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#31 |
Join Date: Jan 2010
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Couldn't a metal body act like a Faraday cage?
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#32 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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A swarmbot without any conductive material in its body can't send radio transmissions. Radio communication and EMP resistance are pretty fundamentally incompatible. EMP resistant swarms will use sound (limited range and bandwidth) or much shorter wavelength light (line of sight only), or possibly scent (very very slow).
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#33 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Jamming radio is plausible, but jamming laser comms is harder, especially if you want there to be any LOS on the battlefield. Sure range and LOS will be limited by platform size and cover, but you can probably afford to put a lot of them out there and relay. Worst case, trail optical fiber, which can be quite thin. (And in any area you control, buried.) You might want to just posit severe EM jamming and some sort of pervasive prism laser jamming covering any "serious" battlefield. Helps to cut down the effect of sat observations as well, which is probably a plus. ("Anything visible from space, even briefly, dies by laser-guided artillery" is probably not fun.) Sensor platforms do not have to be swarmbots either. 20 mm grenade launchers can launch good sensors. Rockets and arty likewise. Then there's the mole angle. You can learn a lot from an array of buried seismic mics, more if you've a good map of the geology. I suggest making "geojamming" a thing that is so easy and trivial that no PC bothers to go there. Possibility: Any battlefield of serious intensity will be immersed in a cloud of jammingstuff. Your side will probably be able to see though it better than the enemy. Probably. For quite conservative values of "better." No-man's land will probably be opaque to both sides. Possibility: Any area that has been occupied by troops will have an underground network of shielded, encrypted, comm and power infrastructure. Caveat: these are my concerns about serious infantry combat between mature TL8 powers that have some time to prepare and innovate. By TL 10 they could very well be outdated as pigeon-guided missiles or as relevant as assault rifles (both late TL 6 innovations). |
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#34 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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#35 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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#36 | |
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: The plutonium rich regions of Washington State
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Luke |
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#37 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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They might let the smoke go when they're in position and well concealed to allow themselves longer sight lines, but it seems more practical to leave spotting to expendable drones and keep the command and base units concealed at all times.
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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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#38 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Assuming the bots never need to receive, yes. You can also have a circuit breaker to at least limit the damage. Problem is that you're adding cost and complexity, and you have a very small amount of space to work in.
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#39 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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On a microbot scale that probably ends up with the "CD in the microwave" problem. The skin will be too thin to conduct well and the vulnerable insides will be too close to the skin to avoid sparks.
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Fred Brackin |
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#40 | |
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Tags |
combat drones, military sf, robots, tl10, ultra-tech |
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