Evyn replied to me:
All the Amphibious Tractors are a wonderful load of trade-offs, they
are slow in the water, limited to how much armor they can carry, and
the sheer number of Jarheads they have got to move. Not to mention the
inherent limitation of how close to the beach their launching ship has
to be. But it is the same sort of question you asking which about what
the minimums are. The aforementioned Amtrac has got to float and be
maneuverable in water, carry a minimum amount of armor, generally
defence vs artillery fragments and have some on board self defense.
SoP is for it to progress to the Area of Operations and to deploy it's
troop compliment a the nominal point of contact with the opposing
forces. Then to remain in contact with it's troops as a mobile
baseline of their operations with limited contribution to their base
of fire.
That would mean at TL11 ground force flyers are still different from
Marine flyers, because ground forces need "real" AFVs.
One dividing line is supersonic speed -- if it is supersonic it can also go
to orbit -- and another dividing line is more than 3 or 4 G acceleration. 3
G from multiple separate thrusters is enough to keep a VTOL flying with
redundancy on any reasonable planet. What cut are you willing to accept in
the armor and armament so that your AFV can keep up with Navy forces
maneuvering at 6 or 8 G?
At this point you're kinda backwards, in that the Naval assets job in
escorting you is to keep the bad guys away.
Is it the Navy's job to escort the landing forces all the way into the
atmosphere?
Here we are in the Helo
model, in comparison to jet fighters Helos and even the Osprey are
much slower that and as such they will use the Marine flight as their
baseline to flit out and provide Air Superiority and Ground Fire
suppression in the zone that could affect the APC.
If you get the escorts into the murk, is it with short-range fighters or
with long-range starships? Sure, the ships are expensive and valuable,
but they're also much tougher than a dinky little fighter.
And you could take the LST-equivalent directly down to the planet to
deploy tanl-equivalent and IFV-equivalent flyers.
Also consider this the sprint to orbit and beyond is a special
evolution in that the craft might only need the reserves to do it as
exit strategy.
If you need an exit strategy for ground forces, can you make pickup in
orbit or do you need a hyperdrive to get into the outer system?
A VTOL tank could have more than 10k points of frontal armor, and side armor
in the high thousands. A FTL-capable dropship would be in the low thousands,
even without long-occupancy bunkrooms.
The question here is How much armour does it need to get it's baseline
mission done? Note most troops assigned to APCs tend to have some
anti-armor capability native to their normal equipment load out, said
Anti-Armor is usually more than enough to do for the APC as well i.e.
disable.
Enough to force enemy infantry and battlesuits to use heavy weapons with
few shots, to slow them down. That is, as much as possible within the
other design limits.
Regards,
Onno
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