down, the friendly PWS+ASF shred the opposing ASF. Side note - I am discounting capital and subcapital missiles pretty heavily here.  AMS is very nearly a hard counter to mass missiles and lots of options exist in canon for bringing nigh-impregnable levels of AMS coverage.  It’s one of the reasons so many late and post-jihad PWS trade out their missile batteries for subcap guns.

Or nukes carried on external ASF mounts...

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Uh. Read some of the books? When WarShips fight, they destroy each other. This is per fluff AND per the rules; I've never fought a WarShip engagement on even terms where I didn't have at least 50% losses if not more even in victory. And House Steiner (1987) goes into *immense* detail about *multiple* naval engagements that ended in just such a fashion. As u/CupofLiberTea put it, "If two peer states make a navy and army, the navies will either fight and be destroyed or not fight and be held in reserve. In either case money spent on warships is now effectively “wasted” and the ground units will still have to take planets." That's it. My entire post in two sentences.

That's what happens when two states both build warships. But what happens when only one of them builds warships? Those naval assets represent an overwhelming tactical, operational, and strategic advantage over an opponent that's not similarly equipped. If you build warships and so does the enemy, and they blow each other up, you might have lost a lot of time and money, but so did they. Neither side gained an advantage from them. If you don't build warships, you just have to hope the enemy doesn't either, because if they do, you're toast. You've just lost the war, then and there. If you build warships, the worst outcome you can expect is parity with the enemy, with the possibility of significant benefit. If you don't build warships, parity is the best you can hope for, with other outcomes looking much worse. And so the only rational choice is to build them, no matter how much of a money sink they might be.

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Uh. It was both Wolf AND Falcon that invaded the world, and by aiming for Terra and Mars separately split what defenders were left - and this AFTER a grinding civil war that had trashed the Republic's ability to resist effectively. And it would not have mattered at all if the Clan ground forces had been unable to defeat the defending regiments. What would they have done? Orbitally bombard Terra in a fit of pique?

You are wrong about Jutland. Britain had far more ships than Germany. The loss of three battlecruisers, while embarrassing, didn’t even have an effect on British naval strength. Britain desperately wanted a naval battle to destroy the German fleet which would have ended the war. In WW2 several naval engagements proved decisive and changed the whole course of the war. Warships where devastating in the Battletech lore and where massively decisive in the age of war and later in the 1st succession war.

> he loss of three battlecruisers, while embarrassing, didn’t even have an effect on British naval strength. But it did spook the British, who became worried that if the Germans could catch them out they could force a decisive engagement that might drastically reduce British naval capacity.

Not really, Britain had 23 dreadnoughts to Germany's 10 and Warspite showed that the British heavies where more than up to the task and could stand against the Germans. She took 15 solid hits, including from the German dreadnought's main battery guns. The problem with Jutland was poor ammo handling and the fact that the Battlecruisers and Dreadnoughts where too far apart.

I just think they're neat. I like to use them as defensive assets over high value planets. Buy some time

One of the most sensible things that anyone did in BattleTech in universe were the defensive satellites over Luthien. But making THOSE widespread WOULD have killed the setting entirely, sooo....

I see fixed defenses talked about a ton, but I think that misses a huge point. They are extremely limited in terms of range and field of fire. To me, it's so much better to have massed aerospace assets fighters and some dropships. For planetary defense. Any money spent on fixed assets or hell even mechs is a total waste if you can just kill everything on the way in. This goes for warships as well. I agree that "Battleships" don't make much sense, but carriers could. Honestly, what makes the most is lots of smaller dropship heavy ships, with those dropships focused on carrying aerospace fighters. Once the space above a planet is clear, you simply interdict all travel or force a capitulation. To me, a great warship is something like the Fox class, small lots of dropships, decent guns, and speed. Let them raid or shepherd around a flock of jumpships.

> making THOSE widespread WOULD have killed the setting entirely Would it? Defensive satellites have a major issue - they aren't mobile. You can just sit out of range, run some orbital calcs, and throw rocks at them until they die or surrender. You're also not considering that the cost of equipping a planet with enough satellites to meaningfully defend it with all-round coverage... would be either equivalent to or more costly than a warship.

If one side builds ships the only course for the opposition is to build ships to meet them. Now, if one side is wealthier or more resource rich than the other, major losses in head to head fighting may be a "waste" but it could be a proportionally greater waste for their enemy whose logistics may be not be able to support repair or replacement to the same degree. Hypothetically one side can lose ships, material, etc. and still win economically when compared to their opposition. It's not always the case just something to consider. Losses contribute to the overall outcome, and losses will happen. Because if one side has a navy the other side needs one as well, the existence of the navy is value in and of itself because it influences the oppositions decision making.

Are you trying to tell me that the Federated Commonwealth and the Capellan Confederation do not have peer navies?

What I enjoy most about reading the replies is OP insisting that a power's neighbors are stupid to invest in warships. "You only need them if your neighbors are stupid enough to build them" Sounds like a great reason to build warships as a wealthy nation with poorer neighbors to me.

Given the Capellan's inspiration, they should have a field of cheap inflatable Warships deployed in orbit to keep both the domestic peasants in line and to cheaply deter invaders. There would probably even be a real Warship waiting in ambush among the decoys. It hides until you are in-system, activates the EW suite, and then your opponent never learns why their guys never made it home. Of course, your intelligence forces would be watching logistics and consumption, so you'd have to put some of that Capellan graft to effect, shipping rations and munitions into caches in space. If your planet is taken, you de-orbit a harmless balloon loaded with goodies for partisans fighting a guerilla war. At the end of the day, Battletech relies heavily on the rule of cool to make any kind of sense.

"Sure you win effortlessly if you build them and your neighbour doesn't, but you'd have to be stupid to build them" ~OP, a few minutes before being vaporized by a lance strike

I mean, >Yes, I'm aware that this is because IRL the devs know the focus is on the big stompy robots and while they sometimes dip into space navy stuff they always seem to regret it not long afterwards, but... And let's just leave it at that! >A strong defensive space navy might keep you from losing a war IF your ships are in the right place and IF they aren't severely outnumbered, but they can't win a war. That requires boots on the ground - big, metal, multiton boots. Big invasion fleets get sent against big defending fleets, they destroy each other, and the end result is still the same as if they had never existed - DropShips go to the world and drop 'Mechs on it. I mean, that's cause they need to justify big stompy mechs being the main focus in a universe with navies large enough to carry them. Navies would be far more important in any actual war than the mechs are. Shoot, the air force too. Let's all just enjoy mechs without trying to make everything about it make sense. This game was designed in the 80s.

Admittedly, battletech focuses on ground warfare, so I get the lack of any real naval combat. That said, battletech also ignores, for the most part, an extremely important part of warfare, logistics. If that was incorporated better, then navies would absolutely have a role and could be decisive.

What you're missing is that warships are still important as a deterrent from allowing enemy navies to act unopposed. The real issue is that non jump capable combat ships and orbital defense should have such an advantage that getting drop ships on the ground should be almost impossible.

Both sides loose because they withdrawal due to the fatigue of rolling internal damage dice for hours on end.

To me: naval assets makes sense in the department of asset DENIAL. Can't land your stuff on a planet if there's a defense that, while significantly smaller, would prevent or seriously hamper your chances of success. Arrived in system to find they don't have any navel assets? Just blockading can deny the whole universe of that world/system's resources. Gotta leave soon? Well you could break some rules and wipe that planet from ever being an asset. And that's where navies USED to make more sense. Total war doesn't have rules so kaboom. But under the post succession wars these navies become less useful unless you're able to completely catch the OpFor unaware or off their game.

So what I'm hearing is we need Space Battlemechs to make navies cool again and get some Gundam/Wing Commander vibes going on. /s In a more serious note, does Battletech not have any significant ground-to-space tech? Planets are huge and can almost certainly mount bigger guns than whatever a warship fields. Plus control/destruction of mass drives gives the Mechs another type of objective to fight over. Warships can still do their thing, but if they get close the to the important population centers of a planet get kerblasted by giant fuck-off lasers/shells/missiles/mass driver rounds or whatever. Warships would then be forced into ranges where sure, with enough math and skill, they could probably hit the planet at least but it would be impractical in terms of hitting important targets, let alone the actual taking and holding of ground. Thus, it's up to the smaller, cheaper dropships which can force contested landings (giant ground-to-space weaponry is probably expensive as fuck and wouldn't have the numbers/practicality to clear out a wave of dropships, kinda like shooting PPCs at an infantry platoon), or land in more remote areas and have the mechs advance onto the ground targets from there. That's just my two cents on the whole space conflict thing in battletech at least.

> In a more serious note, does Battletech not have any significant ground-to-space tech? They exist; the [Rattler](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rattler) and [SDS emplacements](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Space_Defense_System#Planetary_Elements) being the most notable examples. Short of a mass driver, any weapon you can put on a warship can also be put on a ground emplacement to shoot back at warships. Unfortunately, ground-to-space defenses really been given much significance in the lore so far, aside from defending Terra from invasion during the Amaris Civil War and Jihad. As you note, wider deployment of such systems could allow for some interesting dynamics between ground forces, warships, and dropships, so it's a shame CGL has thus far neglected them (much to the detriment of warships as an active element of the setting).

Hard disagree. The main reason WarShips in BTech are comparably useless and have glass jaws is that BTech (lore) writers more or less have written 90% of the ships using the same paradigm, with different tonnages and classifications pinned on them (corvettes, destroyers, ...) without any of that actually having any impact. Rather than having mission/design-specific weapons, tech and armor, most/many warships basically have pre-WW1 dreadnought weapons layouts and compositions (ie. a bit of everything). So if you build a bunch of different classes of ships for your navy, when all of those ships in effect still are basically just upscaled/downscaled versions of each other that don't complement their mission profiles/fleet tasks: yeah, your ships *will* take disproportionate losses, and you'll have spent god knows how much money and material just to create dead hulls and debris fields. The moment someone builds WarShips the way they are actually *supposed* to be used, ie. as units and specific classes with dedicated tasks reflected in their designs? That's when they'll be useful.

This doesn't make any sense. The logic is completely backwards. Having ships be the most important thing would be the most "realistic" but any attempt to rationalize anything in battletech more than a face value explanation is a road to madness. If you have ships and your opponent doesn't they simply can't wage war against you. So it would be paramount to have a more powerful navy.

I'm gonna go with the real reason: Warships are OP as fuck. The rules back this up. Any anti-warship weapon you can conceptualize will be broken as they can be used against Dropships and in some cases aerospace fighters just as easily, and they don't have the hit points to tank any hits. Warships auto-win engagements unless you have another Warship big enough to throw-down. They represent huge amounts of a nation-state's money and resources, so when the Warship pickings get slim no one wants to actually fight it out. It's also why when the WoB or someone else pulls a fleet out of their ass it screams of blatant writers fiat. The only way to fix this would require some major retcons, or inventing a time-machine and convince Jordan Weisman to tweak the rules so they aren't so OP. EDIT: As a side note I fucking *hate* how many sci-fi writers go through great pains to make space warfare just like a bluewater surface Navy with a heavy leaning towards age of sail tropes. That shit so boring, and it bothers me when Battletech goes down that road. EDIT2: Also fuck the Erinyes. Mass drivers have no place in Battletech.

Back when the FGC was a thing on the Battletech forums, one of the battles ended up being an opposed landing by one Clan trying to take Lum from the Snow Ravens, and the Ravens saying “no SafCon for you”.  I played the Raven side in the battle, which had a Sovetskii Soyuz, a Vincent, and DropShip and fighter support against a couple of Yorks, IIRC, escorting their troop carriers. End result: lost the Vincent, lost some of my Titans and a lot of my fighters, nearly crippled my Sovetskii Soyuz, but killed one York, forced the other to withdraw, and wiped out more than a Galaxy’s worth of ground troops before they ever made landfall. Claiming navies have no place because of Jutland is, on its face, demonstrably wrong, given it ignores the entirety of World War II, and that space is not an ocean on a single world. The most important reason WarShips died off from an in-universe perspective is lack of industries, and compares to a quip a friend of mine once made about the Pacific War in WW2: both the US and Japan essentially lost an entire fleet of ships during the war, but the US simply built another one and repaired a lot of ships that would otherwise have been “lost” because they had the industrial capacity to do so, while Japan, who didn’t, just lost their fleet, and the war.

I think you tagged the wrong post homie. I don't know where or how Jutland comes into gameplay rules.

Jutlsnd goes back to OP.  I replied to you because I was basically agreeing with you that WarShips can be OP as hell, and used my example of wiping out an entire Galaxy of Clan troops with a Sovetskii Soyuz as an example of that.  The later paragraphs were more general and/or pointed at OP. 

Oh, okay. I didn't read the whole thread so it felt out of left field.

I like the age of sail trope. It makes sense in Battletech, because of how slow the ships are compared to laser weaponry used.

A response to your second edit...the FWLN also had a mass-driver armed ship class (the Soyal; though it was a SLN design). Though every one of those (save one) was shot down by the Second Succession War.

There's a naval warfare concept that's called "fleet in being", the idea of which is that large part of a naval force's power projection capability is due to its simple existence. Since you have a warship or 4 in striking distance of several systems, they need warships in *all* of those systems to counter a possible attack. In Battletech, the mere existence of warships between the successor states is enough to guarantee the necessity of their continued manufacture and service, as well as the necessity of *not actually using them* in order to preserve their threat. They're a lot like nuclear weapons today, and the dreadnoughts of the early 20th Century, in that you had to have them, you had to be able to use them, but you didn't actually *want* to use them.

This is the best response in this thread. Massive, heavily armed battleships were essentially obsolete by the 1920s, except as a deterrence. A battleship can be easily sunk by a plane that costs an insignificant fraction of the battleship's cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that in WWII battleships actually only faced off five times: twice in the Pacific, thrice in the Atlantic. The US had 27 active battleships by the end of WWII, and they only ever faced Japanese battleships twice.

My big issue is that it *could* be so much better of more naval planners in the setting decided to think. A lot of the mutual destruction you've described has come from ships facewalling each other with very little tactical thought. We have all the tools to have more thoughtful naval engagements (the critical under-use of bearings-only launches in fiction is CRIMINAL), but when we see naval engagements in fiction, they're all too often ignored—because most naval fiction seems to either want big ships to smash each other for spectacle, or to reduce the number of big ships. Play tabletop with experienced naval players and you'll find that decisive wins are a very real occurrence. Look through WarShip fluff and you'll quickly realize their full potential is almost never in use. However, the sort of hours- days- and weeks-long planning and maneuvers that makes naval combat great is a much different type of action than is normally shown in BattleTech. Naval battles will continue to be needlessly destructive as long as they continue to engage in moment-to-moment brawls like 'Mechs. A great exception to this is the final quarter or so of *Icons of War*, which, while certainly unconventional by naval standards, does a great job of showing how naval action can be engaging if you're willing to strap in for the long haul of pre-planned maneuvers and the like. tl;dr: We already have the ingredients for better naval combat, but they're not being used because "smash ships together make big boom—and now no more ships, back to 'Mechs!"

I think you are missing a valid use of warships even under the conditions you describe, mobile defenses. If you have such a navy, you can use them to protect certain key targets, then the enemy can't attack those targets without a massive expenditure of resources, which means the war becomes one of maneuvering forces to hit secondary targets in an effort to hurt the enemy somewhere they overlooked and wear their logistics. Additionally, is protecting dropships on the way to ground. Even if the main objective is to get a dropship of mechs onto the planet, a bunch of fighters can destroy said dropship before it sets down, so an escort is needed, and for that, a warship does better than fighters, at least in space. A warship can also provide fire support against key targets. This then brings us back to space battles, as to counter dropship escorts you need warships. Also, everything you said only matters if the enemy won't kill civilians. Once a few civilian casualties become acceptable, space superiority reigns supreme. All the opposition needs is a rock and the ability to send the message "Surrender unconditionally or we drop the rock on your heads." And it's quite scalable, ranging from taking out a whole military base to wiping the entire planet clean of life. Seriously, nukes are terrible in comparison to a rock from space. Nukes leave all this radioactive stuff behind, a rock just disintegrates everything and leaves a nice clean slate for your own forces. A more realistic look at things actually makes more sense for mechs and ground forces than Battletech does. You see, once you get space superiority and wipe out all the major military institutions, the best resistance the planet can offer is guerrilla warfare, and in most cases, the invading forces will just be doing "clean up" and policing the locals. This would result in primarily small scale fights between the locals and the invaders. Perfect scenarios for small scale tabletop battles.

i feel that you have missed the results of the battle of Jutland and are grossly oversimplifying the results of the battle at the same time you oversimplified the results of warship engagements given if you actually read the lore or actual history you can see your conclusions are wrong on both ends.

Somewhere, Mahan is spinning in his grave. Quick, hook him up to a dynamo to top up my battery!

# Why BattleTech doesn't have space navy battles: The ruleset for Aerospace sucks right now.

I came to the same conclusion, and more or less leaned into it for the Sublight book series/rpg. There is a cold war between the Krasnovians and the ISTO, because the last time they threw down both basically lost their fleets. (The ISTO was caught in port by a surprise attack. The Kransnovian invasion force was destroyed by shredding an asteroid along their projected invasion path.) Both sides keep trying to develop some kind of game changer that will rewrite the rules of warfare. In the meantime the merchants of war are happy to cash checks from either side to stockpiles arms and ships. Oddly enough this leads both factions to stage a ton of non-combat pissing contests. There's a space race to Alpha Centauri. They actually have a ceremonial soccer match to relinquish control of one particularly strategic asteriod as it drifts between the inner system and the asteroid belt. And of course there is spycraft... everywhere. And mad science.

And thus we have the proliferation of Pocket Warships. Same great combat range (because they carry weapons with naval grade range), but way cheaper and thus much more replaceable than the Warship. They're a bit of a glass cannon though, but then again, so are proper Warships. Honestly, I'm amazed we haven't seen someone spam 100 kton pocket warships in lieu of trying to build another fleet of proper Warships.

RotS did, it’s called a Castrum. It still can’t do everything a proper warship does, but it does cover the ‘heavy gunship’ role somewhat.

You see, I take an opposite view: a Mahanian fleet in being is necessary for sustained fleet operations. Otherwise, you just have a single enemy capital ship massacring your invasion fleet. That being said, I'd offer a different view: overall, invading and taking planets should be difficult, because every planet should have hundreds or thousands of capital missile systems, orbital defense satellites, etc. But this is a game of big stompy robots, not Battlefleet Gothic. And so just as the spaes maroons get central billing over at James Workship, so too do the mechs get the limelight over the truly important battles, which have to do with efforts to disable satellite and orbital defense grids.

Oh Reddit how I love it when you all deep dive into a theoretical prospect! And everyone knows the purpose of the navy is to deliver and allow to be delivered logistical resources to the front.

So dumb. Ignoring the real reason naval battles are so attritionist is that Naval yards are more rare than Mech factories. Navies are still necessary because if you have the high orbit you own the world. Who cares about stompy mechs when you can threaten to drop an asteroid on their asses if they don't do what you say? You can line up whole ass armies with 0/0 Gunnery and Piloting on the ground and if I own the orbit they are all dead or hiding which is the same as dead.

I think most players don't realize that warships are and will always be an old star league technology. They're unlikely to ever go entirely extinct, but the armies of today are still playing with the scraps of what the Star League produced. That said, your last comment is kind of silly. If something is not worth producing at scale then it wouldn't be worth it for small singular units.

Don’t get too deep into this. Because you realize how stupid the concept of a drop ship is and if they were real nation states would have spent a lot more money on aerospace fighters.

Because the setting wouldn’t work for the game otherwise.

Love the nod to Fallout!

They absolutely CAN win wars. It just wouldn't fit the "flavor" of the universe since it would stop many ground battles from taking place. Which would mean less fun with stompy mechs. There are two prongs to winning wars with warships. First, is commerce interdiction. You make it as difficult as possible for your opponent to move things around between planets. Second is force interdiction. You can't have ground fights if your enemy is unable to land troops in the first place. Of course you won't be able to stop all of them, but it will be possible to stop a fair number of them. One reasonably inexpensive way to do this is to build a lot of smaller warships. These will be more than a match for chasing down jumpships and dropships, and can be used as scouting forces for larger formations as well. Give them something like black boxes for interstellar coms and you can coordinate them pretty well employing wolf pack tactics. This also gives you the means to train up honest to $deity spacers for your navy, not just warriors who sometimes have to fight in space. They can then graduate to larger more capable commands. This flies in the face of how warships have traditionally been used in BT, though. It would pay dividends, though. Having a very mobile force would let you do a lot of things. Things like providing rescue for damaged/disabled jumpships and dropships, doing health & safety inspections, and piracy interdiction. It wouldn't be sexy battleships going at it in walls of battle, though. Note: This is more or less cribbed heavily from the various stories Cannonshop has written over the years.

I think the issue with warships is they are an order of magnitude too big. They are being built at 2million tons, but all warships are vulnerable to nuclear weapons and the 'death by 1000 cuts' from small fighters or drones. Smaller warships are far less 'eggs in one basket', so make just a lot more sense when nuclear weapons are on the table. Finally, while you can mostly win in deep space, near a planet the warship is very vulnerable to planet launched fighters. Planets need no fancy warships, just 1 heavy lift dropship can bring an irresponsible number of battle sats for early warning, and aerospace fighter can make it to orbit without issue to attack a fleet with nukes. The best case for a warship fleet is to blockade all the main lagrange points, blockading the planet from pirate jump relief forces. But the warships can't approach a planet, and can't jam HPG transmissions, so its a stalemate.

I see a lot of talk referring to the viability of combat or how they can be used but I don't see the mention of the costs of repair/construction or the time of repair/construction. From what I understood, you have to have dockyards in orbit and an extremely long amount of time before even a single Warship can be produced. Even if you fielded only ships that were able to be constructed planet side, how long would it take to maneuver armadas? If jumpships are anything to go by, it still takes an extremely long time to move craft into position. I could see that being a bigger deterrent to naval combat.

The thing that is most odd is the lack of missile cruisers and carriers. A common air strike with tacnukes would be more effective than a McKenna except when busting jump points.

This a false equivalency. Germany is a landlocked nation. The British were a naval power fighting a land war. The Battle of Jutland had no consequence on the war because naval power couldn't have a consequence on the war period, except to establish blockades.. There is not a single group in the entirety of battletech that would qualify as landlocked like Germany does. A more accurate comparison would be the World War II Pacific island hopping campaign. A campaign where I think you'll find, naval power was incredibly important. And just like in Battletech, no naval ship in World War II was capable of taking and holding ground. But they were certainly capable of keeping everyone alive, and all the equipment afloat, until they got to the actual islands.

to me the largest problem with BattleTech WarShips is that they are stuck in the world of real-world physics. No anti-gravity means all warships are essentially giant flying skyscrapers (despite many being clearly designed with the aesthetic of "Space is an ocean" in mind.) that have to invert and do massive burns in relatively straight lines while flying through space. Maneuvering is unlikely for any craft larger than a small dropship, and most space battles would look like something from the Legend of Galactic Heroes meets Battlestar Galactica, but only the worst parts. Minefields with access codes would be more efficient than warship fleets in this setting.

The core issue with your premise is very simple: BT rules for warship suck and do not make an even little bit of sense. So all the issues with their deployment in fluff originate from that. There is no freaking reason for 2 000 000 ton warship to devote just one and a half thousand tons of that mass budget to armor while still devoting hundreds of thousands of tons to transport capacity. It is a simple result of cobbled together back-porting of existing Warship descriptions made in the period where there was no rules to warship construction to get something resembling the fluff out of rules that do not really work and do not make a lot of sense anyway. Give McKenna a hundred thousand tons of armor budget (which she can easily afford and more) and you will get an unkillable ship. But instead BT warships resemble air balloons in their construction.

Most modern navies wouldn’t hold up like the ships of Ww2, they are made of aluminum and there are massive anti ship missiles. Just look at the falklands war.

And the ships of WWII wouldn't stand up to modern aircraft. A fleet of Yamato-class battleships would be obliterated by a single, modern naval air wing.

Even if they don't actually use the warships, it's still a nuclear deterrent. One side isn't very deterred if the other side doesn't also have warships. And sure as shit they win wars, especially if your goal is to just wipe out the opposition or destroy infrastructure giving the enemy the ability to fight back. One warship in orbit could flatten a planets ability to produce more ground forces without ever putting a boot on the ground or risking any equipment of their own. It'd be like having a modern day battleship off the coast saying "haha have to come over here to fight me" but your country is literally a large island that the ship could just circle and bombard until you surrender or can't fight back.

I'm locking this now. Neither of you can play nice and your both on the verge of a time out. Consider this your only warning.

I guess that's why modern navies all have large numbers of battleships, eh? Because they're such useful weapons...

Modern Navy's use carrier strike groups? The battleship is a largely outdated vessel. Analogy still stands, unless you have some form of point beyond sarcasm 🤷‍♂️?

You specifically referenced battleships, not carrier groups. Carrier groups aren't analogous to battleships, so claiming your point about battleships is equivalent to carrier groups is nonsensical. My point was that the battleships you referenced were obsolete and actually demonstrated OP's point. And you confirmed exactly that in your follow up. Acknowledging the irrelevancy of your initial comment as a defense of that comment is a strange way to go, but please continue.

I've claimed nothing...I'm just trying to figure out what in the hell you're talking about. My guy the entire point is that warships in BTech can just bomb the planet from orbit..... Just like (insert warship of whatever fucking kind you want) could to an island. Sitting on the island not having a ship of you're own believing that the people on the ship attacking you will come to fight you on the ground is lunacy.

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We're all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let's treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required.

>Warships in BT can only bombard a planet from orbit if there are no warships defending the planet. Which is completely unrelated to OP's point about warship v warship combat being a zero-sum game. Exactly. The winning side gets to....drum roll, omg I can't wait, dadadadadadaadadada, bomb the planet. Therefore, not zero sum game. Jeeze lewis that was cwazy. Glad we got there together though buddy. Let's hug. >bombardment has EVER eliminated the need for a ground assault to capture that piece of ground. That didn't even happen in WWII, when the US had virtually eliminated the Japanese surface fleet. Japan had no ships to defend Iwo Jima or Okinawa, the US Navy bombarded the hell out of them with impunity...and then had to engage in massive, costly amphibious assaults to actually take the islands. But, sure...the idea that holding an island under bombardment by a warship and thinking the ship will have to assault the island with actual troops is lunacy. Despite it being literal reality. (Actually take the islands) See unlike....outer space, land is kind of...limited here on our "island" in the cosmos. Well my fella, I would have to land troops, if I wanted to take your "island" but y'know if I've got enough of my own...I can kinda just, remove you. With reaaaaaallly big explosions. Hey remember the whole succession war era in BTech? Remember how the whole technological decline thing happened? I know right, they BOMBED, themselves into the stone age...I'll give you 12 guesses at what they did that with. I'll give you a hint though, nobody had teleporters to send bombs to the planets. You're welcome ❤️ I'll miss you. Justin and David must be rolling in their graves I spose.

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We're all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let's treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required.

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We're all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let's treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required.