Also remember modern type 2 or 3 sieges of Dien Bien Phu (~2 months) and Khe Sanh (77 days).


On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 11:57 AM, C. Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
The trouble is that "siege" has been used to several different things:
  1. Directly attacking a fortified position using ladders, siege engines, and the like.
  2. (More or less) passively directly encircling a position to prevent all movement of people or supplies in or out ("starving them out").
  3. Blockading supply and reinforcement routes sufficiently to starve or weaken the target.
All of them can flow into one another as the tactical and strategic situation changes.

Some examples:

Type 1: Henry V's siege of Harfleur
Type 2: The Berlin Blockade in 1948-9, defeated by the Berlin Airlift.
Type 3: The siege of Leningrad during WWII.

Type 1 sieges have mostly gone away with the advent of improved munitions that make both walls and static deployments near the enemy far less effective. The others are clearly still very much in play.

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 3:03 AM, James Davies <xxxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote:

Arguably, sieges have simply changed not gone away.  For example, in the Second World War you could consider the German blockade of Britain an attempted siege, as well as Malta, and the Allied blockade of Japan. 


In a Traveller setting I imagine whole planets under siege, rather than castles or cities. Also, with space stations you might want to capture it mostly intact rather than simply obliterating it and the defenders, so I can see some sort of siege there. Creating a breach, attempting to storm the orbital city, neither side wanting whole-scale destruction of the asset or its inhabitants.

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