Worst "advanced" sci-fi military?

[Captain Seafort]

In all fairness to Starfleet, all of the fancy armor and tanks and machine guns are pretty much irrelavent when you've got a ship with pinpoint weapons in orbit overhead. The way I see it, Starfleet has never really needed to create a viable army division, since one or two starships can wipe out even the best ground army in minutes. But on the rare occasions when they have to fight without orbital support (e.g. AR-558) they're really not prepared for it.

As AR-558 among others demonstrated, you can't always rely on air or space support. As well as that, Starfleet doesn't just lack heavy weapons, they lack everything heavier than an assault rifle. No GPMGs and no mortars isn't just overeliant on orbital bormbardment, it's effectively ignoring the posibility of any ground engagement.

[Captain Peabody]

Yes, as people have pointed out, just because starships exist doesn't mean ground forces are irrelavent...that wasn't my point. We've seen numerous situations where ground forces had to be used. But like it or not, Starfleet is heavily biased towards ship engagements, and I was simply trying to come up with a rationalization for that.

As well as that, Starfleet doesn't just lack heavy weapons, they lack everything heavier than an assault rifle. No GPMGs and no mortars isn't just overeliant on orbital bormbardment, it's effectively ignoring the posibility of any ground engagement.

Now this is going a bit far. We actually have seen several of the things you mention above; during The Arena, Kirk uses a mortar-like photon grenade launcher to clear an enemy position. And we have heard of ground assault vehicles as well; 'hoppers' are mentioned several times throughout DS9 (these are presumably some sort of ground-to-air assault craft), and the Cardassians have been heard to posess 'skimmers'. The main reason we've never seen such vehicles is because most of the ground battles we've seen have for some reason taken place in small, cramped caves. And, as for heavy weapons, what about the huge Phaser Cannon the Enterprise crew uses in The Cage (TOS)? I agree Starfleet is biased against ground, but I don't think they're nearly as helpless as you imply.

[Graham Kennedy]

At least part of the problem is because the writers intended advanced technology to be much cleaner, more effective stuff.

Take "no GPMG" that somebody mentioned. As described in the TM, a Type II hand phaser can destroy several thousand tons of rock in one shot. And they can fire long duration beams. Next to that, a GPMG is a toy. You could forget about grenades and missiles for most situations, too. And if the power cells last for weeks of firing, no worries about logistics for ammunition.

And then you have transporters, which should render most vehicles obsolete. And so on.

The problem comes in that the people who MAKE the show don't follow through on any of this. They don't have the time, or money, or imagination. So they depict phasers are being about equal to a modern day pistol. And they come up with every imaginable radiation and interference which blocks transporters.

Which leaves the characters looking woefully unequipped.

Personally, I am not too keen on the depiction of future military folks as being much the same as ours. Look at Aliens. Those guys are basically present day soldiers with slightly different weapons. It looks nice, but are there really going to be no big revolutionary changes in how we fight wars in the next few centuries?

[Captain Seafort]

There will almost certainly be major changes, but from a broad perspective theose changes are paradoxically pretty minor - even today, the concept of fighting in a long line, with part of a unit defending while part attacks hasn't changed much from the Romans. Sure they used a shield to defending and a sword to attack, while we use one subunit to put down covering fire while the rest advance, but has the basic idea really changed all that much? Probably the best example of thinking outside the box for future military tactics was Staship Troopers - the book, not that stupid film - based around the fundamental unit of a highly trained, almost invulnerable, and nuclear-armed individual soldier.

[Monroe]

I personally think Warhammer 40k and its rip off, Starcraft have probably the most realistic approach to future ground conflicts.

In Warhammer 40k you have huge 8 foot tall genetically engineered warriors with armored suits, two hearts, a way to clone a replacement (Not a huge fan of Warhammer so I'm not sure how this works exactly) and massive guns that can send a bolt through the best armor a foe can have.Then you have the normal army pooled from trillions of people that sends millions to their deaths on a daily basis to drown their opponents in blood.

To me that makes the most sense, have an unlimited amount of humans to waste in whatever military campaign suits you and thousands of genetically engineered super soldiers.

Starcraft ripped off the super soldiers a bit in designing their Space Marine suits (and the Protoss v Eldar / Zerg v those other bug people). Starcraft pools its soldiers from convicts, though I assume since the war with the Zerg and Protoss didn't go so well they began conscripting, give them huge environmental suits to make them more like weapon platforms than soldiers.

Some Mech shows and games have done similiar, though I think The Matrix's mechs are pretty worthless with exposing the driver to all the dangers right in front of him.

I know the Federation would never have super soldiers genetically engineered and mass of low quality troops as the bulk of ground forces but why don't other groups do this? I doubt the Klingons would mind sending their subjugated races in suicide attacks while a few Agmented Klingons in better armor act as the hammer to the mass' anvil. Or better yet the Romulans? Surely they could put some of their lesser races to genetically engineering to make super soldiers and send others armed poorly to soak up weapons fire.



edit: Seafront your post made me think of Halo's Spartans which seem to go with the Warhammer tactic of great troops at your core with cannon fodder as backup. Your post made me also think of Sun Tzu's Art of War which is still studied and read by military leaders for good reasons.

[Sionnach Glic]

Zerg v those other bug people

You mean the Tyranids?

As for the rest, you have a pretty good idea there. Some universes wouldn't take that route because of morals and other restrictions.

[Monroe]

Zerg v those other bug people

You mean the Tyranids?

Yeah that's them. I can never remember their name >.<

[Les]

Movie Starship Troopers...

From what I've come to understand, what went down was that Paul Verhoven was called in to direct a massive sci-fi/action blockbuster from an original script that happend to include alien invasions of a human multi-planet political body focusing primarily around the infantry battles. Someone on production commented, "Hey, kinda like Starship Troopers isn't it?" So they decided to buy the lisence and re-write the still embryonic script into a Starship Troopers movie, and gave Paul a copy of the book so he could know what it was all about.

Apparently he got less than halfway through it before his own political inclinations reacted violently to the Heinlien politics, so then the script was re-written on Paul's behest as a satire of the book.

[Graham Kennedy]

I remember walking out of Starship Troopers and saying "either he never read the book... or he read it and didn't understand it... or he read it and understood it and decided to deliberately insult it."

[Sionnach Glic]

Next to Starship Troopers 2 the first one is a masterpiece. *Shudder*

[Aaron]

I remember walking out of Starship Troopers and saying "either he never read the book... or he read it and didn't understand it... or he read it and understood it and decided to deliberately insult it."

I think it's meant to be a parody of the military-industrial culture. That's how I take, if I don't my head explodes from the sheer shittiness of the Terran Federation military and it's tactics. The only thing they've got going for them is the co-ed barracks.

[Aaron]

Personally, I am not too keen on the depiction of future military folks as being much the same as ours. Look at Aliens. Those guys are basically present day soldiers with slightly different weapons. It looks nice, but are there really going to be no big revolutionary changes in how we fight wars in the next few centuries?

Unless theres some radical new technology in the future there probably won't be any new innovations in military tactics in the future. In the last 200 years or so that gunpowder has been a viable weapon infantry tactics basically stayed the same until the advent of the brass cartridge case which allowed the invention of the machine gun, which in turn lead to the massive losses of WWI and forced the revolution in small unit tactics that we now use today. Without a similar innovation I fear that we will probably continue to use the same basic level of tactics in infantry combat for the forseeable future. They have the benefit of being very well tested.

[Sionnach Glic]

Most modern weapons seem to be superior to a lot of sci-fi weapons in most respects. I think there's a discussion about this going on in the borg shields thread.

[Aaron]

Most modern weapons seem to be superior to a lot of sci-fi weapons in most respects. I think there's a discussion about this going on in the borg shields thread.

I think we can chalk that up to sci-fi writers and directors being ignorant of what real-life weapons are capable of and not listening to their military advisor (if they have one).

[Sionnach Glic]

Indeed. Its quite obvious very few of them have any idea what they're doing and mostly concentrate on making things look shiny.