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Old 11-20-2018, 07:09 PM   #91
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by Michael Thayne View Post
Question for Ulzgoroth: if fixed positions are crucial, what do they look like?
If orbital artillery is a thing, I'd expect at least one large, armored, probably mostly underground surface-to-orbit laser cannon installation. Because if giant lasers shooting from orbit work, giant lasers shooting to orbit work a whole lot cheaper. Smaller emplacements of similar nature to deny high-altitude aircraft also seem likely.

The other thing that you definitely need a fixed position for is your rear echelon. Logistics dumps, troop rest areas, equipment repair workshops, and medical facilities can be packed up and moved, but building a version that worked on the move would be fairly ridiculous.

Any high-value fixed installation necessitates a point-defense network to protect it against massed missile attack. While that doesn't require off-site fixed positions necessarily, it's likely to be more efficient to have distributed fixed weapon and sensor sites than to have exclusively mobile ones or to place all the point defense hardware right on top of the facility to be defended.


None of this is intended to be in contact with the ground battlefront, obviously. I think it's entirely plausible that fortifications could have a role there, but we have nothing resembling a consensus about what that front is so any detailed proposal will look stupid when somebody puts it in a totally different environment than it was conceived for.
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Old 11-20-2018, 09:15 PM   #92
Michael Thayne
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

It might useful to look at this through the lens of Mass Combat unit types. Some notes:
  • Most unit types are probably viable at TL10 (i.e. their TS is doubled at every TL up through TL10)
  • Tanks stop being viable two TLs after introduction
  • Supertanks probably don't get built in settings not trying to ape OGRE.
  • Anti-aircraft weapons are often lasers
  • I have doubts about whether battlesuit DR in Ultra-Tech is really consistent with other assumptions Ultra-Tech makes about armor. If a setting doesn't have them, however, the Mass Combat role might be filled with robots or infantry who use exoskeletons to lug around extra firepower.
  • TL10 naval warfare is a big hairy issue that I don't want to get into.
  • In spite of what I've said about "flying tanks", they probably don't qualify as capital-A "Armor" in the Mass Combat sense. Rather, they're other aircraft types with just enough armor to protect against fragments, forcing enemies to use powerful lasers to destroy them.
  • Flying battlesuits might represent non-superscience robots, like the vertol warbot. Easier to stay airborne if you don't need to carry the weight of a human around.
  • Flying battleships are just a no in a realistic setting.

EDIT: I'm ambivalent about my handling of "armor" in this post. Mass Combat has a bit of a weak spot in the fact that armored cars and OGREs are both "armor". Maybe nuclear jet-engines could enable flying armored cars at TL10 without any superscience—should those be "armor" for Mass Combat purposes? I'm not sure there's a right answer.

Last edited by Michael Thayne; 11-20-2018 at 09:25 PM.
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Old 11-20-2018, 09:40 PM   #93
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

In addition to the above, we also have the cyber component of warfare. Nearly every major power will have enormous quantum computers, the size of small cites and costing one percent of GDP each, to allow them to tear through the encryption of their enemies (or to counter such decryption efforts). An arms race between militaries at TL10 may involve computers as much as it involves spacecraft and physical armies, as an enemy that can lock you out of your own nukes (or detonate them before they are launched) is an enemy with a vise around your tender bits.
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Old 11-20-2018, 09:59 PM   #94
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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I'm ambivalent about my handling of "armor" in this post. Mass Combat has a bit of a weak spot in the fact that armored cars and OGREs are both "armor". Maybe nuclear jet-engines could enable flying armored cars at TL10 without any superscience—should those be "armor" for Mass Combat purposes? I'm not sure there's a right answer.
The 'armor' class is fairly clearly defined - you qualify for it if you're protected against small arms and shell fragments or the period equivalent - with the qualifier that Mass Combat doesn't regard Low Tech personal armor as ever rating one for the Armor class.

The question is, what are small arms at TL10? If it's laser rifles or chemical slugthrowers firing solids, even a late WWII tank might still qualify as Armor, though lighter vehicles that could resist rifle fire but can't stand up to a .50 HMG might not. If everybody's firing HEMP bullets or gyrocs, or regular infantry kit features a partial exoskeleton and a portable railgun as battle rifle, not as much.
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Old 11-20-2018, 10:20 PM   #95
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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In addition to the above, we also have the cyber component of warfare. Nearly every major power will have enormous quantum computers, the size of small cites and costing one percent of GDP each, to allow them to tear through the encryption of their enemies (or to counter such decryption efforts). An arms race between militaries at TL10 may involve computers as much as it involves spacecraft and physical armies, as an enemy that can lock you out of your own nukes (or detonate them before they are launched) is an enemy with a vise around your tender bits.
Realistically, that wouldn't be the case. You could just use longer keys and appropriate encryption schemes to counter such things even if your opponents spends one percent of their GDP on it.

Especially for communication with your nuclear forces. TL 7 could create encryption that resist planet sized TL 12 computers for that (though TL 12 forces could most likely compromise the low TL communication in other ways than directly breaking the encryption). Just use one-time pad encryption.

Last edited by Andreas; 11-20-2018 at 10:26 PM.
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Old 11-21-2018, 07:27 AM   #96
Michael Thayne
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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The 'armor' class is fairly clearly defined - you qualify for it if you're protected against small arms and shell fragments or the period equivalent - with the qualifier that Mass Combat doesn't regard Low Tech personal armor as ever rating one for the Armor class.

The question is, what are small arms at TL10? If it's laser rifles or chemical slugthrowers firing solids, even a late WWII tank might still qualify as Armor, though lighter vehicles that could resist rifle fire but can't stand up to a .50 HMG might not. If everybody's firing HEMP bullets or gyrocs, or regular infantry kit features a partial exoskeleton and a portable railgun as battle rifle, not as much.
I realize the official definition of "armor" is about resisting small arms but does that make sense in an aerial context, if standard anti-aircraft guns are significantly more powerful than any small arms? Arguably to qualify for "Air, Arm" you should be able to withstand the lighter AA guns as well.

As a side-note on Mass Combat: I did some spreadsheet analysis to try to figure out what unit types are most cost-effective. If land-based C3I matters, the Super Tank wins. If everyone has gobs of air-based or space-based C3I, the Super Tank is "merely" on par with a mix of MBTs and heavy artillery. But if Super Tanks don't exist and MBTs are obsolete at TL10? There's a strong case for armored cars dominating the battlefield, at least according to Mass Combat!
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Old 11-21-2018, 08:34 AM   #97
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Hunter missiles aren't terribly powerful, either. They've got less than 4 pound warheads, extrapolating from the basic hand grenade. It's plenty to kill land vehicles using HEAT and guidance smart enough to target vulnerable areas, but it's on the small side against larger targets.
s.)
The 100mm Thermobaric produces the effect of more than 40 lbs of tNT at TL10. More if you add in the increased radius seen in HT.

It should also be noted that artillery shells with HE are 90% casing by weight due to firing stresses while missile warheads are only 50% casing or less. A MOAB is only 10% casing weight. Artillery shells can therefore be the least efficient means of delivery to deploy at long ranges.

This is even before you figure in the weight of the artillery piece and divide that weight by the number of shots it gets off before it is destroyed by counterfire. This gets to the core issue: unless you can make the artillery piece powerfully stealthy even when firing it will be destroyed quickly and easily by TL10 opponents.

The history of fixed targets since the discovery of gunpowder is that they have been no more than engineering projects waiting for hostiles to get around to them. One way this might happen at tL10 is for space mobile forces to launch large KE munitions at ground targets from out of range of any ground-based lasers.

Those lasers will have focal elements that can't be armored while they're ready to fire anyway. They themseves will be vulnerable to briliant missile attack.
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Old 11-21-2018, 08:42 AM   #98
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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The question is, what are small arms at TL10?
25mm underbarrel grenade launcher is the dominant "small armr" they and their ammo are cheapeneough that every soldier can and should have one.

The laser rifle they're attached to is for shooting poorly equipped insurgents. Rifles are not primnary combat arms for infantry at TL10. They don't pentrate armor well enough.
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Old 11-21-2018, 09:29 AM   #99
Michael Thayne
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
25mm underbarrel grenade launcher is the dominant "small armr" they and their ammo are cheapeneough that every soldier can and should have one.

The laser rifle they're attached to is for shooting poorly equipped insurgents. Rifles are not primnary combat arms for infantry at TL10. They don't pentrate armor well enough.
In your opinion, are rifles primary small arms at TL8? Ultra-Tech tells multiple conflicting stories about body armor in the future, but if you look at tacsuits and tactical vests, one story Ultra-Tech seems to be telling is that the balance of rifles vs. body armor stays where it was at TL8. The combat hardsuits tell a much more optimistic story about the future of body armor, but their DR is hard to reconcile with other armor values, so I'd feel free to ignore them unless you feel they're crucial to the "feel" of your setting.
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Old 11-21-2018, 09:44 AM   #100
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Note: the relatively good cost-efficiency of armored cars comes at the expense of having "motorized" mobility rather than "mechanized" mobility—basically they're not good at going off-road. So maybe light tanks dominate the Ultra-Tech battle field after all! Though this is a point where the abstract nature of Mass Combat creates some oddities. Armored Cars and Light Tanks have the same WT, WT 4. While it's true cold war and later armored cars weigh about what a light tank weighed in WWI, what Ultra-Tech calls "light tanks" weigh several times as much, and are SM+5 instead of SM+3! So IDK, I like my idea that the standard fighting vehicle is about 10 tons and has 120 DR (electromagnetic), but Mass Combat is not much help on exact vehicle loaded weights and DR values.
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