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

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

How long does the layer-by-layer process usually take. Assume for the sake of argument this is actually a bunker, not a safe, and the rules of engagement were written with an eye towards trying to take prisoners.

It depends on the bunker. There's a good article about safes and how to open them in Pyramid #3/47, but the requirements for a bunker are different. It won't normally have a "relocker", a system which makes the door unopenable once it is damaged, because trapping people inside is usually unacceptable.

If it's a TL10 bunker, it could have closed-cycle life support for long periods, and presumably has high-tech sensors rather than openings. In which case, you just wreck the sensors and wait for the people inside to surrender. If they don't want to, you point out that you can assemble a big enough shaped charge to blow through the wall or roof, and it doesn't matter how secure their door is.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It depends on the bunker. There's a good article about safes and how to open them in Pyramid #3/47, but the requirements for a bunker are different. It won't normally have a "relocker", a system which makes the door unopenable once it is damaged, because trapping people inside is usually unacceptable.

If it's a TL10 bunker, it could have closed-cycle life support for long periods, and presumably has high-tech sensors rather than openings. In which case, you just wreck the sensors and wait for the people inside to surrender. If they don't want to, you point out that you can assemble a big enough shaped charge to blow through the wall or roof, and it doesn't matter how secure their door is.

Oh, I'd forgotten about that article. Extremely useful. Looks like when attacking concrete a thermic lance beats a devourer swarm. But would a thermic lance work on diamond-like material? If not, what would?

EDIT: Actually, it seems reasonable to assume at TL10 there will be devices that fill a role similar to "thermic lance" but are more powerful. Also, the Pyramid article notes more powerful but non-portable versions already exist, but what counts as "portable" could change for battlesuited trooper.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

But would a thermic lance work on diamond-like material?

Yes, beautifully. A thermic lance runs at 2700°C or higher, up to 4500°C. Diamond starts to turn into graphite at about 400°C at atmospheric pressure, and that will burn readily in air. Boron nitride has better thermal stability, but won't stand up to a thermic lance: a good hot one will happily melt tungsten.

A crazed Austrian chemist during WWII made something better than a thermic lance: a blowtorch that ran on powdered aluminium and gaseous fluorine. It burned through reinforced concrete like a normal blowtorch does through butter, but the protective clothing requirements were ridiculous.

It's not clear you need anything better than an oxygen/iron/aluminium thermic lance at TL10; unless there are ways to raise melting and burning points, which would definitely be super-science by today's standards, the basic kind of lance will go through anything at reasonable speed. To make bigger holes, use a thicker lance, which needs a bigger oxygen supply, which is less portable. Carrying large amounts of compressed oxygen around needs heavy cylinders, and is kind of hazardous.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Yes, beautifully.

That might or might not be true; diamond is a really really good heat conductor, so it is likely to take a while to heat up. Realistically no one material will resist the complete variety of viable threats (at TL 10, you can just use a particle beam, plasma torch, or laser drill with a working temperature that's higher than any viable armor material, so it's purely a matter of time).

[Rupert]

Diamond is hard, but brittle, so a layer of diamond might be defeatable with an air hammer/pneumatic drill. Hammer away at it until it's shattered and then just dig out the bits, exposing the next layer, whatever it might be.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Diamond is hard, but brittle, so a layer of diamond might be defeatable with an air hammer/pneumatic drill. Hammer away at it until it's shattered and then just dig out the bits, exposing the next layer, whatever it might be.

Well, the diamond might not be on the surface (or you might have more than one layer, or it might be part of a metal-matrix composite). If you want high performance without just massive thickness, you're probably going to have a composite laminate of different materials designed to handle different threats (this might be true even if you are okay with massive thickness). At ultra-tech you might also have self-healing materials (for example, run a microtech/nanotech non-newtonian through the door which auto-fills holes in a similar manner to blood clotting).

In the end, though, as long as you don't need what's behind the barrier to be intact, static barriers are going to be destroyed, and they won't take that long to be destroyed; they're there to buy time, not to totally stop opponents.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Oh, I'd forgotten about that article. Extremely useful. Looks like when attacking concrete a thermic lance beats a devourer swarm. But would a thermic lance work on diamond-like material? If not, what would?

EDIT: Actually, it seems reasonable to assume at TL10 there will be devices that fill a role similar to "thermic lance" but are more powerful. Also, the Pyramid article notes more powerful but non-portable versions already exist, but what counts as "portable" could change for battlesuited trooper.

Because the Pyramid article was set in the real world, I deliberately cut out speculation about ultra-tech safecracking methods. The thing to bear in mind is that no safe is crack-proof; all they can do is delay the attacker until the authorities arrive, and/or force them to destroy the contents. If your scenario is "we have just taken over this planet", the attacker is the authorities and delay won't be of any help.

On the defence side, I would expect to see thermal superconducting layers; all the heat-based attacks rely on heating just a local area rather than the entire safe. At TL10 these superconductors break down if heavily loaded, so they slow down the attacker a bit more; at TL11 they essentially force you to melt off the entire outside of the safe all at once. This (a) is outside the easy capability of hand tools, and (b) will fairly definitively destroy whatever's inside – which is what you want at that point.

On the attack side, well, Ultra-Tech wasn't written with safecracking in mind, but the plasma torch is a lot like a thermic lance – even a modern one reaches 20,000°C and higher, though in a tiny area – and it doesn't put out much energy, so the cutting depth isn't as high as the lance. The real-world one is not helpful against many safes, because you need a conductive metal workpiece. But the one on p. 80 doesn't have that requirement, and the fusion torch even less so; I would definitely be inclined to give them armour-ablating capabilities along the lines of the thermic lance in the article.

As for the portability of bigger lances, I don't have the notes on the big units any more but I suspect system weight will scale roughly with the square or maybe 1.5 power of the damage you want to do. (Feeding in twice as much energy won't get you twice as much damage because the flame cools faster.) You can probably split it roughly 1/3 lance system and 2/3 oxygen tank if you want to pack it among multiple people.

[AlexanderHowl]

Another thing to consider is that RTSC could connect a safe to the rest of the building or a bunker to the rest of the city, meaning that using heat to breach the walls would be a waste of time (with electromagnetic armor, even shapecharged and HEMP rounds might be useless). The armor might even be 'toxic' to nanotechnology, as it might contain materials designed to destroy nanorobots when they attack it.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Another thing to consider is that RTSC could connect a safe to the rest of the building or a bunker to the rest of the city, meaning that using heat to breach the walls would be a waste of time

That's not really useful if the attacker controls the surrounding area, since they'll just vandalize your external heat sink.

A buried superconducting heat sink might be useful for protecting a bunker from thermal breaching attempts in combat, though.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

(with electromagnetic armor, even shapecharged and HEMP rounds might be useless).

EMA consumes power and sustains damage when hit. And would be useless if the attacker fires the charge into a place where they've already breached the outside layers. You could include it in a safe I suppose but it's very much an ablative protection, not something that makes attacks useless.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The armor might even be 'toxic' to nanotechnology, as it might contain materials designed to destroy nanorobots when they attack it.

That should be pretty easy, with nanobots really being rather too small to wrap themselves in environmental shielding.

Of course, it would again be ablative, and depending on how it's delivered the attacker might simply hose it off when it appears.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

On the defence side, I would expect to see thermal superconducting layers; all the heat-based attacks rely on heating just a local area rather than the entire safe. At TL10 these superconductors break down if heavily loaded, so they slow down the attacker a bit more; at TL11 they essentially force you to melt off the entire outside of the safe all at once. This (a) is outside the easy capability of hand tools, and (b) will fairly definitively destroy whatever's inside – which is what you want at that point.

Well, this does depend on the other properties of such materials. Unless this thermal superconductor (which smells of superscience to me, but that's another discussion) is also very tough, once you've exposed it you attack it mechanically. However, having to swap attacks layer by layer slows you down, means you need more equipment, etc.