TrashMan wrote:Imagine if you will, humantiy experimenting and by accident (or design) descovering accurate in-system jumping. The range and speed advantage of Loroi suddenly becomes moot as an entire human feet suddenly jumps in right behind the Loroi force, in spitting distance no less.
A single mass driver salvo and half of the loroi force will be either crippled or destroyed.
As the saying goes...if you can't win by playing by the rules...change the rules.
More credible than you might think, as Humanity apparently has abnormally powerful computers (and you thought that all of those FPSes weren't good for anything!
), but as I best recall Arioch has said that you'd need data that you likely wouldn't have.
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Yes towards the end of the war kill ratios improved however who won that war? It was the NV we held our own and fought valiantly but it wasn't enough. They sat in tunnels used US bomb fragments to make land mines and broke the will of the US to keep fighting.
This gets at the issue, but also fails to do such. Ho Chi Minh realized something that we didn't: he could win on the PR front. For us to win on the PR front, we would have needed to start instituting a massive improvement in the quality of the South Vietnamese government. Mind you, I understand that we partially succeeded by assassinating one of their presidents before we fully joined the war, but one bad leader's death does not a government fix.
In comparison, in WW2 we went in after the war and
took over the area for a while.
That is how you fix an insurgency problem: the brute-force way. Which is not enough to say that it's enough, because as sunphoenix said, you need to understand the cultural, economic, and other situations on the ground, and you need to manage things right. None the less, the real solution for those situations is to reshape the local system into a less aggressive form. The techniques for stabilizing an empire are directly comparable to the techniques for creating an ally (or at least someone that won't shot you in the face, purely so that they can later turn you over to shoot you in the back).
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Well what made the Loroi's war one of extermination?
The unwillingness of either party to live under the conditions resulting from failure, along with an enormous amount of anger (at least on the Loroi side, I don't know for certain what the Umiak reason for continuing the war was).
CrimsonFALKE wrote:I mean we are limited to means of extermination since we can't just Nuke the fuck out of a region and call it a day. we'd need camps or death factories.
That's just one direction that this sort of thing can go. Post-WW2 Germany or Japan is another. The Loroi simply happen to not currently be willing to mount an occupation.
discord wrote:crimson: actually we could 'nuke the hell out of them', the nuke scare is quite impressively overblown, they are horrible weapons, but at no point is it a practical physics reason unless something important is nearby that can not be hurt for (reason), it's PR, always PR that keeps the fingers away from that button....and that people actually believe the bullshit about what the bombs do.
But as Vietnam demonstrated, PR is itself a potent weapon.