01-10-2019, 09:57 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
I don't agree with the "everything wearing dreadnaught battlesuits" claim. The bean-counters funding the war are already paying for millions if not billions of droids, and thousands to millions of clones/bioroids, plus the weapons, ships, dropships, and ammo.
Military budgets are not infinite, even at TL11. To save some money in the treasury, particularly when it comes to making sure replacements can be procured in a timely manner, battlesuits are more likely to be reserved for elite units, the equivalent of today's SEALs. It's more likely to have the average meatsack grunt wearing non-powered armor, likely a clamshell over monocrys (the latter for shrapnel than anything else) and a separate combat helmet; droids just get built with as much armor plating as they can stand.
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01-10-2019, 10:00 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
Not bloody likely. The great thing about droid troops is that they're totally expendable. So why put them in expensive and only moderately effective Dreadnought suits?
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01-10-2019, 10:06 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
The game world matters. In comics, genetically augmented armies if metahumans with TL11 gear can wreak havok (think Shi’Ar Imperial Guard, of whom some of the subguardians are augmented clones).
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01-10-2019, 10:23 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Seattle
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
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Most droids would be of lower quality so as to be easily replaced and therefore disposable. Think of actually effective versions of the basic battle droid in the Clone Wars. There would also be a lot (swarms even) of smaller, disposable flying bots. Then there'd be better bots (more armor, better weapons, etc.) to support those and so on. Flying bots are where meat just cannot compete - especially with size. But why biologicals? Assuming that there's an assembly line process for making them en masse, then they, too, are somewhat expendable. Biologicals do best at dealing with other biologicals. Unless there's a total war scenario where civilians simply don't matter, having some amount of empathy is useful in protecting civilians from being needlessly killed. One other consideration is how intelligent the bots can be. If AIs tend to go rogue, then bots will be a lot less intelligent to prevent them from rising up against their masters. (Biologicals can have short lifespans to prevent the same thing from them.)
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01-10-2019, 11:27 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
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You can say that if you have the capability to build robots at all, actual clones always lose out in production *speed*, because it will always take much longer to grow an organism from a cell or cutting than to build something in a factory. But many fictional "clones" are clearly not cloned from anything, and being faster isn't necessarily cheaper, so if you are not in a hurry.... You're going to need tighter definitions of the words to say very much.
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01-10-2019, 12:28 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
Because the combat android will then have an effective ST 50, allowing them to treat Rainbow Laser Cannons as rifles? Or they could dual wield Rainbow Gatling Lasers as if they were pistols? Anyway, what else would you give them to make them indistinguishable from their biological superiors during a conflict?
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01-10-2019, 12:59 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
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01-10-2019, 02:16 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
You can do that without a suit. The difference between a battlesuit and a robot is that a robot is controlled by a brain contained in a box, a battlesuit is controlled by a brain contained in flesh and blood (which then gets put into a box, most likely).
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01-10-2019, 02:49 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
An underplayed feature of droids is storage. When your conflict is over you pack up the viable droids and ship them home to wait until you end up in another fight. Clones continue to function but no longer have a purpose in your society. The ones that don't die are sentient creatures who were only raised for war that end up dumped into a society they'll have to adapt to, likely while dealing with PTSD or crippling injuries.
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01-10-2019, 02:53 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Clone Army Or Droid Army?
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It seems unlikely that you'd suddenly conclude that, contrary to their treatment to date, your clone troops have human rights and should be handled as citizens...
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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