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Old 11-16-2018, 09:54 AM   #1
Michael Thayne
 
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Default [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Superficially, there are a lot of similarities between warfare at TL6 and TL8. Everyone's using smokeless powder, high explosives, and motorized vehicles, right? But look a little closer, and the changes are absolutely radical. It's worth asking what similar changes would happen by TL10 as presented in Ultra-Tech.

For me, the biggest thing that stands out is dirt-cheap electronics—and the implications are pretty terrifying for any would-be great power. A hunter missile with an SEFOP or HEMP warhead is more expensive than a HEAT load for a RPG-7, but only by a factor of four or so. Given the massive increase in effectiveness, expect insurgent groups to have tons of them. Against such cheap missiles, what Ultra-Tech calls "point-defense lasers" seem to expensive for the purpose. A semi-portable laser will be more cost-effective, but even that isn't a perfect solution: if treated like a normal robot character with a gun, you'll always have a 2% failure rate. Plus, if a missile pops up from behind a hill a quarter-mile away, your automated point-defense gun might not have time to aim before the missile hits (unless the GM gives it a limited version of Altered Time Rate or something).

Robobugs, similarly, are only $50 a pop. Major militaries may disperse them by the thousands, because you can buy thousands for the price of a tank. But they might also be sold as children's toys, and if so, you could see insurgent groups using children's toys being used for fire-direction. That sounds crazy when you put it like that, but it would just be the 23rd century version of using $35 cell phones for the same purpose.

Another change unrelated to cheap electronics is the possible emergence of "flying tanks". Even without superscience, if you run with Spaceships pegging fusion air-rams at TL10, the lack of need to carry fuel would allow aircraft with more armor than they have nowadays. Even relatively light armor would largely eliminate the threat from proximity-burst anti-air missiles. Lasers, rather than missiles, could become the preferred anti-air weapons. In that case, maybe fast-flying armor would be the preferred solution to ubiquitous hunter missiles.

Any other ideas?
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Old 11-16-2018, 10:15 AM   #2
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Robobugs can also fly, so 10,000 of them could act as an effective screen against missiles given enough warning (they only have to get in the way, and they would deal 6d damage to a Move 600 missile during a collision). In addition, 10,000 flying robobugs could swarm enemy troops and try to inject anyone who was not protected by sealed armor with drugs or nano.
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Old 11-16-2018, 10:51 AM   #3
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

Yeah, if you're talking about insurgencies you have to consider effective LC, not just cost. A weapon can be cheap but locked down so effectively that it's virtually impossible for anyone outside one nation's military to lay hands on, or expensive but openly sold to literally anybody willing to pay the asking price.

By TL10 with everything in ultratech on the table, there's a whole lot of ways to punish any squishy humans who think they can show up for a fight without sealed full-coverage armor. Does that mean everyone has it, or does it mean that some factions are severely disadvantaged? Ultratech can't really tell you that one.


One of the big features of TL 10 is AI coming fully into its own. I'd expect manned vehicles to be essentially nonexistent, though some would transport humans as cargo. Whether humans have any combat roles depends on how costs stack up and the resources vs. casualty aversion of a given force.
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:01 AM   #4
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
One of the big features of TL 10 is AI coming fully into its own. I'd expect manned vehicles to be essentially nonexistent, though some would transport humans as cargo. Whether humans have any combat roles depends on how costs stack up and the resources vs. casualty aversion of a given force.
It also depends on what AI switches you're using in this setting, and on the legal status of AI's, both of which vary a LOT from setting to setting, even with hard science.

The word "Battlefield" was used, which is interesting because battlefields have become less important in recent wars. Most modern combats are asymmetrical and urban, and the "field" portion of battlefield falls out of use. This is not to say that all these wars are strong forces beating on weak ones: its to say that controlling large amounts of land is not nearly as useful as it used to be. That's only going to get more true at TL10.
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:30 AM   #5
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Yeah, if you're talking about insurgencies you have to consider effective LC, not just cost. A weapon can be cheap but locked down so effectively that it's virtually impossible for anyone outside one nation's military to lay hands on, or expensive but openly sold to literally anybody willing to pay the asking price.
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.

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By TL10 with everything in ultratech on the table, there's a whole lot of ways to punish any squishy humans who think they can show up for a fight without sealed full-coverage armor. Does that mean everyone has it, or does it mean that some factions are severely disadvantaged? Ultratech can't really tell you that one.
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.)

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One of the big features of TL 10 is AI coming fully into its own. I'd expect manned vehicles to be essentially nonexistent, though some would transport humans as cargo. Whether humans have any combat roles depends on how costs stack up and the resources vs. casualty aversion of a given force.
Ultra-Tech is somewhat vague on this. Unfortunately, there are no guidelines for AI skill levels. Also, the one design for a human-sized combat robot is also human-shaped for no good reason. You could, of course, import setting-specific designs like THS's RATS or some of the robots from Reign of Steel. Hmmm, I haven't looked at RoS in awhile...
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:31 AM   #6
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

I'd say that even more important for the nature of warfare than the TL is global politics and culture.
It's not like modern wars really have two TL8 nations going full out against each other.
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:40 AM   #7
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
The word "Battlefield" was used, which is interesting because battlefields have become less important in recent wars. Most modern combats are asymmetrical and urban, and the "field" portion of battlefield falls out of use. This is not to say that all these wars are strong forces beating on weak ones: its to say that controlling large amounts of land is not nearly as useful as it used to be. That's only going to get more true at TL10.
Heh, I actually meant "battlefield" in a looser sense—perhaps I should have said "theater" or some such. As I've thought about this, I've very much been imagining things like, trading hunter missile fire between an occupying force headquartered in a country's capital, and insurgent forces firing the damn things from a neighboring town 15 miles away. I do think fighting in "open air" (even if that means city streets and rooftops) is probably more interesting than the part of urban warfare that happens when soldiers are at the door of a building they need to raid—though even then, you can do things like make a small robot be the "first one through the door". Heck, you might be able to thoroughly scout a building with robobugs before going in.
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:45 AM   #8
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
I'd say that even more important for the nature of warfare than the TL is global politics and culture.
It's not like modern wars really have two TL8 nations going full out against each other.
That kind of thing can change fast, though. Human history has seen a number of periods of relative peace (key word being relative) that suddenly break out into a cataclysmic war. Think the 150 years between the Peace of Westphalia and the Napoleonic wars, or the period between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Of course, if such a cataclysmic war happened today it would probably involve nukes, which might render the rest of your military doctrine moot.
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Old 11-16-2018, 12:58 PM   #9
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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
That kind of thing can change fast, though. Human history has seen a number of periods of relative peace (key word being relative) that suddenly break out into a cataclysmic war. Think the 150 years between the Peace of Westphalia and the Napoleonic wars, or the period between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. Of course, if such a cataclysmic war happened today it would probably involve nukes, which might render the rest of your military doctrine moot.
I fully agree. But full scale war past TL7 is not so much war as apocalypse.
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Old 11-16-2018, 01:17 PM   #10
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] What does the TL10 battlefield look like

The trend has been toward more powerful and independent individual soldiers. That trend is likely to continue.

An armored soldier would carry both energy and projectile weapons, plus a battlefield Ai. The AI would control multiple drones with lesser AIs, all connected into a network. Each soldier would have the equivalent of a company of specialists at his or her command.
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