[Ultra-Tech] Infantry drones and robot gun carriages

[Agemegos]

Let's talk about infantry drones, infantry robots, and autonomous self-propelled gun-carriages for infantry heavy weapons.

By "infantry" I mean the stuff that sneaks about in cover because it would get slaughtered by armour or artillery if it got seen out in the open; stuff for which concealment and cover are vital; stuff that thrives of fieldcraft. Fast vehicles with big guns are aviation or armour; stuff for which it's extreme range is like a shield of steel is artillery or ortillery. I'm here to talk about ordnance that is small enough to hide in a culvert or go up a passenger lift, light enough to stand on an upper floor in a residential building, and quiet enough to perform an infantry patrol or infiltrate a firebase. Ultra-Tech armour, aviation, and aircav, artillery, ortillery, and WMD are very fine topics, but I think they would do best in their own threads.

So: nothing heavier than about half a tonne, and best keep it under 200 kg. Nothing that can't get under a 1-metre overhead. Nothing that can't get over a 1-metre fence. Nothing that can't get up or down a flight of fire-stairs. Nothing that can't advance at at least 1 km/hr without audible sound.

In my setting it is a war crime to use autonomous killing machines, considered as equivalent to using indiscriminate weapons such as landmines. So in my setting all this stuff gets to be dedicated AI (see UT p.25) that cannot fire on a probable person without direct orders from an authorised person. (In colonial militaries "unless someone accidentally or inappropriately removed this safety plate, which you must never do because that would be illegal".) But I don't think it would make a lot of difference if in some other settings the same chassis were driven by non-volitional or volitional AIs. So if anyone wants to discuss volitional variants that is fine with me.

My setting doesn't run to superscience on the ground (there is FTL in space), and I consider some things that are widely accepted (the more perfervid visions of nanotech and nanofac, basically) to be superscience. So my setting is basically TL10 hard SF with some conservative, some radical, and some high-biotech features (see UT p.9). And that's what I'm going to concentrate on though I won't mind superscience, radical-hard, and high-biotech subthreads forming. If you want to chat about TL9 or TL11 you are very welcome.