[Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by weby

]The toys: The toys are likely not very effective as such would not have shielded electronics and jam resistant navigation systems and such so stopping them with military things should be trivial.

In real life, jamming etc. doesn't stop insurgents from making good use of cellphones, presumably because occupying armies don't want an occupation to mean "no more cell phones for you, indefinitely". That kind of thing might spark protests. Great for a quick offensive, sure, not so great for occupying territory without angering the civilian populace too much.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The 100mm can also act as a very effective SAM too and it's only a thick atmosphere that would stop it from being used on orbital targets. Techncially it has 8.5 miles per second of delta-v.

Are you sure about that? If you interpret it as using a booster/sustainer approach, it might have somewhat lower delta-V.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

At TL10, I'm pretty sure you can have safe knockout gasses that could be dropped on a civilian neighborhood and cause minimal casualties. In the face of that potential I don't expect treaties crafted around VX and mustard gas to hold up long. Protective gear is a nearly free add-on to the full-coverage armor that any first-rate military will be using anyway for anti-frag protection.

In the real world, the US military at least will not use chemical riot control agents, period, because it's illegal. The law is respected even though the relevant treaties were obviously designed for VX and mustard gas, as you say. It's not obvious the development of "safe knockout gas" would change that—and I suspect the gas as-written is, if not superscience, at least "cinematic". Maybe it would be realistic if a critical failure on the HT roll caused suffocation. (Your point about the ease of making full-body anti-frag armor sealed is correct though AFAICT.)

[Black Leviathan]

If we presume a course that is more of the same humans will largely be removed from a front line, not have line of sight to a living enemy combatant. Most of TL 10 warfare will be fought with drones but more advanced units than what we have, more effective, more maneuverable flyers with more firepower. Ground units that will serve as a launch base for fleets or swarms of drones.

Counter-intelligence will be the technology of domination. Tricking sensors or hacking data feeds will create ghost targets that will consume resources and time.

Targets will not be military or civilian but infrastructure. Tactics will be engaging without engagement, military strikes designed to bypass resistance. When full forces can be rebuilt within a week, targets like water processing, food processing and manufacture will be more valuable than military operations.

3d printing will close the gap between military superpowers and nearly unfunded guerrilla movements.

Dirty warfare will be bacteria or algae that destroys fuels, or corrupts energy production, or destroys crops, again infrastructure targets taking precedence over more renewable tools.

[Michael Thayne]

Looking at Transhuman Space: Changing Times, I noticed something funny: HEMP got upgraded between 3e and 4e, and a likely unintended effect of the upgrade is that RATS no longer have adequate protection vs. 15mm HEMP. Rules changes like that will tend to favor smaller robots, I think.

[Michael Thayne]

Possible limiting factor on the effectiveness of buzzbot-like robots if you're using Ultra-Tech as your Bible: I realized there was an equivalent in Ultra-Tech, the Scout Robot, and they're significantly more expensive, at $5,000 apiece. Unclear if the computer is meant to be tiny or small.

[AlexanderHowl]

At TL10, Robobugs are actually really quite capable when you look at their design. With a Complexity 5 Tiny Computer, they can run IQ 8 Dedicated AI programs (dumb, but capable enough for something that weighs 0.01 pounds), meaning that they can follow orders without being in constant contact with their controller. With the flier and synthetic organs packages, the costs go up to $100 each, but they are indistinguishable from real insects, meaning that they can hide in plain sight. With their really small weight, you could hide an swarm of 10,000 in the trunk of a car of 1,000,000 of them in a cargo container. Now, imagine a swarm of 1,000,000 Robobugs attacking an entire city...and they are reusable.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Are you sure about that? I

Actually I am. My attempts to reverse engineer a 100mm produced an _exact_ match when I used rules from Ve2 for using conventional missiles in space rather than building them as miniature vehicles.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

In the real world, the US military at least will not use chemical riot control agents, period, because it's illegal. The law is respected even though the relevant treaties were obviously designed for VX and mustard gas, as you say. It's not obvious the development of "safe knockout gas" would change that—and I suspect the gas as-written is, if not superscience, at least "cinematic". Maybe it would be realistic if a critical failure on the HT roll caused suffocation. (Your point about the ease of making full-body anti-frag armor sealed is correct though AFAICT.)

Modern chemical riot agents are gentler than mustard gas perhaps, but they're rather brutal and somewhat dangerous (though GURPS doesn't really stat them as such). The UT gasses are cinematic and pretty much magical, no question - but the TL9 sleep gas as statted is fast-acting, reliable, painless, and utterly safe unless you catch somebody in a position where they need to be conscious to avoid harm.

(Honestly, that stuff ought to just have a ^ on it. It's way better than the TL10 paralysis gas, or the TL9 injected sleep poison!)

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I fully agree. But full scale war past TL7 is not so much war as apocalypse.

No, I think that MAD will still apply.

The current trend- among advanced nations at least- is toward use of precision munitions, since the use of a WMD basically just results in the rest of the world dog-piling on you. I suspect that open wars between nations will degenerate into a contest of who can attrit their opponent's assets to the point that they can no longer defend. Well, actually, I guess that has always been the way wars work, eh? But at TL10 it might be relatively bloodless, with robots being most of the targets. OTOH a robofac can really pump out those bots, huh? And I guess leadership strikes will still be a thing. Don't stand too close to the White House...

But I do think that the current trend towards insurgencies will continue.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I do not know. At TL10, an insurgency is capable of producing a wide range of capabilities without that much cost.

But at TL10 insurgents have some hellacious obstacles, too. Like wickedly efficient biometrics, facial recognition, crime scene analysis, tailored bioagents, traffic analysis, etc. Insurgents have to be able to hide in the populace, and at TL10 that gets damnably difficult. Hermetically sealed full-body suits that cover the face would be obligatory, as would be never even speaking about anything suspicious in the same room as any electronic device that you haven't built yourself. And NEVER EVER on a cell phone!

But, yeah, weapons aren't much of an issue. It's pretty easy to distribute an illegal weapons blueprint for a 3D printer/ robot fabricator. The materials to make the weapons may be difficult, however- what sane government wouldn't start registering explosives and propellants? (Though if you have atom-scale nano fabrication then even that isn't an issue.) But at TL10 you have things like gauss weapons, and registering all power cells would be an exercise in futility.

And then, of course, the government will start distributing disinformation, in the form of robofabricator weapons plans that include bugs and trackers... :)

Isn't this FUN ?!?

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Personally, I see combat robots becoming more prevalent, reducing the number of actual human infantry involved. But without a true volitional AI, you'll still need human officers in the field giving orders, which means that "shoot the meat, save the metal" would become a standing order. And if both sides have robot soldiers seeking out and shooting the armored humans rather than each other, you might have a "battlefield" where the robots are at a stalemate since their order-givers on both sides are dead . . .

Yeah, I thought this, too. When I talked about my stealthed land arsenal ships earlier I envisioned that most would be unmanned, with one manned iteration to lead them. (And other robots, too- I simplified my example.) Heck, the manned one might be unarmed, since you don't want to give away you're operator's location. But if the "meat" gets taken out the robots would still have some sort of programming to guide them in the fight. They wouldn't just stop and stand there.