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The Reverend
2011-11-22, 10:13 AM
So I'm thinking about running a near future military campaign and I was looking at ideas to build a world on. The world is a lot like it is currently politically that is, but I was looking for some military hooks. Some major change on the order the machine guns, tank, helicopter, or aircraft carrier. Some game changer, but not TOO big like antigrav, bifaced carbide, or unobtanium based solutions.

An example from the BOLO universe was that large scale deployment of point defense lasers ended airborne warfare for all intents and purposes. You couldn't break the horizon or you would be Zotted from the sky. No helicopter troop movements, no paratroopers, and no secret midnight aerial raids.


No mecha, because they really are just dumb from a practical military perspective. Unless they were small like jeep to Bradley sized. Then maybe they might be useful.

nyarlathotep
2011-11-22, 10:27 AM
A while ago I ran a giant robot and mech campaign. I ran into the problem that well the whole thing was infeasible and stupid really, missiles could down your super expensive robot in no time and it would likely collapse under its own weight.

So to make the concept work I had two thinks happen: 1 I had materials engineering accelerate producing armor and structural materials far exceeding today's, meaning that it took far more firepower than normal to cut through any given amount of armor(ie bunkerbusters were needed to get through even light tanks). 2 the space program produced jammer satellites which are satellites producing huge amounts of electrical and sonic static in the upper atmosphere, meaning that radar and most electronic means of communication doesn't work more than a few hundred feet above sealevel. This meant that long range radios don't work, missiles can't be guided, and all but the smallest planes become risky to fly, paving teh way for wars fought with robots and super tanks.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 10:28 AM
Even then, they would pretty expensive, fragile and complicated for what they could do.
In Starship Troopers, it is more a case of an armoured exoskeleton, more Iron Man than Gundam.
The use of armed UAV and other remote controlled, or even semi autonomous robotics replacing men in the field could be, potentially, a big game changer.
Instead of a priest and a medic, you send an engineer.
Instead of a body bag, a recycle bin.
No more letters home, only restock orders.
@nyarlathotep:
You're a bit out of date, many (most?) missiles use guidance built into the missile itself.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 10:56 AM
Again np giant robots or mid sized mecha. They require too much unobtanium to be made to work. Real world physics.


Besides if I remember correctly Mech Warrior had to badly skew a lot of rules just to make mecha viable. No RC hovecraft packed with ammo driven in to their legs, pit traps, land mines, etc


So no more mecha talk please. Power armor that's ok.

Radar
2011-11-22, 11:01 AM
(...) No mecha, because they really are just dumb from a practical military perspective. Unless they were small like jeep to Bradley sized. Then maybe they might be useful.
And here I was to propose Macross Zero...

Anyway, missiles not only have their own guidance - it can be even optical if radars fail. In WWII USA used pidgeon-guided aniti-ship missiles and by now we have electronics advanced enough to do real-time pattern recognition.

Autonomous military robots seem to be the way our world is heading right now, so the next natural step would be development of proper EMP weapons. Even if all the equipment is shielded by a Faraday cage, it's just another type of armor to punch through.

There is also a rising interest in warfare through internet, but I wouldn't count on that. If the threat becomes severe (consider Die Hard 4 scenario), vital systems would simply be moved to fully separate networks.

With current miniaturisation of cameras and display units an invisibility cloak (or at least an extraordinary camo suit) becomes a feasible technology. Same goes for invisible vehicles.

nyarlathotep
2011-11-22, 11:11 AM
@nyarlathotep:
You're a bit out of date, many (most?) missiles use guidance built into the missile itself.

I was giving a bit of a gloss over, the way the world was set up the jammers started in the 50s and so technology for it was simply never developed beyond the 50s instead being focused into the aforementioned materials engineering, underwater jets, and machines controlled by human nerves; that being said nukes also creatured giant laser firing dinosaurs in that campaign so absolute realism was not that big of an issue.

@OP When I mentioned my mech campaign I wasn't suggesting that you use giant robots, but that something similar could justify Bolo sized tanks or anything else you would design. (Giant submarines or the reintroduction of battleships etc)

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 11:12 AM
@Radar:
The fun part is becoming not the camouflage, but making sure it works in other wavelengths.
Thermally speaking, present efforts at active camouflage might as well be beacons.
@nyarlathotep:
I know (now) you were not going for total logic here, but . . .
Jamming active guided missiles started in World War 2. It's one of the reasons there was so much work on self contained guidance.

hamlet
2011-11-22, 11:12 AM
Actually, one of the next biggest steps is going to be real times communications and battlefield information delivery in a small form factor mode (i.e., something the size of your i-Phone that lets you send encrypted top secret communication back to base and provides you with real time sattelite eye views of the battlefield along with locations of your troops and enemy troops clearly marked, updated in real time, and entirely safe from enemy intrusion.

That'll actually change battlefield conditions remarkably, helping reduce "fog of war" incidents.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 11:19 AM
And an EMP could take a lot of that out.

Thinker
2011-11-22, 11:20 AM
So I'm thinking about running a near future military campaign and I was looking at ideas to build a world on. The world is a lot like it is currently politically that is, but I was looking for some military hooks. Some major change on the order the machine guns, tank, helicopter, or aircraft carrier. Some game changer, but not TOO big like antigrav, bifaced carbide, or unobtanium based solutions.

An example from the BOLO universe was that large scale deployment of point defense lasers ended airborne warfare for all intents and purposes. You couldn't break the horizon or you would be Zotted from the sky. No helicopter troop movements, no paratroopers, and no secret midnight aerial raids.


No mecha, because they really are just dumb from a practical military perspective. Unless they were small like jeep to Bradley sized. Then maybe they might be useful.

I could see invisibility cloaks (http://www.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm) as being a game changer for purposes of infiltration and espionage. It would also force greater use of infrared vision, which might be countered by a cloaking device (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/18/cloaking-device-objects-invisible-infrared) that only works against the infrared spectrum. Stealth against radar has existed for years. It's conceivable that there would be entire battles where the only visible signs of warfare are the results of the weapons the soldiers use. It would greatly reduce the effectiveness of air power, naval power, and even manpower.

A small unit of cloaked soldiers could infiltrate enemy compounds and destroy targets with no way to stop it except an increase in tamper sensors in access points/walls (which can also be defeated with a bit of effort).

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 11:21 AM
Couple of next Gen techs I've seen that are I interesting

Active and passive reactive camo. Brits have an active system of infrared LED type setup that will make a tank look like a cow in the infrared spectrum. Cow even looks like its eating and looking around.

DARPA said they are about 2-3 years from a meta material that will give a "predator" style camo.

anti sniper systems. Using triangulated sound to find the target to within a foot. Also a camera system that can Identity eyeballs and lenses hundreds of meters away. Combined with an immediate response micro artillery carried with the system.

Most naval warfare theorist say the way of the future will all be small ships carrying drones and submarines as drone aircraft carriers.

razark
2011-11-22, 11:25 AM
Massive deployment of remote systems. There's already airborne drones, why not remote tanks, artillery, etc.

Also, "rods from god" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Thor).

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 11:44 AM
Massive deployment of remote systems. There's already airborne drones, why not remote tanks, artillery, etc.

Yeah, I mentioned something similar earlier. What scares me about such a war between technological equals is that the best way to end it is to focus not only on the mechanical units, but on the civilian population producing them.


Also, "rods from god" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Thor).
That is going to depend on allowing some controversial technologies, like Project Orion or some manner of gas-core nuclear rocket, pretty much anything nuclear in fact, to lift things into space on a truly industrial scale.

razark
2011-11-22, 11:52 AM
Yeah, I mentioned something similar earlier.
That's what I get for opening a reply window and not posting for a while...


That is going to depend on allowing some controversial technologies, like Project Orion or some manner of gas-core nuclear rocket, pretty much anything nuclear in fact, to lift things into space on a truly industrial scale.
We have the technology today. It's just a question of "do we want to spend the massive amount of money to do it?"

The Witch-King
2011-11-22, 12:00 PM
Hovertanks with ground-to-air missiles to knock out helicopters and other air support.

Killbots--drones for combat on the ground.

Seismic weaponry--shaped charge thermonuclear weapons detonated underground to send massive shockwaves at fault lines in enemy territory to cause earthquakes. You didn't deploy a nuke against them so it will be hard for them politically to respond with one of their own nukes.

Exoskeletons--less powered armor--and more a way for infantry to move like three or four times faster. Like jumping stilts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJGh9CO6wzU&feature=relmfu), only more so.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 12:15 PM
T
We have the technology today. It's just a question of "do we want to spend the massive amount of money to do it?"
Oh we could do it with lots of smaller launches, but considering the things must be resupplied, aforesaid technologies may be better. Besides, just like former ICBM got converted into the forerunners of many of today's launch vehicles, the space nut in me can see some obvious spin off technologies.
Iteratives of the very first ICBM are still used to launch astronauts, cosmonauts and supplies to the ISS.
The Witch-King
We're keeping within (mostly) real world physics and a conventional tank tank can carry such ordinance just fine.

hamlet
2011-11-22, 12:20 PM
And an EMP could take a lot of that out.

One of the things, actually, that they're working on. How to shield said devices from EMP effects.

Plus the aspect of two edged swords, here. Nuke one sides electronics, and you'll most likely catch a lot of your own, if not all, within the zone of engagement.

Megaduck
2011-11-22, 12:25 PM
Longer range and a lot more stealth.

The US Navy is testing Hypersonic missiles (http://www.smh.com.au/world/america-tests-new-hypersonic-missile-20111119-1nofy.html) that can hit anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Speed that up a bit and it means that a unit can be shot from anywhere in the world putting a new spin on the phrase, if you can see it you can kill it.

It doesn't really matter what onboard weapons you have because you can call in big brother in minutes and every unit becomes a Glass Cannon (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon).

Therefor the primary goal of any unit is to see its target before the target sees it. Sort of like a game of hide and seek with bazookas.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 12:26 PM
One of the things, actually, that they're working on. How to shield said devices from EMP effects.

This does not surprise me. The implications of their use are down right terrifying.


Plus the aspect of two edged swords, here. Nuke one sides electronics, and you'll most likely catch a lot of your own, if not all, within the zone of engagement.
Detonate it over their civilian population, which is potentially on the other side of the world and out of line of sight.
You just reduced your enemy to the Dark Ages, literally.
Or use non-nuclear devices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse), shorter range, less chance of friendly fire.

Thane of Fife
2011-11-22, 12:38 PM
I hear about carrier-killer missiles that fly low and fast enough that they can't (currently) be shot down. That would have pretty serious effects on power projection.

I also recall reading an article about a heat ray that causes targets to feel like they're going to burst into flames. Useful for crowd control.

Orbital weapons platforms would have sort of the reverse effect of the carrier killers and aren't too 'out there.'

Rifts-style Juicers are probably not very likely, but are plausible. That is, the creation of faster/stronger/tougher/whatever soldiers through the application of drugs.

Heliomance
2011-11-22, 12:48 PM
There's one innovation that makes mechs more useful than other things, although they still wouldn't get huge. Neural interfaces. It's probably vastly more intuitive to mentally control something at least vaguely humanoid.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 12:53 PM
There's one innovation that makes mechs more useful than other things, although they still wouldn't get huge. Neural interfaces. It's probably vastly more intuitive to mentally control something at least vaguely humanoid.
Maybe, maybe not.
Square cube law and gravity means that moving something big is different from moving something small. Many people are clumsy from an adolescent growth spurt, and that's generally just a foot or so.
Driving a mecha that is bigger than powered armour will not be, in my opinion, intuitive enough to make the extra complexity and fragility worth it.

Noedig
2011-11-22, 12:59 PM
Someone touched on it briefly in a post above, but weaponized EMP, while not as startling as some of the other suggestions, is entirely feasible. Send your enemy back to the stone age. Roll in and curb stomp. Of course also as mentioned, there are a few drawbacks if you use this technology for anything but a preemptive strike.

Also, perhaps from a military standpoint, the Geneva Conventions no longer apply in regards to weapons. So gas and biochemical warfare are valid, and suddenly the microwave bombs we've always wanted are now available. Drop on of those on a city and you fry all the living material, while buildings and infrastructure remain untouched. Electronic equipment might suffer a tad, but its less expensive than rebuilding a city.

Rail guns. Put them on battleships. Hit targets from several hundred miles away. Accelerate iron ingots to relativistic velocities and watch cities vaporize with only kinetic energy. No fallout, ammo is cheap, and precedent for this idea exists.

And because you specifically said no mecha, unless it was small:

http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=flyingdebris#/d345p45

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 01:03 PM
And because you specifically said no mecha, unless it was small:

http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=flyingdebris#/d345p45
RPG or IED to the leg and so many millions of dollars becomes a rather dazed gun emplacement.
Not to mention it's centre of gravity is pretty high looking. Ramming speed!
Still, damn that looks cool.

Mastikator
2011-11-22, 01:29 PM
Large scale warfare.
Super long range laser cannons. You can avoid blooming by making several weaker ones that all hit the same spot hundreds or thousands of miles away (from orbit?). A scalpel like weapon of mass destruction, only destroying key locations.

Espionage.
Robotic flies and various insects made from non-metallic materials that record audio and visual information. It can avoid being detected by only recording directly to a relatively close by robo-bugs that sends the information further. It's virtually undetectable (effectively achieving radio-silence without being silent).

Long Range "sniper" weapons.
Laser cannons, just weak enough to avoid blooming, has virtually no range restrictions, can even use an incredibly powerful magnifying scope with infra-red view and infra-red laser to achieve almost perfect accuracy at any earthly range.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 01:36 PM
Unless you Want laser blooming so you can use it to conduct electricity down the ionized beam path. Tesla rifles mmmmm.

Edit-
@ ravens cry. Exactly the size I was thinking. But as you said could quickly become a Very expensive gun emplacement. We dont need every fool with a Light Anti Tank Pistol to be of capable of killing our 35million dollar wunderwaffen.



Students of military history will tell you the winner of large scale industrialized warfare is the guy who produces Good Enough equipment in LARGE numbers. One story told often. The Germans captured one of new Russian tanks and turned it over to their engineers who gave it a once over. They were then asked to make tanks like this. The engineers said was impossible......it would never meet their safety standards.

Noedig
2011-11-22, 01:37 PM
@Ravens_cry: Oh yeah that thing is totally an rpg magnet. The cool factor overrode my sense of feasibility though.

Mastikator
2011-11-22, 01:41 PM
I'm not convinced hand-held laser weapons are feasible, for anti-personnel purposes bullets are better.
But you can totally make a laser based ion-cannon to overload the electric grid of a city, as an anti-city type weapon. Temporarily disabling an entire city, or facility without destroying it completely and with minimal loss of life is a pretty powerful weapon.

GungHo
2011-11-22, 01:47 PM
No mecha, because they really are just dumb from a practical military perspective. Unless they were small like jeep to Bradley sized. Then maybe they might be useful.
Not really mecha, but powered exoskeltons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton) are on the horizon. They're mostly to the point of letting you carry heavy stuff, but they may get to putting armor around it eventually. There are some definite limitations, such as making sure it doesn't tear the wearer apart or require years of training.

If they got to where they really want to go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Force_Warrior) with all of it, each soldier will be carrying around a suite of electronics to improve situational awareness through GPS, IFF, enhanced optics, physiological monitoring, and real-time coordination between squads, platoons, and on up.

Honestly, as a former soldier, some of the things they were looking to implement looked very fiddly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Land_Warrior_060707.jpg), cantankerous to the point of actually hampering your mobility/visability in an ubran environment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:XM29.jpg), or something with a bunch of little buttons that wouldn't survive through a romp through a new forest much less a sandstorm.

If you're wanting to "make it realistic", you're going to have to consider that the more things that a soldier has to fool with, monitor, or turn on, the more distractions, which you don't need in an actual fight. So, ideally, a lot of these things would be passive. They wouldn't have buttons everywhere or menus to scroll through, or a ton of heavy, flashy crap hanging off the weapon or the uniform/suit. They would be simple, fit for purpose, and durable.

Other emergent technologies, some presented in above posts, but adding links for thought:
Less than lethal "energy" weapons based off of microwaves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_gun) and directed sound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapons)
Drones (air, sea, and land) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperated)
Electronic camoflage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking)
Ruggedization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_computer) of electronics
Railguns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun)

Noedig
2011-11-22, 01:51 PM
Something I just remembered is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The new one they are putting out fits pretty much exactly what GungHo said. It's called Future Soldier. There are youtube videos out there about it, and it looks pretty sweet. Excellent source of inspiration.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 02:09 PM
@Ravens_cry: Oh yeah that thing is totally an rpg magnet. The cool factor overrode my sense of feasibility though.
Oh, mecha do that.
That one in particular has a certain brute iron solidity about it that fills me with glee and would be wonderful for the right kind of story, such as a more primitive Mech Warrior.
But feasible or competitive?
Not on your sweet bippy.

The Witch-King
2011-11-22, 02:20 PM
We're keeping within (mostly) real world physics and a conventional tank tank can carry such ordinance just fine.

I'm talking about an armed hovercraft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1mG9pknXVE&feature=related), not a grav tank or a landspeeder. A conventional tank can't cross water as quickly as it can cross land.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 02:31 PM
Surprised no one has mentioned the Metal Storm system.


Also just read about a force field that they are deploying in Afghanistan. Its basically a massive electrical field that cause incoming warheads to explode a couple dozen feet before impact. Its small enough it can be fitted into infantry fighting vehicles and cheaper than other systems. Obviously army is hush on it. They called it electric armor.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 02:34 PM
Also look up the D-Dalus. Its going to replace helicopters and give us cool futuristic ducted fan aircraft.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 02:50 PM
I'm talking about an armed hovercraft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1mG9pknXVE&feature=related), not a grav tank or a landspeeder. A conventional tank can't cross water as quickly as it can cross land.
I think if something with massive, fragile fans and a delicate underbelly had military potential as a tank, we would have seen it by now. They (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft#Military) do have certain uses, but many tanks can cross water, thanks to snorkels.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 03:00 PM
I think Witch King is inspired by the hovercraft of Ogre. Fast attack craft that spit nuclear tipped death. But as with all of ogre they are coated in an armor of unobtanium.

Coidzor
2011-11-22, 03:00 PM
Yeah, I mentioned something similar earlier. What scares me about such a war between technological equals is that the best way to end it is to focus not only on the mechanical units, but on the civilian population producing them.

Well, you know, everything's a house of cards depending upon people acting in their best interest as a whole and war is never in one's best interests as a whole given the interconnected economy.


That is going to depend on allowing some controversial technologies, like Project Orion or some manner of gas-core nuclear rocket, pretty much anything nuclear in fact, to lift things into space on a truly industrial scale.

That's kinda the point though. You get to go ahead and have that space elevator finally. :smalltongue:


Detonate it over their civilian population, which is potentially on the other side of the world and out of line of sight.
You just reduced your enemy to the Dark Ages, literally.

Ah, yes, MAD.

The Witch-King
2011-11-22, 03:14 PM
I think Witch King is inspired by the hovercraft of Ogre. Fast attack craft that spit nuclear tipped death. But as with all of ogre they are coated in an armor of unobtanium.

I am thinking of something in the fast attack role, yes, something armed with missiles and maybe recoilless rifles. Given that a tank round will kill most tanks anyway, I don't see it beyond imagination that an armed hovercraft will have military applications in the near future--and without going so far as to have it covered in biphase carbide.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 03:24 PM
Well, you know, everything's a house of cards depending upon people acting in their best interest as a whole and war is never in one's best interests as a whole given the interconnected economy.

Still scary though.


That's kinda the point though. You get to go ahead and have that space elevator finally. :smalltongue:

And damn if I don't want it.



Ah, yes, MAD.
So far, very few countries have the combination of long range, high altitude missiles and nukes to pull it off and those that do are fairly chummy. But from a sufficient height it only takes one nuke to make all of, say, Canada, blackout country.
Like I said, scary.
Not something I lose sleep over, but enough to make me say "'oly <expletive redacted/>" when I take the time to think about it.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 03:52 PM
Speaking of nukes, have you ever heard an idea that's so crazy it kinda makes sense.

So a guy I know and I were talking about nukes and terrorism. His statements followed something like this.
Considering the number of rogue nukes (and controlled nukes for that matter), uncontrolled fissile material, and the number of random crazies it would seem a logical demonstration that the ability to track, and possibly stop, nukes has been in place for some time. That is what has kept a nuclear incident from happening.

GungHo
2011-11-22, 04:28 PM
Given that the last 60 years of the military budgets of the most powerful governments on this planet has been focused on the development of, the detection of, and the control of nuclear armament, that's not really a far-fetched statement.

byaku rai
2011-11-22, 04:47 PM
Honestly, speaking as a somewhat pacifistic optimist, I'm hoping that the next innovation in military technology will be along the lines of Power Armor, with or without neural interface. Designed properly, it should be quite a force multiplier on small squads of elite troops, allowing them to move faster, carry heavier weapons more easily, and take more punishment (although considering how far offensive technology outstrips defensive tech at the moment, the emphasis will probably be more on stealth and maneuverability).

That's something I've always found slightly off-putting about media representations of mecha, especially of the jeep- to tank-sized versions. Their primary defense would be a blistering offense combined with the ability to move quickly and gracefully over just about any terrain. They'd probably lose out in speed to a light tank, but they'd win in maneuverability, and a well-designed mecha with a skilled pilot would be able to dodge and take cover just as effectively as a skilled infantry trooper.

However, IMO once it crosses the line from an Exo-suit (basically bulkier Power Armor) to an actual vehicle, it's gone past the usefulness point.

TheThan
2011-11-22, 04:48 PM
Politics plays an important part of warfare. Countries like the USA and it’s allies are very concerned about civilian casualties and excess destruction of buildings and infrastructure. Other countries are not. That greatly helps dictate what sort of technology is deployed in a battle field. For instance the U.S. military uses precision guided ordinance to destroy specific buildings within an area instead of artillery strikes or conventional gravity drop bombs. While all three get the job done and are effective, the precision guided ordinance causes far less destruction to the area around the target. Therefore civilian lives and infrastructure remain intact.

So really it pays to consider what the stances of each country you use for your game have and “build” their military forces accordingly.

GungHo
2011-11-22, 05:00 PM
Honestly, speaking as a somewhat pacifistic optimist, I'm hoping that the next innovation in military technology will be along the lines of Power Armor, with or without neural interface. Designed properly, it should be quite a force multiplier on small squads of elite troops, allowing them to move faster, carry heavier weapons more easily, and take more punishment (although considering how far offensive technology outstrips defensive tech at the moment, the emphasis will probably be more on stealth and maneuverability).
That and broader application of Less than Lethal technologies are the next innovation along with broader use of drone technologies.

Note that "take more punishment" doesn't mean "can deflect RPGs like Superman" but is more along the lines of "won't die to/be greviously wounded by random small arms fire". There's a limit to what they can put on you even if they perfect the servos to make it so you're able to walk with a natural gait.

byaku rai
2011-11-22, 05:49 PM
That and broader application of Less than Lethal technologies are the next innovation along with broader use of drone technologies.

Note that "take more punishment" doesn't mean "can deflect RPGs like Superman" but is more along the lines of "won't die to/be greviously wounded by random small arms fire". There's a limit to what they can put on you even if they perfect the servos to make it so you're able to walk with a natural gait.

Oh, I know that. The fact that these things will probably already be outstripped by armor-piercing ammunition for common infantry weapons, making random death by small arms remain a possibility, depresses me like all hell though.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 07:47 PM
The historical trend is a flip flop between armor and weapons as the dominant force in infantry warfare. After a couple hundred years materials science has finally begun pushing armor as the dominant force. The trend can be observed as the armed forces are switching to heavier and heavier caliber firearms to punch thru armor.

I imagine that since Dragon Scale armor can shrug off AK-47 rounds easily that a functional power armor could easily take everything below machine guns. Infantry weapons usage would break down into: soft targets, armored targets, and powered armor targets. You could allow some interoperability with weapon systems by say using shaped charge rounds or sabot rounds to pierce armor. Lightweight anti power armor rockets and rpgs could be effective to.

jseah
2011-11-22, 08:43 PM
Here's one idea I had:

Some breakthrough allows ultracapacitors to overcome most of their technical limitations and pack ever more energy into a low weight. Negligible charge leakage, charge/discharge times can go down to seconds, controllable discharge, no to negligible loss of energy storage based on use (lifetime >10 million cycles)

AA sized and weight batteries can carry 1-10MJs; discharge it all in continuous over twenty hours or in one burst of three seconds or in a combination; recharge from sufficient power in half a minute.
10kg suitcase battery can pack a couple of GJs.


Suddenly, that laser pistol is possible. And so are electric cars.

Destroying a charged battery will probably cause some *bad* to happen as the stored energy turns into heat.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One from somewhere else:

Supercavitation in water has been solved through a new fluid dynamics formulae. Instead of merely supercavitating torpedoes, we can now build small supercavitating submarines.
And the size limit is going up as we get better at it.

Rocket-powered sea combat? Fighters made airtight, able to sit in the sea like submarines (run silent) then suddenly power up and accelerate past the sound barrier before exiting the water.

As it advances, a special design might even be able to transition directly from supersonic flight to supercavitating underwater without doing a sea landing.

The Reverend
2011-11-22, 09:39 PM
Super capacitors

I remember some physics student saying something along the lines that using the batteries you could power ray guns with as bullets would be much more dangerous than beam weapons themselves.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-22, 09:45 PM
Potentially, yes. Get enough energy density, and it might as well be a chemical explosive.

jseah
2011-11-22, 09:51 PM
Super capacitors

I remember some physics student saying something along the lines that using the batteries you could power ray guns with as bullets would be much more dangerous than beam weapons themselves.
Well, depends on how you want to use it. The capacitor itself could be very expensive and thus not suitable for use as a bullet.

And if you can somehow develop it enough to make a single AA battery size thing can contain a GJ, firing that would be massive overkill for most targets using conventional materials found today.
A thousand shots of a 1MJ railgun or laser would be a better anti-personnel weapon.

What might happen if you left one of those lying around charged and a baby gnawed on it and blew the house up...

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-22, 11:58 PM
So I'm thinking about running a near future military campaign and I was looking at ideas to build a world on. The world is a lot like it is currently politically that is, but I was looking for some military hooks. Some major change on the order the machine guns, tank, helicopter, or aircraft carrier. Some game changer, but not TOO big like antigrav, bifaced carbide, or unobtanium based solutions.
So, a certain school of IR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_realism) says there are 2 big reasons why nobody has conquered the world:

(1) The Stopping Power of Water
(2) Population limitations / "The world is really big"

If either of those are overturned, you've got a real Revolution in Military Affairs. We've already made some progress on #2 with Drone Warfare but some sort of mass-produced soldier (e.g. Universal Soldiers, Warbots) could permit an otherwise small nation to start kicking serious butt.

We're not very far on #1 but as the solution to that is Space Warfare, you get all kinds of fun hooks. For example, Moon Bases permit you to throw rocks at Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_weapon#Orbital_bombardment) which worked rather well in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress). If someone set up a rail launcher on the moon they'd be able to administer cheap and terrifying punishment anywhere they want -- and control of the Moon could be the focus of the whole campaign. Likewise, Mobile Infantry a la Starship Troopers (the book! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers)) could be deployed anywhere on Earth from militarized space stations. Heck, we could have this stuff today if we had spent more time on Space :smallsigh:

Tvtyrant
2011-11-23, 12:01 AM
Teleportation/Gates would throw everything akimbo. Now you can nuke everything in seconds rather than minutes, logistics can move things directly from factory to front (depending on the cost of using said instant movement) and infantry can be teleied into bases.

The Reverend
2011-11-23, 06:12 AM
Sorry teleportation is right out. It requires vast amounts of unobtanium to construct. A very valid point though. I remember reading some story where the magazines on infantry weapons had a portal in them directly connected to a warehouse.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-23, 06:33 AM
Now you're thinking with portals!:smallamused:
@Oracle_Hunter:
The trouble with launching stuff from the moon is how long it takes to get to Earth. An ICBM from the former USSR to the US would take about half an hour. Assuming you are fighting a technologically equal enemy, what's stopping them from vaporising your rocks from space in the days, or at least several hours assuming far greater than Apollo speeds, it would take them to travel from the moon. And even if you are not fighting a technologically equal enemy, the long transit gives lots of warning.
Still, even modern aircraft and ICBM likely mean that oceans are not the barrier they were in World War II.

ILM
2011-11-23, 07:54 AM
Some game changer, but not TOO big like antigrav, bifaced carbide, or unobtanium based solutions.
Everyone's talking about realistic or current-but-not-deployed technology, but how realistic do you need it to be? For instance, you could just declare that one side has found a way to provide their vehicles with an effectively infinite source of power for the purposes of mobility - more efficient engines, some kind of new fuel additive, whatever. No more autonomy issues, logistics change completely, and you could actually have hovercrafts on the field (as I understand the main issue with those is the fuel consumption). However, you still have the same weapons, and since they mostly have human pilots or troops aboard you can't have vehicles that all zip through the battlefield at mach 2 pulling 12 g's. There: field of battle is changed, but the tech owners aren't supermen.

The Reverend
2011-11-23, 08:45 AM
Fuel--

Very good point I had not considered

FOssil fuels are a no show, they are now too valuable to just burn.
a couple of options for vehicles.

•Electric- if you can build a battery powered beam weapon your energy density is probably good enough to power common ground vehicles.

•Alt-fuels - whether made from sugar cane, wood cellulose, poop, or using micro-capillary structures and sunlight to convert CO2 its liquid, you burn it, it makes you go. Small scale fuel production that was efficient say one plant at every battalion headquarters or major firebase would ease logistics considerably.

•LENR - low energy nuclear reaction. One of favorite high tech options this basically cold fusion. Low power, small scale. It may go boom but doesn't go BOOM

two crazyier methods are the classic magnet motor which uses a mix of permanent and electromagnets to spin a generator. Also the solid state generator, its a box of electronic circuitry that produces more power than it takes in.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-23, 09:26 AM
@Oracle_Hunter:
The trouble with launching stuff from the moon is how long it takes to get to Earth. An ICBM from the former USSR to the US would take about half an hour. Assuming you are fighting a technologically equal enemy, what's stopping them from vaporising your rocks from space in the days, or at least several hours assuming far greater than Apollo speeds, it would take them to travel from the moon. And even if you are not fighting a technologically equal enemy, the long transit gives lots of warning.

Still, even modern aircraft and ICBM likely mean that oceans are not the barrier they were in World War II.
Oceans are still a huge barrier, thanks to defensive missiles. You can mount more and longer-range stuff on land than any potential invading fleet. Establishing a beach-head is still very costly, and only a nation with undisputed control of the seas and oversea allies can really project power anything like cheaply. And yet, it is still very expensive in terms of time and money to ship materiel overseas.

As for rocks -- do you know how hard it is to vaporize a massive boulder falling at terminal velocity? And what good is advanced warning if the rock is coming down on a relatively fixed target: a military base or a city? In any case, you'll run out of interceptor missiles before the moon runs out of rocks :smallamused:

GungHo
2011-11-23, 09:58 AM
I remember some physics student saying something along the lines that using the batteries you could power ray guns with as bullets would be much more dangerous than beam weapons themselves.
We already have stuff that blows up when it hits things, and they're a lot more cost and materials-efficient than throwing batteries at people. If you have the ability to miniaturize power of that scale, store it as a non-perishable good, and mass-produce it, then you have a lot better things to do with it than blow it up.

Hell, one of the biggest military innovations of the last quarter-century has been JDAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition)... take the old, simple, reliable stuff you already have tons of and bolt on some whiz-bang and end up with a munition that costs a fraction of designing a whole new whiz-bang munition.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-23, 10:09 AM
Oceans are still a huge barrier, thanks to defensive missiles. You can mount more and longer-range stuff on land than any potential invading fleet. Establishing a beach-head is still very costly, and only a nation with undisputed control of the seas and oversea allies can really project power anything like cheaply. And yet, it is still very expensive in terms of time and money to ship materiel overseas.

Oh, it's big, but not impassible. Defence missiles use against ICBM is . . .debatable. Remember D-Day? And that was with then technology.


As for rocks -- do you know how hard it is to vaporize a massive boulder falling at terminal velocity? And what good is advanced warning if the rock is coming down on a relatively fixed target: a military base or a city? In any case, you'll run out of interceptor missiles before the moon runs out of rocks :smallamused:

The Chinese and Americans have both demonstrated blowing up satellites in Earth orbit. Scaling that up is a technological issue, but if you have fairly equal enemies and one is slinging rocks from the moon, I don't see it been implausible.
At the very least you can break it into little pebbles which burn up in the atmosphere, making a nice meteor shower.
Also the lead time gives time for an orderly evacuation of man and material in the case of a military base. A city is harder I amit.
While the moon may not run out of rocks, mining takes time and effort and while so does producing missiles, assuming fairly near future I am amusing Earth has far greater industrial capabilities.
And if you can shoot rocks at Earth, you can shoot missiles at the moon and be potentially more manoeuvrable as unlike a mass driver slug, they can have on-board fuel supplies.

Nerd-o-rama
2011-11-23, 02:59 PM
Stepping in to defend mecha here:

They'll never replace tanks, but small (5-7 meters tops) mecha are more maneuverable than tanks in cluttered places like urban warfare. They could perform a role similar to helicopter gunships in being tank-killers that can go anywhere, especially in urban environments, while being marginally tougher than choppers and harder to hit from a non-ambush position. Bipedal units can make use of vertical cover better than tanks; shorter, elevated guns can allow them to strike from angles where tanks would have difficulty counterattacking, they can more feasibly utilize point-blank assault weapons by getting inside a tank's angle of fire, and they would have far less of a radar signature than a helicopter (though somewhat more than a tank). Of course, they can never be as heavily armored as a treaded vehicle and they present a larger target profile, so infantry will be able to take them down with relative ease compared to a tank, perhaps even with concentrated small arms fire. Despite that, with sufficient advances in energy and materials science, I think they could have a role.


Somewhat more likely than mecha, as discussed, is power armor that renders your infantry largely immune to conventional small arms and, in turn, allows infantry to use larger weapons and integrate more ELINT features like radar and variable-spectrum optics into their individual gear.

razark
2011-11-23, 03:21 PM
At the very least you can break it into little pebbles which burn up in the atmosphere, making a nice meteor shower.

The problem with breaking the rock up is that it is still coming towards you. Instead of a single large bullet hitting you, you are getting a large shotgun blast. It will still have the same mass, traveling at the same velocity, as the single rock. You're merely spreading the damage over a larger area. The smaller pieces may burn up in the atmosphere, but some of them will still get through to the target area, and the chances of breaking it up enough to make it all burn up is very small.

The defensive strategy is not to blow the rock up, but to deflect it.

eepop
2011-11-23, 03:26 PM
"The Stopping Power of Water" got me thinking, how can we remove water from the equation?

Perhaps some advanced weather control technology is developed with the intent of solving the world's food shortage. The process requires that a significant amount more water vapor is put into the atmosphere.

The technology can not be used on a specific location, but instead steadily equalizes the weather of the entire planet. Any extreme event can be dispersed across the globe making its impact minimal.

It starts with just skimming off the top several feet of the oceans, while the technology is used mostly to avert specific disasters. Over time though, people push for it to be used more and more actively to push the usual weather to a near tropic ideal, until most of the water that made up the worlds oceans is in the atmosphere.

With more land available, and food abundant, a population explosion is sure to follow.

If you'd like you can even have the increased water vapor content of the atmosphere reduce the effectiveness of some other technologies:
1) There pretty much continuous cloud cover over the entire globe, rending GPS technologies practically inert.
2) The massive cloud cover makes it much harder to navigate when flying at any considerable altitude.
3) The water content in the air at high altitude becomes reminiscent of nearly solid water, requiring any planes to need to be effectively amphibious (and thus wildly more expensive).


It also provides lots of new reasons to fight:
1) Claiming of the new land that was previously below the oceans is going to ignite conflict almost immediately.
2) Some people will be against such aggressive use of the technology as the "destruction" of the oceans is likely to lead to the death of ocean dwelling creatures.
3) Some people whose livelihoods more or less relied on the obsoleted technologies might hold a grudge and ban together against the use of the weather control.
4) The water content of the air may cause health problems for some. Some countries at high altitudes may be effected enough to oppose use of the machine entirely.


Its not so much an innovation in military technology, but it would drastically change how, where, and why wars were fought.

razark
2011-11-23, 03:43 PM
Bipedal units...
It's been a while since I've looked into it, but last time I checked, bipedal robots were quite inefficient. Slow, tended to lose balance, not maneuverable, etc. due to the high center of gravity and the motions needed to keep it balanced while walking.

Unless these problems are addressable, mecha are never going to replace anything. (Although, I believe some major advances have come about in quadrupedal robots.)

byaku rai
2011-11-23, 04:43 PM
quadrupedal robots.

... I saw this and my first thought was "spider-tanks". This is an awesome thing.

>.>
<.<
RULE OF COOL DON'T JUDGE ME

kieza
2011-11-23, 04:59 PM
How about a development in armor cutting? Say, a gadget that cuts through anything up to tank armor or concrete like butter on contact. Could be a plasma-torch kind of thing, or a vibratory blade, or some exotic energy field.

Couple it with armor that deflects ballistic weapons, make the tech bulky enough that you can't make it into a projectile, and you're looking at the return of close-combat as a major component of warfare.



Alternately, neural interfacing. If it has a enough bandwidth, you'll see a drastic increase in ease of controlling remote equipment. Not just UAVs, but also ground-based vehicles. My understanding is that they do fine now on open terrain, but that rough terrain gets them stuck and slows them down too much to make them feasible.

The Reverend
2011-11-24, 10:44 AM
@ Kieza. That would be Warhammer 40k. Cool, but not where I want to go. Neural interface would be a big improvement for control.

@ Byaku rai spider tanks are cool we can't judge you for that.

@Nerd-o-rama 5-7 meters is about the upper range of the size I was imagining. I think active countermeasures, electric field armor, new materials, and proper infantry support they would be an awesome force. I feel that the Heavy Gear style wheels and treads would be a realistic way to increase maneuverability

Djinn_in_Tonic
2011-11-24, 11:15 AM
So...major military inventions that aren't to much of a stretch from current technology, but still change up the battlefield...

Class V Ares Armor: A far cry above the Class II-III Interceptor armor worn in the field today, Class V Interceptor Armor is very expensive, and thus used mainly for elite forces. It has enough durability and absorbing power to stop any arms fire smaller than a tank shell, and Marines wearing the full Ares battlesuit (including the headgear) have been documented throwing themselves on live grenades and walking away from the resulting explosion with no more than a broken limb. As a result, forces designed to counter these elite armed units are commonly armed with flame-based weaponry, as the Ares battlesuits still can't provide adequate protection to lethal levels of heat, although they are insulated to an extent.

Detonator Mx71 Electric Armor: A personnel carried backpack, the Detonator Mx71 Electric Armor projects a small field of highly charged electrical energy, sufficient to detonate explosives that come within the designated radius. Any "smart" explosive that passes through the shield will instantly detonate upon contact, rather than waiting until it finds its target. The radius for such a shield is usually between fifty and one hundred feet, making it practical for individuals or small forces, and a typical pack has enough power to sustain a shield for several minutes.

Achilles Enhancement Module (AEM): The Achilles Enhancement Module is the closest the US Military comes to the often-fantasized "piloted mech combat." It is a limb-enhancement suit, designed to fit beneath a modified Ares battlesuit. The AEM increases the wearer's speed and strength, typically doubling lifting and carrying capacity and increasing movement speed by a factor of about 3 (with corresponding increases in jumping distance and height). Like the Ares, AEMs are quite expensive, and usually given to elite combat units or scouting patrols.

BigDog Mastiff: The Mastiff is the closest the US Military comes to non-piloted mech combat. Based on developments in military AI and the BigDog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ) project, the Mastiff is a bit larger than your average ATV, capable of navigating rocky terrain at upwards of 15 miles per hour, and carries a mounted machine gun and a mounted anti-tank rifle. While its ammunition is limited and its effective range is only about 100 miles between recharging its electric engine, the Mastiff is the pinnacle of automated combat tech.

Unfortunately, the Mastiff is not without its limitations. Ethics committees around the world and skeptical of its ability to accurate identify threats, and with good reason. At least two existing cases of Mastiffs identifying civilians carrying objects like brooms as valid military threats and opening fire are seeing legal action, but, since programmers are still not liable for malpractice, nor for court-martial, the "intelligent" AI is creating a new ethical situation where civilians have been killed and yet there is no "responsible" party to punish.

Oracle v3.6 Uplink: The Oracle system is obsoleting traditional airforce pilots to a great extent. Planes are normally smaller, as they need no life support, and are piloted via remote over exceptionally fast satellite connections. Most air-to-air and ground-to-air combat now uses short-range communications disruption technology, as disabling the links is usually a faster way to destroy the target, although most planes have redundant features enabling them to operate on several channels, so traditional weaponry has not lost its place.

A few larger planes are still manned by actual pilots instead of, effective, military "gamers," but these have become the exception rather than the rule.

Dragonfire
2011-11-24, 11:31 AM
I guess I will step in and defend mech's as well.


Ovbiouslly mech's will never replace tanks as the main combat units in an army without some serious changes in technology. Tanks are better in nearlly every way, so lets focous on what mechs have better than tanks. Additionally I see effective mechs being less than 20 Ft tall.

-Manpower: You need 1 person to pilot a mech, compared to lets say an Abrams MBT which has 4. This has numerous advantages because it allows you to use less people to do a similar job to a tank, even if it is inferior at this job. It's easier to replace on pilot instead of 4 for each lose. Plus if every time you loose a vehicle you loose 1 man instead of 4 that's another thing that is positive in my mind.

-Travel over broken terrain: I mean stuff like rocky ground and urban areas.

-Hands: There are dozen of utility uses for these, from building structures, to, removing barricades.

Now lets glance at stuff tanks are better at

-Fighting anywhere with large open spaces: If mechs go up against tanks anywhere with long LOS they will die. It's that simple.
Lower silhouette
Stabiler firing platform

Also something on legs, they are a weak point that can be explotied I can think of some stuff like large scale bolos with plastic explosives instead of weights.

So what role would mechs have then. I can easily see them being used by Combat engineers to help build structures or demolish them with there hands, or to plant large explosives. They could also be attached to regular line platoons to act as Nerd-o-rama said and to attack enemy infantry positions though they would be ineffective on open terrain. Finally I can see them attached to Airborne units to serve as light armor and to help build fortifications. The only real way I could see to use mechs would be to treat them as really big infantrymen.

As razark pointed out though there are a lot of flaws in bipedal units that need to be fixed before they would be workable at all.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2011-11-24, 11:38 AM
Obviously mech's will never replace tanks as the main combat units in an army without some serious changes in technology. Tanks are better in nearly every way, so lets focous on what mechs have better than tanks. Additionally I see effective mechs being less than 20 Ft tall.

I can't say they'll even be alongside them at all, without being smaller, autonomous mechs like the BigDog Mastiff or Achilles Enhancement Module I hypothesized above. Let me explain.

Price: Mechs, with all their electronics systems and moving parts, would be much more expensive than a tank of any given size, while being of less utility overall, as they'd always lose a straight-up fight against the heavily armed and armored tank.

Space: Mechs need space for a pilot, and don't have the bulk and immovability of a tank body to provide armor to protect that space. Thus, for your millions, you're left with something much more vulnerable than a tank, slower than a soldier (at least as far as dodging and overall mobility go...a mech would be able to outrun a soldier), and its only plus side is its ability to move over difficult terrain and carry a bigger gun. Not worth the millions it would cost to deploy.

Redundancy: A tank who loses a crew member can still function. A mech that is pierced by a sniper round (if you can pierce a tank with a weapon, you can definitely pierce a mech) is several million dollars of dead technology. Yeah, you'd only lose one man instead of four...but the government does have a value attached to human life: it's roughly $8.4 million at the moment. Plus production and shipment time, you're looking at about an even rate of exchange, and the fact that you're banking on losing the *entire* tank crew (meaning you lose the whole crew and the tank, as opposed to some of the crew, meaning the tank returns) instead of losing one guy *and* the machine means that this probably isn't as big an issue to the military.

In short, smaller enhancement systems like my proposed Achilles (that give movement and carrying capacity enhancements to ordinary soldiers) would be infinitely more valuable than a mech...for the same price you could have several to dozens of such systems, you'd get smaller targets, and less likely-hood of a single sniper round ruining your investment. Maybe a work-mech of sorts would exist for defensive construction purposes, but that's about the only place where I'd see them having any edge over enhanced soldiers and/or tanks.

Treating them as big infantrymen, like you suggested, just means you have bigger, slower target with a bit more armor and larger guns. In a world where rocket-propelled grenades, armor-piercing rounds, smart ammunition, and homing missiles exist, that's not a good thing to have around. Put the big guns on more durable platforms (tanks), and leave the mobility to the normal infantrymen who present a smaller, more mobile target.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-24, 11:48 AM
Dragonfire:
You can give hands to a tank, so if they are genuinely useful, there is no reason we need mecha
Why would a Mecha only have one operator? Sure, that's a typical fictional representation, though by no means universal, but given that they have to pilot a hideously overcomplicated vehicle, load shells, and man whatever guns it has, that's a lot to ask one person. It might be doable, look at fighter pilots, but it adds to the expense and time of their training and limits the possible users to those who can master such a vehicle.
As for travelling over broken ground , tanks are designed for that. While they do have limits, it was broken ground for which they were originally made to cross, the shelled and cratered moon like surface the No Mans land of World War 1.

KineticDiplomat
2011-11-24, 12:32 PM
The innovation won't necessarily be in the technology. Oh, it'll improve, and someone will build a counter to it.

The innovation will be in how warfare is fought. If fourth generation warfare is the network (in the societal sense, not computer, though computer networks are inherently involved) based war that we're teetering on right now in brush wars around the world, what's 5GW going to look like?

That will play a lot more of a role in a military campaign than making some tanks a little shootier or adding power armor.

So, take a look at the world your playing on, extrapolate how warfare will evolve, and run from there.

Dragonfire
2011-11-24, 12:54 PM
Ravens-cry: I assumed a mech would only have one pilot as it would be nearly impposible in my mind to put multiple pilots in a mech without it being even more unweildy than it allready would be, it however is just an assumption I made.

As to putting a hand on a tank, yeah you could I suppose... Again never thought of it like that.

And I again I suppose that is true as well.


Dijinn_in_tonic: I agree on pretty much everything you said about price, though i would argue they would have just as much utillity. And your correct they would loose in a stand up fight. Every single time. So you would try to not get into stand up fights. If you find yourself in a stand up fight with a tank you lost. Better to fire off some missles and fall back or more than likely exploding and dieing.

Again your right about everything else. Radical technology would be needed to make mech's an effective combat unit, that more than likely is not worth the effort to develop. That being said if certian technologies were developed mechs could be made effective or at least a threat. More than likely they will first be used in civillian role as construction vehicles and never see the light of day in combat.

Nich_Critic
2011-11-24, 01:39 PM
Skimmed the thread, so I didn't see if this was mentioned, but in addition to autonomous /semi autonomous drones, how about autonomous drone factories? You land it in the middle of an area, and it defends itself and immediately begins making an army of lethal drones from the materials available. I can see this being especially useful in desert type areas, where you have a near endless supply of silicates to build with.

This is assuming that we can automate nano-scale manufacture, to make the exact types of materials we need regardless of what material is taken in.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-24, 02:01 PM
You need more than silicates to make a robot, you also need metals and hydrocarbons.

Megaduck
2011-11-24, 02:27 PM
As for rocks -- do you know how hard it is to vaporize a massive boulder falling at terminal velocity? And what good is advanced warning if the rock is coming down on a relatively fixed target: a military base or a city? In any case, you'll run out of interceptor missiles before the moon runs out of rocks :smallamused:

Don't need to vaporize it. Just need to nudge it a little bit.

There are a couple problems with the Moon Rocks scenario.

First, the defender is assumed to have space capability, otherwise why are you even bothering to fire from the moon. Therefor, the defender has a chance to monkey with your projectile.

Two, the defender will have the leverage advantage. The attacker will need to put all the power into the rock in one burst. (Unless this rock mounts engines at which time it becomes a starship verse starship battle) meanwhile the defender has the entire transit time to apply energy which means they don't have to put in nearly as much power.

Two point five. The defender has to put far less energy into the rock then the attacker. The attacker has to accelerate the rock to full speed from rest. The defender just has to change the trajectory enough that the rock slingshots off earth gravity field or bounces off earths atmosphere.

Three, the rock is going to be fully visible from earth, easy to track, and consequently easy to generate an intercept for. You'd be able to do it with nothing more then a telescope and a slide rule.

The above means that that its going to take less resources to stop the rock then it does to throw the rock and anyone on earth is going to have more resources then a person on the moon.

Vknight
2011-11-24, 04:01 PM
Kill Sats have always been a favorite.
Not practical in many ways but it has a intimidation factor that really plays into the effectiveness

Ravens_cry
2011-11-24, 04:14 PM
Kill Sats have always been a favorite.
Not practical in many ways but it has a intimidation factor that really plays into the effectiveness

We've already mentioned kill sats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) that potentially could be more practical, especially with cheaper, heavier lifting launch capabilities.

The Reverend
2011-11-24, 06:13 PM
Talking about mecha that dont walk reminded me

I'll look up a link, bbut back in the sixties they made a nuclear recovery vehicle to help clean up busted nuclear reactors. It was based on a tank body and had two huge upper arms capable of lifting something like 15 tons and a wide variety of engineering tools on arms. Gotta find a pic. It looked awesome.

@djin an tonic
We have something similar to the electric armor, actually something just like it. Except its effective field is like 30feet and will blow up most ordnance including dumb fire like RPGs. Your powered armor suggestions are right on target.



One major reason for war in my new game will be an old one: resources. With the ever increasing effectiveness of automated factories and local scale production of 3d printing a lot of trade in finished products just doesn't occur. WalMart doesn't ship the spatula from China it makes them in their 3d printing facility. The only products that are traded in bulk are foodstuffs, raw materials, and VERY complicated items like fusion reactor cores

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-24, 10:07 PM
Two point five. The defender has to put far less energy into the rock then the attacker. The attacker has to accelerate the rock to full speed from rest. The defender just has to change the trajectory enough that the rock slingshots off earth gravity field or bounces off earths atmosphere.

Three, the rock is going to be fully visible from earth, easy to track, and consequently easy to generate an intercept for. You'd be able to do it with nothing more then a telescope and a slide rule.

The above means that that its going to take less resources to stop the rock then it does to throw the rock and anyone on earth is going to have more resources then a person on the moon.
No.

(1) The Attacker needs to accelerate the rock to Moon Escape Velocity (2.4 km/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities)) while any Defense Interceptor attacking from space requires acceleration to Earth Escape Velocity (11.2 km/s) if it wants to intercept something in space. Note that even with Orbital Defense Platforms, you need to launch each part of it at that speed -- and overcome atmospheric friction to boot. The moon has negligible atmospheric friction, so you just need to get it to that speed -- which can be done with a rail launcher-style device. The energy savings are immense.

(2) Any object launched Earthwards benefits from Earth's Gravity Well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_well) which means it will keep accelerating even without the aid of booster rockets. Conversely, any object launched from Earth towards the moon will need to fight against this Well the whole way -- particularly if it is maneuvering.

(3) Rocks accelerating towards Earth require a lot of energy to divert off course. Provided you have interceptors that can home in on a non-active rock (no appreciable heat signature outside of atmosphere; no electronic signature) you still need to hit it directly with enough force to get it well away from the target. Remember that a one-ton rock still hits with the force of a Big Boy-class bomb -- you don't want those landing too close to your target -- and in order to exert that much energy you'll probably be using atomic warheads in the atmosphere above you; a hazard in and of themselves.

(4) Rocks are significantly sturdier than missiles or satellites -- the latter of which we still can't hit accurately even when we're cheating.

It's really hard to deal with kinetic energy weapons. We don't have Rods From God now because we'd still need to get those heavy rods into space against Earth's Gravity Well. On the Moon, we're shooting everything downhill :smallcool:

Thane of Fife
2011-11-24, 11:08 PM
No.

(1) The Attacker needs to accelerate the rock to Moon Escape Velocity (2.4 km/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities)) while any Defense Interceptor attacking from space requires acceleration to Earth Escape Velocity (11.2 km/s) if it wants to intercept something in space. Note that even with Orbital Defense Platforms, you need to launch each part of it at that speed -- and overcome atmospheric friction to boot. The moon has negligible atmospheric friction, so you just need to get it to that speed -- which can be done with a rail launcher-style device. The energy savings are immense.

(2) Any object launched Earthwards benefits from Earth's Gravity Well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_well) which means it will keep accelerating even without the aid of booster rockets. Conversely, any object launched from Earth towards the moon will need to fight against this Well the whole way -- particularly if it is maneuvering.

(3) Rocks accelerating towards Earth require a lot of energy to divert off course. Provided you have interceptors that can home in on a non-active rock (no appreciable heat signature outside of atmosphere; no electronic signature) you still need to hit it directly with enough force to get it well away from the target. Remember that a one-ton rock still hits with the force of a Big Boy-class bomb -- you don't want those landing too close to your target -- and in order to exert that much energy you'll probably be using atomic warheads in the atmosphere above you; a hazard in and of themselves.

(4) Rocks are significantly sturdier than missiles or satellites -- the latter of which we still can't hit accurately even when we're cheating.

It's really hard to deal with kinetic energy weapons. We don't have Rods From God now because we'd still need to get those heavy rods into space against Earth's Gravity Well. On the Moon, we're shooting everything downhill :smallcool:

So, uh, what's the benefit of all this over, say, conventional nuclear weapons? MAD still makes it very unlikely that the weapon would ever be used, as nuclear weapons could effectively retaliate against the aggressor. The rocks aren't going to hit that much harder, if at all harder, than a nuclear weapon. They may be more difficult to stop, but it seems to me like developing better missiles and/or aircraft is a more economic decision than building a giant space weapon on the moon.

On top of which, the energy required to propel a one ton object to 2 km/s is still a pretty significant amount of energy to generate on the moon (about 1800 MJ by my calcs, requiring a perfectly efficient driver system, which is not really possible, and that reaches only the minimum of 2 km/s). Remember that any fuel or solar panels have to be either shipped or constructed up there. According to here (http://ecolocalizer.com/2008/03/05/worlds-7-biggest-solar-energy-plants/), the largest solar plant on earth as of now produces about 1/6 of that.

Then you'd need to actually build the accelerator, which is going to require a pretty decent length (more shipping and construction). Then, if you want it to be aimable, it needs to be able to move, with is going to be really tricky (we're probably not talking about a short tube, here). Also, you know, it's going to be somewhat dependent on the movements of the moon.

Your rocks probably need to be processed (iron content will, I think, affect the workings of the accelerator, possibly dramatically).

You will need to be supporting people living there, most likely, which will mean more trips for food and other supplies.

Furthermore, rocks don't have guidance systems in them, so you need to be able to aim them fairly well. Considering the large distances involved, and the fact that the moon and earth are moving relative to each other, and the atmosphere of earth, and the possibility of equipment faults or of natural disasters moving your launcher, or similar, there are a lot of places where this can go wrong (I'm not certain how doable this is with computers).

My point being, I don't think that rocks from the moon is a plausible idea for the near future. Project Thor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) is a much more likely take on the concept, in my opinion.

The Reverend
2011-11-25, 12:22 AM
Actual spacebased weapons would be a bold move and one likely to bring immediate response. International treaties have basically banned putting active weapon systems up there. Defensive systems like star wars system would probably be acceptable, buuut look at the big stink Russia put up when the US tried to put a missile defense system in Europe.

Stopping a 4th front being opened up could be a great campaign itself.

Megaduck
2011-11-25, 07:11 AM
(1) The Attacker needs to accelerate the rock to Moon Escape Velocity (2.4 km/s) while any Defense Interceptor attacking from space requires acceleration to Earth Escape Velocity (11.2 km/s) if it wants to intercept something in space. Note that even with Orbital Defense Platforms, you need to launch each part of it at that speed -- and overcome atmospheric friction to boot. The moon has negligible atmospheric friction, so you just need to get it to that speed -- which can be done with a rail launcher-style device. The energy savings are immense.

True, launching the same amount of mass from the moon is far more energy efficient then launching the same mass from earth. However, if the moon is sending a 1 ton rock to earth, earth does not need to fire a 1 ton rock back. All earth needs to do is put up enough explosives to knock the rock off track.


(2) Any object launched Earthwards benefits from Earth's Gravity Well which means it will keep accelerating even without the aid of booster rockets. Conversely, any object launched from Earth towards the moon will need to fight against this Well the whole way -- particularly if it is maneuvering.

Also true.


(3) Rocks accelerating towards Earth require a lot of energy to divert off course. Provided you have interceptors that can home in on a non-active rock (no appreciable heat signature outside of atmosphere; no electronic signature) you still need to hit it directly with enough force to get it well away from the target. Remember that a one-ton rock still hits with the force of a Big Boy-class bomb -- you don't want those landing too close to your target -- and in order to exert that much energy you'll probably be using atomic warheads in the atmosphere above you; a hazard in and of themselves.

Not true.

Here is the issue that you’re having. You’re assuming that in order to stop one of these projectiles you’d need to break it up or apply the same amount of energy against the rock that the original rail gun did plus gravity effects. The reason your having this issue is that your assuming that the projectile can only be influenced at the planet’s atmosphere.

However, because the technology exists to build a massive moon base it must be assumed that the technology also exists to have a space presence. So the defender is NOT limited to the orbital area of the planet. All the defender needs to do is put lateral force on the rock and over the course of several thousand kilometers this will translate into a BIG change in target

Assume for a minute that the projectile is moving at steady 12km/s (this is rather high but we’ll go with it and assume we don’t have to deal with gravity effects) at this speed it’ll take 8.25 hours from launch to impact. Say we can generate an intercept at the half way point so at 4 hours to impact. In order to absolutely guarantee a miss we’ll have to move the projectile 12756 KM to the side which is one diameter of the earth. In order to do this the defender need to create a lateral velocity on the object of .85 KM/s this means the defender has a leverage advantage of about 14 to 1.

This is where the issue of time comes in and why it kills the moon gun idea. Small changes to the projectile result in big targeting issues later as the distance traveled magnifies effects. It’s not the energy required to get the rock going that’s important, it’s how much energy it takes to make it miss.


(4) Rocks are significantly sturdier than missiles or satellites -- the latter of which we still can't hit accurately even when we're cheating.

Doesn’t matter. In fact, you’d want to keep the rock intact so you can get the entire thing away from earth.

jseah
2011-11-25, 08:25 AM
In order to absolutely guarantee a miss we’ll have to move the projectile 12756 KM to the side which is one diameter of the earth.
You only need half-earth diameter. So the ratio is 28 to 1.

Yora
2011-11-25, 08:31 AM
This completely ignores gravity.

Also, it doesn't matter how far you move a moving object in space. The important part is the angle by which you shift the direction it travels to. If you can do that far enough away from earth, the angle can be very small.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-25, 08:32 AM
jseah
Not as hard as you might think even then. Given the distances involved, a small change in trajectory adds up.
It becomes even easier if they are not tossing mountains at the Earth and are aiming for a city or a military facility.

jseah
2011-11-25, 08:49 AM
My point was that Megaduck's estimation was too conservative.

The minimum deflection needed to get something to miss is half the target's diameter, not one. So it's twice as easy to do it as he claims.

But yes, that all ignores gravity.

The Reverend
2011-11-25, 09:57 AM
So how do you get the moon gun built
A. Without everyone seeing what you're doing and nuking the construction site.
B. Without everyone seeing what you're doing and blowing up your launch capability.
C Without everyone seeing what your doing and assassinating your scientists and engineers, remember Gerald Bull and Project Babylon and what happened to him.

Radar
2011-11-25, 10:52 AM
Gravity doesn't make things that much harder at theese distances from Earth. In fact, you can do funny things with it with little cost: attach some cheap engines to the rock (as you would have to anyway) and slingshot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist) the rock around the Earth and back into the Moon.

Now a proper Moon laser or high energy particle beam can be quite effective. The best part about a Moon base is that Earth is always visible at the same spot on the sky, so any Moon weapon doesn't need to be adjusted much. This means, they can be quite oversized. Personally I'd go with a particle beam rather then laser - it could be used to cause a massive EMP in the chosen area. Focusing a beam of light or particles would be tricky on such distances, but if you just want to have a solid doomsday device, then you don't have to worry about frying all electronics on half of Earth's surface instead of a carefuly chosen area.

Megaduck
2011-11-25, 11:16 AM
My point was that Megaduck's estimation was too conservative.

The minimum deflection needed to get something to miss is half the target's diameter, not one. So it's twice as easy to do it as he claims.

But yes, that all ignores gravity.

My approximation was extremely conservative. As Oracle Hunter points out the moons escape velocity is only 2.4 Km/s and at that initial launch speed the MAXIMUM speed the rock will reach is about 12 Km/s before it hits the atmosphere. I just decided to stretch that out over the entire run and ignore gravity for simplicity's sake.

There are better and more efficient ways for the military to blow stuff up then a giant moon gun.

That said, there is still plenty of plot ideas here, there is nothing to stop mad terrorists from hijacking the civilian gun and using it as an impromptu weapon on mass destruction. You could have the Earth Defense forces playing a desperate game of 'Missile Command' while our intrepid heroes desperately try to recapture the gun before millions of lives are lost. Bonus points if there is some reason the gun just can't be blown up or the power cut.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-25, 11:47 AM
So how do you get the moon gun built
A. Without everyone seeing what you're doing and nuking the construction site.
B. Without everyone seeing what you're doing and blowing up your launch capability.
C Without everyone seeing what your doing and assassinating your scientists and engineers, remember Gerald Bull and Project Babylon and what happened to him.
A lot of this can be solved by being on the moon.

In order to nuke the Moon Site, you need to first find it, and then reach it. Missiles will need to be very big in order to have enough fuel to reach the Moon and also hit the target nigh-dead on. Remember that there is no atmosphere to propagate shockwaves on the moon, so nukes are only really effective if you hit rock.

(1) Any such missile will be vulnerable to tracking (big rockets and predictable vectors make for easy tracking and interception) and missiles are much easier to knock down than rocks. If you're proposing systems that can launch millions of interceptors to accurately knock tons of rocks out of alignment well above Earth's atmosphere, then conventional ballistic missiles must be completely useless.

(2) Any ship flying at the moon can be intercepted by either the Moon's defensive forces (as land-based defenses are necessarily stronger than mobile ones) and since there is No Stealth In Space (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StealthInSpace) it isn't going to be hard to work up interceptors.

(3) Any smart planner will build his Rail Launcher underground so that you can't just use a telescope to find it. Heck, he could even put it on the dark side of the moon. The exit port can be placed in any crater to hide its location further and with the use of some maneuvering rockets on the Rocks you'll be able to defeat simple vector tracking.

(4) Assassination is much harder to do on the moon. Step #1 is to send up an isolated group of scientists and engineers to do the work, and keep them in a remote area with only your own elite guard to watch them. If the enemy figures out what you're doing, they still need to infiltrate someone onto your base (Remember: No Stealth in Space) and make their way through a very hostile environment (moon-side up top, and dedicated defenses underground) to kill your engineers. Also, this isn't even rocket-science: once you know how to build a rail-launcher all you need is the industrial capacity to build it. If they kill all your engineers, you send up new ones :smallamused:

Radar
2011-11-25, 12:03 PM
While stealth is indeed impossible in space, chaff and decoys work fine - some of them even better (some ICBM designs contain many fake warheads along with real ones, since in space it's impossible to distinguish light, bomb-shaped decoys from the real things).
It is entirely possible to overload the defences with an abundance of fake targets, which can easily have matching signatures to real projectiles or ships.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-25, 12:06 PM
Launching a slug iof some sort takes quiite a bit of energy. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, especially with no atmosphere, and so unless you intend on rebuilding your gun for each shot, you are going to need large and exposed radiators, which will be a big fat infra-red beacon that says "Our base is in this area."
No Stealth in Space works both ways.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-25, 12:24 PM
Launching a slug iof some sort takes quiite a bit of energy. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, especially with no atmosphere, and so unless you intend on rebuilding your gun for each shot, you are going to need large and exposed radiators, which will be a big fat infra-red beacon that says "Our base is in this area."
No Stealth in Space works both ways.
The moon gun is underground and is a Railgun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun). Your "slugs" are tons of rock with a single band of steel wrapped around it (for the Railgun to work on) and a few solid-fuel rockets for maneuvering.

The Railgun itself will have hundreds of feet of rock and shielding to mask its power plant and operation. Put it on the dark side of the moon and its minute EM signature visible at the head will be masked from any detector not orbiting the moon. Its heat signature will be minimal; it has the entire moon to radiate heat into, even if it decides not to use modern heat sinks.

Rockets, on the other hand, produce a lot of heat while they are firing, and their engines will retain a lot of heat after they stop because vacuum is an excellent insulator. Anything fired out of an atmosphere will remain very hot for a long time and will stand out like a flare against the void.

Ravens_cry
2011-11-25, 02:04 PM
That's still a lot of heat and if you are simply "storing" it underground, it's going to show up on the surface eventually. Heat conducts after all.
A flyby probe that loops around the back, a la Luna 3, could also take some pictures of the far side without having to go into orbit.
Something in the right solar or even Earth orbit, the moon being in Earth orbit, duh, could also return imagery.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-25, 02:16 PM
That's still a lot of heat and if you are simply "storing" it underground, it's going to show up on the surface eventually. Heat conducts after all.
A flyby probe that loops around the back, a la Luna 3, could also take some pictures of the far side without having to go into orbit.
Something in the right solar or even Earth orbit, the moon being in Earth orbit, duh, could also return imagery.
I thought we had a "no sparrow may fall" Skywatch service and rock-destroying interceptors. Surely such satellites would be instantly destroyed before they could detect anything.

And yeah, the heat will show up eventually, but it's not like that's going to pinpoint the launch. I mean, you could simply dump the waste heat into the heating system for the (distant) colony and you'd never see it from space. You'd use insulated water pipes to transfer the heat and so on -- it will use the same principles that allow your car's engine to heat the interior of your car.

The reason why waste heat is such a problem on a spaceship is that the only place to dump it is into the very thing you're trying to hide -- the ship. Nobody cares if you can see the moon's thermal signature, after all :smalltongue:

For a more technical explanation, see here (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php) :smallsmile:

The Reverend
2011-11-25, 05:29 PM
I like the assumption u are already on the moon....to bad the only way it will work is to already have a confirmed presence there. I point you to the Fort Apache project the US military planned out back in the sixties Called Project Horizons the sheer amount of man and machinery you would need to put up there means you are part of a larger entity.

Cooling lasers, you dump the waste heat into powering lasers and that is how you dump the heat. Point away from enemy for stealth. Its a classic Sci fi technique.

why would stealth be a problem in space? Nuclear warheads aren't really that hot, anti-radar and ladar materials would still work in space, and its a tiny dot moving against the blackness deploying thousands of beach ball sized inflatables that mimic the real war head. This would be the second wave following the BPEW broad spectrum beam weapons designed to blind your sensors, literally.

Assassinating your scientists is only the beginning, their family, your leaders, their family. Choose to persue a weapon system like that and intelligence agencies are going to figure it out real quick. If your lucky they will suggest its a good idea not to persue it, then kill you if your stupid persists. Some intelligence agencies would just go-ahead and order wetwork people till you stop.

Remember this is a real world setting. Setting up a railgun system on the moon is pretty infeasable for the next 100 years or so if politics continue on the same route. And even then I'm not saying its not technically infeasible or undoable from a scientific or engineering standpoint, Im saying from a political standpoint it wouldn't happen.

Yora
2011-11-25, 07:46 PM
I really like that longscan system at the end of the page. Pretty simple, but also very smart.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-25, 10:56 PM
Cooling lasers, you dump the waste heat into powering lasers and that is how you dump the heat. Point away from enemy for stealth. Its a classic Sci fi technique.
If you can turn waste heat into energy with perfect efficiency, then you've broken the Laws of Thermodynamics. Otherwise, you're going to shine like a spotlight against a black wall in a dark room.


why would stealth be a problem in space?
This is why. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php)


Remember this is a real world setting. Setting up a railgun system on the moon is pretty infeasable for the next 100 years or so if politics continue on the same route. And even then I'm not saying its not technically infeasible or undoable from a scientific or engineering standpoint, Im saying from a political standpoint it wouldn't happen.
Wait, you're saying we can't have technologies that are politically infeasible? Aside from my objection to this claim of "political infeasibility" (if you want a cheap way to get stuff into orbit, railguns are the thing!) how are we supposed to give any suggestions if you don't tell us what sort of things are "politically feasible."

Hell, I'm not willing to bet on anything being "politically feasible" in a hundred years. Would anyone have thought that Japan of 1840 would have fought several great-power wars (and won) by 1940? Or that the expansionist Japan of the early 20th century would be a peace-loving economic superpower by the end? Or, better still, that the fragmented losers of the Boxer Rebellion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_rebellion) would be a unified communist state, and the second most powerful nation on Earth, by the end of the century?

Hah! I'd be willing to posit that at least one nation would have the ways, means, and desire to create a Lunar Railgun within a hundred years -- and it isn't America :smalltongue:

Ravens_cry
2011-11-25, 11:39 PM
@Oracle_Hunter
Maybe I was wrong about thermal imaging, but there is other means of remote detection that would uncover the base. Ground penetrating radar studies from orbit have already done. As for for instantly destroying peeking satellites, nothing is done instantly. By having a high enough orbit and good enough resolution instruments, reconnaissance could be undertaken and the telemetry. relayed back before any form of interception can reach it. If it is destroyed then, it doesn't matter.
There is other targets as well for a counter attack that are even harder to hide, like the mining areas you are getting these hundreds of tonne rocks and the metal for their conductive belly band.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-26, 12:50 AM
@Oracle_Hunter
Maybe I was wrong about thermal imaging, but there is other means of remote detection that would uncover the base. Ground penetrating radar studies from orbit have already done. As for for instantly destroying peeking satellites, nothing is done instantly. By having a high enough orbit and good enough resolution instruments, reconnaissance could be undertaken and the telemetry. relayed back before any form of interception can reach it. If it is destroyed then, it doesn't matter.
There is other targets as well for a counter attack that are even harder to hide, like the mining areas you are getting these hundreds of tonne rocks and the metal for their conductive belly band.
Again, any attack on the Moon by Earth-based forces is going to be at a significant disadvantage due to the physical realities of the situation.

- No mobile can mount a gun as large as you can place on a fixed emplacement, nor can it be as well supplied. This gives a significant advantage to the defense.

- Anything flying from the Earth to the Moon is easily detectable, and is going to be vastly more expensive to launch than its equivalent from Moonside.

- Any interceptor you can station on Earth that operates beyond the atmosphere can also be placed on the Moon -- and missiles/ships/sattelites are far easier to destroy than rocks.

It is really, really hard for Earthbound attackers to effectively combat Moonside targets. This is not to say that the hypothetical moonsiders can't have difficulties, but defending themselves against attack (assuming equivalent tech/armament levels) and hitting Earthside targets with rocks aren't ones to worry about.

razark
2011-11-26, 02:11 AM
I'd like to propose that we should just destroy the moon now. We can avoid all this debating, and never need to worry about how we're going to stop those evil moon-rebels from bombarding us with their terror gun, or how our heroic band of lunar freedom-fighters is going to hide their liberation cannon.

havocfett
2011-11-26, 05:54 AM
Something you may want to consider: We have Weberfoam (Lighter than air/light as air tough metal) now, it's currently expensive, but mass production is a realistic development. You could have.....interesting technologies with this stuff.

Beleriphon
2011-11-26, 08:54 AM
... nor for court-martial, the "intelligent" AI is creating a new ethical situation where civilians have been killed and yet there is no "responsible" party to punish.

This isn't strictly true, one could still sue the military or government of said military since they presumably approved the things without fully testing them. You might also reasonably name the manufacturer of the unit in a suit as well, provided that you could prove they failed to meet the standards of a reasonable military contractor.

eulmanis12
2011-11-27, 11:50 AM
I'm thinking something like Command and Conquerish tech. Most likely with 3 to 4 supernational factions.

say

C.D.R. (Confederation of Democracies and Republics)
Consisting of mostly old NATO nations

P.P.F. (People's Popular Front)
Consisting of China, Russia, North Korea etc

O.D.S. (Organization of Developing States)
Consisting of most of South America and Africa

N.S.S.R. (New Soviet Socialist Republic.)
Consisting of most of the former Soviet union


As usual the major point of conflict would be the middle east where each faction will try to claim control over the last remains of the world's oil supply.


Major changes in warfare that I am suggesting.

Death of the Aircraft Carrier.
advances in Anti-Aircraft tech and increasingly powerful targeting computers signifigantly reduce the combat effectiveness of most aircraft. Gen 4 and below aircraft are reduced to lawn orniments. The sky is dominated by the Joint Strike Fighter, the F22, The Mig Sukoy, the Eurofighter 9, and other Generation 5 fighters. Even the Gen 5's will still be less useful than they once were as low frequency radar renders their stealth next to useless.
Consequently aircraft carriers are not as cost effective, being unable to effectively project power like they used to. The Battleship will reassert itself, carring large compliments of Anti-Air, and anti-missle weapons as well as turrets mounting Rail Guns and similar ultra-high powered ordinance weapons.

Space as a battlefield. Scramjets and the like. Hypersonic flight enables pilots to dogfight in orbit. (naturaly it will not be starwars dogfights, but there will still be dogfights).

Particle Accelerator:
Why not?

For any nations that you don't want to take into account, nuclear wastelands.

Weather Control based weapons.
(not too reliable though, it's easier to start a storm than to end one)

Nerd-o-rama
2011-11-28, 09:48 AM
In the interest of healthy skepticism, a few things:

1) What interest does China (or anyone) have in allying with North Korea? Annexing it if the Kim dynasty ever falters, I can see, but what does North Korea have to offer any of its neighbors but disdain and artillery shells?
2) Even more so, what interest do any of the former Russian/Soviet satellite states or conquered provinces have in forming a "new" Soviet Socialist Republic? People are still trying to break away from Russia and establish individual national identities as it is. There's no catalyst for this alliance if Russia isn't bringing them to heel again, and you already said the Federation was in a (much more feasible) alliance with China.
3) You're just consolidating South America and Africa into one world power to simplify your world map, aren't you? That's fine for fiction, and an alliance of "we're not going to take your crap anymore, Northern Hemisphere" sounds like a feasible idea from a writer's perspective, but frankly, that diverse a selection of small and turbulent nations aren't going to work together well, especially with the relative dearth of infrastructure. It worked in Command & Conquer because a) future technology, b) they had Kane to rally around, and c) Command & Conquer is silly.

I am also not sure what particle accelerators have to to with warfare, but that's an aside.


What I can see as far as superpowers go is the continuing successors of NATO (the US + the EU, possibly including Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation), a possible Russian faction if current anti-Western sentiments in the government continue there, a China-centered Asiatic alliance, an India-centered Asiatic alliance, and maybe a Communist alliance in South America and a militarist state conquering some of Africa if a Somalian warlord gets ambitious and lucky. Iran would also have a decent shot at dominating the Middle East now that their main rivals are gone, but said NATO successors aren't currently likely to allow that uncontested.

You'll notice that the only factions I'm fairly certain would exist with any sense of realism are centered around current nuclear states. There's a reason for that.

Note: I do hope this isn't too political, I'm more aiming to offer an honest amateur assessment of military interests than make any judgments or assumptions regarding political policy in any state.

pendell
2011-11-28, 10:17 AM
Death of the Aircraft Carrier.
advances in Anti-Aircraft tech and increasingly powerful targeting computers signifigantly reduce the combat effectiveness of most aircraft. Gen 4 and below aircraft are reduced to lawn orniments. The sky is dominated by the Joint Strike Fighter, the F22, The Mig Sukoy, the Eurofighter 9, and other Generation 5 fighters. Even the Gen 5's will still be less useful than they once were as low frequency radar renders their stealth next to useless.
Consequently aircraft carriers are not as cost effective, being unable to effectively project power like they used to. The Battleship will reassert itself, carring large compliments of Anti-Air, and anti-missle weapons as well as turrets mounting Rail Guns and similar ultra-high powered ordinance weapons.


Actually, I would suggest the Arsenal ship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_ship) rather than the battleship. I imagine a vehicle which is stealthy, possibly submersible, and possesses a LOT of missiles. The missiles replace the aircraft carrier's manned aircraft.

For that matter, I can see the battlespace being dominated by UCAVs rather than by fifth generation and above manned fighters. An unmanned craft has greater endurance, greater maneuverability, and can be produced in much greater quantities.



Space as a battlefield. Scramjets and the like. Hypersonic flight enables pilots to dogfight in orbit. (naturaly it will not be starwars dogfights, but there will still be dogfights).


Near-future, there isn't any reason for manned vehicles to be fighting in space. Space's primary value is for reconaissance and for sats like GPS. These can be taken down by killer sats, ground-based missile weapons , or even ground-based energy weapons like lasers.

If you ever get the chance, check up the budget figures to see how much it costs to perform a manned space flight versus an unmanned one. The massive expense guarantees that no one will perform a manned mission in space if it can't be performed in an unmanned fashion.

Another possible toy would be the supergun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon), a very large bore cannon or magnetic accelerator that can be used to put satellites in orbit or drop suborbital packages on other targets.


Another wrinkle to consider is cyber-warfare or information warfare. In Tom Clancy's "Bear and the Dragon", the bad guys used a computer virus to take down the computers recording transactions on major stock exchanges, inflicting chaos and disruption on the target nation.

Yet another wrinkle is the concept of "people's war". Note that in the modern world very high-tech modern forces are fought to standstills by people armed with AK-47s and RPGs. A country interested in causing problems in many places for another might invent the next generation of low-cost, highly-reliable, easy-to-manufacture tools , then arrange for shipments of the things to go all over the world, in the hope of tying down an enemy with a series of brushfire wars, each of which requiring time and expense to put down. When the target country's forces are dispersed in many places, hit them hard in a critical theater for a major strategic victory.

It is unlikely that near-term military conflicts will involve high-intensity force-on-force conflict between nuclear-armed actors. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been a direct high-intensity war between nuclear-armed countries since Korea.

Given this, I would expect alliances armed with nuclear weapons to fight wars as they were fought in the twentieth century; through proxies, through insurgent groups. Providing rag-tag band in country X with arms and training to make life a headache for the enemy until the enemy gets sick of it. Augment these by occasional direct action with special forces. In short, terrorism and counter-terrorism.



Weather Control based weapons.
(not too reliable though, it's easier to start a storm than to end one)

In addition, there's the problem of ensuring the storm hits the target you're aiming at and doesn't veer off track and hit something important instead. I wouldn't consider these as true weapons. Instead, they would be most useful for battlefield preparation, ensuring clear weather for an invasion or providing an obstacle to the enemy. More a terrain hazard than a weapon designed to break things and kill people.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora
2011-11-28, 10:30 AM
I don't see a return of the battleship. With armor being pretty much useless against modern naval weapons, there are barely any advantages of having really big ships.
With smaller ships, you can spread out your forces as the situation demands and a single good hit by an enemy can only disable or destroy a much smaller portion of your forces.

Nerd-o-rama
2011-11-28, 12:06 PM
Arsenal ship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_ship)Oh hey, Arsenal Gear was actually named appropriately for its role.


Given this, I would expect alliances armed with nuclear weapons to fight wars as they were fought in the twentieth century; through proxies, through insurgent groups. Providing rag-tag band in country X with arms and training to make life a headache for the enemy until the enemy gets sick of it. Augment these by occasional direct action with special forces. In short, terrorism and counter-terrorism.

The problem is, that's exactly how wars are being fought now, and this is a thread about the next major paradigm shift, which would logically be either back to major force-on-force conflicts (even something as simple as nuclear disarmament or reliable ABM defenses could cause this) or switching to something else entirely (I dunno, mecha sports tournaments? I'd rather just stick to what I know).

eulmanis12
2011-11-28, 12:26 PM
Mostly what I proposed is for realistic fiction purposes, I don't think said factions would occur exactly as outlined.

For south america/africa, the reason I suggested that they would unite is that in the face of 3 other major factions they would likely seek some sort of unity to avoid anexation. South america already has the O.A.S. (Organization of American States)

I don't think that the "new battleship" will completely resemble the old battleship concepts. I think that a large heavy platform is probable because it is easier to defend a single object against all forms of attack than to have similar defences spread out. A battleship sized ship could carry enough defenses to be nearly invulnerable to missle/air/torpedo attack.
UCAVs will become a major factor for sure, but I think manned aircraft will always be more important/ used more often. No matter how well programed a computer is, it still cannot compare to a human. Human's are better able to react to changing circumstances, and better able to respond to a new threat. When a computer faced a problem it doesn't know how to solve it ceases to function. When a human faces the same situation the come up with a solution.

pendell
2011-11-28, 12:28 PM
The problem is, that's exactly how wars are being fought now, and this is a thread about the next major paradigm shift, which would logically be either back to major force-on-force conflicts (even something as simple as nuclear disarmament or reliable ABM defenses could cause this) or switching to something else entirely (I dunno, mecha sports tournaments? I'd rather just stick to what I know).


Then I must direct you to your Von Clausewitz -- war is politics by other means. The purpose of war is to force your opponent to do something he doesn't want to do. From the advent of modern industry to the nuclear bomb, "force your enemy to do something" involved throwing the products of industry -- ships, tanks, guns, planes -- in massive quantities at the other guy in a great attritional wrestling match until one side or the other was defeated.

That paradigm went out the window with the invention of the nuclear bomb. There's no point in throwing massive quantities of factory-produced goods at someone when they can make them just disappear in a mushroom cloud.

The succeeding paradigm was the "shadow war" or the cold war, in which one used proxies to harass and exhaust the enemy. This was useful in periphery engagements, but can never be decisive.

What possible paradigm shift might there be to the next paradigm?

I can think of three:

1) "Mad Max" / Road Warrior paradigm. The current political system collapses and fragments. Imagine the US or western Europe turning into Yugoslavia or Somalia, where petty warlords and criminal gangs fight over the ruins of a civilization. That isn't really a step forward in the military art, though, just a step backward to barbarism. I imagine in such a world the challenge of *fielding* an army is far more paramount than what they're equipped with. An army that travels in Toyota land cruisers and can sustain its combat power is more effective than an army which has MBTs but only enough fuel for 24 hours of use, then it's an army with a lot of big, expensive, immobile bunkers.

2) "Robot" paradigm. Continuing advances in information technology and miniturization allow the fielding of combat-effective ground, air and sea units. They probably won't be mechs. More like the battle bots seen on robot wars, say, a self-propelled tractor with gatling guns. I can well imagine the first country to develop such technology taking on a modern superpower armed with current equipment and winning.

3) Space colonization. Imagine we use accelerators or some other technology to get the cost-per-kilogram to get something to orbit much more cheaply than now. Nuclear weapons aren't quite as much of an issue in space, so an entirely new mechanism for fighting battles in space and on Mars / Luna would have to be developed.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Noedig
2011-11-28, 12:34 PM
Von Clausewitz -- war is politics by other means.

That quote is awesome.
You sir, are awesome.

BRC
2011-11-28, 12:59 PM
2) "Robot" paradigm. Continuing advances in information technology and miniturization allow the fielding of combat-effective ground, air and sea units. They probably won't be mechs. More like the battle bots seen on robot wars, say, a self-propelled tractor with gatling guns. I can well imagine the first country to develop such technology taking on a modern superpower armed with current equipment and winning.

An idea on this front.

With the rising use of robot soldiers (Either semi-autonomous or remote-controlled), the human cost of war is decreased. Declaring war no longer means sending soldiers to die, and so dominant nations (Those with robotic armies) are much more willing to go to war. Going to war is still expensive, but politically speaking, it is much easier for a government to convince it's citizens to spend money than to send their sons and daughters to die.

The result is the creation of highly aggressive Mechano-Military nations, which seize control of natural resources in less-developed nations. Mechano-Millitary nations rarely attack each other directly (Because doing so would invite reprisals, thus bringing the War home), but they gladly fight for control of natural resources in nations that lack mechanized armies.
Heck, perhaps these robotic armies are owned by corporations which serve as proxies for their governments. For example (Making up nations here).

The Cydonia Free State and the North Atlantic Republic are both powerful nations with robotic armies. Escodia is a relatively undeveloped nation with natural resources they both want.
The CFS and the NAR won't go to war with each other directly, since that would mean bringing the war home. Instead, they engage in a form of Corporate Imperialism. Cydon Industries (A corporation with the CFS government as primary shareholder) goes in to secure the resources, where it encounters Nastalan Innovations, a corporation with a similar relationship to the NAR. They deploy their Robots (With a couple human specialists and commanders) to fight for control of the resources. The Escodians don't really get much say in the matter.

Robots are destroyed, the scrap is shipped back to the home countries where new robots are built and deployed. At home people don't really car about the war, since very few people are dying (A few anonymous specialists and commanders, most of whom just get captured alive and ransomed back, and plenty of Escodians who get caught in the crossfire and who are largely ignored). The CFS and NAR may actually have a very friendly relationship between the home countries, since there is no human cost to the war, there is very little animosity. Once you leave the Warzone itself, it's just business.

Mistral
2011-11-28, 01:06 PM
In the interest of healthy skepticism, a few things:

1) What interest does China (or anyone) have in allying with North Korea? Annexing it if the Kim dynasty ever falters, I can see, but what does North Korea have to offer any of its neighbors but disdain and artillery shells?
2) Even more so, what interest do any of the former Russian/Soviet satellite states or conquered provinces have in forming a "new" Soviet Socialist Republic? People are still trying to break away from Russia and establish individual national identities as it is. There's no catalyst for this alliance if Russia isn't bringing them to heel again, and you already said the Federation was in a (much more feasible) alliance with China.
3) You're just consolidating South America and Africa into one world power to simplify your world map, aren't you? That's fine for fiction, and an alliance of "we're not going to take your crap anymore, Northern Hemisphere" sounds like a feasible idea from a writer's perspective, but frankly, that diverse a selection of small and turbulent nations aren't going to work together well, especially with the relative dearth of infrastructure. It worked in Command & Conquer because a) future technology, b) they had Kane to rally around, and c) Command & Conquer is silly.

I am also not sure what particle accelerators have to to with warfare, but that's an aside.


What I can see as far as superpowers go is the continuing successors of NATO (the US + the EU, possibly including Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation), a possible Russian faction if current anti-Western sentiments in the government continue there, a China-centered Asiatic alliance, an India-centered Asiatic alliance, and maybe a Communist alliance in South America and a militarist state conquering some of Africa if a Somalian warlord gets ambitious and lucky. Iran would also have a decent shot at dominating the Middle East now that their main rivals are gone, but said NATO successors aren't currently likely to allow that uncontested.

You'll notice that the only factions I'm fairly certain would exist with any sense of realism are centered around current nuclear states. There's a reason for that.

Note: I do hope this isn't too political, I'm more aiming to offer an honest amateur assessment of military interests than make any judgments or assumptions regarding political policy in any state.

1. Even annexing is outright silly. The only polity nearby with an interest in something like that is the Republic of Korea, which saw exactly what German unification did to that country's economy when East Germany was a mere fraction of the size of West. The size parity between North and South Korea, along with the even larger difference in economic condition between the two compared to Germany, has conspired to make Korean unification very tricky. China has no interest in taking on a basket-case like a post-Kim DPRK, and wouldn't do it unless they feared direct American intervention (which...wouldn't be unlikely, since America would not want an anarchic nuclear state near two of their strategically valuable allies). They'd far prefer to set up a new puppet, more compliant and willing to work with China and South Korea alike.

2. Plenty of them. The Shanghai Cooperative Agreement already includes all of the post-Soviet Central Asian nations except Turkestan, as well as China and Russia. The Collective Security Treaty Organization includes all SCA nations, excepting China, and including Armenia. Political unification is very unlikely (as you say, the spectre of the USSR still remains), but significant military and economic cooperation in Asia is very likely. The ones that will definitely sit out any such agreement are the European nations (except the aforementioned Armenia), but even there, Belarus is a candidate for annexation should Lukashenko fall. There is not a very strong Belarussian identity distinct of Russian, in the way there is for Ukraine.

3. Because space-filling empires are hilarious. :smallbiggrin:

Yora
2011-11-28, 01:35 PM
2) "Robot" paradigm. Continuing advances in information technology and miniturization allow the fielding of combat-effective ground, air and sea units. They probably won't be mechs. More like the battle bots seen on robot wars, say, a self-propelled tractor with gatling guns. I can well imagine the first country to develop such technology taking on a modern superpower armed with current equipment and winning.
Like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KcU0It2wZI&feature=related)? :smallbiggrin:

They do exist, but don't see much use, except when outfitted for bomb disposal.

Knaight
2011-11-28, 02:18 PM
Like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KcU0It2wZI&feature=related)? :smallbiggrin:

They do exist, but don't see much use, except when outfitted for bomb disposal.

Sure, but there is a trend towards increased use of drones, which are getting more sophisticated. Land units are probably the hardest to manage with robots, the air is downright easy by comparison, and already sees drone warfare. Then there is the matter of oceans - not dealing with humans means not worrying about details like "breathable air", and submarine drones become entirely usable.

Nerd-o-rama
2011-11-28, 02:34 PM
I'd never heard of the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement or SCTO. Shows me when to keep my mouth shut. In fiction, something based on those would make an interesting opposition to an India-led South Asian power and, of course, the EU/NATO on the other side (s, if you count Japan and RoK as NATO allies).

I'm interested to see just how far automation goes in real-world militaries after so many decades of pop culture making us fear the Robot Menace. I can definitely see the possibility of a Robot War scenario like BRC outlines if automation improves to the point where a corps of robots can be controlled and maintained by a couple hundred humans. Eliminating the human cost of war (to the war-waging countries) would make proxy wars and the interventionist imperialism BRC describes as popular as ever.

And Balkanization of current world powers is always popular in fiction, and certainly more than possible if you look at historical precedent, but it's very hard to predict who's going to crack how. Or at least, it seems it was impossible for early cyberpunk writers, who always seemed to bet against America...but maybe that was just cynicism from American authors.

Yora
2011-11-28, 02:44 PM
Sure, but there is a trend towards increased use of drones, which are getting more sophisticated. Land units are probably the hardest to manage with robots, the air is downright easy by comparison, and already sees drone warfare. Then there is the matter of oceans - not dealing with humans means not worrying about details like "breathable air", and submarine drones become entirely usable.

With air-drones, you have the huge advantage that the controller can be switched at any time while the plane can circle in the air for days. On the ground, you don't really have that problem. You can get out, stretch your legs, and get food from the storage compartment at any time while not in contact with the enemy. The most use I see is for recon, and in that case wouldn't a flying drone be better than one on the ground?

Naval vessels have the same problem as planes, but to a much lesser degree. Boats and ships can easily be scaled up to allow for room for the crew, places to sleep in shifts, and store food. With submarines, I think air supply is not so much a problem for the crew as for the engines. Again, I see the greatest advantages in the form of swarms of small and relatively cheap scout vessels. Drones can't repair themselves when damaged, so for bigger vessels you still would want to have a crew that can fix things out on the water.

GungHo
2011-11-28, 04:37 PM
How about a development in armor cutting? Say, a gadget that cuts through anything up to tank armor or concrete like butter on contact. Could be a plasma-torch kind of thing, or a vibratory blade, or some exotic energy field.
This exists, basically, as the thermal lance. The problem is that it takes forever to burn through thick metals. You'd have been better off using a HEAT round which does basically the same thing in an instant. At least you don't have to be standing right there for a long period of time, and either way, you're still destroying whatever is inside. Additionally, the fuels you need to operate a torch are as dangerous to you as they are to whatever you're cutting up.


Death of the Aircraft Carrier.
advances in Anti-Aircraft tech and increasingly powerful targeting computers signifigantly reduce the combat effectiveness of most aircraft. Gen 4 and below aircraft are reduced to lawn orniments. The sky is dominated by the Joint Strike Fighter, the F22, The Mig Sukoy, the Eurofighter 9, and other Generation 5 fighters. Even the Gen 5's will still be less useful than they once were as low frequency radar renders their stealth next to useless.
Consequently aircraft carriers are not as cost effective, being unable to effectively project power like they used to. The Battleship will reassert itself, carring large compliments of Anti-Air, and anti-missle weapons as well as turrets mounting Rail Guns and similar ultra-high powered ordinance weapons
If/when it deploys, the JSF will be carrier-launched, not that Gen 5 fighters have really been game changers yet anyway, though that may be a function of circumstance and time.

Short of eliminating military aircraft altogether, you cannot really beat an aircraft carrier for force projection. Even if your force converted to UCAVs, you'd still need a launching/receiving platform that isn't compromised by you being able to convince someone in-theater to let you set up an airbase. It's hard to understand, given that the only people who have been invaded recently aren't really able to converse with us here, how terrifying it is for your enemy to be able to "drive" a fully functional, 24x7 military airbase up to the nearest coast, ready to take advantage of any possible weakness in your air screen. It scared people in the 1940s to death. The movie 1941 was funny, but underlying all the slapstick was a real fear that people had of Japan or Germany "pulling up" and having their way with Los Angeles or Washington D.C. And, that was in the day when aircraft were subsonic and you could conceivably shoot one out of the air with a cannon.

You could go with SHIELD's flying air fortress to get over the two-dimensional restriction, that's not getting away from the concept... it's just an aircraft carrier/arsenal ship in the air. However, if you converted to all UCAVs, you can probably cut the size of the mobile platform significantly (you don't need to have a huge crew to service the pilots... just the aircraft, nor do you need the massive deck to service the weight and wingspan of manned aircraft)... even to the point of reconsidering the idea of submersible carriers.

Tvtyrant
2011-11-28, 04:50 PM
Well, submarine aircraft carriers have been experimented with for a while. That would certainly deal with the ranged missiles.

eulmanis12
2011-11-28, 05:06 PM
I'm not saying that carriers wont exist. Perhaps I phrased that poorly. I'm saying that carriers will not be as effective as they are today. A naval task force of the future, instead of containing a carrier and its support ships, would contain a carrier, 1-2 battleships, and their support ships. Air power would be important, but it wouldn't be a game changer, The nations with Gen 5 aircraft would have enough countermeasures to render their Air to surface capabilities useless, and their only value would be maintaining air superiority.

As far as Gen 5 aircraft "dominating the skies" the idea is relative, against eachother they would be evenly matched, against the Gen 4's and Gen 3's still flying they would be unstoppable. The few Gen 5's in existance today have not made a huge impact yet, but this is because they've yet to go up against organized air forces. American F22's have no hostile aircraft to fight, the Mig Sukoy is still in the prototype phase, the Joint Strike has yet to engage in air to air combat, etc. The impact will come, it just needs a target.

for the reasons for the factions I suggested
USA/NATO is fairly self explanatory, and nobody has called it into question.

China will probably head an east Asian faction, I included north Korea because I believe that China would sooner have the lunatics think of them as allies, than have the lunatics think of them as enemies, and will likely strike a deal. China could easily flatten North Korea, but it would suffer from a nuclear attack in return, much safer then, from the chinese perspective to be friendly and avoid a conflict. They are also both communist countries and thus may have similar intrests in a future scenario.

As for a new soviet union. Russia is trying to rise again and regain its old superpower status. If it succeeds, its a fairly safe bet that some of its old terretory might either come back, or make deals for "protection".

One place I did not give a faction that keeps coming up is India. There are many good reasons India may head its own faction, but India is also on fairly good terms with the USA and might behave as part of a USA/NATO faction despite its geographic Isolation from the USA/NATO powers. Remember, most of the naval equipment India possesses was given by/purchased from NATO nations, particularly the UK

Yukitsu
2011-11-28, 06:01 PM
We're not very far on #1 but as the solution to that is Space Warfare, you get all kinds of fun hooks. For example, Moon Bases permit you to throw rocks at Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_weapon#Orbital_bombardment) which worked rather well in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress). If someone set up a rail launcher on the moon they'd be able to administer cheap and terrifying punishment anywhere they want -- and control of the Moon could be the focus of the whole campaign. Likewise, Mobile Infantry a la Starship Troopers (the book! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers)) could be deployed anywhere on Earth from militarized space stations. Heck, we could have this stuff today if we had spent more time on Space :smallsigh:

It wouldn't be very practical. Any weapon system on the moon of that sort would require a sizeable staff, nuclear technicians, someone who can do underground hydroponics etc. and after all that, you're still inordinately vulnerable to resupply getting owned by terrestrial forces blowing up any inbound supplies. Getting the place running in any sort of reasonable fashion alone would be virtually impossible without an international group swatting you down on the red tape, and if you went ahead and did it anyway, don't be surprised when all of the other countries that aren't building moon bases just blow it all down well before a counter measure system can be put in place, tested and powered.

Sure, assuming they had unlimited free energy, could house and keep sane a large support population, spread their assets out enough to prevent detection of all of the sites and to spread enough counter measures across the lunar surface, it would be a very powerful tool, but in practice, getting off the ground and preventing a loss via siege tactics would pretty much render the whole operation irrelevant.

The Reverend
2011-11-28, 10:28 PM
I ran across a what if short story sometime back that I thought was.....amusing and interesting enough to bring up.

The central plot point was that nuclear weapons never worked. The first uses of them were faked. By the time the soviets had "duplicated" the atomic bomb they did not want the US to find out they couldn't duplicate the bombs fearing NATO invasion. This standoff of denial led to the cold war.

pendell
2011-11-29, 08:44 AM
I ran across a what if short story sometime back that I thought was.....amusing and interesting enough to bring up.

The central plot point was that nuclear weapons never worked. The first uses of them were faked. By the time the soviets had "duplicated" the atomic bomb they did not want the US to find out they couldn't duplicate the bombs fearing NATO invasion. This standoff of denial led to the cold war.

Thinking about this .. another possibility is the world falls back into conventional conflict even though nuclear weapons are still around, just not used. Much like chemical weapons in World War II. Every belligerent had them, but no one used them for fear for retaliation. By our modern paradigm, the Germans should have used chemical weapons en masse when their frontiers were in danger of being breached east and west. As it was, the weapons weren't even used when the Russians entered Berlin.

I wonder why not? Why not pull out all the stops and throw the kitchen sink if you've got nothing left to lose?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

hewhosaysfish
2011-11-29, 08:44 AM
I ran across a what if short story sometime back that I thought was.....amusing and interesting enough to bring up.

The central plot point was that nuclear weapons never worked. The first uses of them were faked. By the time the soviets had "duplicated" the atomic bomb they did not want the US to find out they couldn't duplicate the bombs fearing NATO invasion. This standoff of denial led to the cold war.

I'm curious: how did the author explain faking the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings?

The Reverend
2011-11-29, 09:56 AM
I dont recall how they did faked them. I think it was a massive fuel air explosion.

pendell
2011-11-29, 10:56 AM
I dont recall how they did faked them. I think it was a massive fuel air explosion.

Really?

I forget exactly how much petrol it would take to generate an explosion of 10 kilotons of TNT, but I'm pretty sure it's considerably more than could be carried on 3 B-29s, that being the size of the group that carried out the actual bombing.

Research, chemistry, logistics, and common sense fail on the part of the author, I think.

People forget that most of the cities of Japan had already been laid waste by conventional firebombing with incendiary weapons. I don't believe there is any possible way anyone in Japan would have mistaken an atomic attack for anything else.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Knaight
2011-11-29, 11:25 AM
Really?

I forget exactly how much petrol it would take to generate an explosion of 10 kilotons of TNT, but I'm pretty sure it's considerably more than could be carried on 3 B-29s, that being the size of the group that carried out the actual bombing.
It doesn't matter in any case. Whether or not there is radiation poisoning is going to be incredibly obvious, and ruin any fakes that aren't also dirty bombs.

Yora
2011-11-29, 11:38 AM
You wouldn't actually need a petrol bomb of the power of a nuclear bomb. The big part of conspiracy theories is that everything was faked. Faking photos is easy and maybe the Japanese government was in on the whole thing as they knew they could not win the war, but needed a story to convince the people that there was no point in continuing to fight.
That only leaves the survivors of the two detonations, but given that nobody saw anything comming and with the massive chaos of the aftermath, it sounds quite plausible, for a conspiracy theory, that someone manged to convince everyone that they saw what the american and japanese government claimed. Add some conspiracy theory drugs to the local water supply to make people actually believe that they just remembered wrong in the immediate aftermath and you have a relatively concentional attack made into a working superweapon.

ILM
2011-11-29, 12:05 PM
It wouldn't be very practical. Any weapon system on the moon of that sort would require a sizeable staff, nuclear technicians, someone who can do underground hydroponics etc. and after all that, you're still inordinately vulnerable to resupply getting owned by terrestrial forces blowing up any inbound supplies. Getting the place running in any sort of reasonable fashion alone would be virtually impossible without an international group swatting you down on the red tape, and if you went ahead and did it anyway, don't be surprised when all of the other countries that aren't building moon bases just blow it all down well before a counter measure system can be put in place, tested and powered.

Sure, assuming they had unlimited free energy, could house and keep sane a large support population, spread their assets out enough to prevent detection of all of the sites and to spread enough counter measures across the lunar surface, it would be a very powerful tool, but in practice, getting off the ground and preventing a loss via siege tactics would pretty much render the whole operation irrelevant.
You know, in the context of this thread, I fail to see how the moon-based railgun is relevant at all. If you have the technology to send all the material up there, build an energy plant and a large-scale railgun underground, and to send up all the construction/maintenance staff you need, frankly you're so far ahead of the curve that you're probably already dominating the world anyway.

pendell
2011-11-29, 01:18 PM
nobody saw anything comming and with the massive chaos of the aftermath, it sounds quite plausible, for a conspiracy theory, that someone manged to convince everyone that they saw what the american and japanese government claimed.


What about the hiroshima shadows (http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=47467)?

What about the cancer wards and the people with their hair falling out?

What about a simple geiger counter to check the radioactivity levels in the immediate aftermath?

I'm afraid I cannot consider this theory to be 'plausible' in any sense of the word. If this is an example of one of the 'more plausible' conspiracy theories, I shudder to imagine what the other kind are like.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The Reverend
2011-11-29, 01:31 PM
Oh they used radioactive just not to make the explosion.
The story was that yes all the math showed that a nuclear bomb Should work but it never really did. The story was set in the early seventies I do remember that. Never said it was plausible.

Always been a fan of moon Nazis myself.

Tvtyrant
2011-11-29, 02:18 PM
What about the hiroshima shadows (http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=47467)?

What about the cancer wards and the people with their hair falling out?

What about a simple geiger counter to check the radioactivity levels in the immediate aftermath?

I'm afraid I cannot consider this theory to be 'plausible' in any sense of the word. If this is an example of one of the 'more plausible' conspiracy theories, I shudder to imagine what the other kind are like.

Respectfully,

Brian P.
Yes, all science fiction should be plausible. Like faster than light speed travel, space colonization and force fields.

The Reverend
2011-11-29, 03:11 PM
Saw an interesting article, DARPA has its eyes on an All Electric tank. Thought that would be an interesting idea. They were talking about the need to hide its electromagnetic signature as it would be carrying so much energy.

GungHo
2011-11-29, 03:51 PM
I'm afraid I cannot consider this theory to be 'plausible' in any sense of the word. If this is an example of one of the 'more plausible' conspiracy theories, I shudder to imagine what the other kind are like.
It's speculative fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction)/alternate history fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_history_(fiction)), not a conspiracy theory. I'd quote the part where The Reverend states as much, but you also quoted it a few posts up. No one actually believes that the atom bomb was faked any more than people believe that some guys from West Virginia fought in the Thirty Year's War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series). No one's actually holding up to any scientific measure of plausibility.

Yukitsu
2011-11-29, 05:36 PM
You know, in the context of this thread, I fail to see how the moon-based railgun is relevant at all. If you have the technology to send all the material up there, build an energy plant and a large-scale railgun underground, and to send up all the construction/maintenance staff you need, frankly you're so far ahead of the curve that you're probably already dominating the world anyway.

We mostly do have that technology. What's holding us back is cost, politics and logistics.

Mercenary Pen
2011-11-29, 05:37 PM
We mostly do have that technology. What's holding us back is cost, politics and logistics.

Main area in railguns that needs improvement is metallurgy, because present prototypes can't handle the force of their own firings for more than a few attempts.

Yukitsu
2011-11-30, 02:23 PM
Main area in railguns that needs improvement is metallurgy, because present prototypes can't handle the force of their own firings for more than a few attempts.

Doesn't really stop us from making and using them though, it just gives them a maintenance cost in the hundreds of thousands per shot.

Mercenary Pen
2011-11-30, 03:41 PM
Doesn't really stop us from making and using them though, it just gives them a maintenance cost in the hundreds of thousands per shot.

Agreed, just came out because I'd been using railguns a lot in my NaNo Novel- and needed some idea of the limitations etc.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-30, 08:35 PM
Sure, assuming they had unlimited free energy, could house and keep sane a large support population, spread their assets out enough to prevent detection of all of the sites and to spread enough counter measures across the lunar surface, it would be a very powerful tool, but in practice, getting off the ground and preventing a loss via siege tactics would pretty much render the whole operation irrelevant.
Eh, give me 100 years and I can make it work:

(1) Blowing stuff up in space is not easy; blowing stuff up on the moon is even harder.
In order to hit things in orbit, you need to have ICBM technology -- which very few countries actually have. In addition, you need very sophisticated missiles that can both catch up with and home in on objects moving at escape velocity. The US can't do that today, and nobody else can even come close. Yes, China can frag old weather satellites but those are in a stable orbit for a long time with no countermeasures.

In order to get things on the moon, you need something that can both make it there, find a target, and hit it. The fuel requirements are enormous and without an atmosphere, your bombs (even if they are nuclear) will need to very accurate.

(2) Blowing up another nation-state's bases is an Act of War. On Earth
Any nation-state that decides to attack a moon base is risking war against their assets on Earth. Since only the most powerful nations could possibly build and attack a moon base this means that anyone who does so risks a Great Power War. This is not something you enter into lightly and, to be honest, it is highly unlikely that a Great Power is going to launch such a risky attack before it is too late. Remember that launching a missile at the moon is going to look a lot like launching a nuclear-tipped ICBM and that nuclear powers are real friggin' nervous about ICBMs being launched without forewarning.

It is more likely they would try to set up a moon base of their own in order to launch a more modest attack in case of future emergency.

(3) Moon Bases can be built for non-military purposes and later converted.
Most of the infrastructure you need to build a Moon Gun (including the Moon Gun itself) can be constructed for non-military purposes. The power plants, scientists, and industrial plants could be made for scientific purposes and later converted. Remember that the Moon Gun is also a highly efficient way to send stuff back from the moon to earth -- like supply ships.

(4) There is a lot of power on the moon
Step 1: Solar Panels :smallamused:
Step 2: Fission Plants. You can build closed-cycle fission plants anywhere you want on the moon. You build them underground, away from living quarters (in case of accident) and pipe the power wherever you want.

(5) Hydroponics and Recycling FTW
You can grow plants in hydroponics and use any Life Support System (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/lifesupport.php) you desire to take care of basic water, air, and food problems. That will take care of most "siege problems" since the only thing you need to make Flying Rocks is steel casing and -- if there isn't any iron ore on the moon -- you still don't need a whole lot per Rock.

Gnoman
2011-11-30, 10:01 PM
(5) Hydroponics and Recycling FTW
You can grow plants in hydroponics and use any Life Support System (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/lifesupport.php) you desire to take care of basic water, air, and food problems. That will take care of most "siege problems" since the only thing you need to make Flying Rocks is steel casing and -- if there isn't any iron ore on the moon -- you still don't need a whole lot per Rock.

Use some form of spring-loaded sabot system and the drive bands are reusable.

Yukitsu
2011-12-01, 03:03 AM
Eh, give me 100 years and I can make it work:


Yeah, but for all I know, a hundred years we may be firing black holes out of rifles at one another's chrono paradox armour. A hundred years just to get the manual labour done, you're probably picking a losing strategy.

Yora
2011-12-01, 06:06 AM
In a hundred years, we are still waiting for flying cars and jetpacks. And apartments made entirely out of white plastic.

ILM
2011-12-01, 07:53 AM
We mostly do have that technology. What's holding us back is cost, politics and logistics.
Which is another way of saying you don't really have the tech. If you have it in the lab but can't use it due to inadequate logistics and astronomical costs, booya for you but you're as far behind the guy who can as the guy who doesn't have the tech at all. Building your moon-rail-base would at the very least cost an amount of money that no nation can bear (and I'm not just talking about the current crisis). Improvements could bring costs down, but then we're back to tech.

Yora
2011-12-01, 08:11 AM
Being able to pay for something and wanting to pay for it are two very different things.

The americans wanted to get to the moon before the russians? No problem, BAM! done. But now nobody wants to pay to do that again, because they don't see any point in funding it.

On the other hand, people somehow got the funding for the LHC. Which is 7,500,000,000€ for an instrument that is 27 km long and burried 100m below the ground. For the purpose of finding if a sub-atomic particle exist that in a few hundred years might be useful for something. It really only depends on your ability to convince someone to give you the resources you need.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-01, 09:11 AM
Yeah, but for all I know, a hundred years we may be firing black holes out of rifles at one another's chrono paradox armour. A hundred years just to get the manual labour done, you're probably picking a losing strategy.
No no, 100 Years is the timeline for military innovation in this thread. None of these proposals is going to be implemented in a significantly smaller timescale than that -- power armor doesn't grow on trees, for example :smalltongue:

Besides, the Moon Gun isn't a "strategy;" it's an outcome that is supposed to drive a RPG. You build your peaceful moon base and then, for any number of reasons, you decide to convert it into a Moon Gun. It is much like building a massive national infrastructure for manufacturing cars and then, for some reason, you convert it over to building tanks and bombers :smallamused:

ILM
2011-12-01, 09:19 AM
Being able to pay for something and wanting to pay for it are two very different things.

The americans wanted to get to the moon before the russians? No problem, BAM! done. But now nobody wants to pay to do that again, because they don't see any point in funding it.

On the other hand, people somehow got the funding for the LHC. Which is 7,500,000,000€ for an instrument that is 27 km long and burried 100m below the ground. For the purpose of finding if a sub-atomic particle exist that in a few hundred years might be useful for something. It really only depends on your ability to convince someone to give you the resources you need.
It currently costs around $10,000 to put a pound in orbit. SpaceX has the ambition to bring that down to $4-5,000. NASA would like to be able to do that for about $1000 one day. And that's just putting stuff in orbit, not have it land safely on a piece of rock 384,000 km away.

For reference, the last moon landing, Apollo 17, cost about $2.4 billion in 2011 dollars. It put three men and about 45 metric tons on the Moon, for a total of 3 days, and brought part of it back (works out to about $24,000 per pound, btw).

You're talking about building a permanent base on the Moon, underground, with a powerful power plant and fairly high-current-tech linear accelerator, fire control and targeting systems, and having it staffed pretty much on a permanent basis with all the facilities this requires. At this point it's not a matter of convincing people to give you money, it's finding anywone who has pockets that deep. Hint: the Chinese don't, so pretty much nobody else does.

Which brings me back to my point: if you were able to build that, you're already so far ahead of the curve the rest of the world doesn't even see you anymore.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-01, 10:14 AM
It currently costs around $10,000 to put a pound in orbit. SpaceX has the ambition to bring that down to $4-5,000. NASA would like to be able to do that for about $1000 one day. And that's just putting stuff in orbit, not have it land safely on a piece of rock 384,000 km away.

For reference, the last moon landing, Apollo 17, cost about $2.4 billion in 2011 dollars. It put three men and about 45 metric tons on the Moon, for a total of 3 days, and brought part of it back (works out to about $24,000 per pound, btw).

You're talking about building a permanent base on the Moon, underground, with a powerful power plant and fairly high-current-tech linear accelerator, fire control and targeting systems, and having it staffed pretty much on a permanent basis with all the facilities this requires. At this point it's not a matter of convincing people to give you money, it's finding anywone who has pockets that deep. Hint: the Chinese don't, so pretty much nobody else does.

Which brings me back to my point: if you were able to build that, you're already so far ahead of the curve the rest of the world doesn't even see you anymore.
These are apples and oranges.

Apollo 17 took place in 1972, when information technology was still in its infancy. In the meantime we've had about 40 years of advancement not only in computer technology but also in materials, batteries and heavy industry. I'm not sure how many 2011 dollars it took to build the Great Wall of China, but I'm pretty sure we could built the same thing today for a fraction of the price.

Likewise, our manned space flight technology has basically stalled (if not gone backwards) since the development of the Space Shuttle (circa 1981) which means we haven't seem how our modern technology can be applied to space craft. The private space flight companies give us a hint as to what can be done, and they're only new players to the game.

So yeah, I'm not willing to say that it'll cost us even $1000/lb to launch stuff into space if the government actually invested in permanent launch capability. No, it wouldn't be fixed tomorrow, but it isn't going to be outlandishly expensive forever, let alone 50 years.

pendell
2011-12-01, 10:17 AM
The americans wanted to get to the moon before the russians? No problem, BAM! done. But now nobody wants to pay to do that again, because they don't see any point in funding it.


Point of order: While we won the "moon race" , it didn't build a foundation for a sustainable moon colony. In the grand engineering troika of "fast, cheap, or good: choose 2 of the three" The Apollo project went for fast, fast, and more fast. Bucketloads of money to produce the Saturn V, which has quite logically been called an "exploding totem pole". Yes, it can get you to the moon. And it's so expensive we haven't built any since.

The foundational stepping stone to exploiting space in any reasonable way is a way to get things into orbit economically. The space shuttle was supposed to be a stepping stone towards that very thing but, for a number of reasons, turned out to be more expensive than the single-shot boosters it was supposed to replace.

My understanding that the Constellation program, before it got cancelled, was more of the same: Big, expensive, and unsustainable.

It seems the government has drastically trimmed back the manned program and is waiting for the next Wilbur or Orville Wright to come forward with the next generation of space technologies. Here's hoping it comes soon.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora
2011-12-01, 10:19 AM
Given the timespan from the first flight to massed strategic bombing, and from the first object launched into space to the first man on the moon, I think we could get there in 20 years. If we really saw a need to do it, we could get the money by cutting spendings in other places where it is completely wasted but we have decided we want to maintain.

The Reverend
2011-12-01, 10:46 AM
Cheaper ways to get to space.

a space elevator or sky hook style system
Laser powered acceleration
Mountain mounted rail gun
Nuclear rocket, like that one will ever get off the ground for ecological concerns


OTher that its make rockets cheaper. Anyone else got some ideas?

Yora
2011-12-01, 10:58 AM
The expensive part is getting to space. So in the long term, it would be most economical to minimize the payloads that have to be hauled into orbit from earth. Look at that gigantic thing it took to take three people into space from earth, and compare that to the bottle rockets they used to get them back from the surface of the moon.

Given the required technology, it would be most effective to gather and process as many of the rae materials from the moon or asteroids and reducing the payloads of earth-based transportation to complex electronics, food, and personell. But I don't see the point where this becomes more cost effective than just assembling everything on earth and getting it into orbit with giant rockets within the next 100 years.
Getting the fuel to make it all the way to Mars and back again from a refinery on the moon sounds a lot more easier to accomplish. Given that we only have about 5 decades of space travel, we might get to such a point within 40 years or so.
If the governments of earth see a practical need to use their resources for such a thing.

razark
2011-12-01, 11:51 AM
Getting the fuel to make it all the way to Mars and back again from a refinery on the moon sounds a lot more easier to accomplish.
The problem with that is the moon is a very bad place to build a base or refine fuel. The technology has already been demonstrated to produce fuel on Mars by an automated process, meaning we could launch a gas station to Mars, then go there and fill up for the return trip. Going to the moon for fuel to get to Mars would be like flying from New York to London. With a stop in Sydney to fill up the tanks.

Mars offers quite a few benefits that the moon doesn't. The moon will, for a long time, remain a place to visit. Mars will be a place to stay. The moon will need extensive support to stay functional, while Mars can produce much more of the needed supplies on-site.

ILM
2011-12-01, 12:07 PM
These are apples and oranges.

Apollo 17 took place in 1972, when information technology was still in its infancy. In the meantime we've had about 40 years of advancement not only in computer technology but also in materials, batteries and heavy industry. I'm not sure how many 2011 dollars it took to build the Great Wall of China, but I'm pretty sure we could built the same thing today for a fraction of the price.

Likewise, our manned space flight technology has basically stalled (if not gone backwards) since the development of the Space Shuttle (circa 1981) which means we haven't seem how our modern technology can be applied to space craft. The private space flight companies give us a hint as to what can be done, and they're only new players to the game.

So yeah, I'm not willing to say that it'll cost us even $1000/lb to launch stuff into space if the government actually invested in permanent launch capability. No, it wouldn't be fixed tomorrow, but it isn't going to be outlandishly expensive forever, let alone 50 years.
You're missing my point, I think.

So I'm thinking about running a near future military campaign and I was looking at ideas to build a world on. The world is a lot like it is currently politically that is, but I was looking for some military hooks. Some major change on the order the machine guns, tank, helicopter, or aircraft carrier. Some game changer, but not TOO big like antigrav, bifaced carbide, or unobtanium based solutions.
Plopping a base on the moon has requirements that place it well into the "TOO big" space, however you want to discuss potential coming developments. Like Yora says, it's akin to having strategic bombers when the other side just discovered powered flight - an order of magnitude over bringing machine guns to a rifle fight.

Yora
2011-12-01, 01:44 PM
Mars offers quite a few benefits that the moon doesn't. The moon will, for a long time, remain a place to visit. Mars will be a place to stay. The moon will need extensive support to stay functional, while Mars can produce much more of the needed supplies on-site.

Mars also has the huge disadvantage of having an atmosphere too thin to fly, but a gravity too strong for small steering rockets. Getting stuff on the moon and also off the moon is a lot easier, and it being parked at just about 0,38 million kilometers away, while the mars is between 56 and 400 million kilometers away.
If you are lucky, Mars might just happen to be in the direction you're wanting to go anyway, but if not, it could be a very huge detour.

razark
2011-12-01, 03:18 PM
Mars also has the huge disadvantage of having an atmosphere too thin to fly, but a gravity too strong for small steering rockets. Getting stuff on the moon and also off the moon is a lot easier, and it being parked at just about 0,38 million kilometers away, while the mars is between 56 and 400 million kilometers away.

Why bother flying with wings on Mars? Why bother with small steering rockets? Like I said, you can dump and automated fuel factory on the planet, and let it chug away for years. Instead of using wings to generate lift, you could have the luxury of jumping around with big rockets.

As for getting stuff to and from the moon, it is easier. But if you want to remove things from the moon, you have to land the fuel needed there. Any supplies you want to use on the moon need to be shipped in. Mars allows you to produce the fuel needed, so outbound cargo capacity can be more efficient. Mars can also provide water, oxygen, metals, plastics, glass, and various other items you would need to support a base that just aren't available on the moon. Building a structure, growing food, etc. are also easier, because Mars has an atmosphere, while the moon has none.

Like I said, the moon is a place to visit, Mars allows you to build a home.

eulmanis12
2011-12-01, 04:12 PM
Why bother flying with wings on Mars? Why bother with small steering rockets? Like I said, you can dump and automated fuel factory on the planet, and let it chug away for years. Instead of using wings to generate lift, you could have the luxury of jumping around with big rockets.

As for getting stuff to and from the moon, it is easier. But if you want to remove things from the moon, you have to land the fuel needed there. Any supplies you want to use on the moon need to be shipped in. Mars allows you to produce the fuel needed, so outbound cargo capacity can be more efficient. Mars can also provide water, oxygen, metals, plastics, glass, and various other items you would need to support a base that just aren't available on the moon. Building a structure, growing food, etc. are also easier, because Mars has an atmosphere, while the moon has none.

Like I said, the moon is a place to visit, Mars allows you to build a home.

You do realize that while yes, Mars has an atmosphere/the chemical elements and compounds needed to support settlement it is missing one key thing. A MAGNETIC FIELD, living creatures, including humans, placed on mars will be fried, irradiated, and ultimately dead. The moon is partially protected by earths magnetic field and so is safe to inhabit despite the lack of resources, Mars has resources, but is just as deadly as the hottest desert in the world multiplied by 5 wile simultaniously being colder than Antarctica on average. Unless you have the abillity to restart the motion of Mars's core and restart its magnetic field, your colonization attempt will be short lived.

The Reverend
2011-12-01, 04:14 PM
Neither of which will make much impact on near future warfare. Besides there are no plastics on Mars or the moon, the moons high H3 content will more than make up for a lack of atmosphere, and we should skip Mars land on its moons and use them as a staging point to harvest the asteroids into L-point orbits.

Back on track now.

One thing I was reading about is the metropolitanization of warfare. With more and more people in urban areas the long slog from house to house will become the norm with rural warfare being a rarity. I really think this will play into a number of things we have been talking about and tie them together: less than lethal weapons, power armor, small scale mecha, robotics, ulta precise weaponry, active camoflauge, bush fire wars, networked information systems on both sides, hacking as a another warfare dimension, etc.

I think that is clear picture of what it will look like. Highly population dense combat theater in which your enemy will probably look like a civilian and is well informed and will constantly try to target your information sources. To counter him your primary assets will be data manipulation and intelligence, backed by high power powered swift attacks with overwhelming forces displaying a supernatural accuracy against an enemy unafraid to hide behind innocents.

hamishspence
2011-12-01, 04:15 PM
Last I checked, the Moon was well outside the Van Allen Belts and the Earth's main magnetosphere.

Best solution to radiation might be to dig in- put the moonbase underneath a metre or so of rock.

ILM
2011-12-02, 03:46 AM
Back on track now.

One thing I was reading about is the metropolitanization of warfare. With more and more people in urban areas the long slog from house to house will become the norm with rural warfare being a rarity. I really think this will play into a number of things we have been talking about and tie them together: less than lethal weapons, power armor, small scale mecha, robotics, ulta precise weaponry, active camoflauge, bush fire wars, networked information systems on both sides, hacking as a another warfare dimension, etc.

I think that is clear picture of what it will look like. Highly population dense combat theater in which your enemy will probably look like a civilian and is well informed and will constantly try to target your information sources. To counter him your primary assets will be data manipulation and intelligence, backed by high power powered swift attacks with overwhelming forces displaying a supernatural accuracy against an enemy unafraid to hide behind innocents.
Not sure about that. My bet is that rather than develop a whole new doctrine, one side will eventually just get tired and carpet-bomb the entire place into oblivion, civilians and all. After all, you're not waging war to take a city, or a block, or a house. You don't care about those; they may be or contain objectives, and that's what you're interested it - civilians are just in the way and in the end, you don't need them. If bringing down the city can end the war faster and with less casualties on your side than running through each and every house, there's a case to be made to go down that route. Politics may get in the way, but then again they may not...

edit: which could make a decent plot hook in itself, actually.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-02, 09:13 AM
Not sure about that. My bet is that rather than develop a whole new doctrine, one side will eventually just get tired and carpet-bomb the entire place into oblivion, civilians and all. After all, you're not waging war to take a city, or a block, or a house. You don't care about those; they may be or contain objectives, and that's what you're interested it - civilians are just in the way and in the end, you don't need them. If bringing down the city can end the war faster and with less casualties on your side than running through each and every house, there's a case to be made to go down that route. Politics may get in the way, but then again they may not...

edit: which could make a decent plot hook in itself, actually.
Eh, you don't generally go to war just to murder everyone -- you do it to achieve greater power (or some concrete objective). You don't fight in cities you don't want to control, and cities you want to control aren't much good when they're bombed to oblivion. Unless you develop a "neutron bomb" style weapon, you're going to have to control at least some cities with infantry which returns us to the so-called "urbanization" of warfare.

That said, I don't think "urbanization" is going to make a fun plot hook for a Future War game. Urban conflicts became big news in the 1980s and 1990s and have been a feature of several wars since; they're old news, not news of the future. It would be like claiming to run a tabletop wargame set 40,000 years in the future and discovering that it revolves around trench warfare.

pendell
2011-12-02, 09:57 AM
My bet is that rather than develop a whole new doctrine, one side will eventually just get tired and carpet-bomb the entire place into oblivion, civilians and all.


Moral issues aside, this also isn't practical. If you carpet bomb a city, guess what you get? A veritable labyrinth of concrete rubble and obstacles which are even more of a problem than the original city was. Consider the assault on Monte Cassino (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino) back in 1943. The original intention was to bomb the site into submission. In point of fact, it was unoccupied. The resulting rubble was every bit as much of a headache for the attackers as the original monastery was.

Consider also the first battle of Grozny. The Russians sent in a lot of tanks with very , shall we say, liberal rules of engagement and they still lost.

It is a *lot* of work to raze a city to the ground and kill all the inhabitants. That's true even if you use nuclear weapons. Why? Well, guess what: Those enemies not immediately killed in the blast will dig in in the ruins outside ground zero. Now you have the fun of fighting your way in AND dealing with radiation hazards at the same time.

The last time this was done was at Hama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre) in 1982. It wasn't simply a matter of bombing the city. No, the army had to knock down one building at a time with artillery and bulldozers, then send in flamethrower teams to clean out the cellars.

Considering the immense effort involved, "destroying the city" is something you do if you're a Darth Vader villain with lots of time, energy, resources, and public opinion to burn because you've got a point to make. But it's not something most military professionals would recommend near-term regardless of the moral scruples involved; it's simply not practical.

The traditional military answer to urban conflicts is to simply go around the city and let it be someone else's problem. Since most modern wars involve fighting insurgents on behalf of a government, the primary objective of the war is to assert control of the cities, and so this isn't typically possible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Nerd-o-rama
2011-12-02, 10:13 AM
It would be like claiming to run a tabletop wargame set 40,000 years in the future and discovering that it revolves around trench warfare.

Hmmm...

Also, the usual sci fi answer to urban warfare is create a city/country/planet-destroying superlaser and stick it in orbit. And then march around it, because it's a puddle of glass/asteroids.

The kind of sci fi I'm thinking of tends to use pre-80's military doctrine, though...

GungHo
2011-12-02, 11:33 AM
If bringing down the city can end the war faster and with less casualties on your side than running through each and every house, there's a case to be made to go down that route. Politics may get in the way, but then again they may not...
Political ramifications from a kill-em-all approach aside, there are economic factors as well. A city in this day and age represents a large concentration of wealth and resources, and you can't do anything with that if it's rubble. Hell, all you've done is put a giant obstacle on the map that no one can navigate. Given how long it takes to build a city in the first place, it begs the question of whether you're going to war to gain resources or you're just Lex Luthor crazy.

ILM
2011-12-02, 11:56 AM
The traditional military answer to urban conflicts is to simply go around the city and let it be someone else's problem. Since most modern wars involve fighting insurgents on behalf of a government, the primary objective of the war is to assert control of the cities, and so this isn't typically possible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.
For occupation purposes, I agree. But if your objectives don't include that, meh. I direct you to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US was basically like "we've f*cked around long enough in those crummy islands, now shut up and take our terms." Indiscriminate destruction may be inelegant, but it works pretty well if you really want to convince the enemy he's better off just giving up what you want (or giving up altogether).

For civil wars and insurrections, of course, you're entirely correct. But if Iran decides to make good on its promise to erase Israel from the map, or if the US decides they really want that oil, or if China decides they need to expand a bit because it's getting crowded or because they're running short on fresh water reserves, I'm pretty sure the urban fighting will be fairly anecdotic.

pendell
2011-12-02, 03:57 PM
For occupation purposes, I agree. But if your objectives don't include that, meh. I direct you to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US was basically like "we've f*cked around long enough in those crummy islands, now shut up and take our terms." Indiscriminate destruction may be inelegant, but it works pretty well if you really want to convince the enemy he's better off just giving up what you want (or giving up altogether).


The fundamental flaw in this approach is that it is psychological -- you assume that if you hit an enemy hard enough, they will simply give up.

That can be a flawed assumption. If the enemy doesn't surrender when you nuke them, you have the problem of conducting conventional operations in the NBC hell you've created.

The only way you can make someone surrender is when you have a seventeen year old with a rifle drag him from his spider hole. So long as the enemy has his command chain intact, a "force them to surrender by bombardment" strategy assumes that the person running the show is rational and willing to surrender if you hit them hard enough.

Nuclear weapons haven't been used in anger since 1945. But modern forces of overwhelming conventional power have been beaten repeatedly in the 20th century, regardless of how ruthless they were, simply because the other side was too stubborn to quit.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gravitron5000
2011-12-02, 04:06 PM
Main area in railguns that needs improvement is metallurgy, because present prototypes can't handle the force of their own firings for more than a few attempts.

...


Doesn't really stop us from making and using them though, it just gives them a maintenance cost in the hundreds of thousands per shot.

And from earlier in the thread ...


Unless you Want laser blooming so you can use it to conduct electricity down the ionized beam path. Tesla rifles mmmmm.

So ... how about using a pair of high powered lasers to specifically create a pair of blooms which would act as rails for your rail gun? Maintenance issue solved as each shot gets its very own set of brand new ion-rails :smallbiggrin:

Yora
2011-12-02, 04:36 PM
The rail guns not only run the current through the projectile, they are also actual rails that hold the projectile in place. The rails act like the barrel in a conventional gun. Without a rail, running a current through the projectile would simply push it away for 10 cm or so until it gently comes to rest.

H Birchgrove
2011-12-02, 09:09 PM
Since BOLO was mentioned, I'll just mention that giant tanks/landships won't realistically work, at least not on a planet with a biosphere and therefor soil.

Because someone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus) already (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte) tried (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1500_Monster).

madtinker
2011-12-02, 09:25 PM
For what its worth, I know they are working on missiles to target a single bad guy. DARPA is sinking millions into robotics, both human assistance devices and remote vehicles. If something were to change the way we wage warfare...bio weapons. Flesh eating bacteria, bird-swine flus with 70% mortality. Infect whole populations, costing billions in health care and preventative medicine. Add in conspiracy theory and you could render a nation's government impotent from social unrest.

If you want to get a little further away from the real world, you play off the idea of germ warfare and add mind-altering effects. A bacteria that produces amphetamine-like toxins that make the victim think he's on fire and wreak havoc, especially when thousands of people start flipping out across a city.

Yora
2011-12-03, 08:54 AM
Bioweapon are a really bad idea. In warfare, you are not interested in killing all life in a given area, you are interested in capturing points of strategic locations. Nuclear contamination may fall to acceptable levels in time and chemical weapons could be made to become innert and disperse after a few hours or days. But bioweapons can not be contained or controlled. There is a very good chance that eventually your own troops or population will be affected by it as well.
You don't want to send your soldiers into an area where they will catch bacteria and viruses that they will bring back home and you don't want surviving enemies to spread them all over the place outside the target area. You can not make any difference between enemy troops and other people in the area, and genocide is not very high on the list of priorities for modern technically advanced armies. If you would want to kill everything in an area that will be contaminated and too dangerous for anyone to enter for years, just nuke it. A lot more easier and safer.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-03, 01:29 PM
If you would want to kill everything in an area that will be contaminated and too dangerous for anyone to enter for years, just nuke it. A lot more easier and safer.
Except that after you nuke an area, there isn't much left that is worth getting even after the radiation clears.

Bioweapons are more dangerous simply because we don't understand how life works as well as we do atoms. But, it is possible that we can make a "safe" bioweapon with the following techniques:

(1) A Genetic Kill Switch -- something that operates like telomeres (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) in that they shorten with each new generation and kill the ability of the bioweapon to reproduce after a set number of generations. This will allow you to determine how long the bioweapon operates in an area.

(2) Turn Evolution Off -- if you shut off the bioweapon's ability to alter its genetic structure (by making it resistant to mutation and gene-swapping by bacteria) then you have much less of a risk of your bioweapon getting out of control. Besides, you don't need Evolution when you're designing a disease that targets known weak points in the human immune system.
This way you create a biological "neutron bomb" -- it kills humans, but doesn't damage property. Plus, you can make it with a virulence period that is measured in days instead of years or centuries.

Of course, it can't normally distinguish between civilians and soldiers but you can't have everything :smalltongue:

Tvtyrant
2011-12-03, 03:15 PM
There was a really good paper I read a few years ago about Malthus and mono-crops; even if we continually prevent diseases from killing off swathes of humanity our crops are raised in a similarly pandemic-raising environment.

Taking that and applying it to foods that your country isn't reliant on but others are would also change the nature of the beast. China doesn't need corn, but the US does, so China creates a blight that effortlessly destroys the American corn belt. The US doesn't need rice (it grows it, but it isn't really a staple to the extent corn is) and so destroys it to make asia reliant on the US for food production.

Gravitron5000
2011-12-05, 01:01 PM
The rail guns not only run the current through the projectile, they are also actual rails that hold the projectile in place. The rails act like the barrel in a conventional gun. Without a rail, running a current through the projectile would simply push it away for 10 cm or so until it gently comes to rest.

Ironically, I seem to have forgotten about gravity (which is what would pull the projectile out from between the rails). I must be having an identity crisis.

You only need enough of a platform to keep the projectile within the rails for as long as you want to accelerate it (or for the max length of your bloom). If I remember correctly, most of the durability issues come from the fact that your rails are part of the circuit, and so are both subjected to high temperature (due to current flow/resistance), and deformation (due to the large magnetic flux that is generated when passing a large current). If your projectile track, or barrel, is non-conductive neither of these factors apply. and you should still get a break from a large amount of maintenance issues. Still, no barrel-less rail gun.

One more though is that the flux generated upon firing would likely act upon the blooms themselves, so the blooms would have to be shaped to take and deformation into account. This likely would be complicated, but not insurmountable.

BRC
2011-12-05, 06:19 PM
Except that after you nuke an area, there isn't much left that is worth getting even after the radiation clears.

Bioweapons are more dangerous simply because we don't understand how life works as well as we do atoms. But, it is possible that we can make a "safe" bioweapon with the following techniques:

(1) A Genetic Kill Switch -- something that operates like telomeres (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) in that they shorten with each new generation and kill the ability of the bioweapon to reproduce after a set number of generations. This will allow you to determine how long the bioweapon operates in an area.

(2) Turn Evolution Off -- if you shut off the bioweapon's ability to alter its genetic structure (by making it resistant to mutation and gene-swapping by bacteria) then you have much less of a risk of your bioweapon getting out of control. Besides, you don't need Evolution when you're designing a disease that targets known weak points in the human immune system.
This way you create a biological "neutron bomb" -- it kills humans, but doesn't damage property. Plus, you can make it with a virulence period that is measured in days instead of years or centuries.

Of course, it can't normally distinguish between civilians and soldiers but you can't have everything :smalltongue:

Of course, a few days is still enough time for somebody to get infected, hop on a plane, and spread the disease to a nearby city. One person with a car could mean the difference between a weapon that effects a small area and a pandemic that wipes out half a country.
Plus, it's not an exact science. You can make the bio weapon resistant to mutation and gene-swapping, but evolution is a powerful thing. Of the billions of bacteria, all it takes is for a few to overcome the kill-switch. We have a good idea how much damage a bomb is going to deal, but a biological weapon is just too unpredictable.


That said, Biological weapons need not kill people. If you made a bioweapon that, say, induced severe drowsiness and fatigue, you could cripple an enemy army and civilian population, as people become sick they are unable to work or fight, and the infrastructure becomes overwhelmed. You can then use the cure (Which you have prepared and stockpiled ahead of deploying the weapon) as a bargaining chip to force them to surrender. Relatively few people actually die, so you don't have to worry about an angry local populace seeking revenge for the death of their loved ones. There is less harm if the weapon ends up effecting a wider area than you intended. And once you've taken over and distributed the cure, you still have a fully populated region under your control. Rather than dealing with a depopulated, war-ravaged area, you have a fully functioning political system that you can take over. Obviously you replace people in key posts, but farmers are still alive to work in their fields, workers can still keep factories running, policemen will enforce your laws, ect.

Unless your intent is to depopulate the area, which is another story entirely.



Speaking of Nonlethal weapons, this could be a solution for urban warfare. If enemy combatants are suspected to be in an area, troops first deploy a powerful knockout gas, then equip gas masks and begin searching the area. Enemy troops without protection will have been knocked out by the gas, and will either be picked up by the search, or if they manage to wake up before being detected, will be cut off from their allies and unsure what to do. Meanwhile, enemy troops who DO have protection from the gas will be easy to identify, since they'll be the ones moving around.

There will still be collateral damage, as sleeping civillians get killed by explosions or stray bullets, but probably less than would be hurt by the panicked mob, and from the perspective of a commander it greatly simplifies the nightmare that is urban combat.

Of course, it's entierly possible that, as soon as word gets out that an area has been gassed, gas-mask equipped looters will flock to the scene, dodging bullets and grabbing stereos.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-05, 09:20 PM
Of course, a few days is still enough time for somebody to get infected, hop on a plane, and spread the disease to a nearby city. One person with a car could mean the difference between a weapon that effects a small area and a pandemic that wipes out half a country.
Plus, it's not an exact science. You can make the bio weapon resistant to mutation and gene-swapping, but evolution is a powerful thing. Of the billions of bacteria, all it takes is for a few to overcome the kill-switch. We have a good idea how much damage a bomb is going to deal, but a biological weapon is just too unpredictable.
Ideally, if you are using a bioweapon as a weapon of war, you're preventing people from leaving the country through mundane means. At the very least, don't let them have passenger plane flights out of the country :smalltongue:

Additionally, I'm positing sufficient biological knowledge to create "safe" weapons which are sufficiently resistant to mutation in respect to their "timer" ability. We may not know that now but it is conceivable we'll know it in the not-so-distant future.

BRC
2011-12-05, 09:51 PM
Ideally, if you are using a bioweapon as a weapon of war, you're preventing people from leaving the country through mundane means. At the very least, don't let them have passenger plane flights out of the country :smalltongue:

Short of putting up a giant impenetrable quarantine force-bubble, you can never be sure that the bioweapon won't spread outside the region you're intending to hit. So you've grounded all passenger flights, well then somebody in a private plan leaves from a small airship, hoping to get out before they get infected (They already have been, but they don't want to admit it to themselves). You manage to have good enough air cover you can be sure nobody is flying out, then somebody with a car tries to drive out. You've got the borders locked down tight? Somebody dies in the river, now people in the country downstream are getting infected. Somebody leaves the country on foot. You manage to quarantine all that, well somebody gets desperate enough to rush your blockade, now your troops are infected. Your troops are wearing hazmat suits? One of them got sloppy and they're not sealed up properly.


Now, obviously some of these scenarios are remote possibilities, but when dealing with something like a bioweapon, you can't afford to take chances.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-12-05, 10:35 PM
So you've grounded all passenger flights, well then somebody in a private plan leaves from a small airship, hoping to get out before they get infected (They already have been, but they don't want to admit it to themselves). You manage to have good enough air cover you can be sure nobody is flying out, then somebody with a car tries to drive out. You've got the borders locked down tight? Somebody dies in the river, now people in the country downstream are getting infected. Somebody leaves the country on foot. You manage to quarantine all that, well somebody gets desperate enough to rush your blockade, now your troops are infected. Your troops are wearing hazmat suits? One of them got sloppy and they're not sealed up properly.
We're not talking terrorists here, we're talking about armies.

Passenger planes -- can be shot down, risk of bioweapon spread
Car drives out -- blow it up at a checkpoint
Dies in a river -- more enemies die, if dead bodies are a vector you choose.

Or, you can just make it a 48 hour bug: it spreads by air from living hosts and kills after 24 hours of incubation. All bugs cease reproduction after 48 hours of initial reproduction. The "collateral damage" when you have Bio-Timers is fairly easy to limit.

The Reverend
2011-12-05, 11:00 PM
Nice!!!! laser blooming. I should have thought of that, I've been racking my brain for an alternate to the rail deformation issue for several days now and I had already said it!! Slapping face palm. Maybe the round can produce its on trail of vapor to be ionized hmmm. This could take some thinking.

The Boz
2011-12-06, 06:03 AM
It won't work. The Lorentz force will scatter your much lighter medium (air) before moving the projectile.

The Reverend
2011-12-06, 09:00 AM
I was just thinking about that, no way really to bottle it effectively unless the "air rail" was made using a laser structure to use thermal pressure to channel a strip of gas that we would use to conduct the electricity. But even then it would interfere with the rounds flight out of the barrel.


Too bad they can't just fabricate a giant carbon nanotube assembly fir the rails instead of metal.

Gamgee
2011-12-06, 11:11 PM
How strictly science does it have to be? How far in the future? Quark Gluon Plasma Blaster would defeat any known material ever, not to mention it could burn the sun out it's so hot. Making it a canon is just over kill. More of a doomsday weapon than something practical.

A Ray Gun, basically a super powerful laser. Not only does it travel far and supremely fast, but it also like actual light retains its power as the beam of light spreads out. Allowing a single blast to eventually widen enough to take down cities.

Personally in the future I don't think any large scale conflicts will be fought, much like today it's going to get smaller, better equipped, and more intelligent troops. If heavy armor is necessary I could see something akin to an Iron Man suit as the heaviest thing typically deployed because remaining undetected is really the key thing here.

Particle canons could also be terrifying, I think nanite robotic soldiers/viruses would be pretty scary. Would also reduce or eliminate the need for actual soldiers as much as possible.

Teleportation would solve the logistics of warfare allowing the army to fight a new blitzkrieg war unlike anything ever seen before. It might allow a conventional war to actually occur, but it would be lightening fast and over before the enemy can retaliate. The fallout of rebels even getting a single teleportation unit/device is unfathomably bad.

Anything that makes warfare faster, deadlier, and more well informed while being unable to be noticed. All the while reducing casualties.

Gnoman
2011-12-06, 11:21 PM
A Ray Gun, basically a super powerful laser. Not only does it travel far and supremely fast, but it also like actual light retains its power as the beam of light spreads out. Allowing a single blast to eventually widen enough to take down cities.


Um, no. While you can give whatever magical qualities to your death ray that you want to, any form of radiation, including light, will drop massively in power the more it disperses, exacerbating the distance fall-off.

jseah
2011-12-07, 03:45 AM
Or, you can just make it a 48 hour bug: it spreads by air from living hosts and kills after 24 hours of incubation. All bugs cease reproduction after 48 hours of initial reproduction. The "collateral damage" when you have Bio-Timers is fairly easy to limit.
This... doesn't work.

Lets say your bug has a lifecycle of 1 hour. So 48 divisions. There really isn't any way to ensure that prokaryotes stop after 48 divisions.

You can put in telomeres for a eukaryotic bug but those grow too slowly. Has an advantage of being much harder to treat. A week time limit might be reasonable, although it'll probably be a month or two before most of them die out.

And then one of them picks up some human telomerase and poof, no more limit. World wide pandemic, everyone dies.

Horizontal gene transfer is hard to stop. Your control system could get destroyed by a virus infecting your bug. Your bug could pick up DNA somewhere else.
Stopping random mutations removing the control system is possible. Your bug just has to require the control system to live, so anything damaging it kills the bug.
You just have a problem when some similar gene in the wild gets spliced into your bug's genome. Without the timer.

Sure, it's incredibly unlikely, but you have trillions of the things running around and all it takes is a few to successfully transform before you end up with plague 2.0

Yukitsu
2011-12-07, 02:09 PM
We're not talking terrorists here, we're talking about armies.

Passenger planes -- can be shot down, risk of bioweapon spread
Car drives out -- blow it up at a checkpoint
Dies in a river -- more enemies die, if dead bodies are a vector you choose.

Or, you can just make it a 48 hour bug: it spreads by air from living hosts and kills after 24 hours of incubation. All bugs cease reproduction after 48 hours of initial reproduction. The "collateral damage" when you have Bio-Timers is fairly easy to limit.

None of that has ever really been shown to be effective through history. Full scale armies cannot stop every person from leaving or entering a country, especially if they themselves are being attacked by outside forces.

Yora
2011-12-07, 03:04 PM
What advantages would bioweapons have over nuclear and chemical weapons?
Advantage: They can spread outside the original target zone by themselves.
Disadvantage: They can spread outside the original target zone by themselves!!!

If you use a weapon, you want to make sure that it hits the target and nothing else. Especially not yourself.
Useful for terrorists, who simply want to **** everything up and consider that a victory, but in that case development is way too complicated and expensive.

BRC
2011-12-07, 04:01 PM
None of that has ever really been shown to be effective through history. Full scale armies cannot stop every person from leaving or entering a country, especially if they themselves are being attacked by outside forces.

Throw in that the people IN said country know that a bio weapon has been unleashed, and so they're all desperate to get out before they get infected, and of course they're all telling themselves that there is no way they are infected yet (Because if they are, they may as well just lay down and die).
And then there are the people who are infected, decide "Well, I'm dead anyway", and try to suicide-rush your lines to infect your troops. And, of course, don't forget that they're army will STILL be trying to kill you, so you've still got a couple days between when you use the weapon and when it takes it's toll during which time you will be fighting an army desperate to get the cure they think you've stockpiled (Whether or not you have)/who thinks they're already dead and wants to take you with them.

Basically, you would need something akin to a WWI-style trenchline around the entire country, with enough air cover to stop any sort of aircraft from getting out. Oh, and you'll need to be blockading all the ports and rivers. And if there are any mountains, don't trust those to keep people in. It's very difficult to get an army across mountains, but individuals are a different story entirely.

And did I say "Blockade the ports", I meant "Blockade literally any part of the coast where somebody could put a boat into the water". And by "Boat" I mean "Anything that can float for long enough to get past your lines".


Oh, and every single one of your soldiers will need Hazmat Gear. And you better hope that none of them take pity on refugees who swear that they're not infected and are willing to bribe their way through the lines. And you'll need to keep the posts manned 24/7. And by "Manned" I mean "Manned well enough to withstand a full scale attack". Two guys in a Machine gun nest won't do the trick. And you'll need lots of soldiers to avoid any individuals succumbing to bribes/pity/stupidity.

Basically, if you have enough troops to pull off a blockade of this magnitude, then you don't NEED a bioweapon. Just march your troops up to the border, because you apparently have a soldier for roughly every five feet of border area.

Mind you, this weapon may be useful if deployed against a single city or military base, which you can then surround and wait out. But if you're capable of doing that, then a conventional siege is probably a better idea. Waiting for them to starve means that, at any point before people start dropping dead, they can peacefully surrender and people will start eating again. If you release a bioweapon, you've just condemned all of them to death.

So, that basically limits valid targets to well-stocked military bases. Kind of specific a target considering how much you would need to invest in this sort of system.

Gamgee
2011-12-07, 04:09 PM
Um, no. While you can give whatever magical qualities to your death ray that you want to, any form of radiation, including light, will drop massively in power the more it disperses, exacerbating the distance fall-off.
I was tired when writing that. I know light disperses, but I meant so say. Have it behave like light in that it radiates outward in a cone shape. But unlike real light which weakens have it stay strong.

Gnoman
2011-12-07, 04:31 PM
I was tired when writing that. I know light disperses, but I meant so say. Have it behave like light in that it radiates outward in a cone shape. But unlike real light which weakens have it stay strong.

My point was that this is impossible without rewriting every law of physics, meaning that you could just call it a magic cannon, and be honest about it.

jseah
2011-12-07, 04:49 PM
So, that basically limits valid targets to well-stocked military bases. Kind of specific a target considering how much you would need to invest in this sort of system.
Actually, actually...

If you made a bioweapon that spread *poorly*, say by contact only and doesn't survive outside the body for any amount of time...
and by extensive testing, birds and insects don't carry it. Oh, and mice/rats as well.

And then you made it horribly lethal within 24 hours. With basically 100% death rate.

THEN, you might have a containable bioweapon.


Forget about that 48 hour timer. Timers are clunky and apt to fail.

Just have an ebola-like virus that dies shortly without red blood cells (ie. contact only) and can't infect anything but humans. Amp up the lethality to sure-kill level.

If you drop one of these into a city, you only have to blockade it for a day before half the population is dead. No airborne, no vectors, no waterborne means you don't have to worry about anything other than humans. Super-high lethality means really obvious symptoms so screening for infection is simple, quarantine is likewise simple since infected people keel over really quickly.

And containment is easy since once everyone is dead, the virus dies as well. It just kills its host too fast to spread very far.

After everyone is dead, wait 24 hours for remaining virus to die before moving in or you risk catching it too.

...

...

And then a person with the flu catches your virus and packages the virulence factors into its genome. Worldwide pandemic levels human civilization.


Well, guess its back to the drawing board. =)

The Reverend
2011-12-07, 07:11 PM
Near future was outlined in the first post.

No magic cannons. Hard Sci Fi only.

Bioweapons will probably never be used for all those reasons, not including a biologically derived poison like risen or anthrax. Besides if you REALLY want to stop a out of co trol bioweapon you deploy neutron weapons and kill all possible vectors.

Yukitsu
2011-12-07, 07:17 PM
Actually, actually...

If you made a bioweapon that spread *poorly*, say by contact only and doesn't survive outside the body for any amount of time...
and by extensive testing, birds and insects don't carry it. Oh, and mice/rats as well.

And then you made it horribly lethal within 24 hours. With basically 100% death rate.

THEN, you might have a containable bioweapon.


Forget about that 48 hour timer. Timers are clunky and apt to fail.

Just have an ebola-like virus that dies shortly without red blood cells (ie. contact only) and can't infect anything but humans. Amp up the lethality to sure-kill level.

If you drop one of these into a city, you only have to blockade it for a day before half the population is dead. No airborne, no vectors, no waterborne means you don't have to worry about anything other than humans. Super-high lethality means really obvious symptoms so screening for infection is simple, quarantine is likewise simple since infected people keel over really quickly.

And containment is easy since once everyone is dead, the virus dies as well. It just kills its host too fast to spread very far.

After everyone is dead, wait 24 hours for remaining virus to die before moving in or you risk catching it too.

...

...

And then a person with the flu catches your virus and packages the virulence factors into its genome. Worldwide pandemic levels human civilization.


Well, guess its back to the drawing board. =)

Spread is inversely proportionate to lethality. The most wide spread diseases are widespread because they don't kill you at all. Anything that killed me in 24 hours is going kill a household of guys and then stop being a threat.

Best bio weapon I could come up with is a flu. A normal, but really concentrated flu. Spreads fast, won't kill everyone if it spreads, and getting it would knock out a large degree of fighting capacity within a week for about 2-3 weeks as it made the rounds. Your troops go in, mow down the ill, and about 3 days later, hopefully after they've finished and are being pulled back, get ill themselves and get over it in a segregated barracks.

Yeah a flu won't kill many of the defenders, but really, try aiming, running or maneuvering with a 39 degree fever. Not to mention trying to be sneaky when you've got a bad cough.

Gnoman
2011-12-07, 07:58 PM
Really, there's a very real chance that warfare will move backwards in the future. Semi-portable megawatt-class lasers (which could happen as soon as 20 years from now) would essentially eliminate aircraft from the equation, and larger installations would easily eliminate all orbit-based installations (thus, no GPS, no recon sattelites, no space-based weaponry). Having reverted to only two levels of warfare (land and sea), and the nuclear threat nearly non-existant, wars of the future could easily resemble WWI with better tanks.

jseah
2011-12-08, 04:01 PM
Spread is inversely proportionate to lethality. The most wide spread diseases are widespread because they don't kill you at all. Anything that killed me in 24 hours is going kill a household of guys and then stop being a threat.
That might be true in a rural area, but if you set it off in a train station (and blockade the airport within the same hour) in the middle of town during rush hour, most of the city WILL be dead in a day.

90% within half a week and infection should die off pretty soon after that.

That's the point of making it insanely lethal. You DON'T want it to spread. Especially not to your own country.

pendell
2011-12-09, 10:26 AM
Here's some near term military innovation (http://defensetech.org/2011/12/08/iranian-tv-shows-captured-rq-170/) for you. Evidently a robot drone flown by country A was subverted and captured by country B for reverse engineering. So if you're looking for short-term military innovations, this would be a good place to start looking. Imagine what would happen if a country depended heavily on such vehicles and suddenly lost control of the entire fleet!

I Think I saw that movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SgxDw3-UI&feature=related) .

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora
2011-12-09, 10:37 AM
Wrong movie. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEtrzdGSXCU&feature=related)