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Old 07-26-2013, 09:06 AM   #31
lexington
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
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.
Couldn't a metal body act like a Faraday cage?
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Old 07-26-2013, 09:17 AM   #32
Anthony
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
A swarmbot without any conductive material in it's body is more likely to be a genetically engineered insect than a "real" robot.
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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Old 07-26-2013, 09:40 AM   #33
martinl
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Brett View Post
How effectively can ECM (and EMP or jammer warheads) keep things foggy?
EMP can kill the heck out of unshielded things, but EMP shielding is not hard. Additionally, if you posit wide area attacks that kill small electronic things, your high-tech infantry is similarly affected. At most, you move up the minimum size of a long lived sensor platform. Expendable munition platforms have a short lifetime anyway.

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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Old 07-26-2013, 09:42 AM   #34
martinl
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Radio communication and EMP resistance are pretty fundamentally incompatible.
However, unless the EMP is constant, radio equipment can be kept in a shielded compartment that only opens for brief bust transmissions.
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Old 07-26-2013, 09:43 AM   #35
martinl
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
A swarmbot without any conductive material in it's body is more likely to be a genetically engineered insect than a "real" robot.
At TL 10, this may not be a "real" distinction.
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Old 07-26-2013, 10:11 AM   #36
lwcamp
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by martinl View Post
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.)
Prism jamming could work if lasers only operate on one specific wavelength, or if they always operate outside of the visible spectrum (and this latter case is still not terribly plausible, given what I've read op on for scattering by small particles. Selective scattering of a narrowband wavelength is more plausible, on the other hand). If you have tunable lasers that can operate in the visible, jamming the lasers is equivalent to smoke - you will not be able to see through it either.

Luke
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Old 07-26-2013, 10:37 AM   #37
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Prism jamming could work if lasers only operate on one specific wavelength, or if they always operate outside of the visible spectrum (and this latter case is still not terribly plausible, given what I've read op on for scattering by small particles. Selective scattering of a narrowband wavelength is more plausible, on the other hand). If you have tunable lasers that can operate in the visible, jamming the lasers is equivalent to smoke - you will not be able to see through it either.

Luke
However, if long-range precision attacks directed by pervasive spotting units are a sufficient problem, that might be the necessary for exposed units. Infantry maneuvering only inside of smoke cover where they can't see or be seen beyond short rifle range at the outside, preventing effective sniping and making bombardment or suppression fire blind.

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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Old 07-26-2013, 10:47 AM   #38
Anthony
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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However, unless the EMP is constant, radio equipment can be kept in a shielded compartment that only opens for brief bust transmissions.
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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Old 07-26-2013, 11:07 AM   #39
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by lexington View Post
Couldn't a metal body act like a Faraday cage?
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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Old 07-26-2013, 11:32 AM   #40
Sunrunners_Fire
 
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Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
However, if long-range precision attacks directed by pervasive spotting units are a sufficient problem, that might be the necessary for exposed units. Infantry maneuvering only inside of smoke cover where they can't see or be seen beyond short rifle range at the outside, preventing effective sniping and making bombardment or suppression fire blind.

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.
Then you simply drop artillery/ortillery/bombs on the smoke. You can see the smoke even if you can't see what is inside it. And if you can see it, you can kill it.
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