How would weaponry develop differently in a world where you have total technological superiority?

Question

In today’s modern military, massive things are generally frowned upon. They’re simply too big of a target.

Oh! You have a big tank that could easily beat my tanks?

Apply aircraft.

Oh God! Oh no! You have a big bad battleship with guns that can pierce my armor like a knife through butter?

Spam Aircraft hAHa

The point of all this is, big targets are bad no matter how good at its job it is. Better to have many targets that you could throw at the enemy over and over.

Here’s the thing, I have humans but they’re incredibly advanced. Sufficiently so, that they’ve survived the end of the universe and moved on to another one. They came upon a planet where they’ve discovered magic exists. Not being sure on the capabilities of this magic; they just start advancing technology like crazy.

Starting from the medieval era, they’ve been developing technology both military and civilian. For now, they seem to be at the late WW2 to the early Cold War era. They have total air superiority and even control the major bodies of water.

Now, since everyone is so far behind on technology would it a waste for them to build the super weapons? Things such as the P1000 Ratte, the H45 Battleship and the unnamed 500-ton Japanese Flying Boat.

Reasons to build such things in a world where even a small frigate can control a large amount of coastline? A world with magic may have hidden powers that are overwhelmingly strong, better safe than sorry I guess.

Answer 1

Probably yes.

Provided that (a) they indigenous people's magical capabilities are incapable of destroying your weapons, and (b) the colonists are a united people, then by all means yes. As you pointed out, the main problem with these weapons is that they are glass cannons; they are "capable of going through armor like a knife through butter", but they have trouble when you start spamming aircraft/infantry.

However, this magical world doesn't have spammable aircraft. As a result, there is no restriction on building these. In fact, these would be the perfect weapon for your world. You see, on a basic level all massive weapons are fleets-in-being. Their designers have been told to

"Make it evil... Make it totally clear that this has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."

• Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

In order to fulfill these instructions, fleets-in-being have to be monolithically huge. To use another example from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a bomb the size, shape and color of a cricket ball is never going to scare anybody, even if everybody knows it can destroy the universe.

Answer 2

Almost certainly not.

While the technological disparity with insurgencies is not to this degree, the resource disparity is similar. What did the US Army want when they were at war in Iraq? They didn't want more M1 tanks, even though they were essentially immune to RPGs and all but the most powerful IEDs, they started producing MRAPs that were cheaper to operate and could be in as many places as possible.

When you're against a weaker enemy, you don't need overwhelming power in a single location, you need dispersed power in as many locations as possible. What you're talking about here is not dissimilar to the problem in the US military of Fobbits(a combination of hobbit and Forward Operating Base, for those people who never leave their bases and thus accomplish little).

Even if the magic does weird things, how do you know that it doesn't affect something heavier more? Or maybe putting all of your eggs in one basket makes it easier for all of the wizards to gang up on your tiny handful of powerful units. Frankly what you need in that case isn't overwhelming military force but better intelligence gathering, so that you can come up with counters to their magic. Which is also the case in fighting insurgencies in reality, something fortress units naturally make worse.