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Old 07-24-2013, 12:17 PM   #21
jeff_wilson
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by martinl View Post
As a high level observation, with TL10 sensors and AI data processing, concealment and cover are hard. Not to say that there aren't plausible countermeasures, but so much depends on not being seen that it is hard to postulate a good strategy without knowing at least a broad outline of what fieldcraft is in the setting.
This is what I was thinking about the counter-observation position. Smartdust is too small for directed movement, but finger-sized and smaller swarmlings can creep about and direct artillery if they see an infantryman, so if you have those, you need your own swarmlings to watch for theirs and their smart dust with a provision to spoof it with false positives, perhaps by playing spoken conversations or squirting traces of exhalation gases, sweat, etc. Or they could arrange periodic, random shelling with bomblets to keep the swarmlings blown up and the smartdust literally scattered to the winds.
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Old 07-25-2013, 05:13 PM   #22
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

Yeah. Swarmbots threaten to make the battlefield (a) unrecognisable and (b) non-survivable.

My setting is TL10 (no nanotech) and attack swarms are outlawed (like poison gas, germ warfare etc.), besides which I assume that the electronic environment on the battlefield is very hostile to broadcast communications. But there is no reason not to discuss the TL11 battlefield as it exists in others' settings.
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Old 07-25-2013, 05:48 PM   #23
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Yeah. Swarmbots threaten to make the battlefield (a) unrecognisable and (b) non-survivable.

My setting is TL10 (no nanotech) and attack swarms are outlawed (like poison gas, germ warfare etc.), .
Grouping them with terror weapons is probably about right. However much they might scare civilians they are militarily useless. Too slow, too fragile and low armor penetration.

Even if not Geneva Conventioned they aren't going to change the battlefield.
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Old 07-25-2013, 06:53 PM   #24
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Grouping them with terror weapons is probably about right. However much they might scare civilians they are militarily useless. Too slow, too fragile and low armor penetration.

Even if not Geneva Conventioned they aren't going to change the battlefield.
Yeah. Jeff_Wilson's point about observation/scout/picket swarms, on the other hand, is a compelling one, I think. How effectively can ECM (and EMP or jammer warheads) keep things foggy?
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Old 07-25-2013, 07:01 PM   #25
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Yeah. Jeff_Wilson's point about observation/scout/picket swarms, on the other hand, is a compelling one, I think. How effectively can ECM (and EMP or jammer warheads) keep things foggy?
Predator swarmbots might be a better choice; swarms are pretty crap against soldiers but they're just fine at killing other swarms. If you're below a certain swarm density your swarms will interpenetrate, though, as they lack the ability to detect one another reliably.

Swarmbots are realistically going to have pretty serious bandwidth issues, so they'll probably be silent except when they spot something they think is worth reporting on, and they aren't very smart so if you can figure out what they think is worth reporting on you can avoid looking like that.
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Old 07-26-2013, 01:39 AM   #26
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Yeah. Swarmbots threaten to make the battlefield (a) unrecognisable and (b) non-survivable.
Which I imagine was the reaction of soldiers to pretty much every paradigm shift on the battlefield.

Muscle-powered warriors reacting to gunpowder, pike-and-shot reacting to firearms and artillery advancement making their tactics suboptimal, line infantry reacting to minie bullets and advanced artillery in the Crimea and American Civil War, everyone reacting to armoured tanks, mechanised transport, artillery accurate beyond line of sight, airpower and radios in WWI-WWII and the Iraqis discovering what advances in technology and electronics really mean on the battlefield in Kuwait.

Once drones are small enough and cheap enough, 'infantry' warfare starts being about ECM and ECCM, just like naval and air warfare at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. Elements of infantry are carrier battle groups which must be protected from the enemy drones while providing a base for their own to operate.

I really see no way around that, no more than you can easily justify battleships duking it out as the primary means of projecting naval power with today's technology.

It really doesn't matter that you don't buy into ultra-miniaturisation, because that this puropse, drones the size of fingers or even hands are quite enough. As long as they are cheap, you can deploy them widely enough so that you need drones of your own to track them and even one drone suffices to call in air strikes, artillery or ortillery.
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Old 07-26-2013, 08:11 AM   #27
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Yeah. Jeff_Wilson's point about observation/scout/picket swarms, on the other hand, is a compelling one, I think. How effectively can ECM (and EMP or jammer warheads) keep things foggy?
Scout swarms suffer from the same limitations of other swarms when it comes to moving in to new territory and offensive searching i.e move 6 for a flyer swarm v. move 20 for a 4 lb aerial Scout Robot. The 4lb robot ahs better sensors too. You can even mount Gyrocs on it like it was miniature airplane (which it is of course).

Fro defensive uses and establishing sensor perimeters there's no need to drop a whole swarm in a single hex. They can be a lot more spread out.

EMP warheads knockdown any swarm in their area for a period of seconds. Microwave scramblers do it for minutes. Simple concussion explosions kill swarms. Thermobaric warheads do it with extreme prejudice.

Area jammers will keep swarms from radioing back to base though they might maintain short-range internal comms on an IR frequency. There is a "micro" sized laser com in UT with a 1000 yard range at TL10 but micro-swarms are much less likely to maintain good line of sight to relays due to tactics.
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Old 07-26-2013, 08:25 AM   #28
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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EMP warheads knockdown any swarm in their area for a period of seconds. Microwave scramblers do it for minutes.
Realistically, EMP will either outright kill, permanently degrade, or have no effect on swarmbots.

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Old 07-26-2013, 08:36 AM   #29
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Yeah. Jeff_Wilson's point about observation/scout/picket swarms, on the other hand, is a compelling one, I think. How effectively can ECM (and EMP or jammer warheads) keep things foggy?
A big issue for insect-sized drones will be false positives. At that size their visual resolution will be poor and they will not have a lot of data processing, so they will visually trigger on animals, vegetation blown by wind, civilians, and the like. Real insects rarely use vision for identification (although many use vision for warning and targeting - any many varieties are not too picky about what they target), rather they use chemical cues. Insect-sized drones with built in sniffers could at least distinguish people from animals and wind-blown grass, but would still have trouble telling soldier from civilian, or tank from civilian automobile (although the smell of weapons fire might linger on the shooter for a while, depending on your tech assumptions - any you could probably figure that anyone who has fired a gun in the last couple days is probably a legitimate target. This becomes more difficult as you go away from gunpowder and towards electric propulsion or beam weapons).

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Old 07-26-2013, 08:40 AM   #30
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Realistically, EMP will either outright kill, permanently degrade, or have no effect on swarmbots.

Luke
A swarmbot without any conductive material in it's body is more likely to be a genetically engineered insect than a "real" robot. It's hard to get insects to phone home and provide printouts of their data though.

Oh, as one more note, the MAD systems that only heat a thin layer of skin to 130 degrees will probably affect the whole swarmbot and cook real insects in their juices.

Now that I've thought of that I want one to kill the local mosquitoes. :)
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