in order to do a tactical bombardment you'd need guidance
You are bombing static targets at the surface of the planet. The only thing you need is to calculate a proper trajectory.
yes, obviously it's trivial to hit a target that isn't moving, from about 24,000 feet. how ridiculous of me to think that you would need either guidance or a giant formation of bombers carpet bombing entire cities.
i mean obviously look at these morons. just drop your unguided bomb. the target is stationary. shifting wind bands? uncertainty about your and targets' real positions, and efforts of defenders to kill you? obviously these are trivialities. target is stationary, therefore easy
Hypothetical; which is easier? Going from orbit to land, or going from the ground to orbit?
Which presents a follow-up question; which is easier; shooting a ship in orbit from the ground, or shooting a building on the ground from orbit?
In fact, you bring up an interesting example in WW2; they had the means to bomb with about as much accuracy as we do today. Malcom Gladwell did a thing on it. They spent millions on a device and then installed the device in every bomber. They trained every pilot in the fleet to use this device, and then noticed... nothing. People still couldn't hit crap, so they tested and re-tested and re-tested this device and confirmed that, no, the device works perfectly in calculating fall trajectory so well that you can hit a watermelon from the upper atmosphere, even usually without accounting for wind. So what was the problem?
People weren't using it.
The reason that bomber accuracy has increased since then isn't because the aiming techniques have gotten better, we've just removed people from the equation more and more.
I mean, today you could knock a person's hat off with a (unarmed) bomb from a passing jet in the upper atmosphere without hurting the person, consistently. Probably today it'd not even be that hard to de-orbit a bomb from outside the atmosphere (we already de-orbit stuff way more than you'd think (we've already de-orbited a space station, fun fact) and the reason you don't hear about all the satellites we drop is bc we're good at not hitting stuff with them by accident), and we're not even a space-faring civilization.
ground to orbit assuming your termination criteria is "hit the ground" if we are talking about precision guidance, IE you want to hit a target smaller than a city with a craft that doesn't have an infinite survivability against heat and G, it's the opposite.
shooting a craft from the ground is much easier, because:
1. orbital motion is predictable, and confounding factors can be accounted for. the chief issue is accelerating the projectile and/or missile to such a speed that it is impossible to dodge considering the range of the target, and the target's potential for changing it's plane and degree of motion.
2. hitting a target on the ground from orbit has a number of very difficult confounding factors. your position and the target's position mandate the specific path it will take to get to the ground, many of these paths will not be survivable by the munition(s), in addition to this, wind bands are unpredictable and multilayered which means a guidance kit is going to be mandatory to put in corrections on the way down. a freefall projectile is simply never going to get to the target and destroy it, assuming the projectile requires hit-to-kill. if you had a 15 megaton projectile you could maybe do it assuming the projectile is moving very, very quickly and can somehow survive re-entry at speeds where wind and atmospheric disturbances are not a factor.
if you are talking about norden, it was a very effective tool but ultimately it was oft defeated by unknowable information. the squadron meteo says that winds are going to flow at 12kn 180 24,000 8 kn 140 12,000 and 0 kn groundspeed. by the time you get to hamburg, what are the winds like? who knows? you don't have anything to measure it with (well, maybe at exactly where you are) also, you are getting shot at the whole time. often the bombardier was killed or the formation was broken up or approaching the drop point there's 109s everywhere and you are focused on other things like the armor piercing incendiary rounds going through the midsection of your airplane and not on doing math to calculate the bomb release point. the reason bombers have gotten better is
1. better, more computerized gunsights
2. better visibility, enhanced ability to see and comprehend battlespace
3. the vast majority of bombs are guided now.
if you leveldrop an unguided ironbomb from 20k even with a "perfect" release solution, you still aren't going to get anywhere near the target. you might do slightly better than a B-17, but it is only because the computer is doing more math, better. ultimately the bomb is still subject to a large amount of unaccountable factors. without correcting on the way down most munitions are basically still a carpet bombing tool, at best.
but while i relish chitchatting about the history of strategic bombing, this is all mostly beside the point. the game is at it's heart world war II in space so it's tangentially related i suppose but for me the worst part is the lack of interesting tactical options and the missed opportunity of more interesting battles with more interesting objectives than "deploy as much as necessary, massacre them" I always considered how battles work out now as a placeholder but maybe that's not actually true? it seems odd to me to miss the opportunity to change combat into something more ~nuanced~
opinions though