If the planet will get invaded... it is clear they will target the shield first, without it being down, they can't take the planet.
Thus, either engineers or other personel working on the shield will deactivate it OR their people have already infiltrated it and are ready to deactive it.
There is another possibility... someone local wants to take over the planet. They're not unified so any nation that's in disarray with the current planetary government can be a candidate. Not only can it be the president (or monarch or whatever) of that nation but perhaps the military leader etc...
With other words, the answer to the success of the invasion is the shield... the problem is that there are many ways it can get deactivated or destroyed.
Or we are focussing on the wrong things...
Diving straight through the shields, even in those giant super-protective balls that are Trade Federation ships, does not seem like a tactic they will be using. Too risky; they'll have wanted to do something to increase their chances. Cheeky bastards.
"I hope everything was satisfactory," Xeth says, referring to the scans. "Who will we be talking to in the city command center?"
It IS a very heavy defence network. They cou,d end up losing ships which you doubt they want to. But the bigger issue is- what does it gain them? They don't want to raze this planet, they want to capture it. To do that they need to make surface landings of troops, and those landing craft could be blown to pieces.
You suppose the big ship could move into low orbit beneath the shield and bombard as many ground defences as possible to clear a path in one area for a landing there, but it would be high causalities all the way and you couldn't captture this planet with one landing. They might capture one city but they would not win the war.
Nor is there much point to them blockading this place; tying up their fleet for such a long-term siege seems a waste of their time. In the end, you suspect Xeth is right; they'll have a more elegant solution than trying to rbtue force it through sucha well-defended planet.
You don't know how to destroy it. You don't have the firepower.
But of course, you don't need to knock out the whole fleet, do you?
Indeed!
It;s the price the Feds pay for being a coprorate organisation that wants its own massive army. The only way for it to do that is via robotics, and the only way to be able to operate a robotic army on a Galactic scale and keep it to cost is to use these remote controlled battle droids, without independant capacity... which means a weakness in the form of the Control device, in this case the Control Ship.
It's not too hard to pinpoint; it is the one with the aerials all over it.
All of these ruminations are very welcome!
You arrive, themn, after being driven in a gravcar through the city- a very expansive and relatively hi-tech city, it seems this planet is well-teched- to the Strategic Defence Command, wherepuon you are shwon into the War Room, complete with giant screen that can show various theatres of war.
There you meet a Marshall Gedorin. The Colonel explains that the anomlaies detected at the edge of the system COULD be from a large hyperspace exit, soemthing these 'visitors' (he says, gesytring towards you) say they have information about.
Long story short- Gedorin does not believe you for the reasons the Colonel outlined earlier, and in any case points out that the defences ofg the planet rule out any risk. he basically shoos you guys into a corner.
"Of course," he says. "After all, you cannot get through the shield in order to be able to destroy it. Even if you somehow got through at one point, the shiled is produced by eight main generators globally. We can lose any one and still maintain the shield, and even if we lost another it would only lose strength in one area."