Reign of Steel - ways to destroy the robots?

[Pragmatic]

Originally Posted by Rowan

I love that show! =) Watched both seasons, so I know what you mean. =) By in large the guys in RoS seem to be pretty tough bots. But that's pretty cool, because I feel it really simulates that unstoppable feel like in the terminator series.

Sadly, the series has been terminated. :-(

[whassupman03]

Hello...

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Sadly, the series has been terminated. :-(

Yep. It has been shut down. The question is... will they set up a finale to cap the cliffhanger?

Anyway, back to the subject - one thing you have to wonder is what kind of weapons do the guerillas (Or nomads, survivalists, etc.) have on hand to defend themselves against the machines - or attack them with. The guerillas and nomads probably try to scrounge up as much weaponry, ammunition, and in the case of captured AI-built weapons, power cells (e.g. for autolasers, blasters, etc., Myrmidons use a lot of TL8-9 handheld weapons such as rifles).

And the survivalists, if they were smart and were able to beat the raging mobs of the Apocalypse Plagues, probably stashed away a large amount of civilian or even military weaponry and such at their enclaves (That's the survivalist in me talking...). Perhaps the most well-equipped are equipped with reloading equipment - and if they know their skills, could even make different ammo such as AP, APHC, etc. (See GURPS High-Tech for 4e). One thing to also note is that according to RoS, there are some cottage industries in the Machine Zones, and some of these can produce cheap versions of TL7 (TL8 in 4e) weapons. So that is also a factor. It might be slightly easier to acquire anti-material rifles that can fire 12.7mm rounds, which are much larger and, if AP, APHC, or even scrounged-up explosive rounds, can be better at shutting down robots - permanently.

Another episode in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles involved killing a Terminator with a 20mm sniper rifle. I don't know the model used in the show, but I know that one GURPS website (The Dreambird's Lair - yep it's still around, if you know where to look) had 3e specs for a "sniper cannon" known as an NTW-20 built by South Africa. The link is below...

http://web.archive.org/web/200304090...ter.de/saw.htm

...now one thing I'm wondering is what it would look like in 4e - that is it's stats. If anyone can tell me how to convert 3e weapon stats to 4e, I would greatly appreciate it. That way we can convert old weapons to 4e so we can use them. That would expand our capability to find weapons for this subject.

Anyway, there are several sources to acquire possible weapons for the humans...

* GURPS Robots...
* ...GURPS High-Tech (Both 3e and 4e)...
* ...GURPS Ultra-Tech (Both 3e and 4e)...
* ...and others.

Now in the case of human-built weapons, TL8 weapons (TL9 in 4e) would be harder to come by because they would be harder to supply with ammunition. On the other hand, TL7 (TL8 in 4e) would be much easier in this setting to supply with ammunition and parts, and could be a staple of human arsenals.

As well, VIRUS would supply wild humans with large amounts of advanced anti-robot or anti-vehicle weapons (Perhaps some are TL9 [TL10 in 4e], which use reverse-engineered AI technology), and smuggling operations created by Black Zoners and underground movements such as Free America could exist from Zones Washington and London to the Machine Zones.

Anyway, that's what I have to say for now. I hope this helps people with their ideas. And if you know how to convert 3e weapons to 4e, I would appreciate it if you told me! Thanks a bunch.

whassupman03

[whassupman03]

Hello...

Hey, it's been a while since I have written on this forum, so I think I will add my two cents on this thread. Right now I don't have a way to destroy the actual robots, rather I have a possible way to pave the way to do so.

As you know, the robots use a lot of minefields to defend their facilities. So I was thinking, how would I get through the minefield so I could destroy those robots? Well I have a way, called a "Snake Bomb."

NOTE: I do not promote the construction of real explosive devices. This is for games only. If you do this anyway, you will be liable to the fullest extent of the law, since it is a criminal offense (And possibly a terrorist offense) to construct a working explosive device. And you may very well blow yourself up in the process, so don't try this at home kiddos!

Anyway, the Snake Bomb is an improvised weapon to use against minefields such as those that surround slave camps. I got the idea from watching the Military Channel, which once depicted a Combat Engineering Vehicle of some sort launching a cable-like device which could blow up a minefield. This utilizes the same principle, except since most resistance forces don't have armored vehicles of any sort, they will have to deploy this by hand, or at least getting a small reprogrammed robot to do so.

There are a number of ingredients:

• One or more lengths of garden hose
• A garden hose end cap
• A large quanity of ANFO explosive
• A number of used grenade pins
• A number of thin and sturdy wooden stakes equal to the number of grenade pins.
• Several rolls of duct tape
• A blasting cap
• A fuse of the desired time

So what you have to do is fasten the garden hose lengths together, fastening the end cap to one end. Then you stick the grenade pins through one side (But not the other) at certain intervals, using duct tape to reinforce them so the hose doesn't leak. After you do that, fill the hose with ANFO (You can also use any explosive you get your hands on, but ANFO is the easiest to make for most resistance groups fighting against the machines, because of the ease of finding the ingredients.). After you do that, duct tape the blasting cap into it, and pin an old-fashioned fuse onto it.

There, you have yourself an exploding snake. All you have to do is get someone (Or something) to crawl through a minefield, watching where they crawl through and pinning the stakes through each grenade pin. Once you go all the way through, follow the snake back to the safe zone, and light the fuse. Once you do so, you bail out. When it explodes, there's a good chance that it will detonate a path through the minefield, clearing a way for slaves to leave or guerrillas to sneak in and blow the machines to bits. It probably works best to have more than one during a mission, so you can either pave a wider path or make more than one path as a backup.

Now one thing of note - one can also be modified to turn it into a flexible Claymore mine. All you have to do is put a lot of broken circuit boards, glass, shards of metal, or even ball bearings if you can steal them from the robots, into the ANFO. You can use this to detonate more mines, or use against marauders, bandits, zonegangs, or lightly-armored robots for those who like to use it against those humans who like to pillage or collaborate with the AIs offensively. If I recall, there are bounties on these guys, so it could be used on them as well.

Well I have to go. Take care and have a nice weekend!

whassupman03

[Kale]

Originally Posted by whassupman03

Another episode in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles involved killing a Terminator with a 20mm sniper rifle. I don't know the model used in the show, but I know that one GURPS website (The Dreambird's Lair - yep it's still around, if you know where to look) had 3e specs for a "sniper cannon" known as an NTW-20 built by South Africa. The link is below...

http://web.archive.org/web/200304090...ter.de/saw.htm

...now one thing I'm wondering is what it would look like in 4e - that is it's stats. If anyone can tell me how to convert 3e weapon stats to 4e, I would greatly appreciate it. That way we can convert old weapons to 4e so we can use them. That would expand our capability to find weapons for this subject.

GURPS High Tech has stats for a couple 20mm cannons as well as a .50 or two. I think they are mostly man-portable, and would probably be handy for taking out lighter combat-designed robots.
I'd suggest that any non-combat purpose robot, or very light combat robots should go down to assault-rifle fire. Maybe with the requirement of superior AP ammo against light scout-type combat robots.

[Michele]

I wouldn't rely too much on direct-firing weapons to take on combat robots. They are going to have direct-firing weapons of their own, and very good sensors; when you see them, they can see you.

So: land mines and IEDs first. They can be activated automatically, or from a standoff position.

An alternative: indirect-fire weapons. Mortars and multiple rocket launchers are easy to make and can even be made starting with scavenged tubes. They are area weapons, good at damaging unarmored things, and inaccurate, so the best target would not be a single robot, but rather an area target; a compound, a field workshop, a factory, etc. If a moving robot or convoy have to be targeted that way, ideally they should be forced to stop first.

Which brings me to the fact that the two techinques can be combined. Use a roadblock to stop the head of a convoy, a IED to blow up one of the last vehicles in the convoy, thus bottling most of the others up. Then fire the multi-launcher.
Scoot from the standoff positions before the best armored and/or least unlucky enemy vehicles start reacting.

I suppose, alas, that if all of that is reasonably successful, the opposition will then increase air support...

[whassupman03]

Hello...

Originally Posted by Michele

I wouldn't rely too much on direct-firing weapons to take on combat robots. They are going to have direct-firing weapons of their own, and very good sensors; when you see them, they can see you.

So: land mines and IEDs first. They can be activated automatically, or from a standoff position.

Well I would like to say something about direct-fire weapons Michele. Currently, there is a weapon under development called the TRAP, which is mentioned in GURPS High Tech on page HT205. TRAP (Telepresent Rapid Aiming Platform) is a sort of sentry gun, or in other words a remote-controlled gun, which is being developed for the US Army. It usually mounts a machine gun or semiautomatic rifle, as stated in the book.

This weapon is cool because you don't have to be manning the machine gun nest to fire the gun, you can be somewhere else! Not only is it good for perimeter defense, but it can be used as a decoy to lure the robots into paying attention at a point on the battlefield where there are no guerrilla fighters, allowing the guerrillas to sneak in and achieve their objectives. I don't see any reason why an improved version can't mount an autocannon. Perhaps newer 2030s-era weapons can come from the Final War, or a 2040s-era version may be distributed by VIRUS.

Originally Posted by Michele

An alternative: indirect-fire weapons. Mortars and multiple rocket launchers are easy to make and can even be made starting with scavenged tubes. They are area weapons, good at damaging unarmored things, and inaccurate, so the best target would not be a single robot, but rather an area target; a compound, a field workshop, a factory, etc. If a moving robot or convoy have to be targeted that way, ideally they should be forced to stop first.

I agree with this strategy, of course it would probably seem to be risky if you are targeting certain robot facilities such as slave camps, especially when the mortars disperse a lot of shrapnel, like flechette shells.

As for rockets, I seem to recall from my readings in Twilight: 2000 lore that the New Americans, who were mostly survivalists that included a bunch of more unsavory folk and tried to take over America, were able to build rockets like you see mounted on attack helicopters from more rudimentary materials such as PVC piping, for instance. So like you may see when you buy an Estes rocket kit, it's pretty easy to build the rocket too. Of course they would have to build some sort of warhead into the rocket to make it lethal. Perhaps Scrounging rules can be applied to acquire the materials necessary to build the weapons.

Originally Posted by Michele

Which brings me to the fact that the two techinques can be combined. Use a roadblock to stop the head of a convoy, a IED to blow up one of the last vehicles in the convoy, thus bottling most of the others up. Then fire the multi-launcher.
Scoot from the standoff positions before the best armored and/or least unlucky enemy vehicles start reacting.

I suppose, alas, that if all of that is reasonably successful, the opposition will then increase air support...

One thing of note - sometimes a convoy is carrying work parties from slave camps. They would have to have some sort of intel first as to the cargo. I'd tend to deploy most of the heavy-hitting weapons against the escort vehicles, like Juggernauts, while using more surgical weapons such as autocannons against things like Robotrucks, such as their robot brains, to disable them. This can be a good way to preserve the cargo, whether you are rescuing slaves or stealing industrial materials to fuel the research efforts of VIRUS.

Oh and thank you Kale for your input. I'm sure that we can find suitable weapons not only in GURPS High-Tech but also GURPS Ultra-Tech as well. Both tend to fit in the GURPS Reign of Steel universe.

Well take care and have a Happy Halloween!

whassupman03

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by whassupman03

Another episode in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles involved killing a Terminator with a 20mm sniper rifle. I don't know the model used in the show, but I know that one GURPS website (The Dreambird's Lair - yep it's still around, if you know where to look) had 3e specs for a "sniper cannon" known as an NTW-20 built by South Africa. The link is below...

The weapon in question that Derek Reese was carrying was a Barrett .50 caliber rifle, which the poor actor virtually had welded to his shoulder for most of the episode for not terribly good reasons. :-)

The quote, after Derek showed the .50cal API bullet to John Connor, was that it "hit like a 20mm cannon." Depending on the KE damage of a 20mm solid or HE bullet, this might be exactly accurate, since the 6dx2(2) of a GURPS .50AP bullet would be 6dx4 of "regular" KE damage.

My spreadsheet puts 22d for a 20mm shell massing 102g at 1030m/s, so again, 'hits like a 20mm' is accurate for a solid bullet.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Michele

An alternative: indirect-fire weapons. Mortars and multiple rocket launchers are easy to make and can even be made starting with scavenged tubes. They are area weapons, good at damaging unarmored things, and inaccurate, so the best target would not be a single robot, but rather an area target; a compound, a field workshop, a factory, etc. If a moving robot or convoy have to be targeted that way, ideally they should be forced to stop first.

You'll run into the same issues with IDF that our enemies currently have. Counterbattery fire and an inability to get observers close enough to direct fires on anything important. It would be worse in RoS, the zoneminds can easily deploy much faster and more accurate counterbattery systems as well as point defense weapons.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by Mgellis

Steel (current year 2026) is part of the Infinite Worlds setting. Why not assume that Homeline is interested in helping out?

I'm not sure why they would do this, but it might be as simple as "let's save as many as we can" combined with "hmmm...genocidal supercomputers with armies of killer robots...perhaps we should figure out how to stop them, just in case we ever have to, you know."

Rather than attack the Zone Minds directly, and risk capture, they could recruit and support teams of local humans to do it.

That's a great idea and would make a great campaign. But my mind can't help jumping from the tactical level to the strategic and wonder what Homeline's goal, resouces, and strategy would be. It wouldn't be absolutely necessary to know in order to run a very satisfactory tactical campaign, but in subtle ways it would make a difference whether the goal is merely to save as many people and possible and convey them to that empty worldline over there, or whether it was to destroy every stinking zonemind, only the budget won't run to furnishing nuclear missiles from outside the line.

So, what does Homeline want accomplished and what resources does the Agent in Charge have to do it with?


Hans

[Anthony]

Defeating the robots in Reign of Steel is pretty much a matter of Plot Device, guerrilla forces without external support, against the military forces of an industrialized state, pretty much just lose. Particularly since genocide is a viable option for the ZoneMinds. Given that, it's really a question of what plot device you want; I'd be tempted to steal from Terminator movies, but that's me.