Invading a Space Station would be Really Really Hard.

I think we’re due for some fluffier fare. So I’m going to talk about a space-station invasion and the utter unrealism of it.

So let’s think. If you have a typical, Halo-style orbital defense platform, and you tried to invade it, it’s always, always going to be:

1. Heavily armed and defended.
2. Full of low, narrow corridors and exposed pipes, for some reason.
3. Filled to the brim with die-hard marines with lasers.
4. Easily within range of reinforcments.

So let’s see how it would go, Point-Counterpoint style.

1. You send in a big fleet of destroyers, cruisers, and fighters. Their accurate point-defense shreds your fighters within minutes.
2. Your destroyers and cruisers open fire. Its shields easily ward off the first barrages.
3. Your boarding crews go in. Most of them are blown out of the sky early on.
4. Several of them make it. Their marines are chokepointed in a narrow, low corridor and thinned out pretty thoroughly.
5. After a hard-fought battle, several of the squads enter the belly of the station. The marines barricade themselves and vent your guys into space.
6. They warp in reinforcements and shred your fleet. You lose.

Science fiction is silly that way. The spaceships they design are so unimaginably big that no fighters could possibly harm them with anything short of “a laser capable of firing a beam of pure antimatter.” But they always either die very quickly for no apparent reason or have some kind of flagrant weakness, like a heating vent or a bridge. Even the most moronic race of aliens would figure what they were doing wrong, especially since all aliens are either nonsentient or exponentially more intelligent than man.

Man, of course, has still managed to carve out an empire much larger than any alien empire, due in no small part to Liberty, Halliburton, and Mom’s Apple Pie. Probably also has something to with James Tiberius Kirk’s tear-off shirt. However, only one of their intrepid ships ever really does anything. And it’s usually a fighter or a cruiser.

Try invading a space station, even a little one, with one diminutive fighter or one ponderous cruiser.

~ by pieboy on December 25, 2006.