system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Is there any real reason to engage in surface combat compared to just controlling the orbit around a plant and bombarding surface targets with impunity from orbit?

If you don't want to destroy infrastructure, you can just use modular yield explosive warheads or kinetic impactors. Currently, we can send a Predator drone to launch a missile to kill everyone on one side of a wall but leave the wall and the people on the other side intact.
gpt
Theatre shields exist in *Star Wars*: a defending force can produce a shield bubble over strategic areas even if they can't put a shield around the entire planet. This is why the Empire lands on Hoth and fights a ground campaign in *The Empire Strikes Back*: the shield precludes a precision bombardment and they can only leverage their orbital and air superiority once Veers destroys the shield generator. While they could conceivably bombard the area around the shield so heavily that the ground underneath is liquified, this would deny them the opportunity of capturing surface resources, prisoners, intelligence, etc.

For the attacker, theatre shields also have the happy effect of concentrating combat around a handful of areas. This explains why *Star Wars* armies routinely expect to capture planets with bizarrely-low numbers of troops.