[Ultra Tech] Shortening Range

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Well, I was repeating my concerns because someone asked, but I think the thread has already come up with quite some solutions:

• Have excellent jamming in place, making extremely long-range attacks difficult
• Have some kind of shielding that makes long range attacks (especially orbital attacks) difficult or impossible
• Reduce the effectiveness of AI, remove it completely, or make it as precious as humans
• Have your fights primarily in cluttered areas, like forests, cities and the interior of spaceships, not on featureless plains.
• Have social pressures that remove the ability to use massive destruction against your foes

I have no real reason not to use mini-nukes and anti-matter rounds, though, outside of social pressures, which just means the bad guys are more likely to nuke people.

Make the high-power weapons expensive. This makes them harder for most combatants to get, and easier for governments (or whoever takes that role) to restrict. If the mininukes are super-duper expensive, then even the bad guys will only use them when cheaper options won't work.

(This could be realistic, too, for both mini-nukes and antimatter. Plus, antimatter is inherently dangerous in a terrene environment, it defaults to disaster with pretty much anything going wrong with the technology.
I could readily imagine that most people, bad guys included, would be reluctant to be close to it. Kind of like carrying bottles of sulfuric acid as weapons, it might work but is it worth the risk?

Social pressure can cover a range of things, too. If it's just social disapproval, the bad guys might not care. If using the forbidden weapon means that everybody feels free to shoot at you for it, or even that your former friends and allies won't trade with you, take your money, or the like, that's something else. In the real world, there are some actions that will make even hardened criminals violently hate you. In a future world, using mininukes or other forbidden weapons might fall into that category.

Still, there's no getting around some of the problem, the regular 'in your face' battles of pop sci-fi just don't make realistic sense. You can fix some of it with various solutions, but there's no plausible way to make it really realistic on all fronts. It's not hard to come up with specific situations where an in-your-face battle happens, but I've never seen a plausible situation where it happens as a routine thing with the SFnal technologies.