Transporting Troops in the Firstorm Universe

[Ruckdog]

So, there has been some talk about how to integrate Planetfall and Armada, where you can do a planetary assault and orbital support with an Armada game to influence a Planetfall game. While that is a topic that deseves more discussion, I wanted to address a more general question:

How are ground forces transported in the Firestorm Universe?

There are two basic options as I see it; first, troops and equipment might just be carried on normal warships. Given that the battleships in Firestorm are about the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars, this is certainly plasuable. The other option is that dedicated assault transports are used to ferry major ground forces from one war zone to another. What do you guys think? I would be in favor of the the second option myself, sort of in line with the dedicated amphibious units that reached their zenith during WW II.

[Landlubber]

I think it's more akin to the first option, myself. If you can fit a few battalions or even brigades inside a massive capital-class vessel anyway, why risk putting them all in a more vulnerable troop-transport? I envision troop transport in the Firestorm universe as something akin to Starship Troopers: the Rodger Young was a combat ship, if I recall correctly, but the troopers themselves deployed in drop pods straight from there to the surface. At least, that's my recollection--but it's been about 15 years since I read the book, and even longer than that (thankfully) since I saw the movie.

So that begs the question: how many drop-pods can a battleship in the Firestorm universe deploy? And how do the troops and equipment get back? Not sure if we'll ever see answers to these questions.

I could also see them having another option--some sort of armored transport that deploys from cruiser/battleship-rate vessels, for invasions on planets where drop-pods would be ill-advised (stormy atmosphere, atmosphere too thin to stop the pods from smashing into the ground, too much vegetation, etc).

[Quickdraw]

My thoughts are that it is a little of both.
As Greg said, I imagine with initial ground force deployment that they are coming directly off of cruiser/battleship class vessels (especially considering the scale and size of those vessels). Possibly housing large troop transports akin to the amphibious troop carriers of the WWII era.I imagine that in the reality of the universe a battleship could conceivably be a one man show. Handling small scale orbital defenses and dropping ground forces in numbers capable of small scale regional invasion.
After the dust has settled? I would assume that upon completion of an objective, or once a foothold has been made, support ships such as to atmospheric drop ships and large troop carriers come FSD-one into the system.

[Ruckdog]

Well, I tend to imagine that just about every major starship will have a marine complement of some kind; after all, where does that AP value come from? Likewise, since there doesn't seem to be Star Trek-style transporters in Firestorm, I imagine a lot of ship to ship and ship to planet transfers happen by using small shuttles and the like. So, even if a ship has no wing rating, it has to have some kind of shuttle bay for this purpose. It's not too hard to imagine these small craft and marine compliments being used for raids and small assaults. For a full planetary invasion, though, it might still make sense to have a dedicated troopship of some kind; that way, you could free up the volume and mass on your full-fledged warships for more weapons and the like. Packing in enough troops and equipment on a battleship to enable it to perform a forced-entry attack on a planetary scale may very well present too many design difficulties and/or force too many performance penalties. In that respect, I can see the "little of both" model making sense.