Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Rambo
Those vessels probably aren't going to be very adequate troop transports, seeing as how they're design for exploratory missions. Seeing as how your optimized interstellar transport can only get 350 metric tons, it's doubtful that something built for exploration would be very useful in that role.
Ships optimized for interstellar travel take five years to get to Pandora. Just throw a bunch of unsuited ships in for the Armada and suddenlly your invasion fleet takes decades to get there.
If Unobtanium is really so vital that humanity would be willing to glass a world for it, then they're not going to be willing to wait decades to get the supply reinstated.
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I think the time factor alone would pose enormous challenges for any Earth-launched counterattack on Pandora. As you said, it takes at least five years (it's closer to just-over six actually, if the ISVs travel at around 0.7 times the speed of light) to fly from Earth to Pandora. Which means we're talking about an at least 10-year grace period before a potential invasion: five years for the deported crew of the mining facility to get back to Earth (and for them to alert headquarters about the loss of their facility), and another five years for an assembled invasion force to return to Pandora — if at all.
Even if we suppose that the deported Earthlings manage to send an SOS ahead of them, that alert would still take at least 4.4 years to get to Earth, assuming that Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system. That gives Earth a just-under two-year head start to prepare its forces before the deported miners return home.
Whichever way you look at it, the Na'vi victory is whole lot more decisive than it seem at first glance. Ten Earth years is a lot of time — and for all we know, that's time enough for Pandora life to recover from their combat losses, and then some.
(By the way, since I'm no expert, I'm curious whether time dilation would be a factor as well, since the ISVs are travelling at close to lightspeed. To the miners, it may seem as though only six years have passed since their banishment from Pandora, but to Earthlings, maybe several more years would have passed since the loss of their unobtainium source?)
So, far more than logistics, I think the lack of timely communication would pose far greater challenges to any potential counterattack. This is an age-old problem that every large empire has faced. You need only look at the history of the globe-spanning British
East India Company, for example, to extrapolate the kinds of problems a space-age megacorporation might similarly face.