Shipping
		An often-touted saying in favor of placing weapons in space is that it is the ultimate high ground.  While this is true, this does not mean that the benefits of the high ground are conferred to it.  Traditionally, the benefit of an army holding the high ground is that the defenders must expend less energy defending it then the attackers hoping to take it.  The idea is that space based weaponry would be virtually immune for the same reason; any attack on such a platform would first have to break free of the planet’s gravity well.  However, this simplistic comparison misses the important point that significant amounts of energy must be expended to put the weapon in space in the first place, often times more energy then is needed to attack it.  While the defending planet has less total resources to draw upon, their central location means that they must expend less energy to use their assets and can do so much more swiftly.  The defender need only build a tank and transport it to the front lines, while the attacker must ship the materials across the stars to the factory, build the tank, ship the tank across the stars, and transport it to the front.  This disparity has always been an issue, but the scope of interstellar war magnifies every logistical issue in conventional warfare, no matter how trivial. To extrapolate the logistical costs this entails is difficult, but can be broken down into three parts which the cost of transportation is dependent upon – the cost of building, maintaining, and operating transport ships; time; and the energy required for transportation.  The first is difficult to ascertain, and for the simplified purposes here can be treated as negligible – the prevalence of private starships implies it will be low, and ships are reusable.  But the other two are readily calculable.  For any given transportation system one can calculate the energy required to move something from place to place within a given amount of time.  As the energy required to transport an object isproportional to the cost to do so, it follows that the less energy it takes to transport something and the faster it can be done will be cheaper.  In practice this would be demonstrated as the cost to transport X tons per unit distance would be the power of the drive divided by the mass transported, divided by the velocity of the drive multiplied by the cost of energy.  {[(P/(Mt*V)]*C}*Ms*D = $ Where P is power (watts), Mt is the total mass the ship can haul (kg), V is velocity (m/s), C is cost of energy ($ per Mw-hr), Ms is mass being shipped, and D is the distance being traveled.  The power required, velocity, total mass, and cost of energy will all be static, thus making logistics dependent only on the total being sent and the distance traveled.  This has important implications for conducting war on an interstellar scale.  It precludes adopting an “island hopping” strategy similar to that used by America in World War 2.  While a small military could theoretically wage war, it would require large-scale genocide and devastation of the infrastructure to deny your enemy – otherwise the enemy could just return with their faster then light ships and continue using the resources making for an outer space version of the Vietnam “single hill” debacles.  Further, you must then either build your own infrastructure and import a labor base or continue to ship all your supplies further as you now cannot turn the planet’s resources to your benefit.  Both of those options are economically devastating.  Thus one must invade and capture each planet as they progress.  This also forces certain planets that may have been neutral to now be strategically significant, drawing them into the war – exactly as Lord Sidious wanted. One might try to offset the costs of transport by using fewer troops to capture places more distant.  However this fails in light of the advantages of the defender and the effects of casualties.  Repeated shipments as part of a large campaign will cost more then coming in with overwhelming force from the onset.  The ships must travel to the front to deliver the troops, then depart back to base, then return to the front with reinforcements.  Further, a smaller force will take longer to secure an area then a larger one due simply to the fact that they can occupy less territory.  This means they will suffer higher casualties, which will increase the total number of troops that must be delivered to the engagement.  The only feasible option is to come in with sufficient numbers in the beginning, which is what the Grand Army of the Republic was designed for (Attack of the Clones Visual Dictionary) and what the Republic and Confederacy did. (Clone Wars: The Best Blades)
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