One Sentence.... 'Ion Cannons are expensive!" Plus Ion Cannons just aren't lying around for ready purchase. And the Rebel Alliance didn't have "ready cash" just laying around!
Ground to orbit weapons are another odd part of Star Wars. Ships are small. Planets are big. It takes time for fire to reach orbit. If the ships could detect a large weapon firing they could in theory move out of the way. That and the defending planet needs a quite large array across the planet to be effective.
One must assume that in reality energy weapons move much faster than they are shown on the screen to illustrate the presence of the weapon to the audience.
Well if energy weapons are going the speed of light, then the enemy will only see you shooting the moment the weapon hits. Because of the speed of light goes both ways you don't know when the other guy shoots at you with energy weapons. Continuous strategic evasive maneuvers using a computer with a really good RNG just isn't interesting visually, even if it's optimal for survival. It's just rolling dice at that point.
Yeah but as long as the time it take the projectile to hit its target is shorter than the time the ship need to get out of the way it will work. and the given range of the ion cannon in canon and the video of it, does show the projectile is really fast. Yeah the planet need a large array but the size of the planet is also a problem to the attacker, as they would need large number of ship to be able to attack the whole surface of the planet in a reasonnable amount of times, thoug they have the advantage of being able to concentrate their forces unlike static defense. Then again it is a static weapon using terrain to its advantage in logic it should be cheaper than a star destroyer. The same way tanks and self propelled artillery are way more expensive than towed artillery, and static artillery, which contribute to negate the ability of the attacker to concentrate forces to breach the defenses, as you will simply have more gun than him. The only real downside i can see is the inability of the weapon to hit target that aren't in direct line of sight, given the point of them is to have the range advantage, if the planet is not entirely covered with them or its firing zone doesn't cover hyperspace lane entry point, or you can't force the enemy in its firing zone, they are kind of useless as they are too easy to outmaneuver, and negate the range advantge it would be cheaper and more effective to just install regular starship turbolaser on the ground.
Outside Star Wars, one of the truisms of space combat in sci fi is "He who holds the orbitals, holds the world." For that matter, if you hold a planet's orbitals, you don't NEED cannon to bombard it. Any large rock dropped from orbit at high velocity will hit with the force of several nukes.
Your description of the ground to space weapons reminds me of the criticism the Maginot Line gets for not stopping the germans from invading. However it did exactly what it was supposed to do, slowed the enemy down.No sane strategist thought it could hold indefinitely, but it would slow the enemy down until the proper defense units could be mobilized. Of course the way the Germans bypassed most of it and their tactics in dealing with the mobile defense forces was unexpected and unprecedentedly successful, but that's a separate issue. But much like the Maginot Line, the planetary guns are there to slow down an invasion, but realistically only a fool or a planet with an insane budget would think they could fend off a concentrated effort indefinitely with just those weapons. But they will buy time for shields or mobile defense forces to respond.
Captain Mainwaring: "They'll never get through the Maginot Line" Sergeant Wilson: "They didn't" Captain Mainwaring: "You see" Sergeant Wilson: "They went around the side" Captain Mainwaring: "They...? That's a typical shabby Nazi trick"
@@ZoeMalDoran I realize you're quoting a joke, but the French actually expected to go around the Maginot line, and planned for it. The idea was that whenever hostilities became inevitable the British and French would move into Belgium and take up defensive positions along the many canals and rivers. The problem was that the Belgian king still had hopes of remaining neutral, and so didn't allow the British or French to move in until the Germans invaded. That left the Allies scrambling to push northeast as fast as the could, leaving a gap between the southern edge of the advancing forces and the northern edge of the Maginot line. At the Ardenne forest
The French did make one critical mistake with the Maginot Line--they assumed the Germans couldn't get through the heavily forested Ardennes. But the Germans managed to get through with both infantry and tanks, swinging around the end of the Line and taking it with ease.
Why does the ground-based weaponry have to be so much larger than ship-based weaponry? My guess would be that they are designed to shoot through atmosphere and up a gravity well they need to be far more powerful to reach their targets; presumably, that would mean that while a Star Destroyer can effectively bombard a planet from space (down a gravity well), one parked at ground level could not effectively shoot space forces.
It is more likely a practical thing. You have a static gun and a giant power source (since you have no limitations like space ships) so you make it as big as possible in order to do most of your hits
It's not necessarily that they have to be larger. Rather, go the other way, a starship has limited space, and either have to accept a large quantity of smaller turbo lasers and other weapons, or a smaller quantity of very heavy weapons. A planet does not have that sort of limitation. You can build a ground-based weapon as large as you want to make it, and as large as you're able to make it (accounting for cost, materials, power supply, so on and so forth). While it is true that a ground-based weapon system needs to have sufficient power to fire through the atmosphere (and escape the gravity well), the fact that the atmosphere and the above surface gravity well is so miniscule compared to the absolute size of the planet makes it a rather small issue, easily dealt with by the amount of potential available power on the massive installation. On the other hand, even though a starship can fire down into the gravity well and have that extra velocity and momentum built up because of how quickly a starship can move compared to a stationary (relatively speaking), it still needs to draw on a comparatively smaller potential available power source to direct its shots down to the surface, and if it's a ship with a lot of smaller weapons, it may not have the power to penetrate the atmosphere with its weapons in sufficient power to actually do damage. Atmosphere may be permeable, but it's still a relatively dense area, compared to deep space, and all those particles in the atmosphere can diffuse the energy brought by any weapon. One reason why both Death Stars, both Eclipses and Starkiller Base were so massive compared to other ships/stations was because they needed the space to put the energy generation to power their superweapons, and while those weapons could break through atmosphere and so much more, if they didn't have the power, they'd be useless. But there were so few of those built cause of the massive costs and challenge in building, the same general problem massive ground-based weapons have. So, yeah, ground-based weapons can be larger, not because they have to be, though it helps, but because they can be. Starship weapons do have to be larger to be effective, otherwise, they're not going to have the power to do any real damage to ground targets, but because of the limited size of ships and the cost of building bigger ships, there have to be trade-offs. Either a planet busting ship that can barely handle space combat (like the Eclipse) or a humongous ship/station that takes a very long time to build, but can planet bust and handle space combat, like the Death Stars and Starkiller Base. Or you can build hundreds and thousands of ships with smaller weapons and use them to try to boil an atmosphere away with saturation bombardment heating up the atmosphere and eventually glass the planet.
The main reason why is they'd have to have a much faster shot to engage a small ship rather then the ship that can freely dodge incoming fire, unless the facility itself moves, or your changing the planets orbit, the attackers will know exactly where your firing postions are, so they need to be able to fight atmosphere and hit the target, while space forces in comparison are just putting a circle into the circle hole
The star destroyer also has to go through the atmosphere to fire, the only difference is gravity. Also it is stated those weapon have greater range than star destroyer turbolaser.
You may have missed the Battle of Scrim Island as depicted in the first of the new Thrawn novels. An island protected by a planetary shield, a single turbolaser and four ion cannons made mincemeat out of the Star Destroyer Judicator. It even opened and closed the shield before the Imperials could effectively counterattack. And the planet, Batonn, wasn't some ultra-wealthy core world.
And also Thrawn was able to exploit the problem of needing to lower the shield to fire. When they opened the shield he would fire on the weapon being exposed.
@@moffjendob6796 It wasn't quite that simple. In the novel, Thrawn had to gather intel first then carefully plan his tactics and coordinate his fleet during the battle. It contrasted greatly with what the previous Imperial admiral did, which was basically "shoot them when they pop up." That didn't work out so well for him.
That because Disney went and threw away all the old Canon so they could say what ever they wanted and rewrite what ever they want because nothing before they owned it matters anymore.
As someone who worked in air defense, surface to air missiles and surface to air artillery, I take issue with this. Except when it comes to planetary shields. There is a reason why militaries around the world invest so heavily on these and related systems. It’s because they work. Even when it comes to planetary shields, a planet has a whole lot more resources and energy at its disposal than a fleet does. That is except when it comes to food supply. Because for whatever reason ecumenopolis in most scifi series have decided that it would be easier to just import their food and produce any for themselves.
It does seem to be dismissed a little too easily. If nothing else, an array of ground to space weapons can enforce a standoff distance against the ships which are large enough to have sufficient firepower to bombard the surface. Rather than a group of star destroyers have the liesure to take the best position to bombard the surface they have to be far enough to take evasive maneuvers when the surface cannons fire which could also put them far enough out of position to prevent them from exploiting the temporary hole in the shield. It seems to presume that the fleet has a significant advantage in firepower over the surface defenses, that the latter can only make a few pot shots while the fleet can fire on them. When coupled with surface defenses, a shield might not need to be complete impregnable to be effective. Merely reducing the fleet's firepower to the point that it doesn't do significant damage by the time it reaches the surface ought to be sufficient to give the defenders an advantage.
@@MalfosRanger And then the ground assault problem. Where you have maybe, maybe a few thousand troops take over a planet with a populations numbering in the millions, if not billions or more. “We’ve captured the capital building!” “Sir, the planet is ours.” The scales are all wrong.
it does kill me that the idea of starving a planet out is the main thought a siege in Star Wars. Star Wars is mostly filled with Garden Worlds and home worlds... a lack of food won't be the problem, more likely a lack of luxury goods, specialized medicines, and specialized technologies would be.
I like the conceptual idea of it working like 19th century ships and forts. The fort is vastly more durable than the ships, but it is immobile. In a straight slugging match, the fort with either come out on top or inflict massive casualties, so fleets almost always avoid direct bombardment and try to find ways around the fort.
Pretty much anything would've been a better option. Using Legends numbers (so take a grain of salt) the cost of a single Death Star would be enough to fund the construction of enough Tie Defenders for every Imperial Star Destroyer with some left over for other ships or planetary defense units.
Realized something, you don’t need a shield to cover a whole planet just over the key areas. Set up mobile defense systems to target landing craft and support, use the shields to funnel the invaders into an area of your choice. Basically use the shields and the ground to orbits as a bait to force the invaders into a disadvantaged area.
Makes sense, you've essentially created a planetary scale Maginot Line which is far more likely to work when you don't have neuteal countries creating weak points (IE Belgium).
and cover said area with over lapping fields of fire, with OTT amount of turrets, with massive power supplies to the state of literally one shot landing crafts, so even if they send 200 landing craft at a time, not a single ship gets with in 1000 ft of the ground. Like most it all comes down to resource and planning. If you have limit turrets, then like you said use shields to funnel into a kill zone for your turrets, if you a rich MF, then F it just go completely all out OTT with defences.
Honestly, i would think that planetary Weapons would actually be cheaper to build. Going back to to WW2 inspirations of star wars, they could be "shore batteries". Additionally, I think some of the problems with planet based weapons comes back to star wars writers having no sense of scale. If you can build a spaceship the size of a star destroyer, building a single weapon that's upscalled a bit is much, much easier. You can still build them in orbit and bring them down through heavy transports, so you don't don't need dedicated on-world manufacturing. Of course, a lot of this has to do with most planets in star wars being really, really poorly optimized. There's typically only a few cities and maybe a few million residents on a planet, and that's over the course of thousands of years of colonization. A single planet of average habitability for most species should be able to produce pretty much everything it would need by itself, especially with the heavy use of Droid automation. Planetary shields not being something that can be shot through seems to go against how most shields are presented, such as ship shielding, so that's not a very good explanation imho. A planet could easily possess multiple fleet's worth of firepower, even if it's just Concentrated around the main capital. I just think planetary defenses are underrepresented in sci-fi, along with how ground invasions tend to just be "We captured this single city and now the planet is ours!"
The weapon itself is less the driving point of costs, the power supply is. You dont just set up a cannon somewhere in a concrete bunker and bring it some ammo. Building a sufficent power source is expensive, even more so when it also needs to be fortified.
@@toastyrules8221 Ye no. Its still wayyyyyy cheeper. As the original commentor put it, not enough effort is put into writing planetary defense. Think on it for a bit. A ship's reactor is limited by the size and class of ship yet can mount an impressive array of turbolasers, point defense lasers, ion cannons etc. So a upscaled ion cannon or hypervelocity gun would be easy to power since the reactor doesnt have the limitation of being ship locked. The power generator or reactor could power the shield and defense array relatively easily and it would be quicker and cheeper than building a single capital ship. Droids are a thing. Orbital shipyards too. With the tech we have seen it is very possible. Only reason that we dont see it is narrative biases.
@@ADB_UWIM_2807 the entire scaling and combat strategies applied for spaceflight species of Star Wars is way off, if you ask me (specifically for movies and cartoons - I do not know how are represented in the books), and planet defenses are also poorly represented because of this. We don't really see smart weapon systems with self-guidance and navigational systems but most of the times there are "dumb" weapons used in close combat (almost like "melee" combat), we know the Star Wars weapons are using ammunition (being batteries, gas canisters etc) and fuel yet we don't see any issues with ammunition & fuel scarcity especially for the rebels and projectile traveling speed seems inconsistent, we have "laser/plasma" weapons with fast-firing projectiles and other times their travel speed is so slow, you can physically walk away from it's path and the list goes on. There are some specific advantages of surface planetary defenses that are not represented in the movies. You can actually encapsulate most of the defense battery's structure inside a permanent shield and it would be easier and cheaper to fuel it on a planet's surface (could also go with something self-sustainable like subteranean thermal energy) than in space. You can leave only the gun itself exposed to fire at all times without any shield hindrance and just protect the rest of the structure around it with the energy shield, the gun will also be a very small target and it would be very hard to hit especially from space (even with guided targeting systems) and if you get a battery of 3-4 guns like this around a base, you already have a pretty solid defense that would make any enemy think twice before attacking you and you would force the enemy to not engage you directly, making any dirrect fire to the gun difficult. You're also allowed to dig into the ground and use the natural shielding of a planet's surface to protect the underground facilities if you go deep enough (in space they would be fully exposed unless you would build a really strong shield around the power generator, fuel storage and others) and most ship weapons won't be able to penetrate, unless we talk about specialized siege ships and planet-killer superweapons. Also, being on a planet's surface you can focus on having big enough firepower and projectile speed to knock out any enemy ship that is on direct path towards your base and focus on long-range interception within the vicinity of your planet and this will give you some tactical protection from space bombardments and direct assault of the base or encircling your entire planet and get caught in a blocade. Instead, it will force the enemy to go around you for ground assaults and buy some time for defense preparations or tactical retreat. If the rebels would have enough resources, 2 groups of 3-4 gun batteries each, on a planet's surface on opposite hemisferes would give a great tactical advantage and allow for a potent planetary defense system, as long as it is co-ordinated with allied defense fleet and other combat groups. But, to be honest - I would see these kinds of strategies working in favor of planetary defense forces instead of the rebels, where you have a planet and a population to defend and you can co-ordinate the planetary defenses with your own planetary fleet of combat ships. The rebels lack the numbers and firepower to go toe-to-toe with the Empire so it's not feasible for them, but still - having just 1 of these bad boys near your base would make any capital ship captain prudent and less direct in his tactics to attack your forces.
@@urlauburlaub2222 there are a few key issues with the logic explained: 1. Energy dissipation works with range, which means the longer the object you're attacking the more energy you need per shot to obtain it. 2. You also have energy loss if the said target is in atmosphere so you must compensate for it when you're doing orbital attacks. 3. Orbital strikes are already long-range, since all engagements happen in space from thousands of kilometers away or more, while most ship space-combat depicted in Star Wars is usually hundreds of meters at best. 4. A competent spaceship and fleet composition would be the most effective technology available with the least risks involved. In Star Wars, a pretty big self-guided torpedo would be better than any laser-guided weapon depicted since you can equip that torpedo with a self-guiding system, programmed to evade any defense fire thrown at it. I mean, for crying out loud, we have a million-language-talking robots with self-conscience and abilities to make complex tasks and mimic sentient organisms in the depicted universe yet they can't make a guidance system solely programmed for attack/evasion? Not to mention all those "wonder" weapons and technologies that defy any other tech and system described in Star Wars. As a comparison and a good analogy, the Star Wars civilitations are described as today's safari/jungle tribes warring themselves with modern vehicles, firearms and an ocasional cannon or rocket launcher, using Victorian Era combat strategies.
@@urlauburlaub2222 points 1,2 and 3 are available for any kind of energy-based weapon. Even in space, for any set distance there is an energy loss even for light due to it's dispertion in interaction of various kinds of radiations, particles, gravitation fields etc. It's not the mass of the "plasma bolt" or any mumbo-jumbo Sci-Fi tries to explain, any energy projectile - be it gas-based or light-based- has a stored energy within it based on it's dimensions/energy of fire and will lose energy with any atmosphere it passes on within it's travel distance, space void being the only place where you can call it as "neglejible" for short-travel distances since there is a small chance to meet any particle or any kind of interaction that could cause energy dispersion. This is why "However, bolts increase their power while falling. " is a false statement - even if Star Wars tries to explain it like this, they're not kinetic weapons to act like this. If they would use rods or any kind of projectile that could survive atmosphere re-entry, then yes, it would be valid. 4. + 5.: they have strong warheads. We saw them being used again and again even in the old moviess, they're capable of doing anti-gravitational fields and power generators or engines for any kind of hyperspeed spaceship but they can't do a destroyer-killer warhead? That's too far-fetched. Even the episode 8 movie is showing bombs capable of destroying - well - a destroyer. I get it, the origins of Star Wars universe is rooted in the '70s when everyone was dreaming about future energy-based weapons, but the rules of this universe and it's capabilities - especially military - are grossly misrepresented. Any old-school SciFi Universe has it's flaws, from Dune to StarTrek, StarGate, Andromeda etc. I grew with SciFi and I like the stories they can build, but we should not blindly agree with everything a writer says. StarWars included.
"A ships a fool to fight a fort". Shore batteries have always been though nuts to crack in real life. Realistically off screen and off page, ground based weapons and attacking fleets anchoring into to gun lines probably duel for a while before the ground stations are fully raised. Just like shore batteries after the age of sail, they're there to delay amphibious assaults or force landings else where I would imagine.
It seems like the Rebellion learned a lot from the disasterous retreat from the Siege of Atollon. The scenario there was very similar, but with a few key differences. The Imperial force at Atollon was smaller than at Hoth, but so was the Rebel base. Also, while Vader is quite a competent battlefield commander, most of the actual decision making was done by incompetent subordinates. At Atollon, you had Thrawn in command, who was a much more hands-on commander, and who had a superior tactical and strategic intellect. It seems that the Rebels learned the right lessons from that failure, and the planetary ion cannon was pretty key to their evacuation strategy. It was probably there to deal with Imperial Interdictor cruisers, but Vader didn't bring any, preferring to brute-force the attack with speed and firepower. But the ion cannon could work in both scenarios, either removing Interdictors blocking access to hyperspace or disabling Star Destroyers in blocade positions. I don't think the Rebellion had the resources to install planetary ion cannons at all their bases, but I think the presence of the ion cannon on Hoth *definitely* influenced their decision of where to set up their primary headquarters.
@@miniaturejayhawk8702 I guess you could say that Veers is the exception. He doesn't do anything we see in the films that's explicitly incompetent, but it's implied that the majority of Vader's command staff aren't particularly good at their jobs. Both canon and Legends sources demonstrate that high ranking military positions are more often political appointments rather than meritocratic ones. The Empire was plagued with the kinds of corruption and inefficiencies that you get when individuals are promoted based on loyalty instead of competence. One of Thrawn's best assets was his ability to frame his competency *as* loyalty; otherwise he would have never been able to ascend the ranks of command within the Empire.
@@miniaturejayhawk8702 Because loyalty is easier to fake than competence. All you had to do to get promoted in the Empire was kiss the right ass, so there were a significant number of high ranking officers who were only concerned about their own gain, but knew how to keep the appearance of extreme Imperial patriotism. This was most evident in Legends, when hundreds of the admiralty *immediately* became independent warlords the instant the Emperor was dead.
To be fair Vader's initial plan had been to drop out of hyperspace directly into orbit already within range of their weapons. One of his subordinates screwed up the jump coordinates and that is the ONLY reason the Alliance had a chance to see them coming and escape.
@@BertoxolusThePuzzled Given the dialogues of the movies, I'd say it was the opposite. Vader blamed Ozzel for bringing the fleet "too close to the system", so I suppose he wanted to sneak on them with a slower, farer approach?
@@farseeraradrel4808 I thought this was cleared in some novel that connected this being Vader attempting Thrawn's usual strategy of uaing extremely strategic and tactic hyperspace jumps for rapid repositioning and to catch enemies by surprise, but who knows if that is even canon anymore at this point. XD
I agree with the point overall, but the Hoth canon was meant for a specific situation which was planned perfectly. The empire would not have detected the canon signature until after the shield was down, as the power for the canon was masked by the power for the shield (the empire would have thought the power output was all for the shield, they were not smart like that). Because the empire would expect fleeing rebels to use the most direct path to escape, they clustered their intercept ships in that area. The empire wanted to capture rebel leadership to make an example of them, so they were not shooting everything down as soon as it was detected; this gave the canon the chance to target and shoot the star destroyers, letting the Rebel ships to get through. If the Rebels used a targeting pattern based on typical imperial fleet movements (which they knew well), they could send waves of transports out timed to hit the intercept fleets as they came into range (which is what we see in Empire, I think).
The problem with that thinking is that i thought this video in it of itself would be a LOT smarter than "Duh, SHIELDS" No, the problem with ground based weaponry shooting from the planet, in a realistic scenario or hard sci-fi it just wouldn't work or DO much. The amount of energy needed to pierce the atmosphere, the earth's curvature effecting the targeting, gravity and dissipation of energy in the atmosphere from the ozone layer would do more than enough to negate ANY power from ANY ground based installation (unless it would be a rocket with boosters, then the shot would take much longer than that to make it for good reason)
@@mattmurphy7030 Nope. I know the old eu and the new. The empire was filled with a lot of over-confident officers who made a LOT of mistakes. Look how Tarkin died.
Reminds me of these type of weapons in the game Imperium Galactica II. They were expensive, difficult to maintain, and attacking fleets would know exactly where they were and return fire. Additionally if troops in that game were landed on the planet, they were useless. However, in the right situation they did have their uses. Like you said though in star wars, in this game it was only really something for the rich and powerful planets, and they needed to be massed up. There was also another game, Star Ruler 2, I think it was, where planetary guns only worked if you had a fleet or satelites in orbit. So yeah, like you said these weapons do have their drawbacks.
IG2 was a great game with one exception - unless you played on the easiest mode, all the diplomacy, trading, and other functions were completely useless. There is one faction in the game so powerful they would pretty much obliterate all the other races before you even made contact with them, and the game was just a fight between you and them.
I get the feeling you underestimate the importance of area of denial weapons. Cutting off access to or forcing the enemy through areas of your choosing is a massive advantage. AOD weapons are the staple of 20th and 21st century warfare for a reason.
I was thinking the same. They do not litter the whole planet with ground based weapon, just the locations where they don't want enemy ships to bombard from orbit or make a direct orbital drop. Making the enemy move somewhere else to land waste them a lot of time and logistics.
A secondary shield network just for the ground based gun would be prudent. Similar to a ship based shield system that can be fired through - _ships don't drop their shields to fire._ As well, a lot of fortifications in the area to defend against any ground based assault or fighter/bomber attack. You don't just have a giant cannon by itself, you rock paper scissors shotgun the whole defence complex. It then becomes a strong point where defenders can rally and launch counter attacks from. For the location, there are two main options; Near enough to cover a vital location, such as the Capital, that needs to be protected. The other location that could use such a massive weapon is the main military base. Having your defence fleet/hangars and so on under a separate fire through shield, so it can't be taken out in a surprise attack means that any invasion becomes a drawn out affair for the invaders, they can't do a shock and awe. If Naboo had such a complex, the Trade Federation could have been devastated in orbit, while their attempts to get anywhere near the Capital would have been stopped. Landing craft could be taken down by smaller guns in the complex, while Naboo fighters could have enjoyed air superiority with the aid of their ground based AA. The Trade Federation would have had to land forces far away, beyond the horizon, and marched them in. That would have taken a lot of time and they would have been continually harassed, and once within the same horizon arc as covered by the big gun the Naboo air force would straff them.
That's... What they did actually, and they marched a column so vast the RSF couldn't possibly have been able to attack it and do meaningful damage without losing over half their fighters in a single run right into Theed. There were dozens of MTTs and hundreds of STAP, platoon attack craft, and AATs, capable of creating a wall of fire so intense even many corvettes would've been blown out of the sky.
If you get a degree of computer coordination between the planetary shields and the ground based weapons installations, I suspect you can set up a combined routine that makes the lowering of the shields, the firing of the weapons and the raising of the shields afterwards into a single cohesive routine, cutting the moment of unshielded vulnerability to maybe a second or two, perhaps even less, at which point it would difficult to take advantage of those openings without knowing the timings in advance
@@1TW1-m5i I always assumed it was a scale thing, like shields over a certain size cannot be made to only work one way. Though a planetary shield along with a smaller secondary shield that covered the ground base/cannon would kinda solve the issue of opening the shield.
@@hphp31416 Cause they aren't lasers? They move slower then actual bullets but even ignoring that the technical books explain blasters as firing esentially plasma contained within a magnetic field.
All those problems (firin through shields, powering weapons, etc.) should also apply (to a lesser degree) to ships aswell, yet they seems to have solved it. A ship based tubolaser able to vaporize a mountain from orbit; should be more or less able of vaporizing that same mountain if their positions were reversed. In most scifi; planetary weapons are 'cheaper' and easier than a ship mounted equivalent (same is true for real life weapon systems too).
cheaper isnt really the case its a lot easier to build big in space then on a planet where gravity is constantly getting in your way but it would atleast be easier to supply and find operational crew
@@ashardalondragnipurake When people talk about gravity in that context; they are talking about it being a problem for launching into space, not while on Earth. Planet based systems (inc power source) can be as huge as they want, can be less efficient and even harmful to the environment, ship based ones cannot -space, environment, power; are all in short supply.
@@LENZ5369 For ships designed for operating only in space and built in space that is a non issue, they can be as big as you want. Space, environment, and power are all merely dependent on the size of your budget, resources, time, and workforce. This is why Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers like the Eclipse can exist. As well as why you can have mobile fleet building, repair, and rearming bases like the Supremacy. If its never intended to actually land on a planet then you can go as big as you want and can afford. Only landing craft are actually limited due to having to be able to function in planetary atmospheres and escape a planets gravity well.
@@TankHunter678 Yes but you missed the point -in that case why build a 'ship' at all; why not just build engines on a moon or planet (aka 'planetships')? By making "budget, resources, time, and workforce" irrelevant; you make the Star Wars universe: it's world building, narrative, plot drivers, all of it; also irrelevant. SW has a preference for ship over planets and for manned fighters over capital ships. That is the SW flavour and I have no problem with it, my issue is bastardizing real life science to (badly) justify it's flavour. Could have just said that turbolaser strength is lowered by gravity -hence turbo lasers on planets suck. Also: in real life -where we don't have deflector shields, super materials, FTL and so on; there are limits to what we can build.
@@LENZ5369 The problem with putting thrusters on a moon or planet is that it is far far harder to push something out of a gravity well than it is to simply build something outside of a gravity well. It is also incredibly hard to change trajectories once it gets into motion. You also eliminate its ability to support life, which is kinda important since planets are not easy to replace unlike ships. The only real use putting thrusters on a planetary object would be if you wanted to take a moon and chuck it at a planet in the same solar system to destroy it like in Planetary Annihilation. Hence why its better to simply build your artificial moon fortress. Since you can also design the thing to be far more mobile then any planet with thrusters on it and actually able to support life without having to burrow through existing material. As all the life supporting systems are designed and built beneath the outer shell during construction. I do want to point out that in real life we do not have orbital shipyards capable of allowing us to build vessels outside the gravity well. Any ships we design have to have operating within gravity as a requirement which is the biggest limiting factor for us.
Ground based defenses are presumably a last resort option should you lose the fight in space. And more importantly something that can threaten the incoming ships and delay a landing operation from happening literally right on top of you. If you had the resources to deploy them you could use it in conjuncture with cheaper smaller AA type weapons to seriously hamper landing forces At an important location. Considering these are rebels and they are throwing every thing they have for even a 1% extra chance at survival. even a single ION cannon made a big difference. Without it a shitload more forces would have dropped sooner and closer which would have been a much different battle then the conflict on hoth. Defending the entire planet with ground based weapons is definitely feasible in star wars considering the death star existed but ideally they would just keep big ships from parking right on top of a base and just nuking it to shit and back. Targeting a small ground target accurately cant be all that easy and entrenchments can provide a lot of cover for a few good return shots. Tl;dr they aren't for Full defense of the entire planet but there to keep big ships from doing what they love to do which is park in low orbit right over some guys house and just bombarding it.
I once wrote a Star Wars story with a major planetary siege. The defenders had cleared out the civilian population and huddled all of the defenders in one city protected by a powerful shield and two anti-orbital ion cannons, all hooked into the power grid of the otherwise-abandoned city. This created a funnel above the city where enemy capital ships could not go without getting blasted and risking a fall onto the planet. Unable to bombard the city effectively from outside the funnel, the attackers were forced to rely on ground forces, though they either had to land outside of the cannons' range (using big, Acclamator-like landing ships) or piecemeal using tons of shuttles in airspace still contested by the defenders' ground-based fighters. And then the ground forces would need to walk through piles of fortifications and artillery. The attackers did have the option of blockading the planet and starving the garrison out, but starfighters both from the city and hyperspacing in on hit-and-run attacks were able to pick away at the orbital forces. The defenders could also bring in supplies in blockade runners, attempting to hyperspace in and dash past the enemy fleet until they reach the relative safety of the funnel. All in all, a very interesting and complicated scenario that evolved out of the ground-to-space gun technology.
Simply ignore the city, locate civilian food supplies and infrastructure, and contaminate/destroy them using asymmetric warfare assets. The defenders are given a choice. Remain in their fortifications and watch as everything they hoped to defend is destroyed, or surrender. If they opt to allow the civilians to die, its a propaganda coup. "We were trying to deliver aid for (made up disaster) but they wouldn't stop shooting at us." The gullible will buy the story, and the astute will understand that you'll do anything to win.
You are one of the main reasons I want to start reading legends. I was never willing to read them growing up, but after watching your channel for the last 4 years I'm a changed man. Thank you Eckhart, and keep up the good work and awesome videos!
I was in the Army and my first job was a (MOS: 14R) M6 Bradley Linebacker Crewmember. The M6 is a anti-air variant of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that replaces the TOW launcher with a launcher that holds 4 stinger missiles which are used for low flying and slow air threats. That job ceased to exist around 2005 where I had to pick a new job, and this lead to the only mistake I made in the Army, where I chose Satellite communications where I did well enough in school to become a network controller (MOS: 25S1C). Here is what I see wrong with the ion cannon. Shooting a line of sight projectile at an air target is hard to do. This is why we now have guided munitions for taking out air targets. So if you are going to use an unguided projectile, you need to used overwhelming volume of fire to ensure you hit the target, especially one that is in space. The slow rate of fire of the ion canon means you are probably going to miss, especially since it is not moving at the speed of light. If the star destroyer is moving, especially turning, that makes it even harder to hit. From my satellite communications experience, an energy based weapon is going to lose a lot of energy passing through the atmosphere. Learning about satellite communications, I was shocked when we were taught the math to figure out the loss in signal strength of a signal being transmitted through the atmosphere and how much it is, and even more with its return trip. In the movie, the weapon is pointed around 45 degrees, the closer to 0 or 180 the look angle is, the more loss of power a signal endures with the least amount of loss occurring at 90 degrees (looking straight up). A missile would have to be large in order to get to a star destroyer, so that isn't viable. Especially since it can be shot down or jammed. Using multiple ion cannons to give a volume of fire, or using a weapon with a high rate of fire, would be a more realistic scenario for defense. That is ignoring the whole planetary shield issue.
I like how in the battle of Naboo a full on blockade was used to starve the planet of resources and communication before ground troops invaded. It was very stealthy and deceptive, even to the galactic senate. Nobody could be sure what was going on until the Jedi got Queen Amedala out to plead to the senate of her planets situation. They didn’t have planetary shields or massive turbo lasers. Only a fleet of small fighters.
Not like a Republic member planet is going to expect to be attacked, generally the idea would be that no one would attack for fear of the Republic mobilizing to deal with the threat. Thus you only really are going to have enough forces to deal with any local pirate presence, which Naboo did not really have to deal with much due to how safe its region was.
It still doesn't make sense to me how such a lush green planet could be starved via orbital blockade. Like did they stop growing their on food completely and loose all ability to do so in the less then 50 years since they stopped being isolationist?
@@scottthewaterwarrior The planet may be lush and green, but that does not mean a lot of it was developed for use in mass farming. Especially for a world that focused a lot on preserving their natural beauty as much as possible. You also have to take into account that the Trade Federation very easily would have been able to take over the farms and any storage facilities, Naboo simply lacked the military power to do anything. Especially given how many forces the Trade Federation can simply throw at them. This is why they had to rely on the Gungans who actually had a standing army instead of just a royal guard.
@@TankHunter678 They were isolationist only 40 years before the start of Episode 1, even less in the Disney timeline. My whole argument is aganst the blockade, once they invaded the planet and took over that's a different story, but that would be an occupation at that point, so they'd control the suply on planet too.
@@scottthewaterwarrior The blockade is not what started the starvation, the starvation happened after the ground invasion. The blockade and the threat of invasion was to force the people of Naboo into agreeing to their demands. The starvation was intentionally inflicted after the invasion in an effort to break resistance and get them to sign the documents.
One thing I think is missing from Star wars is star fortresses. Orbital ships without hyperdrives etc. Like the death star but a 20th of the size. Putting mega weapons on star forts say 8 kms would make them for more effective
Legends does have the Golan series of defence platforms, the mark 1 is roughly equivalent to a Star Destroyer in firepower, weirdly to carries much less fighter craft though.
@@danf3201 you'd think it'd be able to be 5 times the power of a star destroyer for the same cost with no hyperdrive. And able to field Tens thousands of fighters or drones since weight doesn't matter in orbit with minimal engines.
@@caliph20 I think the Golan marks do up to 8 eventually, with each more powerful then the last, but yes, much like Stellaris, defence stations with fighter/bomber craft and long range weapons make the most sense, otherwise they could be 'sniped' at by fighters/bombers or by alternating strafing runs from mobile ships. Instead the Golans are close quarter brutes, armed like they can move when they can't.
That thumbnail. I will never ever look at that cannon ever again without imagining "Quick! Fire the giant boob cannon thing!" From Family guy star wars.
If the rebels had access to Surface defenses maybe the outcome would have been different because eventually some part of the shield would fail with a planetary shield But overall the strategy worked well using the shield to interdict troop landings
Turbo lasers and point defense cannons are cooler than a shield (if you can’t have both). Once an enemy inevitably gets passed orbital defenses (including a shield) the planet is effectively gone, unless a fighter wing takes them out super fast. Even then there’s still damage. Think of it this way: if an invasion force gets past your extended installations and big ships that can’t be everywhere at once, having cannons varying in size warding off warships of any size and taking out transports and fighters is better for you, your ground forces, residential areas, power and infrastructure and evacuation routes. A planetary shield is if the planet is a very large and important installation in and of itself but only so much that you’d put a lock and key on it (and you can’t fit or afford the extra firepower) and don’t expect it to be hit with anything big enough to break the shield (Scariff) or you *do* expect it to face extreme hazards from something like solar flares or debris.
“The greatest threat to any invasion has always been the ground defenses, with them you are forced to land beyond the fire arc of the defence net”. Realistically you would use weapons like this to deny specific areas to easy invasion or bombardment. Place them so you cannot drop right on a city or other strategic location without removing the big gun.
Reminds me of Stargate, where they were eventually offered a Tollan Ion cannon, and they briefly went over the idea of how to utilize it, and figured that even if the gun were somehow mobile it just wouldnt provide coverage, so they went back to the Tollans and asked for a total of 38 for full coverage. Naturally they never got any due to plot, and they didnt help the Tollans much either, but that was for totally different reasons. Lets just say the Tollans are not the best tacticians.
@@davidioanhedges I mean, their entire defense was two components: Ion cannons and the fact they lived on a planet unknown to the Goa'uld, so much so that they built their own gate. Then they invited Zipacna for the whole trial, and nearly bit it there if it werent for SG-1, and then Zipacna jumps in bed with Anubis and snitches to the only guy who has access to superior shield tech.
I imagine another factor that keeps us from seeing more heavy defensive emplacements is that from the perspective of a galactic government there are very few cases where they would be worth while. For the same price of a sophisticated planetary defense network, you could probably buy a decent number of capitol ships. Those ships may not necessarily be as effective at defending a world, but they aren’t tied to just one world, then can go where needed, and can also, you know, attack and whatever else.
If planetary defense is their only goal, why would they spend money on a ship instead of the same amount on a dedicated cannon? Or squadrons of fighters with proton torpedoes?
@@MightyGalvatron Most fighters are not designed with a hyperdrive on board, and you need to be able to project power into the nearby region to deal with pirate bases. Sure dedicated defense emplacements and fighters is pretty good, but you kinda do need to eventually deal with that pirate base the enemy keeps retreating to. Especially if the Pirates are taking out your freight before it ever gets into the protective range of your guns and fighter support. It was the same problem we had in WW2. Early on we did not have fighters that could go as far as the bombers and come back, the result was a LOT of bomber deaths. Or when it came to the Battle for the Atlantic, we lost a lot of cargo ships loaded with supplies for Great Britain to German U-Boats until we officially joined the war and finally took the fight to them. There is also the thing that a mobile ship force can also help with evacuation in the event of a known upcoming invasion.
The funny thing about that ion cannon and shield is that they were ultimately bad ideas. The Rebellion was never going to win an actual toe-to-toe battle with the Empire like that, as evidenced by what happened when Veers landed. Their best defense was secrecy, like the hidden base on Yavin. The only thing the generator and cannon did was give the Empire clues that someone was on Hoth. If those weren't there there's a good chance the probe droid finds, well, nothing.
Fleet battle between Grand admiral Thrawn vs. Ender Wiggin Each one has an equal sized fleet with equally capable subordinates, and since Ender is from a different universe each has equal understanding of the technology they’re using. They are in command of Star Wars vessels. Pick a famous fleet of your choosing I’d suggest death squadron
If ender and thrawn can both bring their crew, ender will wipe the floor with thrawn. While thrawn is a great strategist enders speciality Is tactics and micro management which gives him a big advantage
Ender has perfect empathy. If he is allowed to study Thrawn before facing him, then Ender basically can't lose. He will not only perfectly predict what Thrawn will do, he'll be able to perfectly predict how Thrawn will respond to this knowledge. He'll kill Thrawn and then cry a lot about it, having perfectly empathized with his enemy.
@@celebrim1 one of Thrawn's specialties is also getting into his adversary's mindset, so they would probably be on equal footing for ability to predict each other's moves and counters when given time to study one another.
@@maximfunfstuck5741 I agree that Ender has way better subordinates than Thrawn. I imagine this being both of them commanding equal subordinates though. I really just want to test their respective command abilities.
In one of the old rpg books, the game stats for the Death Star were given by sector. That is how many weapons of what type were in a sector and how many sectors there were on the Death Star. I think there over 20 sectors on it. The rationale being that because of the size and curvature of the Death Star, ships were only threatened by one sector at a time. The same would indeed hold true for a planet. A planet would have hundreds of such sectors, at least. Odds are only a rare planet could set put guns in all of them. Cities, power plants, industrial areas, would likely get the most.
For a planet, you could get away less weapons covering it, a few dozen still but no where near hundreds, plants are not very curved so a firing arc of weapons, especially if they are built at high elevations and away from the coast, they would cover a monstrously large area. Think about how much of space you can see at night when looking up.
I wonder, has it ever happened in Star Wars history that someone thought to strap engines to a large or medium sized asteroid (which most solar systems have plenty of)? The trajectory calculations would be simple, dropping nuclear weapon yield payloads on specific targets. The materials would be cheap(-ish), and the attacker would suffer no real loss if their attack were "neutralized" and in fact the defender would still suffer without a planetary shield because you can't instantly vaporize a large space rock, just break it up into several smaller space rocks, still damaging any infrastructure in the area. And from what I've seen from SW, anyone attacking a planet without "liberation" in their heart wouldn't bat an eyelash at the collateral damage such an attack would cause. tl;dr: SO MANY unneccessary forces were committed to Hoth by the empire. One big boulder would have given them a bloodless victory. Yes, that doesnt work cinematically, but good camera work doesn't win wars, people.
Ion cannons remind me of artillery waiting for a ship to comze close. In other words, the enemy(empire) get in range only to be shot at with a "disabling" Ion cannon. So the rebels could escape in time. Badically what ESB showed us
Planetary based weapon are not meant to defend the whole planet. It is a means to deny the space directly above a strategic location on the planet, like for example your capital city or a power station. You don't want spaceships to carry out orbital bombardment so you have ground weapons to keep them away. It is the equivalent to Anti-aircraft guns. A real serious planetary defense is a combination of a planetary shield and orbital fortresses. Coruscant has a planetary shield as well as a series of Golan defense stations around the planet. I am not sure how many they have in orbit. Technically it would be in orbit above a strategic location. This stations are powerful.
I mean, as far as I can recall, most of the bases used by the Alliance were abandoned by whatever species inhabited the planet long before the Alliance came to use it. So maybe a few weeks to probably a few years. But I'm no Star Wars expert by any means, so take my words with a grain of salt.
I wonder if planetary shields are good for the environment? I mean, they probably change the amount of insolation a planet receives. They would also tend to hold atmospheric gasses in.
The only real use I can see for a ground-based anti-ship weapon like this is as specific Orbital Denial and as a means of dictating the pace of a battle. Set one of these things up, and you can effectively contest the orbit above a given point to, let's say, prevent orbital bombardment of a major military installation. Not only can it keep ships above a given tonnage at bay, but it also forces your enemy to commit resources to neutralizing that installation. Build up a sufficient network of secondary AA and ground defenses, and you could cause some serious pain to any invading force.
IMO the biggest problem with ground-to-air weapons(and space battles in general) is that the planet's location is known, whilst the fleet's position isn't. A fleet has no need to go anywhere near the planet in order to bombard it. Planet's orbits are known years in advance, so space fleet could attack from the edge of the solar system, fire their payloads, throw some asteroids on course with the planet, and disappear, long before anyone on the planet even knows that something has happened. If the space fleet attacks using lasers(light) then the planet wouldn't receive any warning either. The first warning would be an impact.
Ground to space cannons seem like theyd always be stuck dealing with one of two massive issues. Energy weapons would have to deal with atmospheric dispersion, I'd imagine the sheer amount of air an energy projectile would need to shoot through would bleed off a massive amount of energy from any shot by the time it exits our atmosphere. Mass drivers, like railguns, on the other hand would need to accelerate a projectile to such an insane speed that, again, by the time it enters orbit, either the combination of air resistance and gravity hasnt slowed it down to below escape velocity, to reach its target in orbit, or simply burnt the entire projectile due to friction.
Atmospheric dispersion works both ways. If a starship can bombard the planet with energy weapons, the same weapon fired from the ground can hit the starship. And normally, the weapons on the planet can be made a lot bigger. And in many Sci-Fi universes gravity is not an issue as anti-gravity in some form exist. In Star Wars its repulsors. When small, person sized starships can easily go up and down the gravity well so can missiles. Only mass drivers would still have a problem.
Another problem is that much of the energy you fire (maybe more than half) gets absorbed by the atmosphere. Ion weapons and short wavelength lasers would suffer from this the most.
Considering a planetary shield CAN cover an entire planet, that just turns everything into a old school "wait for them to surrender due to lack of supplies" situation, where the attacker just sits their and waits, while the defender waits for reinforcements. However, i can see Anti Orbital defenses being used to support a defending fleet or knock out a few incoming enemy ships before the invasion/siege begins. You can also use the Planetary shield to funnel enemy invasion forces where you want them to go, kinda like a minefield. Plus, "realistically" speaking their is going to be multiple layers of Anti Aircraft Artillery Ranging from the BIG F OFF Anti Orbital gun to Flak guns to direct fire gun positions. Id also imagine their would be secondary smaller shields around these gun positions to harden them from enemy bombardment. Isn't that was Shutter Shields are for?
That "wait for lack of supplies" might not work. Planets can grow their own food and planets have resources (ex: minerals). If they have enough natural resources to sustain the planetary shield and the surface guns, they can hold out for a long time.
@@crazyelf1 with the way interplanetary trade, smuggling and planetary specialization has been depicted, a vast majority of the worlds in SW are vulnerable to siege tactics. Agriworlds need new parts. Mustafar needs more food. Coruscant DEFINITELY needs more food. Anyone with a fleet large enough to disrupt interplanetary trade and a source of supplies of their own that last long enough or a logistics network sufficiently good can starve out any planet the writer(s) happen to be targeting, barring supertech ancient space-magic hidden in the cavern nearby
Eck, can you please do a video on how different factions built up their logistics? I know it’s very important for any war, but Star Wars doesn’t seem to give it justice. Thanks and great video as always
From what I remember reading, ground base weapons had a longer ranger and was more powerful than Ship base. So you would fire before the ships got into firing range of you. As for the idea that they could move the ship before the shot reaches you, I think is wrong is that shots do not show up on sensors so you wouldn't see it coming. I have always seen myself use them to lay traps myself. Capture destroyers and other ships.
This video reminds me of Tollan Ion cannons from the TV show Stargate SG-1. One episode its mentioned the placement of iron cannons on Earth & how many they would need to protect a planet of this size.
Every tool, no matter how good it is, has its limitations and needs to be used properly. Otherwise it's nearly useless. The closest approximation we have in the real world are shore batteries, artillery or rocket batteries built in coastal positions. They'll never be able to handle an enemy fleet by themselves, but they will be able to divide their attention. It's one thing to defeat a coastal defence fleet, it's another to try to sink a lot of maneuverable ships while ultra heavy guns are firing at you.
Could you have a large shield covering the gun like a Droidaka and use the incoming energy charge to help the gun reload and with the barrel pointing out past the shield the weapon wouldn't be as exposed? Just a thought 🤨
Those disadvantages don't really make sense when you think about it (something you generally shouldn't do in Star Wars) Ground based lasers being large is a design decision. Basically if a laser, say from a star destroyer, can shoot down and hit the ground the same laser can shoot up from the ground and hit the star destroyer. But making a larger weapon is much easier on the planet than in space because of potentially better heat management and power sources so you can have planetary weapons which would completely destroy a ship in a few shots like the Ion Cannon. Expensive? Yes, but probably less expensive than a ship and when you are talking about a united, developed planet the economy would be so big that it would be no problem to finance several dozen or even hundreds of such weapons. Tracking a spaceship is also much more easy than finding a camouflaged cannon on the surface of a planet. Combine that with the near impossibility of actually conquering a developed planet. Take a planet with 6 billion people (less than earth). How many troops do you think can this planet muster? 20 million? 100 million? More? How many soldiers must you land to even have a chance to defeat them and how many ships do you need to keep them supplied for several years? Conquering even one such a planet would be a gigantic undertaking. So it makes sense that the Imperium build the Death Star because that would still be cheaper than a single planetary invasion.
Clearly inferior to orbital defense platforms. ... What do you mean "they've boarded the orbital defense platforms"!? They'll turn them into highly effective bombardment platforms that, because we don't have ground-to-space weapons, we can't take out! ... What do you mean "incoming bombard-
Reminds me of Babylon 5, "Captain, I believe he's turned the defence grid on Earth. If you don't stop them, they'll fire in 10 minutes. The Particle beams on those platforms can level 40% of the planets surface. You have to stop them!"
The one thing that strikes me as kind of silly: There's no reason that a planetary turbolaser has to be that big. If a conventional Star-Destroyer mounted turbolaser can shoot from space down to a planet's surface without issue, it stands to reason that it could do the same in reverse... and I doubt that the bombardment weapons on a star destroyer are of the same insane scale of those required to return fire. Just take the arms, shielding and reactor of a star destroyer and distribute it around the city you're looking to protect, it's still a huge investment of resources but the result I think is far more practical. Admittedly the planetary turbolaser sounds more like a super-laser than a turbolaser, in which case it absolutely makes sense for it to be of that scale.
Actually, it does make sense because laser in star wars a basically particle cannons not laser, so they have mass. The laser from orbit is using the gravity of the planet to help them, where as the laser on the ground requires more power to fight against the gravity.
I always assumed ground defenses were so large because you can build a gun much larger than a ship gun then just connect it to the power grid. Power is still less of a limitation on the surface than in orbit.
@@RorikH They *can* be bigger, but the primary issue that was being presented in this video was that they were too expensive and power-hungry, things that wouldn't be an issue if they were reasonably scaled. Better to have more complete coverage of critical areas in my opinion.
A great example of ground to space weapons is in Star wars the old Republic. On multiple occasions shields could ruin invasions. But also ground AS (ANTI SPACE WEAPONS) in large groups could large fleets trying to capture a planet. Due to AS guns being spread out made it harder to bombard all of them. Note they are quite useless at destroying fleets from afar. But trying to land troops from capital ships during the old Republic era was very difficult if the planet had AS guns, due to capital ships having to get close. Even during the Empire era capital ships would often get close to planets due to fighters posing a greater threat to landing craft.
I’ve always wondered when ships set up a blockade why don’t people just go to the other side of the planet is it because of hyperspace lanes. Also I feel like a malevolence style defense would be neat
6:55 That particular game scene (while it looks very nice) is crap, if the shield is up, the SD cannot enter the atmosphere unless it came through past the edge of the shield and then flew under the shield. Most planetary defenses will always have a huge offensive advantage in firepower, it stands to reason, the cannons do not need to move, the power sources are vast, so yeah, one does have to worry about intruders in the form of fighters or commandos managing to punch holes through the shield to sneak through. If I was Thrawn, I would bring a few asteroids to impact the shields to overload them and send large amounts of fighters to hit the power generators if they were on the surface. If the generators were underground, that would require another strategy.
There's good reason for the planetary cannons being so much larger than the weapons of a capital ship. There's an immense loss of power when shooting from a planet into space (and from space to the surface of planet) that just doesn't exist when two spacecraft are blasting away at each other across the void. Both turbolasers and ion cannons are energy weapons. They will be affected by the Van Allen Belts, Ozone, the whole freaking ionosphere, heck even clouds and other forms of water vapor, as well as other obstacles. These sources of interference will either deflect some of the energy in new directions, reflecting it back down towards the planet, or lensing it into odd patterns in space; or absorb the energy into themselves, preventing it from going anywhere. Therefore, the weapons would need to be quite substantial to simply match the capabilities of a capital ship. But the builders don't just want a weapon - with this outlay of resources, they want to be able to destroy or disable any ship that may attack. So they build larger still, with a power source sufficient to operate an entire capital ship going into a single weapon. The end result is a weapon so large that its own mass leaves it vulnerable to collapse from even modest attack, and an energy profile visible from the next system over. The very definition of a glass cannon.
I wonder what they have for smaller guns. I doubt these massive weapons are very useful against a big group of small or medium ships, unless if they have a scatter or "airburst" function.
The big issue with ground defenses is the same issue land based naval defenses faced in the battleship era of the early 20th century. You could have very effective anti ship canons and fortresses, but the cost of those was comparable to a capital ship. For just slightly more resources you get a battleship that isn't a static defense, and can be used all over the place. And to defend ports you can just use older battleships that can't keep up with the modern battleline that your new one just replaced. That said, certain critical port cities (or worlds with SW) are important enough to invest in permanent heavy defenses to always have a baseline defense. Like Fort Drum guarding Manila bay, or LA's shore batteries.
Didn't the thing on Hoth require an *enormous* amount of power? Planetary weapons are probably best suited as a deterrent . A couple would almost certainly be enough to scare off most pirates abd minor factors from attacking in favor of an easier target. They are rather less likely to ward off a determined enemy like the Empire.
There’s an episode of Stargate SG-1 where the idea of ground based ion cannons comes in and they made the point to explain what Justin has as far as needing dozens if not hundreds to be positioned across the planet in order to legitimately protect it.
There are various kind of shields in sci-fi, it depends from the author and situation. In Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium series, there's the Langstrom Field, that allows to defend either ships and planets, if it has to collapse, a single section could shot down, you lose only a piece of the ship.
In my book,the way how I use planetary defense is a mixture of halos orbital Mac cannons,and Star Wars planetary shields that have focal points at points around the planet ,along with integrated defense stations that house the mac cannons,turbo lasers and ion cannons and smaller point defense lasers and flak arrays these defense stations are apart of the actual shield,and if they are destroyed the planetary shield will just seal up that area. Power wise defenses are powered with internal solar cores that contain micro sun while the planetary shield is powered by multiple mid tier size solar cores.
A frame in the game playback reminded me of a story I'd heard about infantry versus mechanized calvary (tanks / halftracks). Story was, during the Battle of the Bulge, US troops were low on anti-armor weapons, but had plenty of rifle ammo thanks to air-drops. A couple of armored Nazi vehicles peek over the ridgeline to keep an eye on them. A bright field Captain finds a private who is good at trigonometry and directs him to take 'ranging shots' at the Nazi vehicles and graph the results. Captain takes the distance and angle numbers to his squad leaders, and then around 400 riflemen fire at the armored vehicles: 2 shots- one at 85º to arc up and then come down and hit the less armored top, the second with direct fire at the engine in the rear. -While an armored vehicle can deflect a rifle round, about 400 hitting simultaneously on the top, and another 400 on the engine WAS more than the armor could stand, taking out the armed vechicle. So, translating that to Star Wars lore, what happens if EVERY rebel in the trenches on Hoth ALL aim and shoot at the knee-joint of an AT-AT? Same for the Clone War, if you've got thousands of clone-troopers, put a thousand blaster-bolts at the weak point of a Separatist vehicle- concentrated firepower from a thousand small arms isn't small...
AT-AT's armor plating is think enough that outside of anti-ship grade weaponry you wont be penetrating them. All the rebels would have achieved is wasting ammo.
So basically...these ground-to-space weapons are worth on very very important planets (like Coruscant, Kuat, Fondor etc) where you can set up many of them, it wont win a battle but it will sure give enemy fleet more targets to focus on and threat coming from the planet
Either Inside the Worlds of Star Wars Trilogy from 2004, or the same map was recompiled in the 2005 book Complete Star Wars: Locations - Inside the Worlds of Episodes I-VI. I looked it up!
A couple of thoughts: 1) Ground weapons should be able to be synced to planetary shields with essentially millisecond accuracy, making the window of vulnerability when dropping them extremely short. 2) There's nothing stopping each weapon facility from having its own, smaller shield, in addition to the main planetary one. Two layers of protection from orbital bombardment.
As a 40 year fan of Star Wars, and a person who prefers defensive strategy to aggressive offense, I've always been rather fond of things like the Planetary Ion Cannon, and similar emplacements. Even in stuff like 40k, where such scale weapons are usually left to lore dumps, and either not present, or already dealt with, by the time of the action we get to see, it's been fun to try and figure out what different categories of worlds would ve able to muster, in the form of defensive weapons. You never know when an Ork force will pop up, and every Boy who makes ground is now an Ork in his element; the more of their ships you can destroy with all hands, or even just disable outside of "let's just crash it, and seez what we'd can get!" range is a bonus. One dumb little thing, though, and Hoth always confused me with it; where was the Rebel Fleet? I get that hiding was crucial, and not every Rebellion wants to go full Gar Stazi, and just remain on a mobile fleet all the time, but leaving their top brass on a world, without the defensive measures of its guard fleet, seemed weird. In my head, the Rebellion usually relied more on fighters than capital ships, so you'd think maybe they'd at least have some concealed ground-based hangar bays, from which to launch X-Wings, Y-Wings, and A-Wings, and they did have some of those; Luke even fled the planet separately aboard his fighter, but I surmise most fighter craft were berthed within the fleet, and it was somewhere else, leaving the Command Staff on Hoth with transports, and the ion Cannon, merely to cover their escape. Honestly, while I know the Empire wasn't too keen on its own fighters, I'd have thought they'd launch clouds of them to hary escaping ships, and disable them. Oh well.
Wait, I'm confused. If planetary shields would block surface-based energy weapons from firing outwards, then how do starfighters like X-wings and capital ships like Star Destroyers fire their energy weapons through their own shields?
Bubble like shields, like those of a droideka's, have their weapon's barrels poking out of the shield. But for starships, the shield is like a second skin for the ship, the main skin being the armor. There's a thing called shield frequency (originally from Star Trek) that allows certain things to pass through the shields and prevent certain things to go through the shields. For example, Mon Calamari have shields for their cities that allow ships or other solid objects to pass through, but keeps water from coming in. This is also shown in ship hangers where starfighters and shuttles can go though while not exposing everything to the vacuum of space
I think the biggest use of ground to orbit weapons, and anyone who's played Empire at War will know how effective it can be, is using them in combination with even just a space fleet to intercept an enemy. With the distraction of your own space units (Albeit likely at great loss) an unhindered ground battery of planetary cannons can make short work of any larger ships the enemy brings to bear if given a little time. The other thing is people seem to assume such weapons are easy to spot. But it is much easier for satellites and observation equipment to spot a fleet of starships jumping into your atmosphere than it is for any newly arriving ships to spot likely hidden and spread out cannons, that may not even be visible above ground until they are needed. And by the time you've made your plan of descent, when the cannons come out it very well may be too late to adjust.
Eck I have an audible related question for you. I have read the forerunner saga plus halo fractures. Which three halo books do you recommend I read next?
I have to say that I love ground-to-orbit weapons, I use them whenever possible, it's great to see big destroyers utterly disabled from the ground as my bombers and ships finish them off. It would have been great to have massive banks of guided missiles, you could have them move from their protected launcher, optionally through a planetary shield gate, and into the enemy capital ships.
A double shiled layer would completely deny shooting back, if they have the technology to open them individually, even a very small gap would ensure it is possible to shoot from groundlevel, but denies any ships in orbit to shoot back
IIRC the imperial doctrine was not to send fleets of several Star Destroyers, but fleets of small ships around a SD each. If so, it means by disabling the flagship you actually crippled the whole invasion force. That's even more true if you could do that before it launched Tie, & dropships...
New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit Audible.com/eckhartsladder or text eckhartsladder to 500-500.
One Sentence....
'Ion Cannons are expensive!"
Plus Ion Cannons just aren't lying around for ready purchase.
And the Rebel Alliance didn't
have "ready cash" just laying around!
hi Eck do you think that the rebel every reofit any Z-95 into zoto x-wing as a stop gap measuers until well made xwings came off the producetion line
Or they could learn to read, Audible is the most stupid thing in the world.
What about ships? Surely the shields of ships would have to operate much the same way as planetary shields.
@@jamesjellis what if the ships had wings?
Ground to orbit weapons are another odd part of Star Wars. Ships are small. Planets are big. It takes time for fire to reach orbit. If the ships could detect a large weapon firing they could in theory move out of the way. That and the defending planet needs a quite large array across the planet to be effective.
One must assume that in reality energy weapons move much faster than they are shown on the screen to illustrate the presence of the weapon to the audience.
Well if energy weapons are going the speed of light, then the enemy will only see you shooting the moment the weapon hits.
Because of the speed of light goes both ways you don't know when the other guy shoots at you with energy weapons.
Continuous strategic evasive maneuvers using a computer with a really good RNG just isn't interesting visually, even if it's optimal for survival. It's just rolling dice at that point.
Homie. We’re talking HUGE railguns that are being fired like the front line on line infantry. You’re getting hit.
Yeah but as long as the time it take the projectile to hit its target is shorter than the time the ship need to get out of the way it will work. and the given range of the ion cannon in canon and the video of it, does show the projectile is really fast.
Yeah the planet need a large array but the size of the planet is also a problem to the attacker, as they would need large number of ship to be able to attack the whole surface of the planet in a reasonnable amount of times, thoug they have the advantage of being able to concentrate their forces unlike static defense.
Then again it is a static weapon using terrain to its advantage in logic it should be cheaper than a star destroyer. The same way tanks and self propelled artillery are way more expensive than towed artillery, and static artillery, which contribute to negate the ability of the attacker to concentrate forces to breach the defenses, as you will simply have more gun than him. The only real downside i can see is the inability of the weapon to hit target that aren't in direct line of sight, given the point of them is to have the range advantage, if the planet is not entirely covered with them or its firing zone doesn't cover hyperspace lane entry point, or you can't force the enemy in its firing zone, they are kind of useless as they are too easy to outmaneuver, and negate the range advantge it would be cheaper and more effective to just install regular starship turbolaser on the ground.
Outside Star Wars, one of the truisms of space combat in sci fi is "He who holds the orbitals, holds the world." For that matter, if you hold a planet's orbitals, you don't NEED cannon to bombard it. Any large rock dropped from orbit at high velocity will hit with the force of several nukes.
Your description of the ground to space weapons reminds me of the criticism the Maginot Line gets for not stopping the germans from invading. However it did exactly what it was supposed to do, slowed the enemy down.No sane strategist thought it could hold indefinitely, but it would slow the enemy down until the proper defense units could be mobilized. Of course the way the Germans bypassed most of it and their tactics in dealing with the mobile defense forces was unexpected and unprecedentedly successful, but that's a separate issue. But much like the Maginot Line, the planetary guns are there to slow down an invasion, but realistically only a fool or a planet with an insane budget would think they could fend off a concentrated effort indefinitely with just those weapons. But they will buy time for shields or mobile defense forces to respond.
Captain Mainwaring: "They'll never get through the Maginot Line"
Sergeant Wilson: "They didn't"
Captain Mainwaring: "You see"
Sergeant Wilson: "They went around the side"
Captain Mainwaring: "They...? That's a typical shabby Nazi trick"
@@ZoeMalDoran I realize you're quoting a joke, but the French actually expected to go around the Maginot line, and planned for it. The idea was that whenever hostilities became inevitable the British and French would move into Belgium and take up defensive positions along the many canals and rivers. The problem was that the Belgian king still had hopes of remaining neutral, and so didn't allow the British or French to move in until the Germans invaded. That left the Allies scrambling to push northeast as fast as the could, leaving a gap between the southern edge of the advancing forces and the northern edge of the Maginot line. At the Ardenne forest
>unexpected and unprecedented
Other than, you know, doing the exact same thing in the previous World War.
The French did make one critical mistake with the Maginot Line--they assumed the Germans couldn't get through the heavily forested Ardennes. But the Germans managed to get through with both infantry and tanks, swinging around the end of the Line and taking it with ease.
Read my mind re: maginot line.
Why does the ground-based weaponry have to be so much larger than ship-based weaponry?
My guess would be that they are designed to shoot through atmosphere and up a gravity well they need to be far more powerful to reach their targets; presumably, that would mean that while a Star Destroyer can effectively bombard a planet from space (down a gravity well), one parked at ground level could not effectively shoot space forces.
It is more likely a practical thing. You have a static gun and a giant power source (since you have no limitations like space ships) so you make it as big as possible in order to do most of your hits
It's not necessarily that they have to be larger. Rather, go the other way, a starship has limited space, and either have to accept a large quantity of smaller turbo lasers and other weapons, or a smaller quantity of very heavy weapons. A planet does not have that sort of limitation. You can build a ground-based weapon as large as you want to make it, and as large as you're able to make it (accounting for cost, materials, power supply, so on and so forth). While it is true that a ground-based weapon system needs to have sufficient power to fire through the atmosphere (and escape the gravity well), the fact that the atmosphere and the above surface gravity well is so miniscule compared to the absolute size of the planet makes it a rather small issue, easily dealt with by the amount of potential available power on the massive installation.
On the other hand, even though a starship can fire down into the gravity well and have that extra velocity and momentum built up because of how quickly a starship can move compared to a stationary (relatively speaking), it still needs to draw on a comparatively smaller potential available power source to direct its shots down to the surface, and if it's a ship with a lot of smaller weapons, it may not have the power to penetrate the atmosphere with its weapons in sufficient power to actually do damage. Atmosphere may be permeable, but it's still a relatively dense area, compared to deep space, and all those particles in the atmosphere can diffuse the energy brought by any weapon. One reason why both Death Stars, both Eclipses and Starkiller Base were so massive compared to other ships/stations was because they needed the space to put the energy generation to power their superweapons, and while those weapons could break through atmosphere and so much more, if they didn't have the power, they'd be useless. But there were so few of those built cause of the massive costs and challenge in building, the same general problem massive ground-based weapons have.
So, yeah, ground-based weapons can be larger, not because they have to be, though it helps, but because they can be. Starship weapons do have to be larger to be effective, otherwise, they're not going to have the power to do any real damage to ground targets, but because of the limited size of ships and the cost of building bigger ships, there have to be trade-offs. Either a planet busting ship that can barely handle space combat (like the Eclipse) or a humongous ship/station that takes a very long time to build, but can planet bust and handle space combat, like the Death Stars and Starkiller Base. Or you can build hundreds and thousands of ships with smaller weapons and use them to try to boil an atmosphere away with saturation bombardment heating up the atmosphere and eventually glass the planet.
The main reason why is they'd have to have a much faster shot to engage a small ship rather then the ship that can freely dodge incoming fire, unless the facility itself moves, or your changing the planets orbit, the attackers will know exactly where your firing postions are, so they need to be able to fight atmosphere and hit the target, while space forces in comparison are just putting a circle into the circle hole
One parked at ground level..
Jump in that.
The star destroyer also has to go through the atmosphere to fire, the only difference is gravity. Also it is stated those weapon have greater range than star destroyer turbolaser.
You may have missed the Battle of Scrim Island as depicted in the first of the new Thrawn novels. An island protected by a planetary shield, a single turbolaser and four ion cannons made mincemeat out of the Star Destroyer Judicator. It even opened and closed the shield before the Imperials could effectively counterattack. And the planet, Batonn, wasn't some ultra-wealthy core world.
It was a captured Imperial base though was it not? Batonn didn't fund it
And also Thrawn was able to exploit the problem of needing to lower the shield to fire. When they opened the shield he would fire on the weapon being exposed.
@@memeteeme1571 Well, yeah, but it was Thrawn. If he'd been at Hoth, things may have gone differently there as well.
@@MightyGalvatron It takes Almighty Thrawn to come up with the idea of "shoot them when they pop up"?
@@moffjendob6796 It wasn't quite that simple. In the novel, Thrawn had to gather intel first then carefully plan his tactics and coordinate his fleet during the battle. It contrasted greatly with what the previous Imperial admiral did, which was basically "shoot them when they pop up." That didn't work out so well for him.
0:09 After playing EaW I feel they're TOO common, at least on some planets because I have seen planets in that game with ONLY Ion Cannons on them.
lol image a giant planet with 1000000s of them
Yeah, a bunch of times the Rebels in Galactic Conquest mode would fill up planets with ion cannons as soon as they unlock them
@@ZoeMalDoran They do that even in mods, the Rebels are an absolute PAIN to fight in space over such planets...
It gets annoying when the rebels spam the Ion cannon to any of your ships, lol.
Funny enough the latest Obi-Wan comic was all about the Republic stealing plans for a Mega Ion canon the CIS were developing
That because Disney went and threw away all the old Canon so they could say what ever they wanted and rewrite what ever they want because nothing before they owned it matters anymore.
As someone who worked in air defense, surface to air missiles and surface to air artillery, I take issue with this. Except when it comes to planetary shields.
There is a reason why militaries around the world invest so heavily on these and related systems. It’s because they work.
Even when it comes to planetary shields, a planet has a whole lot more resources and energy at its disposal than a fleet does. That is except when it comes to food supply. Because for whatever reason ecumenopolis in most scifi series have decided that it would be easier to just import their food and produce any for themselves.
It does seem to be dismissed a little too easily. If nothing else, an array of ground to space weapons can enforce a standoff distance against the ships which are large enough to have sufficient firepower to bombard the surface. Rather than a group of star destroyers have the liesure to take the best position to bombard the surface they have to be far enough to take evasive maneuvers when the surface cannons fire which could also put them far enough out of position to prevent them from exploiting the temporary hole in the shield. It seems to presume that the fleet has a significant advantage in firepower over the surface defenses, that the latter can only make a few pot shots while the fleet can fire on them.
When coupled with surface defenses, a shield might not need to be complete impregnable to be effective. Merely reducing the fleet's firepower to the point that it doesn't do significant damage by the time it reaches the surface ought to be sufficient to give the defenders an advantage.
They are probably ruled by Dutch Politicians.
@@MalfosRanger And then the ground assault problem. Where you have maybe, maybe a few thousand troops take over a planet with a populations numbering in the millions, if not billions or more.
“We’ve captured the capital building!”
“Sir, the planet is ours.”
The scales are all wrong.
it does kill me that the idea of starving a planet out is the main thought a siege in Star Wars. Star Wars is mostly filled with Garden Worlds and home worlds... a lack of food won't be the problem, more likely a lack of luxury goods, specialized medicines, and specialized technologies would be.
I like the conceptual idea of it working like 19th century ships and forts. The fort is vastly more durable than the ships, but it is immobile. In a straight slugging match, the fort with either come out on top or inflict massive casualties, so fleets almost always avoid direct bombardment and try to find ways around the fort.
Cool topic eck.
Question: If the empire didn't make the second death star, what would they do with the resources, and how would it change the story?
they would build a giant square the could destroy planets
its a square this time
palpy liked collecting shapes
most likely go to at least make more ships or other projects
More dreadnoughts
Pretty much anything would've been a better option. Using Legends numbers (so take a grain of salt) the cost of a single Death Star would be enough to fund the construction of enough Tie Defenders for every Imperial Star Destroyer with some left over for other ships or planetary defense units.
@@michaelandreipalon359 A hundred thousand of them
Realized something, you don’t need a shield to cover a whole planet just over the key areas. Set up mobile defense systems to target landing craft and support, use the shields to funnel the invaders into an area of your choice. Basically use the shields and the ground to orbits as a bait to force the invaders into a disadvantaged area.
Makes sense, you've essentially created a planetary scale Maginot Line which is far more likely to work when you don't have neuteal countries creating weak points (IE Belgium).
and cover said area with over lapping fields of fire, with OTT amount of turrets, with massive power supplies to the state of literally one shot landing crafts, so even if they send 200 landing craft at a time, not a single ship gets with in 1000 ft of the ground.
Like most it all comes down to resource and planning. If you have limit turrets, then like you said use shields to funnel into a kill zone for your turrets, if you a rich MF, then F it just go completely all out OTT with defences.
Honestly, i would think that planetary Weapons would actually be cheaper to build. Going back to to WW2 inspirations of star wars, they could be "shore batteries".
Additionally, I think some of the problems with planet based weapons comes back to star wars writers having no sense of scale. If you can build a spaceship the size of a star destroyer, building a single weapon that's upscalled a bit is much, much easier. You can still build them in orbit and bring them down through heavy transports, so you don't don't need dedicated on-world manufacturing.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with most planets in star wars being really, really poorly optimized. There's typically only a few cities and maybe a few million residents on a planet, and that's over the course of thousands of years of colonization. A single planet of average habitability for most species should be able to produce pretty much everything it would need by itself, especially with the heavy use of Droid automation. Planetary shields not being something that can be shot through seems to go against how most shields are presented, such as ship shielding, so that's not a very good explanation imho. A planet could easily possess multiple fleet's worth of firepower, even if it's just Concentrated around the main capital.
I just think planetary defenses are underrepresented in sci-fi, along with how ground invasions tend to just be "We captured this single city and now the planet is ours!"
The weapon itself is less the driving point of costs, the power supply is. You dont just set up a cannon somewhere in a concrete bunker and bring it some ammo.
Building a sufficent power source is expensive, even more so when it also needs to be fortified.
@@toastyrules8221 Ye no. Its still wayyyyyy cheeper. As the original commentor put it, not enough effort is put into writing planetary defense. Think on it for a bit. A ship's reactor is limited by the size and class of ship yet can mount an impressive array of turbolasers, point defense lasers, ion cannons etc. So a upscaled ion cannon or hypervelocity gun would be easy to power since the reactor doesnt have the limitation of being ship locked. The power generator or reactor could power the shield and defense array relatively easily and it would be quicker and cheeper than building a single capital ship. Droids are a thing. Orbital shipyards too. With the tech we have seen it is very possible. Only reason that we dont see it is narrative biases.
@@ADB_UWIM_2807 the entire scaling and combat strategies applied for spaceflight species of Star Wars is way off, if you ask me (specifically for movies and cartoons - I do not know how are represented in the books), and planet defenses are also poorly represented because of this. We don't really see smart weapon systems with self-guidance and navigational systems but most of the times there are "dumb" weapons used in close combat (almost like "melee" combat), we know the Star Wars weapons are using ammunition (being batteries, gas canisters etc) and fuel yet we don't see any issues with ammunition & fuel scarcity especially for the rebels and projectile traveling speed seems inconsistent, we have "laser/plasma" weapons with fast-firing projectiles and other times their travel speed is so slow, you can physically walk away from it's path and the list goes on.
There are some specific advantages of surface planetary defenses that are not represented in the movies. You can actually encapsulate most of the defense battery's structure inside a permanent shield and it would be easier and cheaper to fuel it on a planet's surface (could also go with something self-sustainable like subteranean thermal energy) than in space. You can leave only the gun itself exposed to fire at all times without any shield hindrance and just protect the rest of the structure around it with the energy shield, the gun will also be a very small target and it would be very hard to hit especially from space (even with guided targeting systems) and if you get a battery of 3-4 guns like this around a base, you already have a pretty solid defense that would make any enemy think twice before attacking you and you would force the enemy to not engage you directly, making any dirrect fire to the gun difficult. You're also allowed to dig into the ground and use the natural shielding of a planet's surface to protect the underground facilities if you go deep enough (in space they would be fully exposed unless you would build a really strong shield around the power generator, fuel storage and others) and most ship weapons won't be able to penetrate, unless we talk about specialized siege ships and planet-killer superweapons. Also, being on a planet's surface you can focus on having big enough firepower and projectile speed to knock out any enemy ship that is on direct path towards your base and focus on long-range interception within the vicinity of your planet and this will give you some tactical protection from space bombardments and direct assault of the base or encircling your entire planet and get caught in a blocade. Instead, it will force the enemy to go around you for ground assaults and buy some time for defense preparations or tactical retreat.
If the rebels would have enough resources, 2 groups of 3-4 gun batteries each, on a planet's surface on opposite hemisferes would give a great tactical advantage and allow for a potent planetary defense system, as long as it is co-ordinated with allied defense fleet and other combat groups. But, to be honest - I would see these kinds of strategies working in favor of planetary defense forces instead of the rebels, where you have a planet and a population to defend and you can co-ordinate the planetary defenses with your own planetary fleet of combat ships. The rebels lack the numbers and firepower to go toe-to-toe with the Empire so it's not feasible for them, but still - having just 1 of these bad boys near your base would make any capital ship captain prudent and less direct in his tactics to attack your forces.
@@urlauburlaub2222 there are a few key issues with the logic explained:
1. Energy dissipation works with range, which means the longer the object you're attacking the more energy you need per shot to obtain it.
2. You also have energy loss if the said target is in atmosphere so you must compensate for it when you're doing orbital attacks.
3. Orbital strikes are already long-range, since all engagements happen in space from thousands of kilometers away or more, while most ship space-combat depicted in Star Wars is usually hundreds of meters at best.
4. A competent spaceship and fleet composition would be the most effective technology available with the least risks involved. In Star Wars, a pretty big self-guided torpedo would be better than any laser-guided weapon depicted since you can equip that torpedo with a self-guiding system, programmed to evade any defense fire thrown at it. I mean, for crying out loud, we have a million-language-talking robots with self-conscience and abilities to make complex tasks and mimic sentient organisms in the depicted universe yet they can't make a guidance system solely programmed for attack/evasion? Not to mention all those "wonder" weapons and technologies that defy any other tech and system described in Star Wars.
As a comparison and a good analogy, the Star Wars civilitations are described as today's safari/jungle tribes warring themselves with modern vehicles, firearms and an ocasional cannon or rocket launcher, using Victorian Era combat strategies.
@@urlauburlaub2222 points 1,2 and 3 are available for any kind of energy-based weapon. Even in space, for any set distance there is an energy loss even for light due to it's dispertion in interaction of various kinds of radiations, particles, gravitation fields etc. It's not the mass of the "plasma bolt" or any mumbo-jumbo Sci-Fi tries to explain, any energy projectile - be it gas-based or light-based- has a stored energy within it based on it's dimensions/energy of fire and will lose energy with any atmosphere it passes on within it's travel distance, space void being the only place where you can call it as "neglejible" for short-travel distances since there is a small chance to meet any particle or any kind of interaction that could cause energy dispersion. This is why "However, bolts increase their power while falling. " is a false statement - even if Star Wars tries to explain it like this, they're not kinetic weapons to act like this. If they would use rods or any kind of projectile that could survive atmosphere re-entry, then yes, it would be valid.
4. + 5.: they have strong warheads. We saw them being used again and again even in the old moviess, they're capable of doing anti-gravitational fields and power generators or engines for any kind of hyperspeed spaceship but they can't do a destroyer-killer warhead? That's too far-fetched. Even the episode 8 movie is showing bombs capable of destroying - well - a destroyer. I get it, the origins of Star Wars universe is rooted in the '70s when everyone was dreaming about future energy-based weapons, but the rules of this universe and it's capabilities - especially military - are grossly misrepresented. Any old-school SciFi Universe has it's flaws, from Dune to StarTrek, StarGate, Andromeda etc. I grew with SciFi and I like the stories they can build, but we should not blindly agree with everything a writer says. StarWars included.
"A ships a fool to fight a fort". Shore batteries have always been though nuts to crack in real life.
Realistically off screen and off page, ground based weapons and attacking fleets anchoring into to gun lines probably duel for a while before the ground stations are fully raised. Just like shore batteries after the age of sail, they're there to delay amphibious assaults or force landings else where I would imagine.
It seems like the Rebellion learned a lot from the disasterous retreat from the Siege of Atollon. The scenario there was very similar, but with a few key differences. The Imperial force at Atollon was smaller than at Hoth, but so was the Rebel base. Also, while Vader is quite a competent battlefield commander, most of the actual decision making was done by incompetent subordinates. At Atollon, you had Thrawn in command, who was a much more hands-on commander, and who had a superior tactical and strategic intellect. It seems that the Rebels learned the right lessons from that failure, and the planetary ion cannon was pretty key to their evacuation strategy. It was probably there to deal with Imperial Interdictor cruisers, but Vader didn't bring any, preferring to brute-force the attack with speed and firepower. But the ion cannon could work in both scenarios, either removing Interdictors blocking access to hyperspace or disabling Star Destroyers in blocade positions.
I don't think the Rebellion had the resources to install planetary ion cannons at all their bases, but I think the presence of the ion cannon on Hoth *definitely* influenced their decision of where to set up their primary headquarters.
@@miniaturejayhawk8702 I guess you could say that Veers is the exception. He doesn't do anything we see in the films that's explicitly incompetent, but it's implied that the majority of Vader's command staff aren't particularly good at their jobs. Both canon and Legends sources demonstrate that high ranking military positions are more often political appointments rather than meritocratic ones. The Empire was plagued with the kinds of corruption and inefficiencies that you get when individuals are promoted based on loyalty instead of competence. One of Thrawn's best assets was his ability to frame his competency *as* loyalty; otherwise he would have never been able to ascend the ranks of command within the Empire.
@@miniaturejayhawk8702 Because loyalty is easier to fake than competence. All you had to do to get promoted in the Empire was kiss the right ass, so there were a significant number of high ranking officers who were only concerned about their own gain, but knew how to keep the appearance of extreme Imperial patriotism. This was most evident in Legends, when hundreds of the admiralty *immediately* became independent warlords the instant the Emperor was dead.
To be fair Vader's initial plan had been to drop out of hyperspace directly into orbit already within range of their weapons. One of his subordinates screwed up the jump coordinates and that is the ONLY reason the Alliance had a chance to see them coming and escape.
@@BertoxolusThePuzzled Given the dialogues of the movies, I'd say it was the opposite. Vader blamed Ozzel for bringing the fleet "too close to the system", so I suppose he wanted to sneak on them with a slower, farer approach?
@@farseeraradrel4808 I thought this was cleared in some novel that connected this being Vader attempting Thrawn's usual strategy of uaing extremely strategic and tactic hyperspace jumps for rapid repositioning and to catch enemies by surprise, but who knows if that is even canon anymore at this point. XD
I agree with the point overall, but the Hoth canon was meant for a specific situation which was planned perfectly.
The empire would not have detected the canon signature until after the shield was down, as the power for the canon was masked by the power for the shield (the empire would have thought the power output was all for the shield, they were not smart like that).
Because the empire would expect fleeing rebels to use the most direct path to escape, they clustered their intercept ships in that area. The empire wanted to capture rebel leadership to make an example of them, so they were not shooting everything down as soon as it was detected; this gave the canon the chance to target and shoot the star destroyers, letting the Rebel ships to get through.
If the Rebels used a targeting pattern based on typical imperial fleet movements (which they knew well), they could send waves of transports out timed to hit the intercept fleets as they came into range (which is what we see in Empire, I think).
The problem with that thinking is that i thought this video in it of itself would be a LOT smarter than "Duh, SHIELDS"
No, the problem with ground based weaponry shooting from the planet, in a realistic scenario or hard sci-fi it just wouldn't work or DO much. The amount of energy needed to pierce the atmosphere, the earth's curvature effecting the targeting, gravity and dissipation of energy in the atmosphere from the ozone layer would do more than enough to negate ANY power from ANY ground based installation (unless it would be a rocket with boosters, then the shot would take much longer than that to make it for good reason)
@@mattmurphy7030 Nope. I know the old eu and the new. The empire was filled with a lot of over-confident officers who made a LOT of mistakes.
Look how Tarkin died.
Pov: you are the empire in the death star and you lightspeed travel to the rebels base and it has thousands Ion Cannons of it
Rip death star
Reminds me of these type of weapons in the game Imperium Galactica II. They were expensive, difficult to maintain, and attacking fleets would know exactly where they were and return fire. Additionally if troops in that game were landed on the planet, they were useless. However, in the right situation they did have their uses. Like you said though in star wars, in this game it was only really something for the rich and powerful planets, and they needed to be massed up. There was also another game, Star Ruler 2, I think it was, where planetary guns only worked if you had a fleet or satelites in orbit. So yeah, like you said these weapons do have their drawbacks.
Yeah this video reminded me of Tollan Ion cannons in the TV show Stargate SG-1.
IG2 was a great game with one exception - unless you played on the easiest mode, all the diplomacy, trading, and other functions were completely useless. There is one faction in the game so powerful they would pretty much obliterate all the other races before you even made contact with them, and the game was just a fight between you and them.
I get the feeling you underestimate the importance of area of denial weapons. Cutting off access to or forcing the enemy through areas of your choosing is a massive advantage. AOD weapons are the staple of 20th and 21st century warfare for a reason.
I was thinking the same. They do not litter the whole planet with ground based weapon, just the locations where they don't want enemy ships to bombard from orbit or make a direct orbital drop. Making the enemy move somewhere else to land waste them a lot of time and logistics.
Hypervelocity cannon arguably more fun to use
Dang right! :D
*Hypervelocity cannon firing!*
A secondary shield network just for the ground based gun would be prudent. Similar to a ship based shield system that can be fired through - _ships don't drop their shields to fire._
As well, a lot of fortifications in the area to defend against any ground based assault or fighter/bomber attack.
You don't just have a giant cannon by itself, you rock paper scissors shotgun the whole defence complex.
It then becomes a strong point where defenders can rally and launch counter attacks from.
For the location, there are two main options;
Near enough to cover a vital location, such as the Capital, that needs to be protected.
The other location that could use such a massive weapon is the main military base. Having your defence fleet/hangars and so on under a separate fire through shield, so it can't be taken out in a surprise attack means that any invasion becomes a drawn out affair for the invaders, they can't do a shock and awe.
If Naboo had such a complex, the Trade Federation could have been devastated in orbit, while their attempts to get anywhere near the Capital would have been stopped. Landing craft could be taken down by smaller guns in the complex, while Naboo fighters could have enjoyed air superiority with the aid of their ground based AA.
The Trade Federation would have had to land forces far away, beyond the horizon, and marched them in. That would have taken a lot of time and they would have been continually harassed, and once within the same horizon arc as covered by the big gun the Naboo air force would straff them.
That's... What they did actually, and they marched a column so vast the RSF couldn't possibly have been able to attack it and do meaningful damage without losing over half their fighters in a single run right into Theed. There were dozens of MTTs and hundreds of STAP, platoon attack craft, and AATs, capable of creating a wall of fire so intense even many corvettes would've been blown out of the sky.
If you get a degree of computer coordination between the planetary shields and the ground based weapons installations, I suspect you can set up a combined routine that makes the lowering of the shields, the firing of the weapons and the raising of the shields afterwards into a single cohesive routine, cutting the moment of unshielded vulnerability to maybe a second or two, perhaps even less, at which point it would difficult to take advantage of those openings without knowing the timings in advance
Somehow, starships and droids seem to be able to shoot through their own shields. So it must be possible to do somehow.
@@1TW1-m5i I always assumed it was a scale thing, like shields over a certain size cannot be made to only work one way. Though a planetary shield along with a smaller secondary shield that covered the ground base/cannon would kinda solve the issue of opening the shield.
@@scottthewaterwarrior shields let light to pass, so why not lasers?
@@hphp31416 Cause they aren't lasers? They move slower then actual bullets but even ignoring that the technical books explain blasters as firing esentially plasma contained within a magnetic field.
All those problems (firin through shields, powering weapons, etc.) should also apply (to a lesser degree) to ships aswell, yet they seems to have solved it.
A ship based tubolaser able to vaporize a mountain from orbit; should be more or less able of vaporizing that same mountain if their positions were reversed.
In most scifi; planetary weapons are 'cheaper' and easier than a ship mounted equivalent (same is true for real life weapon systems too).
cheaper isnt really the case
its a lot easier to build big in space then on a planet where gravity is constantly getting in your way
but it would atleast be easier to supply and find operational crew
@@ashardalondragnipurake When people talk about gravity in that context; they are talking about it being a problem for launching into space, not while on Earth.
Planet based systems (inc power source) can be as huge as they want, can be less efficient and even harmful to the environment, ship based ones cannot -space, environment, power; are all in short supply.
@@LENZ5369 For ships designed for operating only in space and built in space that is a non issue, they can be as big as you want. Space, environment, and power are all merely dependent on the size of your budget, resources, time, and workforce. This is why Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers like the Eclipse can exist. As well as why you can have mobile fleet building, repair, and rearming bases like the Supremacy. If its never intended to actually land on a planet then you can go as big as you want and can afford.
Only landing craft are actually limited due to having to be able to function in planetary atmospheres and escape a planets gravity well.
@@TankHunter678 Yes but you missed the point -in that case why build a 'ship' at all; why not just build engines on a moon or planet (aka 'planetships')?
By making "budget, resources, time, and workforce" irrelevant; you make the Star Wars universe: it's world building, narrative, plot drivers, all of it; also irrelevant.
SW has a preference for ship over planets and for manned fighters over capital ships.
That is the SW flavour and I have no problem with it, my issue is bastardizing real life science to (badly) justify it's flavour.
Could have just said that turbolaser strength is lowered by gravity -hence turbo lasers on planets suck.
Also: in real life -where we don't have deflector shields, super materials, FTL and so on; there are limits to what we can build.
@@LENZ5369 The problem with putting thrusters on a moon or planet is that it is far far harder to push something out of a gravity well than it is to simply build something outside of a gravity well. It is also incredibly hard to change trajectories once it gets into motion.
You also eliminate its ability to support life, which is kinda important since planets are not easy to replace unlike ships.
The only real use putting thrusters on a planetary object would be if you wanted to take a moon and chuck it at a planet in the same solar system to destroy it like in Planetary Annihilation.
Hence why its better to simply build your artificial moon fortress. Since you can also design the thing to be far more mobile then any planet with thrusters on it and actually able to support life without having to burrow through existing material. As all the life supporting systems are designed and built beneath the outer shell during construction.
I do want to point out that in real life we do not have orbital shipyards capable of allowing us to build vessels outside the gravity well. Any ships we design have to have operating within gravity as a requirement which is the biggest limiting factor for us.
Ground based defenses are presumably a last resort option should you lose the fight in space. And more importantly something that can threaten the incoming ships and delay a landing operation from happening literally right on top of you. If you had the resources to deploy them you could use it in conjuncture with cheaper smaller AA type weapons to seriously hamper landing forces At an important location. Considering these are rebels and they are throwing every thing they have for even a 1% extra chance at survival. even a single ION cannon made a big difference. Without it a shitload more forces would have dropped sooner and closer which would have been a much different battle then the conflict on hoth. Defending the entire planet with ground based weapons is definitely feasible in star wars considering the death star existed but ideally they would just keep big ships from parking right on top of a base and just nuking it to shit and back. Targeting a small ground target accurately cant be all that easy and entrenchments can provide a lot of cover for a few good return shots.
Tl;dr they aren't for Full defense of the entire planet but there to keep big ships from doing what they love to do which is park in low orbit right over some guys house and just bombarding it.
I once wrote a Star Wars story with a major planetary siege. The defenders had cleared out the civilian population and huddled all of the defenders in one city protected by a powerful shield and two anti-orbital ion cannons, all hooked into the power grid of the otherwise-abandoned city. This created a funnel above the city where enemy capital ships could not go without getting blasted and risking a fall onto the planet. Unable to bombard the city effectively from outside the funnel, the attackers were forced to rely on ground forces, though they either had to land outside of the cannons' range (using big, Acclamator-like landing ships) or piecemeal using tons of shuttles in airspace still contested by the defenders' ground-based fighters. And then the ground forces would need to walk through piles of fortifications and artillery.
The attackers did have the option of blockading the planet and starving the garrison out, but starfighters both from the city and hyperspacing in on hit-and-run attacks were able to pick away at the orbital forces. The defenders could also bring in supplies in blockade runners, attempting to hyperspace in and dash past the enemy fleet until they reach the relative safety of the funnel.
All in all, a very interesting and complicated scenario that evolved out of the ground-to-space gun technology.
Simply ignore the city, locate civilian food supplies and infrastructure, and contaminate/destroy them using asymmetric warfare assets. The defenders are given a choice. Remain in their fortifications and watch as everything they hoped to defend is destroyed, or surrender. If they opt to allow the civilians to die, its a propaganda coup. "We were trying to deliver aid for (made up disaster) but they wouldn't stop shooting at us."
The gullible will buy the story, and the astute will understand that you'll do anything to win.
Keep it up eck you are my main source of star wars info
You are one of the main reasons I want to start reading legends. I was never willing to read them growing up, but after watching your channel for the last 4 years I'm a changed man. Thank you Eckhart, and keep up the good work and awesome videos!
I'm glad you mentioned/linked this video at the end of your short. I don't think I got notified about this one.
I was in the Army and my first job was a (MOS: 14R) M6 Bradley Linebacker Crewmember. The M6 is a anti-air variant of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that replaces the TOW launcher with a launcher that holds 4 stinger missiles which are used for low flying and slow air threats. That job ceased to exist around 2005 where I had to pick a new job, and this lead to the only mistake I made in the Army, where I chose Satellite communications where I did well enough in school to become a network controller (MOS: 25S1C). Here is what I see wrong with the ion cannon. Shooting a line of sight projectile at an air target is hard to do. This is why we now have guided munitions for taking out air targets. So if you are going to use an unguided projectile, you need to used overwhelming volume of fire to ensure you hit the target, especially one that is in space. The slow rate of fire of the ion canon means you are probably going to miss, especially since it is not moving at the speed of light. If the star destroyer is moving, especially turning, that makes it even harder to hit. From my satellite communications experience, an energy based weapon is going to lose a lot of energy passing through the atmosphere. Learning about satellite communications, I was shocked when we were taught the math to figure out the loss in signal strength of a signal being transmitted through the atmosphere and how much it is, and even more with its return trip. In the movie, the weapon is pointed around 45 degrees, the closer to 0 or 180 the look angle is, the more loss of power a signal endures with the least amount of loss occurring at 90 degrees (looking straight up). A missile would have to be large in order to get to a star destroyer, so that isn't viable. Especially since it can be shot down or jammed. Using multiple ion cannons to give a volume of fire, or using a weapon with a high rate of fire, would be a more realistic scenario for defense. That is ignoring the whole planetary shield issue.
I like how in the battle of Naboo a full on blockade was used to starve the planet of resources and communication before ground troops invaded. It was very stealthy and deceptive, even to the galactic senate.
Nobody could be sure what was going on until the Jedi got Queen Amedala out to plead to the senate of her planets situation. They didn’t have planetary shields or massive turbo lasers. Only a fleet of small fighters.
Not like a Republic member planet is going to expect to be attacked, generally the idea would be that no one would attack for fear of the Republic mobilizing to deal with the threat. Thus you only really are going to have enough forces to deal with any local pirate presence, which Naboo did not really have to deal with much due to how safe its region was.
It still doesn't make sense to me how such a lush green planet could be starved via orbital blockade. Like did they stop growing their on food completely and loose all ability to do so in the less then 50 years since they stopped being isolationist?
@@scottthewaterwarrior The planet may be lush and green, but that does not mean a lot of it was developed for use in mass farming. Especially for a world that focused a lot on preserving their natural beauty as much as possible.
You also have to take into account that the Trade Federation very easily would have been able to take over the farms and any storage facilities, Naboo simply lacked the military power to do anything. Especially given how many forces the Trade Federation can simply throw at them. This is why they had to rely on the Gungans who actually had a standing army instead of just a royal guard.
@@TankHunter678 They were isolationist only 40 years before the start of Episode 1, even less in the Disney timeline. My whole argument is aganst the blockade, once they invaded the planet and took over that's a different story, but that would be an occupation at that point, so they'd control the suply on planet too.
@@scottthewaterwarrior The blockade is not what started the starvation, the starvation happened after the ground invasion. The blockade and the threat of invasion was to force the people of Naboo into agreeing to their demands.
The starvation was intentionally inflicted after the invasion in an effort to break resistance and get them to sign the documents.
One thing I think is missing from Star wars is star fortresses. Orbital ships without hyperdrives etc. Like the death star but a 20th of the size. Putting mega weapons on star forts say 8 kms would make them for more effective
Legends does have the Golan series of defence platforms, the mark 1 is roughly equivalent to a Star Destroyer in firepower, weirdly to carries much less fighter craft though.
@@danf3201 you'd think it'd be able to be 5 times the power of a star destroyer for the same cost with no hyperdrive. And able to field Tens thousands of fighters or drones since weight doesn't matter in orbit with minimal engines.
@@caliph20 I think the Golan marks do up to 8 eventually, with each more powerful then the last, but yes, much like Stellaris, defence stations with fighter/bomber craft and long range weapons make the most sense, otherwise they could be 'sniped' at by fighters/bombers or by alternating strafing runs from mobile ships. Instead the Golans are close quarter brutes, armed like they can move when they can't.
That thumbnail. I will never ever look at that cannon ever again without imagining "Quick! Fire the giant boob cannon thing!" From Family guy star wars.
If the rebels had access to Surface defenses maybe the outcome would have been different because eventually some part of the shield would fail with a planetary shield But overall the strategy worked well using the shield to interdict troop landings
I've always loved the giant boob nipple guns.
Well that's how the Family Guy described them.
You’re hands down my favourite Star Wars Channel. Super informative, and straight forward! Keep up the awesome work!
Turbo lasers and point defense cannons are cooler than a shield (if you can’t have both). Once an enemy inevitably gets passed orbital defenses (including a shield) the planet is effectively gone, unless a fighter wing takes them out super fast. Even then there’s still damage. Think of it this way: if an invasion force gets past your extended installations and big ships that can’t be everywhere at once, having cannons varying in size warding off warships of any size and taking out transports and fighters is better for you, your ground forces, residential areas, power and infrastructure and evacuation routes. A planetary shield is if the planet is a very large and important installation in and of itself but only so much that you’d put a lock and key on it (and you can’t fit or afford the extra firepower) and don’t expect it to be hit with anything big enough to break the shield (Scariff) or you *do* expect it to face extreme hazards from something like solar flares or debris.
“The greatest threat to any invasion has always been the ground defenses, with them you are forced to land beyond the fire arc of the defence net”.
Realistically you would use weapons like this to deny specific areas to easy invasion or bombardment. Place them so you cannot drop right on a city or other strategic location without removing the big gun.
Reminds me of Stargate, where they were eventually offered a Tollan Ion cannon, and they briefly went over the idea of how to utilize it, and figured that even if the gun were somehow mobile it just wouldnt provide coverage, so they went back to the Tollans and asked for a total of 38 for full coverage.
Naturally they never got any due to plot, and they didnt help the Tollans much either, but that was for totally different reasons. Lets just say the Tollans are not the best tacticians.
The Tollans trusted in their superior technology, it made then utterly invulnerable, right up until the point it didn't
@@davidioanhedges I mean, their entire defense was two components: Ion cannons and the fact they lived on a planet unknown to the Goa'uld, so much so that they built their own gate.
Then they invited Zipacna for the whole trial, and nearly bit it there if it werent for SG-1, and then Zipacna jumps in bed with Anubis and snitches to the only guy who has access to superior shield tech.
As I recall, the cannons were hackable by the goauld so it didn’t help them
I imagine another factor that keeps us from seeing more heavy defensive emplacements is that from the perspective of a galactic government there are very few cases where they would be worth while. For the same price of a sophisticated planetary defense network, you could probably buy a decent number of capitol ships. Those ships may not necessarily be as effective at defending a world, but they aren’t tied to just one world, then can go where needed, and can also, you know, attack and whatever else.
Not to mention that most worlds within the territory would not be expected to be attacked in the first place.
If planetary defense is their only goal, why would they spend money on a ship instead of the same amount on a dedicated cannon? Or squadrons of fighters with proton torpedoes?
@@MightyGalvatron Probably because ships are much more versatile than dedicated cannons or starfighters..
@@galenmarek4550 They're also weaker and far less nimble.
@@MightyGalvatron Most fighters are not designed with a hyperdrive on board, and you need to be able to project power into the nearby region to deal with pirate bases. Sure dedicated defense emplacements and fighters is pretty good, but you kinda do need to eventually deal with that pirate base the enemy keeps retreating to. Especially if the Pirates are taking out your freight before it ever gets into the protective range of your guns and fighter support.
It was the same problem we had in WW2. Early on we did not have fighters that could go as far as the bombers and come back, the result was a LOT of bomber deaths.
Or when it came to the Battle for the Atlantic, we lost a lot of cargo ships loaded with supplies for Great Britain to German U-Boats until we officially joined the war and finally took the fight to them.
There is also the thing that a mobile ship force can also help with evacuation in the event of a known upcoming invasion.
The funny thing about that ion cannon and shield is that they were ultimately bad ideas. The Rebellion was never going to win an actual toe-to-toe battle with the Empire like that, as evidenced by what happened when Veers landed. Their best defense was secrecy, like the hidden base on Yavin. The only thing the generator and cannon did was give the Empire clues that someone was on Hoth. If those weren't there there's a good chance the probe droid finds, well, nothing.
And just like that I’m here to enjoy more Star Wars!
Fleet battle between
Grand admiral Thrawn vs. Ender Wiggin
Each one has an equal sized fleet with equally capable subordinates, and since Ender is from a different universe each has equal understanding of the technology they’re using. They are in command of Star Wars vessels. Pick a famous fleet of your choosing I’d suggest death squadron
If ender and thrawn can both bring their crew, ender will wipe the floor with thrawn. While thrawn is a great strategist enders speciality Is tactics and micro management which gives him a big advantage
Ender has perfect empathy. If he is allowed to study Thrawn before facing him, then Ender basically can't lose. He will not only perfectly predict what Thrawn will do, he'll be able to perfectly predict how Thrawn will respond to this knowledge.
He'll kill Thrawn and then cry a lot about it, having perfectly empathized with his enemy.
@@celebrim1 one of Thrawn's specialties is also getting into his adversary's mindset, so they would probably be on equal footing for ability to predict each other's moves and counters when given time to study one another.
@@maximfunfstuck5741 I agree that Ender has way better subordinates than Thrawn. I imagine this being both of them commanding equal subordinates though. I really just want to test their respective command abilities.
"Prepare to fire the Giant Boob Nipple Gun." *Family Guy Star Wars
In one of the old rpg books, the game stats for the Death Star were given by sector. That is how many weapons of what type were in a sector and how many sectors there were on the Death Star. I think there over 20 sectors on it. The rationale being that because of the size and curvature of the Death Star, ships were only threatened by one sector at a time.
The same would indeed hold true for a planet. A planet would have hundreds of such sectors, at least. Odds are only a rare planet could set put guns in all of them. Cities, power plants, industrial areas, would likely get the most.
For a planet, you could get away less weapons covering it, a few dozen still but no where near hundreds, plants are not very curved so a firing arc of weapons, especially if they are built at high elevations and away from the coast, they would cover a monstrously large area. Think about how much of space you can see at night when looking up.
I wonder, has it ever happened in Star Wars history that someone thought to strap engines to a large or medium sized asteroid (which most solar systems have plenty of)?
The trajectory calculations would be simple, dropping nuclear weapon yield payloads on specific targets. The materials would be cheap(-ish), and the attacker would suffer no real loss if their attack were "neutralized" and in fact the defender would still suffer without a planetary shield because you can't instantly vaporize a large space rock, just break it up into several smaller space rocks, still damaging any infrastructure in the area.
And from what I've seen from SW, anyone attacking a planet without "liberation" in their heart wouldn't bat an eyelash at the collateral damage such an attack would cause.
tl;dr: SO MANY unneccessary forces were committed to Hoth by the empire. One big boulder would have given them a bloodless victory. Yes, that doesnt work cinematically, but good camera work doesn't win wars, people.
Ion cannons remind me of artillery waiting for a ship to comze close. In other words, the enemy(empire) get in range only to be shot at with a "disabling" Ion cannon. So the rebels could escape in time.
Badically what ESB showed us
One of the biggest weaknesses is planets rotate.
I wasn’t expecting that outro, it was very surprising and funny
Planetary based weapon are not meant to defend the whole planet. It is a means to deny the space directly above a strategic location on the planet, like for example your capital city or a power station. You don't want spaceships to carry out orbital bombardment so you have ground weapons to keep them away. It is the equivalent to Anti-aircraft guns. A real serious planetary defense is a combination of a planetary shield and orbital fortresses. Coruscant has a planetary shield as well as a series of Golan defense stations around the planet. I am not sure how many they have in orbit. Technically it would be in orbit above a strategic location. This stations are powerful.
Given the amount and size of infrastructure required, how long do we think the Alliance was on Hoth?
I mean, as far as I can recall, most of the bases used by the Alliance were abandoned by whatever species inhabited the planet long before the Alliance came to use it. So maybe a few weeks to probably a few years. But I'm no Star Wars expert by any means, so take my words with a grain of salt.
I believe there's a three years gap between star wars IV and V
I wonder if planetary shields are good for the environment?
I mean, they probably change the amount of insolation a planet receives.
They would also tend to hold atmospheric gasses in.
The only real use I can see for a ground-based anti-ship weapon like this is as specific Orbital Denial and as a means of dictating the pace of a battle.
Set one of these things up, and you can effectively contest the orbit above a given point to, let's say, prevent orbital bombardment of a major military installation. Not only can it keep ships above a given tonnage at bay, but it also forces your enemy to commit resources to neutralizing that installation. Build up a sufficient network of secondary AA and ground defenses, and you could cause some serious pain to any invading force.
IMO the biggest problem with ground-to-air weapons(and space battles in general) is that the planet's location is known, whilst the fleet's position isn't.
A fleet has no need to go anywhere near the planet in order to bombard it. Planet's orbits are known years in advance, so space fleet could attack from the edge of the solar system, fire their payloads, throw some asteroids on course with the planet, and disappear, long before anyone on the planet even knows that something has happened. If the space fleet attacks using lasers(light) then the planet wouldn't receive any warning either. The first warning would be an impact.
Ground to space cannons seem like theyd always be stuck dealing with one of two massive issues.
Energy weapons would have to deal with atmospheric dispersion, I'd imagine the sheer amount of air an energy projectile would need to shoot through would bleed off a massive amount of energy from any shot by the time it exits our atmosphere.
Mass drivers, like railguns, on the other hand would need to accelerate a projectile to such an insane speed that, again, by the time it enters orbit, either the combination of air resistance and gravity hasnt slowed it down to below escape velocity, to reach its target in orbit, or simply burnt the entire projectile due to friction.
Atmospheric dispersion works both ways. If a starship can bombard the planet with energy weapons, the same weapon fired from the ground can hit the starship. And normally, the weapons on the planet can be made a lot bigger.
And in many Sci-Fi universes gravity is not an issue as anti-gravity in some form exist. In Star Wars its repulsors. When small, person sized starships can easily go up and down the gravity well so can missiles. Only mass drivers would still have a problem.
Another problem is that much of the energy you fire (maybe more than half) gets absorbed by the atmosphere. Ion weapons and short wavelength lasers would suffer from this the most.
Yo Ladder Please Do What If Abeloth Escaped The Maw during the Clone Wars!
Considering a planetary shield CAN cover an entire planet, that just turns everything into a old school "wait for them to surrender due to lack of supplies" situation, where the attacker just sits their and waits, while the defender waits for reinforcements. However, i can see Anti Orbital defenses being used to support a defending fleet or knock out a few incoming enemy ships before the invasion/siege begins. You can also use the Planetary shield to funnel enemy invasion forces where you want them to go, kinda like a minefield.
Plus, "realistically" speaking their is going to be multiple layers of Anti Aircraft Artillery Ranging from the BIG F OFF Anti Orbital gun to Flak guns to direct fire gun positions. Id also imagine their would be secondary smaller shields around these gun positions to harden them from enemy bombardment. Isn't that was Shutter Shields are for?
The word for that is “siege”
That "wait for lack of supplies" might not work. Planets can grow their own food and planets have resources (ex: minerals). If they have enough natural resources to sustain the planetary shield and the surface guns, they can hold out for a long time.
@@crazyelf1 with the way interplanetary trade, smuggling and planetary specialization has been depicted, a vast majority of the worlds in SW are vulnerable to siege tactics. Agriworlds need new parts. Mustafar needs more food. Coruscant DEFINITELY needs more food.
Anyone with a fleet large enough to disrupt interplanetary trade and a source of supplies of their own that last long enough or a logistics network sufficiently good can starve out any planet the writer(s) happen to be targeting, barring supertech ancient space-magic hidden in the cavern nearby
Eck, can you please do a video on how different factions built up their logistics? I know it’s very important for any war, but Star Wars doesn’t seem to give it justice. Thanks and great video as always
"Activate boob nipple gun!"
I can only ever think of that family guy joke now 😆
It took me this video to truly realize why the empire had to do that slow approach via walkers because of that domed shield
From what I remember reading, ground base weapons had a longer ranger and was more powerful than Ship base. So you would fire before the ships got into firing range of you.
As for the idea that they could move the ship before the shot reaches you, I think is wrong is that shots do not show up on sensors so you wouldn't see it coming.
I have always seen myself use them to lay traps myself. Capture destroyers and other ships.
This video reminds me of Tollan Ion cannons from the TV show
Stargate SG-1. One episode its mentioned the placement of iron cannons on Earth & how many they would need to protect a planet of this size.
Every tool, no matter how good it is, has its limitations and needs to be used properly. Otherwise it's nearly useless. The closest approximation we have in the real world are shore batteries, artillery or rocket batteries built in coastal positions. They'll never be able to handle an enemy fleet by themselves, but they will be able to divide their attention. It's one thing to defeat a coastal defence fleet, it's another to try to sink a lot of maneuverable ships while ultra heavy guns are firing at you.
Why would a ground weapon be more expensive than the ship it shoots? The reverse seems more likely to be true.
Scale maybe? The ground ion cannon could disable a ISD in one burst, so its leagues more powerfull than thw armament of one ISD
@@nahuelleandroarroyo Not only that, it’s significantly more powerful and has to be powerful to propel the “projectile” into orbit.
@@official_pol2198 what is the projectile?
@@criticality2056 Ions perhaps?🤔
@@JohnFourtyTwo oh, how much does something like that weigh?
Ohdog the cutscenes from Tie Fighter and "Rebellion" bring back memories
2:45 How do you starve out a planet? Especially one who's entire surface, water, and underwater are as built up as Coruscant
Could you have a large shield covering the gun like a Droidaka and use the incoming energy charge to help the gun reload and with the barrel pointing out past the shield the weapon wouldn't be as exposed? Just a thought 🤨
He brought the intro back!!
Those disadvantages don't really make sense when you think about it (something you generally shouldn't do in Star Wars)
Ground based lasers being large is a design decision. Basically if a laser, say from a star destroyer, can shoot down and hit the ground the same laser can shoot up from the ground and hit the star destroyer. But making a larger weapon is much easier on the planet than in space because of potentially better heat management and power sources so you can have planetary weapons which would completely destroy a ship in a few shots like the Ion Cannon.
Expensive? Yes, but probably less expensive than a ship and when you are talking about a united, developed planet the economy would be so big that it would be no problem to finance several dozen or even hundreds of such weapons.
Tracking a spaceship is also much more easy than finding a camouflaged cannon on the surface of a planet.
Combine that with the near impossibility of actually conquering a developed planet.
Take a planet with 6 billion people (less than earth). How many troops do you think can this planet muster? 20 million? 100 million? More? How many soldiers must you land to even have a chance to defeat them and how many ships do you need to keep them supplied for several years?
Conquering even one such a planet would be a gigantic undertaking. So it makes sense that the Imperium build the Death Star because that would still be cheaper than a single planetary invasion.
Clearly inferior to orbital defense platforms.
... What do you mean "they've boarded the orbital defense platforms"!? They'll turn them into highly effective bombardment platforms that, because we don't have ground-to-space weapons, we can't take out!
... What do you mean "incoming bombard-
Reminds me of Babylon 5, "Captain, I believe he's turned the defence grid on Earth. If you don't stop them, they'll fire in 10 minutes. The Particle beams on those platforms can level 40% of the planets surface. You have to stop them!"
@@Ishlacorrin eyyy Babylon 5 fan, love that show.
Thanks for this. It's mentioned in shows or films but usually in passing. The only time I remember seeing a shield is Rogue One.
The one thing that strikes me as kind of silly: There's no reason that a planetary turbolaser has to be that big. If a conventional Star-Destroyer mounted turbolaser can shoot from space down to a planet's surface without issue, it stands to reason that it could do the same in reverse... and I doubt that the bombardment weapons on a star destroyer are of the same insane scale of those required to return fire. Just take the arms, shielding and reactor of a star destroyer and distribute it around the city you're looking to protect, it's still a huge investment of resources but the result I think is far more practical.
Admittedly the planetary turbolaser sounds more like a super-laser than a turbolaser, in which case it absolutely makes sense for it to be of that scale.
Actually, it does make sense because laser in star wars a basically particle cannons not laser, so they have mass. The laser from orbit is using the gravity of the planet to help them, where as the laser on the ground requires more power to fight against the gravity.
I always assumed ground defenses were so large because you can build a gun much larger than a ship gun then just connect it to the power grid. Power is still less of a limitation on the surface than in orbit.
@@ajh3461 That is most likely part of it.
The whole advantage of a planetary weapon is that it can be big though. If you don't have to move it then weight is a much smaller issue.
@@RorikH They *can* be bigger, but the primary issue that was being presented in this video was that they were too expensive and power-hungry, things that wouldn't be an issue if they were reasonably scaled. Better to have more complete coverage of critical areas in my opinion.
A great example of ground to space weapons is in Star wars the old Republic. On multiple occasions shields could ruin invasions. But also ground AS (ANTI SPACE WEAPONS) in large groups could large fleets trying to capture a planet. Due to AS guns being spread out made it harder to bombard all of them. Note they are quite useless at destroying fleets from afar. But trying to land troops from capital ships during the old Republic era was very difficult if the planet had AS guns, due to capital ships having to get close. Even during the Empire era capital ships would often get close to planets due to fighters posing a greater threat to landing craft.
I’ve always wondered when ships set up a blockade why don’t people just go to the other side of the planet is it because of hyperspace lanes. Also I feel like a malevolence style defense would be neat
6:55 That particular game scene (while it looks very nice) is crap, if the shield is up, the SD cannot enter the atmosphere unless it came through past the edge of the shield and then flew under the shield.
Most planetary defenses will always have a huge offensive advantage in firepower, it stands to reason, the cannons do not need to move, the power sources are vast, so yeah, one does have to worry about intruders in the form of fighters or commandos managing to punch holes through the shield to sneak through.
If I was Thrawn, I would bring a few asteroids to impact the shields to overload them and send large amounts of fighters to hit the power generators if they were on the surface. If the generators were underground, that would require another strategy.
There's good reason for the planetary cannons being so much larger than the weapons of a capital ship. There's an immense loss of power when shooting from a planet into space (and from space to the surface of planet) that just doesn't exist when two spacecraft are blasting away at each other across the void.
Both turbolasers and ion cannons are energy weapons. They will be affected by the Van Allen Belts, Ozone, the whole freaking ionosphere, heck even clouds and other forms of water vapor, as well as other obstacles. These sources of interference will either deflect some of the energy in new directions, reflecting it back down towards the planet, or lensing it into odd patterns in space; or absorb the energy into themselves, preventing it from going anywhere.
Therefore, the weapons would need to be quite substantial to simply match the capabilities of a capital ship. But the builders don't just want a weapon - with this outlay of resources, they want to be able to destroy or disable any ship that may attack. So they build larger still, with a power source sufficient to operate an entire capital ship going into a single weapon.
The end result is a weapon so large that its own mass leaves it vulnerable to collapse from even modest attack, and an energy profile visible from the next system over. The very definition of a glass cannon.
God I forgot how good the attention to detail in 2015 battlefront was with all the super cool and smart background details and Easter eggs
Good book recommendation, I used one of my credits on one of the Thron books a while ago and remember loving it.
Bro good job on improving on your videos I’ve been a subscriber for months now and your sub count has increased for a while good job❤
I wonder what they have for smaller guns. I doubt these massive weapons are very useful against a big group of small or medium ships, unless if they have a scatter or "airburst" function.
The big issue with ground defenses is the same issue land based naval defenses faced in the battleship era of the early 20th century.
You could have very effective anti ship canons and fortresses, but the cost of those was comparable to a capital ship. For just slightly more resources you get a battleship that isn't a static defense, and can be used all over the place. And to defend ports you can just use older battleships that can't keep up with the modern battleline that your new one just replaced.
That said, certain critical port cities (or worlds with SW) are important enough to invest in permanent heavy defenses to always have a baseline defense. Like Fort Drum guarding Manila bay, or LA's shore batteries.
Didn't the thing on Hoth require an *enormous* amount of power? Planetary weapons are probably best suited as a deterrent . A couple would almost certainly be enough to scare off most pirates abd minor factors from attacking in favor of an easier target. They are rather less likely to ward off a determined enemy like the Empire.
There’s an episode of Stargate SG-1 where the idea of ground based ion cannons comes in and they made the point to explain what Justin has as far as needing dozens if not hundreds to be positioned across the planet in order to legitimately protect it.
There are various kind of shields in sci-fi, it depends from the author and situation. In Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium series, there's the Langstrom Field, that allows to defend either ships and planets, if it has to collapse, a single section could shot down, you lose only a piece of the ship.
In my book,the way how I use planetary defense is a mixture of halos orbital Mac cannons,and Star Wars planetary shields that have focal points at points around the planet
,along with integrated defense stations that house the mac cannons,turbo lasers and ion cannons and smaller point defense lasers and flak arrays these defense stations are apart of the actual shield,and if they are destroyed the planetary shield will just seal up that area. Power wise defenses are powered with internal solar cores that contain micro sun while the planetary shield is powered by multiple mid tier size solar cores.
A frame in the game playback reminded me of a story I'd heard about infantry versus mechanized calvary (tanks / halftracks). Story was, during the Battle of the Bulge, US troops were low on anti-armor weapons, but had plenty of rifle ammo thanks to air-drops. A couple of armored Nazi vehicles peek over the ridgeline to keep an eye on them.
A bright field Captain finds a private who is good at trigonometry and directs him to take 'ranging shots' at the Nazi vehicles and graph the results. Captain takes the distance and angle numbers to his squad leaders, and then around 400 riflemen fire at the armored vehicles: 2 shots- one at 85º to arc up and then come down and hit the less armored top, the second with direct fire at the engine in the rear.
-While an armored vehicle can deflect a rifle round, about 400 hitting simultaneously on the top, and another 400 on the engine WAS more than the armor could stand, taking out the armed vechicle.
So, translating that to Star Wars lore, what happens if EVERY rebel in the trenches on Hoth ALL aim and shoot at the knee-joint of an AT-AT?
Same for the Clone War, if you've got thousands of clone-troopers, put a thousand blaster-bolts at the weak point of a Separatist vehicle- concentrated firepower from a thousand small arms isn't small...
AT-AT's armor plating is think enough that outside of anti-ship grade weaponry you wont be penetrating them. All the rebels would have achieved is wasting ammo.
So basically...these ground-to-space weapons are worth on very very important planets (like Coruscant, Kuat, Fondor etc) where you can set up many of them, it wont win a battle but it will sure give enemy fleet more targets to focus on and threat coming from the planet
Love the Intro🤝.
What’s the book shown at 7:49? I remember borrowing that book from the library and loving it a long time ago. I’d like to know its title and buy it.
Either Inside the Worlds of Star Wars Trilogy from 2004, or the same map was recompiled in the 2005 book Complete Star Wars: Locations - Inside the Worlds of Episodes I-VI. I looked it up!
The map of hoth with the attack lines always reminds me of a skiing map
Good thing you put the big red arrow in the thumbnail. never would have spotted the huge surface to space ion cannon otherwise.
A couple of thoughts:
1) Ground weapons should be able to be synced to planetary shields with essentially millisecond accuracy, making the window of vulnerability when dropping them extremely short.
2) There's nothing stopping each weapon facility from having its own, smaller shield, in addition to the main planetary one. Two layers of protection from orbital bombardment.
As a 40 year fan of Star Wars, and a person who prefers defensive strategy to aggressive offense, I've always been rather fond of things like the Planetary Ion Cannon, and similar emplacements. Even in stuff like 40k, where such scale weapons are usually left to lore dumps, and either not present, or already dealt with, by the time of the action we get to see, it's been fun to try and figure out what different categories of worlds would ve able to muster, in the form of defensive weapons. You never know when an Ork force will pop up, and every Boy who makes ground is now an Ork in his element; the more of their ships you can destroy with all hands, or even just disable outside of "let's just crash it, and seez what we'd can get!" range is a bonus.
One dumb little thing, though, and Hoth always confused me with it; where was the Rebel Fleet? I get that hiding was crucial, and not every Rebellion wants to go full Gar Stazi, and just remain on a mobile fleet all the time, but leaving their top brass on a world, without the defensive measures of its guard fleet, seemed weird. In my head, the Rebellion usually relied more on fighters than capital ships, so you'd think maybe they'd at least have some concealed ground-based hangar bays, from which to launch X-Wings, Y-Wings, and A-Wings, and they did have some of those; Luke even fled the planet separately aboard his fighter, but I surmise most fighter craft were berthed within the fleet, and it was somewhere else, leaving the Command Staff on Hoth with transports, and the ion Cannon, merely to cover their escape. Honestly, while I know the Empire wasn't too keen on its own fighters, I'd have thought they'd launch clouds of them to hary escaping ships, and disable them. Oh well.
Wait, I'm confused. If planetary shields would block surface-based energy weapons from firing outwards, then how do starfighters like X-wings and capital ships like Star Destroyers fire their energy weapons through their own shields?
Bubble like shields, like those of a droideka's, have their weapon's barrels poking out of the shield. But for starships, the shield is like a second skin for the ship, the main skin being the armor. There's a thing called shield frequency (originally from Star Trek) that allows certain things to pass through the shields and prevent certain things to go through the shields. For example, Mon Calamari have shields for their cities that allow ships or other solid objects to pass through, but keeps water from coming in. This is also shown in ship hangers where starfighters and shuttles can go though while not exposing everything to the vacuum of space
*Cough cough* target practice from orbit.... unless there are faster firing weapons than the ion cannon at hoth...
star wars makes no sense with its weapons, maybe its better we dont try to understand them becuase its just going to make problems
@@instinctisfiercenotcruel.958
That sounds like a challenge at the cost of adding more questions and problems.
@@jasoethesentienteyeshapedg4847 there is gonna be problems either way i guess
Great Video! Thank you!
I think the biggest use of ground to orbit weapons, and anyone who's played Empire at War will know how effective it can be, is using them in combination with even just a space fleet to intercept an enemy. With the distraction of your own space units (Albeit likely at great loss) an unhindered ground battery of planetary cannons can make short work of any larger ships the enemy brings to bear if given a little time. The other thing is people seem to assume such weapons are easy to spot. But it is much easier for satellites and observation equipment to spot a fleet of starships jumping into your atmosphere than it is for any newly arriving ships to spot likely hidden and spread out cannons, that may not even be visible above ground until they are needed. And by the time you've made your plan of descent, when the cannons come out it very well may be too late to adjust.
Eck I have an audible related question for you. I have read the forerunner saga plus halo fractures. Which three halo books do you recommend I read next?
I have to say that I love ground-to-orbit weapons, I use them whenever possible, it's great to see big destroyers utterly disabled from the ground as my bombers and ships finish them off. It would have been great to have massive banks of guided missiles, you could have them move from their protected launcher, optionally through a planetary shield gate, and into the enemy capital ships.
A double shiled layer would completely deny shooting back, if they have the technology to open them individually, even a very small gap would ensure it is possible to shoot from groundlevel, but denies any ships in orbit to shoot back
IIRC the imperial doctrine was not to send fleets of several Star Destroyers, but fleets of small ships around a SD each. If so, it means by disabling the flagship you actually crippled the whole invasion force. That's even more true if you could do that before it launched Tie, & dropships...
This also reminds me of the battle of scarif as the rebels had to take out the shield gate before launching an attack on the planet’s surface.