The lack of actual warships meant space battles were rare and usually fought between Dropships and Aerospace units. Even when warships started getting churned out again, ground support use was rare (The Wobblies' habit of nuking the shit out of people was an aberration).
You know, in a potential Aerotech Space-Sim that could be pretty fucking cool for a setting. One of my favorite Space-Sims of all time is Conflict: Freespace, and the plot there is that during an armed conflict between Terrans and Vasudans, a third race (called Shivans) pops up and starts to wreck everyone's shit with a level of technology never seen before.
I could imagine a similar storyline being quite amazing, where you start out as a pilot on some backwater Periphery border, doing your tutorial missions where you shoot down pirates, a few missions where you fight some Periphery warlord getting a bit uppity on your border and then a fleet of WarShips popping up, just dishing out destruction left and right.
Freespace had this amazing campaign that was a losing battle with only minor successes here and there, but ultimately an unstoppable enemy. Something along those lines set in the early Clan Invasion might be a pretty cool game.
It absolutely was. There's a hilarious line from Hanse Davion in Warrior: Coupe during a press conference as his forces were kicking ass left, right, and center.
I can totally see that as an effect of the Succession Wars, that logistics and communications are so fucked for generations, you end up with a massive army but all conflicts boil down to small scale skirmishes, partially cause you simply lack the ability to operate on a large scale and everyone is so used to small-scale stuff, you basically have no one who can even manage the logistics necessary to operate a large army.
This isn't just about getting troops to another planet (though that is a pretty steep cliff to scale in itself), but you also need to coordinate troops on the ground and be able to communicate quickly between a vast scale of different units.
Just for reference, when the Black Hawks were shot down in Mogadishu, there were plenty of ground troops closeby and air support was also present. However there was no direct communication between the different troops, so the air support was directing the groundforces to the site of the crash via the regular communication channels.
Ie: The pilot reports that the ground forces have to go right at the next crossing to his radio guy in the base, that guy reports it to his superior, who reports it to the superior of the ground roces, who reports it to his radio guy who reports it to the ground forces who drove past that crossing 5 minutes ago. I once saw an animation of troop movements in the city over time and it's surreal how many times they ended up doing a wrong turn due to the delayed communication. They ended up going through the same roadblocks over and over. Communication for an experienced army with perfect access to all lines of communication in modern times can be a bitch if there's an oversight like this. Just imagine how this would pan out in BT, where communication beyond company level might be nonexistent for many units, simply cause they barely had a necessity in the past 50 years.
Also doesn't help that an operation on the scale of Hanse Davions attack on Capella would be something that people avoided for generations, since it might escalate to yet another Tintavel Massacre/nuclear escalation of the Succession Wars and a heavy investment of troops that could backfire in various ways, such as being weakened on other fronts and getting attacked there or simply losing the troops after the operation fails and then getting your shit slapped hard in return.
