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Old 11-16-2018, 01:26 PM   #11
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

If you're talking about a future-tech total war, it's probably going to be guys in bunkers using drones to kill guys in other bunkers. And drones launching missiles to kill drones. And emplaced defenses using lasers to kill missiles and drones. And, finally, guys with trucks and bolt cutters to break into network and power hubs to cut wires to kill emplaced defenses. And to prevent that, guys with cheap handguns and rented uniforms to protect the hubs.

Have PCs be the bolt-cutter guys. Or the rental cops.
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Old 11-16-2018, 01:30 PM   #12
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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
... insurgents ...
I remember a briefing once where it was laid out that since WWII there has never been a successful insurgency that didn't have three factors working for it:

1. Support from a significant portion of the local populace. This is the main problem that the insurgents had in Malaysia, which is often used as an example of a successful counterinsurgency action- the locals hated them.

2. A safe haven where they could not be effectively attacked, e.g. Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, or Pakistan with the current Taliban. This is why the Pakistani military's lack of enthusiasm for acting against them is so frustrating to the US military.

3. An external supporter, e.g. North Vietnam, Wahhabist "charities", Pakistan (?), etc.

Now, those factors don't guarantee success, but insurgents can't win without them.

Rand has some fun thoughts, too.

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If you're talking about a future-tech total war, it's probably going to be guys in bunkers using drones to kill guys in other bunkers.
Not really. If there is one thing that modern maneuver warfare has proven it's that sitting in a static bunker is just a very lazy form of suicide. There is a reason that we don't build fortresses anymore- MOABs, MOPs, and whatnot. If you cede maneuver to the enemy, well, the enemy will maneuver against you while you sit there with your thumb up your @$$. Sitting in a bunker just lets him mass against you at his leisure.

Heck, today even things like Cheyenne Mountain are obsolete. If you read the minutes of the congressional hearings where they discuss selling Cheyenne Mountain off to private entities, they never elect to do so and the reason listed, more or less, is because Cheyenne Mountain is so frikkin kewl! More seriously, the reason is stated as something like "Yeah, it's obsolete, but it's a damned interesting capability to have, and you never know if it might come in handy again sometime. And it would cost too damned much to build another one, so we'll keep the one we've got, just in case."

If I were doing a realistic TL10 military scifi campaign, I would expect the key to be not being detected or hiding near something the enemy is not willing to destroy in front of the cameras, like a populated city. In short, yes, insurgencies. But also other forms of asymmetrical warfare, including by states. Qaddafi lived so long largely because western states weren't willing to take the PR hit to pattern-bomb Libya.

I have envisioned large stealthed armored ground vehicles (it's easier to hide in the sensor clutter near the ground than in the air), each of which functions like an arsenal ship of sorts, launching drones and munitions, afraid to activate active sensors for fear of eating an ARM and thus using mostly passive sensors, or at least remote sensor packages with networked information sharing. Once an attack is coming, though, you light up the active sensors to direct the point-defense lasers, and then scoot! You need to MOVE, Son! Because you just unzipped your fly and everything the enemy has will now be bearing down on the last known position of that radiation source!

Last edited by acrosome; 11-17-2018 at 02:14 PM.
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Old 11-16-2018, 01:47 PM   #13
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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I fully agree. But full scale war past TL7 is not so much war as apocalypse.
Huh, does this remain true at TL10, I wonder? Effective anti-ballistic missile lasers might effectively make older, bigger bombs obsolete. Mininukes will be more of a threat, but a TL10 mininuke still costs $10,000, so the cost-effectiveness math of missile defense is much more in your favor than when dealing with $500 conventional missiles. Antimatter missiles can cost under $1,000 apiece, if you only load each missile with a tenth of a microgram, but with that little antimatter, it's only really effective at on the order of 100 yards (and since it mainly kills by gamma rays, not heat, it probably won't set the whole city on fire like a traditional nuke).
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Old 11-16-2018, 01:49 PM   #14
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

I do not know. At TL10, an insurgency is capable of producing a wide range of capabilities without that much cost. Imagine an attack where an insurgency launches 10,000 flying robobugs to attack government officials with poisons or diseases. Even if they had ten flying robobugs attacking each government official, removing the right 1,000 individuals could cripple a government.
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Old 11-16-2018, 01:57 PM   #15
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Another thing not directly mentioned yet is how effective _small_ weapons are. The on;ly things in UT at TL10 that can resist the TL10 25mm HEAT are the 30 ton tanks. This might actually be the reason for their continued existence. Everything else goes "boom!" when you hit it with weapon you can fire from an underbarrel grenade launcher. Or technically even a 25mm tangler pistol.

If you use guided rounds you can use that grenade launcher at 2200 yards too. If you wonder about how expensive that could get the base price for a 25mm launcher round is only $0.90.

If you put EM and laminate armor on _everything_ you still have to face the 100mm Tactical Missile. With an APEX warhead that can penetrate DR 2000 and then cause an internal explosion. Don't bother bringing the Iowa BBs back out of mothballs.

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.

So IMHO the TL10 "battlefield" looks mostly empty and deceptively quiet punctuated by scattered large explosions cause by things too small and/or too fast for you to see very well.
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Old 11-16-2018, 02:22 PM   #16
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Of course, there's also the "how much can be spent on the individual soldier?" issue. A large nation like the US or the EU could have twenty billion (GURPS) dollars to spend on their infantry alone, but have to outfit two million infantry soldiers, giving a per-soldier outfitting of G$10,000. A smaller nation of the same technological capability with a three hundred million dollar budget but only a ten thousand soldiers can outfit their individual soldiers with $30,000 worth of gear, making the smaller nation's individual soldiers better equipped than the larger nation's. And that's not getting into every *other* issue with depot bean-counters, rear-echelon mechanics, sealift sailors, airlift crews, military intelligence, satellite command, and others who wear the uniform but will never be near the battlezone their entire tour of duty.

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 . . . .

Granted, a secondary order of "if no humans, scrap the opposing side's metal" would at least keep the robots active until recalled by remote or the last enemy unit was destroyed. And EW to jam such signals would be a valid tactic.



*numbers pulled off the top of my head, reality of actual budgets vary wildly.
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Old 11-16-2018, 02:22 PM   #17
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

A specific thought on drones: THS and Ultra-Tech make somewhat different tech assumptions, but I think something like THS' buzzbots would be totally consistent with UT assumptions. Give one of those things a 15mm gyroc pistol with HEMP rounds, and it can seriously threaten anything with less than 100 DR vs. shaped charges. THS emphasizes RATS and UCAVs as the main combat robots, but buzzbots are cheap and you can buy dozens for the cost of one larger combat robot. Not sure how those other designs fit in with UT armor assumptions, though, which are pretty different from THS.
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Old 11-16-2018, 02:47 PM   #18
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

It depends on so many things.

Things like:
-How much money is used to equipment
-AI availability and their skill levels
-Nature of the conflict, be it major war or insurgency.
-Possible TL difference of the combatants
-How easy communications are to disrupt
-How easy it is to supply the forces
-What are the rules of engagement
-What weapons are banned
-What super science technologies are available
and so on.

As for the points in your original post:
Cheap electronics: That actually benefits the great power as they have more money to buy such, making things like the robobug thing you talked about easy for them. Thus they would know everything happening in the area.

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.

As for point defense: If using GURPS rules the point defense will always be able to engage the missile(as long as there are no more than that one and the missile is detected) as they will be in a wait(point defense) condition.

The problem with flying tanks is that while they work fine against lower tech/low heavy weapons opponents, there is no way to armor them enough to take any real hits by heavy weapons. As weapons are becoming more and more "it you see it, you can hit it" and there really being no way to hide the thermal signature of something like that, they would likely not fare that well when coming against things like air defense lasers/blasters. A traditional tank is so much easier to hide.

So you would need to define the scenario more to get meaningful answers.
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Old 11-16-2018, 03:05 PM   #19
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
....At TL10, an insurgency is capable of producing a wide range of capabilities without that much cost.....
Indeed, the real game changer to me seems to be the robust Fabricator and Robofac technologies; a suitcase minifac, feed stock and some mil-spec schematics are all a budding insurgency needs to start their own little arms race.

In their own right such technologies present a significant proliferation issue, since in addition to being able to produce all kinds of sharp and nasty implements (or parts there-of), they are able to reproduce themselves (or parts there-of), and thus such proliferation will tend to follow geometric growth while feedstocks supplies abide.

The ability to 'grow your own logistics' will be a prime military asset, particularly interfacing with military AI technologies. Insurgencies which can take advantage of TL10 fabrication technologies will be able just keep recurring; I could see this even becoming the de-facto form of warfare for established nation-states, where 'fortification' and 'entrenchment' are discarded as an unviable military doctrine and replaced with something that more closely resembles a heavily-armed espionage and counter-espionage scenario, with plain-clothes special forces launching semi- and completely-autonomous attacks on enemy targets from within their population (if possible) using munitions built in-situ.

I rather think the extremely high legality of the TL battlefield, and consonant extreme cost in advanced material and highly trained personnel, will somewhat disabuse nation states and other 'official' military agents from engaging in it, in its place a kind of crypto-military coup-counting seems at least plausible.
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Old 11-16-2018, 03:18 PM   #20
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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
In the real world, insurgents routinely get their hands on a huge range of weaponry. Few weapons are "locked down so effectively" to prevent this unless they're denied to even most legitimate governments by international agreement (LC0 in GURPS terms). Weapons can be stolen from the government you're rebelling against, sold off by corrupt officials, or provided by sympathetic governments that don't want to get directly involved (perhaps covertly).

When evaluating what LC1 technology insurgents are likely to have, I'd ask questions like "is it cheap enough to be ubiquitous in legitimate militaries?", "is it small enough to be smuggled?", "how hard is it to capture intact?", and "what logistical challenges does using it present?" If a technology is brand-new, that might keep it out of the hands of insurgents initially, but it won't be long before other people copy the design, and once something is no longer perceived as "cutting edge" people will get more casual about handing it out to allies.

The 3e book Special-Ops has a nice discussion of the importance of external support to insurgencies. My guess is the average person underrates this as a factor, because weapons-providers often want to keep their support a secret, and weapons-receivers want to pretend they did everything on their own. But it's a common feature of real-world insurgencies, so in a TL10 multipolar world, insurgents will have all kinds of cheap LC1 gear, at least once it's been around long enough to no longer be cutting-edge.
Is somebody going to make and dump hundreds of thousands of brilliant missiles onto arms markets or supply them directly to insurgents? Maybe, but maybe not - until a weapon is widely available through arms traders, direct supply is likely not to be a deniable act, which in some political circumstances makes it undesirable.
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Will this really be more true at TL10 than TL7-8? I can imagine a sci-fi writer in the 1910s assuming that in the future, all soldiers will wear gas masks all the time, but in reality we restricted poison gas by international agreement. Pretty sure existing international agreements would prohibit the "robobugs with syringes" trick mentioned by AlexanderHowl. Future societies might or might not have the same norms, and of course some people would break the rules, but I'm not sure there's any reason to assume things would change between TL8 and TL10. (Of course, between the need to fight places other than Earth, and improvements in lightweight materials, sealed armor might become common anyway.)
Yes, it is, at least if you let Ultratech rule. At TL8 gas weapons are only at all reliable if you want to kill or seriously injure most people in the area of effect, especially civilians. They're nasty lingering and indiscriminate, which creates a PR problem. And protective gear is extremely inconvenient, which limits the benefits of using them in conjunction with an assault rather than for interdiction or deliberate atrocity.

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.
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