Earth 21st Century vs Terran Dominion

Assuming Mengsk wants to conquer our Earth, what would be the bare minimum amount of force he needs to spare to do so?

Condition
_ Dominion aren’t allowed to use its biggest ship. Space and aeroship are limited to Wraith, Banshee, Viking and Medivac.
_ Dominion aren’t allowed to build Nuke.
_ Earth Govs will use nuke without preserve
_ Earth Govs don’t know where and when the Dominion will land
_ Dominion aren’t attacking Earth satellite
_ Dominion doesn’t need to mineral and gas since they have infinite resources in their bank.
_ Assuming Earth Radar can detect cloaked units

Depends on the approach. And depends if you go with lore or multiplayer versions. Take into account how strong are fully equiped Banshees (longer cloak, linear splash damage) or Vikings (longer range and splash).

You could win with just Marines, Medivacs and Vikings of a sufficient number. Medivacs should be faster than anything Earth has, so doom drops would be hella’ effective. Vikings are sufficient Air to Air protection.

Or you could go full Ghost and with proper execution, we’re conquered with very little casualties.

And now if you take into account that not all soldiers are equal…

Can you imagine how much difficulty Earth would have dealing with one Ghost or Spectre if it’s Nova or Tosh?

Just gathering intel and then couple of well-aimed shots and Earth governments destroy themselves.

There is two problems with this question.

First the range of military warfare is much larger than what we observe in game. A real life missile would easily hit those Terran from way across the map.

Secondly, since no satellite was destroyed (for some reason) and the range of our current radar technology is just plain out range anything Terran has. (Nobody knows for sure the range of any country radar, it’s military secret) Nova and Tosh will be spot long before they get anywhere.

Also, while we are at it, do you know the blast radius of our nuke? Even the largest map will be completely obliterated by just one warhead.

Yep, that’s why i want to know the bare minimum that Mengsk needs to conquer Earth.

The anti-ship guided-missiles launched from Destroyers have roughly 100km of range. Unless the Terran can intercept those it’s game over for Mech of any kind.

The one thing that we can agree is that Terran projectiles hasn’t miss a single shot. That mean their rockets and missiles has better accuracy and precision than Earth’s counterparts.

For Marine, their suit should be strong enough to tank normal Tank’s shells and Artillery shot. Though anti-armour munition from MBT will still one shot marine. Anti-materiel rifle will also headshot marine through the glass cover without trouble if they can land the hit.

Marauder suit may need more explosive to put down but it should not be too difficult to deal with.

Siege Tank has somewhat bigger splash and explosion attack in siege mode but their range is still within conventional range of MBT and arti. They does appear to be much more heavily armoured and require a lot of firepower to put down.

Best course of action i see is Mengsk go full doom drop and throw 1000000 marines with medivac to attack.

Ghosts might show up on a radar per OP. But they wont if the radars don’t have LoS but if you have it that close to ground level it will be impossible to tell the ghost apart from normal people walking around.

Also range in game wouldn’t be equal to range in the lore. Marines with gauss rifles have aim bot level accuracy at 1km against zerglings. There are more insane feats of them being used as prompt AA against targets about 30km away.

Marines will be difficult to deal with as they pretty much make 21st century infantry useless in the fight and any light vehicle wont stand up to them either. Add in a few marauders and even tanks will not be able to do enough work.

One Battlecruiser, but apparently you arent allowing them for some arbitrary reason.

Thats rather dubious. Even if the armor survives (and thats a big if) the soldier inside will be dead. Physics still works on marines.

  • Marines are immune to small arms fire and the estimates I’ve seen on the internet place their Gauss Rifles as equivalent to M242 Bushmaster mounted on Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles.
  • Siege Tanks and Thors are too slow and impractical for realistic warfare.
  • Fighter planes have their own radar so cloaked Terran aircraft in this scenario are unable to hide. Ghosts and widow mines are too close to the ground for radar to have any use so they can run amok without any effective counter.
  • Despite the fact that Terran aircraft are unable to cloak in this scenario they will still dominate the skies. With the exception of Banshees all the Terran air units are spacecraft which means their top speed must exceed escape velocity (Mach 33) which is even more impressive when you consider they don’t need boosters to achieve orbit. To put this in perspective Sidewinder missiles have a top speed of Mach 2.5 and the fastest military aircraft is the retired SR-71 (Mach 3).
  • Considering the Earthicans can freely use nukes while the Terrans left their WMDs and capital ships at home a typical Hollywood style alien invasion would stop dead in its tracks the moment the Terrans establish a base on the surface.

But I suppose that doesn’t answer your question. The bare minimum amount of force needed for the Terrans to conquer Earth is about a dozen medivacs loaded with assorted infantry and a dozen or so Wraiths and/or Vikings. The Earth is dependent on its supply chains (especially oil production) while the Terrans can safely establish a base anywhere in the solar system. All the Dominion needs to do is drop their infantry in a random oil-producing nation (let’s start in Saudi Arabia) and destroy all the oil infrastructure they can get their hands on. When the first world nations deploy their military forces to the nation being attacked the Terrans load up in their dropships and fly over to Venezuela to wreck their infrastructure. Every time the Earthicans mobilize a counterattack the Terrans just load up and attack the next country. Lather, rinse, repeat. Why fight fair when you can fight smart? The dropships are too small to justify a nuclear response and Terran fighters can easily intercept Earthican aircraft and tomahawk missiles targeting the Marines on the ground. Meanwhile any Terran fighters not guarding the medivacs are roaming the oceans picking off oil tankers and oil rigs. If the Dominion is feeling particularly cruel they could drop a dozen or so widow mines at the Panama and Sinai canals but that’s frankly overkill at this point. After about a month of attacks the Terrans just warp away for a well deserved vacation. When they come back in a couple months they will find the Strategic Petroleum Reserve ran out, all Earthican aircraft are grounded, and the Earthican militaries are fighting each other over the last few drops of oil. GG no re.

I find it extremely strange if their suit doesn’t have shock absorption

Its explicitly a problem, based on the description for the marauder health upgrade in WoL. Marines dont have it as bad because the kinds of things that would send them flying tend to breach the suit anyway, but marauder suits are a bit tougher in general and sometimes survive things like direct impact with a tank shell.

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