Supersonic Swords and Gun-Kata

[Jub]

Ghetto Edit:

Besides, even if we assume that advances in computer technology slow to a crawl and we only see advances to the 4th order of magnitude over what we have today, that's still massive enough that you need to take it into account in your world building. Even if we assume that software eats a lot of that extra power up, we can still picture drones and automated systems that are in the range of one hundred to one thousand times better than what we have today. So that vehicle that can only just barely complete the DARPA Grand Challenge can now drive it better than a human or that humanoid robot can now display agility and power that put Olympians to shame. These are things that need to be taken into account.

Toss in the expected growth of our knowledge of physics in areas known about today and add to that the implications of this magitech shield and we might wonder why there's a man in the suit at all. Or we might wonder why the war is even being fought when the resources we might fight over are plentiful among the asteroids.

[krakonfour]

Formless has a point about technical details getting in the way of enjoyment. I am trying to suggest only things that could potentially add to enjoyment (e.g. ways that the defenses of an armored man might be bypassed by clever foes). Or things that allow you to understand an unfamiliar topic better, so that you can use that understanding to enhance your story (e.g. nuclear targeteering; most people just assume that the natural targets for nuclear missiles are big cities, which isn't strictly true).

For now, there is no story, so there is no objective other than a global vision of how the fighting should be. If the vision is unattainable, then it has to be modified. And yes, I'm still learning.

I may be failing, of course. As everyone here knows by now, I can get stupidly pedantic.[/Quote]

Really? Failed to notice.

Solution: thicker grenade casing, notched for fragmentation.

That's a solution with a lot of drawbacks. It's easier to detect, you can carry less of them and it relies on explosive power, not fragmentation (the fragments are easily defeated by the level of armor here). A thicket casing would just hinder it. One solution would be to armor the detonator mechanism in a metal casing and compartimentalize the explosuve charge. That way the explosive charge won't get blasted apart, and the primer is harder to damage.

Solution: throw several grenades- the defense system can only carry so much ammunition in those pre-mounted "pop up a grenade and blow it up" racks. Trophy uses buckshot- which is in many respects more effective, but requires a traversable mount that can be swung to fire at a specific angle against a specific target.

Some type of MRSI? Could work. The ammunition cost per kill would explode, and any movement of the user during this time would expose the grenades to a fresh face of the ADs.
Speaking of buckshot, there's still a way to utilize them. All you have to do is multiply the number of barrels. Miniature barrels could be pointed in all directions, an loaded with shotgun shells like in the Metal Storm gun. No reload needed, just discard the roman candle once you're done.

True, but having to actively think about whether or not your defense should be on makes it more likely that people will screw up, especially if they are fatigued by extended combat.

We'd have fresh young soldiers leaving the setting on 'max' nearly all the time then, and risk running out of ammo in the middle of a gunfight. Veterans would use the 'max' setting less, and would survive longer.

In fact, I can see the newer soldiers having their ADS slaved to the commander's one. Since communications don't need a dedicated person anymore, the 'commander' could be the one to both establish the unit's tactics and optimal suit settings. If the commander gets killed, the young soldiers would be trained to 'max and roll'. Max to shoot down everything; roll to keep presenting fresh faces of the ADS system whenever the alarm sounds, compensating the loss of defensive ammunition.

In real life there have been cases of ships getting sunk by antiship missiles because the crew of the ship shut off the missile alert warning to make the noise go away. Yes, its stupid, but it happens. Just something to think about.

Since it's a combat situation (being shot at), I can assume that it's the stress which dumbed them down.

Once things start exploding in the area, buildings become structurally less sound. Also, as Skimmer notes, unlike a moving vehicle, a walking person has very uneven ground pressure, because sometimes your weight is all on your heel or toe, rather than being evenly distributed across your foot.

According to my calculations, unless the suit starts sprinting, then it can go wherever a wheeled military vehicle can, and further, if it walks carefully.

Consider the possible consequences of such a clusterfuck. Note that one way to clarify the situation is with air defense lasers- something you may not have considered before. Lasers ignore your force-screens, and an aircraft cannot easily be armored to resist sustained fire from a laser beam.

Consequences. Humm.
-For one, if lasers are prevalent, then terrain would be extremely important. Lasers are line of sight weapons, so anything blocking them is a suitable defense. This would include mountains, hills, depressions in the terrain and such. We'd have aircraft skimming the ground all the time, and very few fights would happen high in the sky.
-Because of the above, climbing rates, high altitude performance and all that snazz would be washed out by flight control accuracy and thrust power.
-Lasers mean being hit the moment you crest a ridge. Reaction times would give way to full computer control the moment you are hit. While this might advocate for pilotless craft, it is human judgment that can best utilize the terrain.
-Lasers are energy intensive. How much the craft can produce and store becomes an important parameter.
-Large mirrors are not very aerodynamic. They are best placed at the back, where the current jets engines end. It'd be funny to see pilots wanting the enemy to be on their tail.
-Missiles would be needed for BVR fights. If they can be shot down, then the number of missiles an aircraft is expected to carry would need to be increased greatly.
-Do a barrel roll! actually works.

Moreover, since such technologies are already under development today, at least basic systems (whatever capability is implied by "basic") will be mature technology by 2100; at least as mature as active defense systems for armored vehicles. This may be the Indian countermeasure to Chinese aerial drone/transport spam.

I'm doing calculations on potential laser capabilities. Finding how much damage they make or how much armor they can penetrate is easy. Deriving power, cooling and size requirements is just another step. Accuracy however is not something I have much information on.
For example, in my previous laser-tank example, the 200kW beam focused by a 1m diameter mirror has a spot size of 0.17mm at 5km and 0.04mm at 1km. It can go through aluminium at a rate of 5 and 725m/s

That's crazy effective, right?
Well, take into consideration that atmospheric conditions deviating the beam by a tenth of a millimeter requires it to restart the digging process all over again. A few bumps, heat warping of the mirror or whatevers, and the amount of surface area the beam wanders over becomes many multiples of the spot size.
If you spread the beam to a more reasonable 1.7cm wide spot to cushion out the beam jumping around, then your penetration falls to 5mm/s.

Speaking of drones... why not? What stops you from having 100000 Chinese guys sitting in office buildings in Beijing, remotely directing 100000 combat drones in Pakistan? That's exactly how we're doing it now. Granted there are limits to that, but it's far from impossible.

Are you telling me that India firing a few ASAT and anti-radiation missiles will completely destroy China's drone force in the area?

I still think it should present a real problem for the guy who tries to command far from the scene of battle. It's dramatically interesting and presents you with a lot of storytelling options: you can pit the 'ultramodern' style of war where everything is controlled virtually from five thousand kilometers away, against the 'traditional' style with men on the ground who are trusted with the initiative to understand what is happening and react appropriately. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.

The 'tradional' forces' main objective would then be to either set up a powerful enough jamming device to blanket the area, or destroy enough communication relays to reduce the bandwidth, and thus the number of drones active. In fact, they might not have to fight any enemy forces head on at all.... interesting indeed.

If screen-generator production is a bottleneck... well, each SAM takes at most two screen generators. Each soldier takes one.

If India has the means to train an army commensurate with its population, and equip them all with force-screens, then India could produce tens of thousands of SAMs and barely make a dent in its overall screen-generator production capacity.

Indeed, putting screens on Air Force planes and SAMs would probably take priority over putting screens on infantrymen. Putting your infantry in these powered armor suits will make them pretty hard to kill whether they have personal screens or not- they're still tactically effective without the screen.

Anti-air missiles are NOT effective without the screen, not against an opponent that possesses screen technology.

Damn. Hadn't thought of it in terms of generator production.
Well....
It just means that I'll have to get the Indian airforce overwhelmed by simply being an inferior force, and not by some gimmick.

So India launches the invasion without making a backup plan for "what happens if China sends reinforcements?" That seems very unwise. If nothing else, even if India totally annihilates the armies in Pakistan, they have to assume China won't automatically give up right then and there.

There could be some backstabbing involved. India could negotiate with China for the latter to leave Pakistan in return for some economic concessions, and then attacks Pakistan, and finds Chinese forces that it decides it can overwhelm. In fact, this could be a good retro-active casus belli.
If India conquers Pakistan as it intended, it would have a very large force left over that would set up defenses against Chinese reinforcement. They could gain control over the mountain path and install laser anti-air defenses and whatnot all over the country, as well as capture the airfields and so on. It would have an overwhelming advantage over China if it tries to take back Pakistan.

Stage 6: India wins. China pulls back its last forces, sets its last minefields and debates whether to allow Pakistan to nuke India. Decides not to.
Stage 7: India cannot keep Pakistan, and retreats, having lost thousands.

How did you go from (6) to (7)?[/Quote]

India has conquered Pakistani territory by concentrating its forces in a sweeping frontline. The actual number of soldiers, ammunition and planes remaining is low. If China counter-attacks with a fresh force from the mainland, it would crush the remaining Indians. Also, the Indian invaders are in no position to stop Pakistani rebellion and guerrilla raids from demoralizing the army and sabotaging the defenses. It would be a wise move to retreat, at least closer to the Indian borders.

It's no worse than the existing needs a SAM site has, such as a big truck-mounted radar antenna which is itself powered by a large generator. Basically, you can't fire up a heavy SAM site without making it potentially visible to the enemy; the point of air defense is that the enemy must take serious risks to get anywhere near your air defense sites.

Doesn't the current methodology for air warfare dictate that the attacker first tries to locate SAM sites by satellite and spy info first, then try and clear a path for the attack craft with missile and artillery strikes rather than try and blast past them?

Light SAMs like Stingers can be fired up without tipping off the enemy that you're there, but they have much lower performance.

With the necessity for a large power generator and field deployers for each AA weapon, these light missiles, like Stingers, might be completely phased out, or their price and size would explode.

Pulsing seems a fairly likely response.

If done correctly, it can increase the rate of penetration by 40 times. However, the beam spot has to be smaller than the crater, and the entire train of pulses has to hit the same spot, and both are things I'm positing as unlikely in a ground warfare scenario.

I'm finding it extremely hard to find any info on current laser accuracy. Laser target pointers were my best bet, but I found zero numbers for ground-based variants, and only slant ranges for airborne variants.

Also, look into things like diode lasers.

Those and solid state lasers in general seem to be less fragile, volatile and more efficient than gas and liquid lasers. The problem is, they get expensive for high-power applications, and are hard to cool down (unlike gas in a cavity). While their theoretical performance is high (70%), their current efficiency is 26% at most. Chemical lasers provide very easy high power beams, and are easy to cool, but their lasing medium gets used up fast... but hey, no huge generator to lug around!

...Wait what? How does the screen "absorb" the energy of explosions and things as heat again?

The kinetic impact energy is shared between the projectile and the generator, minus whatever is discarded into the bracing and other stuff. The volume of the shield remains constant during impact. When the shield shrinks however, the energy is contains rushed back to the generator and burns it up.

Also, it would have to absorb those 9.8 gigajoules very quickly, and the risk of burning out physical apparatus is very serious. We're talking about enough heat to literally melt hundreds of kilograms of metal here, energy releases comparable to the explosion of a large, heavy bomb, unless I'm doing my estimates badly, badly wrong.

Melt hundreds of kilograms of metal? Umm... that's just enough energy to boil 30kg of water from 1 degrees C. Water is a cool thing, after all.

It costs 2.8MJ per m3.
I was thinking more of protecting the heart of a city, where the civilians would rush to in case of a nuclear attack alarm, and where the rich people already live.

If the incoming warhead is targeted on the city center, those defensive screens will not protect the city from being ignited by flash.[/Quote]

Do you think there'll ever be 'nuclear-proofed cities', with building coated against nuclear flash?

Also, if you try and sound an alarm that tells everyone in the suburbs of a city to rush to the city center, you will not get everyone under screens safely. Not even nearly everyone- heck, if you tried this in real life you'd face the reality that not everyone even has easy access to a vehicle allowing them to evacuate, i.e. schoolchildren at schools with no buses parked outside.

I did mention stepping up nuclear drills and requiring police-state levels of organization....

Nuclear attacks

Didn't know all that. Thanks.

Depending on how the generator is affected by blast, its components may just be physically crushed and destroyed no matter how much shock-absorption you use. Is there some single piece of the generator that receives the momentum transfer, or is it magically transferred uniformly to the whole generator and all its components?

Using the electromagnet analogy, the forces would act on the field emitter (iron core of the magnet), which is only one component of the generator, but also easy to brace (it's a big chunk of metal).

Also, putting the generator underground means its zone of effect must be vastly increased, which means it is far less likely that you'll be able to get the screen up and running before an attack.

I said it would be pushed out, so it'll create a rather flat bubble direct over the generator, above ground.

No, because ultimately your attempts to leverage the scarcity backfire upon you.

You're forcing other people to figure out ways to do without (e.g. for materials required to make microchips, people will respond to scarcity by using fewer microchips, using electronics less for entertainment, and relying more heavily on devices that hook up by wires to a single central processor).

But the thing is, China would only attempt it if the high tech industry reached a point where it cannot compensate for a cut in rare metal supply. The consumers would be forced to buy Chinese metals, and as I see it, it is much easier to adjust the prices than to retool the whole industry. The demand will remain strong.

During the OPEP crisis, we didn't all switch to electric cars, did we?

You're limiting the scale on which your own mines can profitably extract and export the resource.

You're encouraging other people to madly step up their own production capacity and make yours obsolete.

In general, the longer your attempt at price gouging goes on, the more the market will try to find ways around your gouging. It isn't perfectly effective, but it happens.

China's objective is to
a-ruin US and Euro economies
b-replace its dollars with yuans

If both of these are completed, then it can drop the price heist without having achieved a permanent change in the way the commodity is dealt with. In fact, the mere news of China scooping up worldwide production of rare metals and threatening producers could send the markets into a buying spree of any metals the Chinese haven't gotten a hold of. Meanwhile, China is dumping dollars into the worldwide market by buying already available metals at any price. The US, especially as it becomes ever more high-tech dependent in the following decades, would face an uphill battle. The industry it relies on is facing a spike in construction costs, and the currency it is buying the materials with is devaluating rapidly. If it refuses to buy, it kills off its sole money producer.

China might not even take years of global rare earth starvation to complete its objectives.

I'm not sure the screen is two-directional. If it is, then you're right, and the obvious response is to screen the missile's warhead, let the warhead penetrate the shield, and use the shield closing back down on the missile afterward to trigger the fuze.

The screen is two dimensional. You cannot shoot out of your own shield.

If it isn't, then the screen will not prevent rocket exhaust from leaving. Nor, properly tuned, will it stop the airstream- we already know the screen CAN be set not to block air molecules, so presumably it can also be set not to block wind, perhaps even supersonic wind. It's not like we really need the screen for its protective powers in this case, so we can afford to do things like that.

An even simpler method is to extend the exhaust tube outside of the shield.

[krakonfour]

Ghetto Edit:

Besides, even if we assume that advances in computer technology slow to a crawl and we only see advances to the 4th order of magnitude over what we have today, that's still massive enough that you need to take it into account in your world building. Even if we assume that software eats a lot of that extra power up, we can still picture drones and automated systems that are in the range of one hundred to one thousand times better than what we have today. So that vehicle that can only just barely complete the DARPA Grand Challenge can now drive it better than a human or that humanoid robot can now display agility and power that put Olympians to shame. These are things that need to be taken into account.

Toss in the expected growth of our knowledge of physics in areas known about today and add to that the implications of this magitech shield and we might wonder why there's a man in the suit at all. Or we might wonder why the war is even being fought when the resources we might fight over are plentiful among the asteroids.

This setting has drone suits, drone aircraft, advanced computer/machine interfaces that allow the user to control the suit's movements with thought suggestions, and a market that has an extreme demand for rare earth metals that go... into producing computers.

There's a man in a suit because having a self-driving car or a robot athlete doesn't presuppose a conscious, tactically-thinking level of AI technology.

[Purple]

How do the shields interact with EMP? Especially the non atomic kind that you can actually fit inside a mortar bomb or RPG warhead.

[krakonfour]

How do the shields interact with EMP? Especially the non atomic kind that you can actually fit inside a mortar bomb or RPG warhead.

Shields do not block EMP waves, but they are rather sturdy when facing such radiation.

[Simon_Jester]

You can't ignore Moore's law when writing a story set in the future, just like you can't ignore the knock on effects of the new technologies introduced as magitech.

I would not propose to ignore it, but I do propose that we cannot assume it will go on forever.

Please try to understand that Moore's Law is NOT a law of nature, it is an empirical projection from current trends.

We could have made similar graphs 'proving' that the speed of human transportation had been growing exponentially from the 1820s to the 1950s... but if we used that same projection in 1950 to "prove" that by 2020 people would be using hypersonic rocketplanes and equally hypersonic bullet-subways to get around, or that typical highway speeds would be two hundred miles an hour, we'd be wrong.

Will computer technology continue to advance? Yes. Will it advance indefinitely, with new physical breakthroughs being made "as needed" to preserve the rate of computer advances? We have absolutely no way of guaranteeing that.

Ghetto Edit:

Besides, even if we assume that advances in computer technology slow to a crawl and we only see advances to the 4th order of magnitude over what we have today, that's still massive enough that you need to take it into account in your world building.

This is fair- although we may well find that a lot of the technical challenges in building highly sophisticated automation wind up revolving around the brains of the programmers, not around the capabilities of the computer. The main reason robot cars are still not safe for the open road is that they don't react well to stimuli they weren't programmed to cope with, even if they have the sensors and navigation software to be very effective at not crashing into walls and at actually knowing which way to go to get to a distant destination.

If the programmers can't come through, drone technology will remain rather limited no matter how fast the underlying hardware works.

---

For now, there is no story, so there is no objective other than a global vision of how the fighting should be. If the vision is unattainable, then it has to be modified. And yes, I'm still learning.

My suggestion is that you persistently sit down and think, whenever you come to a conclusion in your setting: "how could this be made into an interesting story, or part of a story?"

For example, "we can screen small things, but not big things" is simply a brute fact when taken by itself. But can it be made interesting? Well, for one, your characters are going to be surprised and impressed by large screened installations, reflecting on how much power or persistence it must have taken to create such a large screen-bubble. For another, you may well see, in-story, innovative characters being the first to try screening a large object with numerous smaller generators, and having to fiddle and jury-rig a lot to make it work properly.

-Large mirrors are not very aerodynamic. They are best placed at the back, where the current jets engines end. It'd be funny to see pilots wanting the enemy to be on their tail.
-Missiles would be needed for BVR fights. If they can be shot down, then the number of missiles an aircraft is expected to carry would need to be increased greatly.

Please look up existing airplanes armed with lasers for more reference material on this context.

That's crazy effective, right?
Well, take into consideration that atmospheric conditions deviating the beam by a tenth of a millimeter requires it to restart the digging process all over again. A few bumps, heat warping of the mirror or whatevers, and the amount of surface area the beam wanders over becomes many multiples of the spot size.
If you spread the beam to a more reasonable 1.7cm wide spot to cushion out the beam jumping around, then your penetration falls to 5mm/s.

How many of these things can be controlled for by fast-acting, fast-reacting hardware and software? As Jub points out, computers are going to get a lot smarter and quicker in the future, especially for relatively simple tasks like "establish feedback mechanism to keep beam trained on target."

Speaking of drones... why not? What stops you from having 100000 Chinese guys sitting in office buildings in Beijing, remotely directing 100000 combat drones in Pakistan? That's exactly how we're doing it now. Granted there are limits to that, but it's far from impossible.

Are you telling me that India firing a few ASAT and anti-radiation missiles will completely destroy China's drone force in the area?

China wouldn't try to get away with doing it that way against a competent modern opponent, so...

1) The drones do still need onboard software control, but this control may well be limited. Sort of like how if the chain of command just ceased in a real military, individual soldiers would probably sit tight and try to defend their own territory, but would be a lot less likely to do complicated things like organize offensives or used combined arms coordination between different branches.

2) Satellites can be force-screened, yes? All you need is an onboard solar/nuclear plant to power them- can it be done?

3) Large aircraft, screened against long range missile attacks, become a good choice for relaying communications in this setting. The screen allows them to safely fly high and slow above your side's airspace, without being an easy target for enemy ASAT weapons or missiles.

The 'tradional' forces' main objective would then be to either set up a powerful enough jamming device to blanket the area, or destroy enough communication relays to reduce the bandwidth, and thus the number of drones active. In fact, they might not have to fight any enemy forces head on at all.... interesting indeed.

Alternatively, they might try to deliberately make the battlefield "complicated," so that the attention and thoughts of the enemy armchair commander are spread too thin and he misses something important.

Think about one of the things that people complain about in strategy games: the AI can direct its soldiers in more than one place at one time (say, attack your base and defend against an attack on its base simultaneously), while you can only view one part of the map and command one unit of troops at a time.

If a single enemy general is commanding a huge force of drones, he's effectively playing Starcraft against an AI where every individual unit is aware of the situation and will do exactly what it sees fit to ruin his day.

The way you combat this is to give the general a bigger and bigger staff who can keep closer tabs on each little piece of the tactical picture, while the general concentrates on "big picture." But if you're doing this to economize on manpower and relying on the drones' autonomous intelligence, you're still at least somewhat limited by the coordination problem- you have, say, one guy per four or ten or 100 drones or whatever.

Damn. Hadn't thought of it in terms of generator production.
Well....
It just means that I'll have to get the Indian airforce overwhelmed by simply being an inferior force, and not by some gimmick.

Perhaps

Also, always think in terms of production capacity when talking about what kinds of military equipment is or is not available. It's a huge issue in real life, and adds versimilitude when you put it into a story, by forcing people to make responsible decisions that have the ring of realism, and to live with the consequences of those decisions.

For example, if screen generators cost ten thousand dollars apiece (in 2013 dollars) and a soldier accidentally breaks one, he gets a royal chewing-out. If they cost a hundred thousand dollars, he may well get kicked out of the army if his actions are found to be irresponsible enough. If they cost one thousand dollars, depending on the kind of army he's in, it may just get shrugged off as "shit happens."

Also, perhaps one of the reasons why the Indians lose air superiority is that their laser weapons are more crude, so that they can only mount effective anti-air lasers on fixed ground installations, while the Chinese have them on their own combat aircraft? Thus, the Indians cannot redeploy air defense lasers to cover a fast-moving battlefield, nor can they use their own laser planes to penetrate Chinese airspace, while the Chinese can rapidly redeploy lasers to cover any place they wish?

This is also a fairly realistic example of how being the lower-tech power in real life hurts you when the tech gap is narrow. Instead of "there's this whole class of weapons they have and we don't," you get "we both have these weapons, but theirs are light and portable while ours are big and bulky and clumsy to set up"

Stage 6: India wins. China pulls back its last forces, sets its last minefields and debates whether to allow Pakistan to nuke India. Decides not to.
Stage 7: India cannot keep Pakistan, and retreats, having lost thousands.

How did you go from (6) to (7)?

India has conquered Pakistani territory by concentrating its forces in a sweeping frontline. The actual number of soldiers, ammunition and planes remaining is low. If China counter-attacks with a fresh force from the mainland, it would crush the remaining Indians. Also, the Indian invaders are in no position to stop Pakistani rebellion and guerrilla raids from demoralizing the army and sabotaging the defenses. It would be a wise move to retreat, at least closer to the Indian borders. [/quote]Can't the Indians effectively bottleneck the Chinese forces trying to counterattack in Pakistan by taking advantage of the problems with their transportation network?

Come to think of it, since you DON'T want this war to have decisively altered the balance of power as far as I can tell...

Why not actually have it both ways? The Indians are able to temporarily delay any Chinese buildup to a counteroffensive by striking at the railways and highways China counts on to supply forces in Pakistan, but the Indians are badly overextended and dealing with tens of millions of hostile Pakistanis, a considerable fraction of whom become guerillas, support for guerillas, or even suicide bombers (there would probably be Pakistani suicide bombers if you invaded them today, anyway).

Eventually, the Indians and Chinese realize that this war is stupidly expensive and sign an agreement demilitarizing Pakistan and in general backing off before either side finds the temptation to go nuclear irresistible.

Doesn't the current methodology for air warfare dictate that the attacker first tries to locate SAM sites by satellite and spy info first, then try and clear a path for the attack craft with missile and artillery strikes rather than try and blast past them?

Where possible, yes- but you may not always be able to get that kind of information, so there are doctrines for fighting through an air defense network with planes. Look up "wild weasel."

Light SAMs like Stingers can be fired up without tipping off the enemy that you're there, but they have much lower performance.

With the necessity for a large power generator and field deployers for each AA weapon, these light missiles, like Stingers, might be completely phased out, or their price and size would explode.

They would really only remain effective against aircraft the enemy doesn't see fit to screen properly on account of them being deemed too expendable. Possible examples might be low-speed drones and certain kinds of cruise missile.

Also, it would have to absorb those 9.8 gigajoules very quickly, and the risk of burning out physical apparatus is very serious. We're talking about enough heat to literally melt hundreds of kilograms of metal here, energy releases comparable to the explosion of a large, heavy bomb, unless I'm doing my estimates badly, badly wrong.

Melt hundreds of kilograms of metal? Umm... that's just enough energy to boil 30kg of water from 1 degrees C. Water is a cool thing, after all.

Water has roughly ten times the specific heat capacity of metal. The problem is that the actual parts of the generator are presumably made out of metals or plastics, so if a huge amount of energy is dumped into them all at once, it may damage them before the onboard cooling system can drain off the surplus heat.

It costs 2.8MJ per m3.
I was thinking more of protecting the heart of a city, where the civilians would rush to in case of a nuclear attack alarm, and where the rich people already live.

If the incoming warhead is targeted on the city center, those defensive screens will not protect the city from being ignited by flash.

Do you think there'll ever be 'nuclear-proofed cities', with building coated against nuclear flash?[/quote]Only a society highly prepared for nuclear attack, anticipating nuclear attack, could build them, and it would probably be more economical and effective to build active defenses against nuclear attack- one other thing that's going to advance over the next hundred years is ABM technology.

My honest impression is that nuclear war remains frightening enough that, rather than obsess over being able to fight one and win, most nations put most of their energy into:
1) Avoiding the need to fight one in the first place (i.e. don't piss off a nuclear power), and
2) Deter any possible nuclear attack by threatening retaliation.

Also, if you try and sound an alarm that tells everyone in the suburbs of a city to rush to the city center, you will not get everyone under screens safely. Not even nearly everyone- heck, if you tried this in real life you'd face the reality that not everyone even has easy access to a vehicle allowing them to evacuate, i.e. schoolchildren at schools with no buses parked outside.

I did mention stepping up nuclear drills and requiring police-state levels of organization....

Drills alone don't solve this problem, nor does regimentation. The simple fact is that a modernish city does not have the transportation facilities to suddenly pick up all citizens on the outskirts and move them several kilometers on ten or twenty minutes' notice. A lot of people are going to be abandoned in place by any such civil defense scheme.

The logical counter to THAT is of course bomb shelters in or around individual buildings, but you're still dealing with the unpleasant reality that saving the population's life in case of nuclear war only helps if your infrastructure is in good enough shape to feed them afterwards, and it's the infrastructure that is really targeted here.

I said it would be pushed out, so it'll create a rather flat bubble direct over the generator, above ground.

So only the open-air volume protected by the screen costs energy to create? You don't need as much energy to create a 1 km 'sphere' that is mostly underground as you would to create a 1 km 'sphere' suspended in midair?

But the thing is, China would only attempt it if the high tech industry reached a point where it cannot compensate for a cut in rare metal supply. The consumers would be forced to buy Chinese metals, and as I see it, it is much easier to adjust the prices than to retool the whole industry. The demand will remain strong.

During the OPEP crisis, we didn't all switch to electric cars, did we?

If it had gone on for five years, we would have. It's a big risk to take as a way of making a power grab.

China's objective is to
a-ruin US and Euro economies
b-replace its dollars with yuans

On one side note, I think you really should consult with an economist on this part, though there's none in this thread. Also, I think you need to think very seriously about whether the Chinese are coming across as cartoon villains here. So far, China has shown no interest in actually sabotaging anyone else's economy, because they themselves are trying to develop wealth by trading with others. Beggaring your trading partner is bad for your long-term trading prospects.

I'm not sure the screen is two-directional. If it is, then you're right, and the obvious response is to screen the missile's warhead, let the warhead penetrate the shield, and use the shield closing back down on the missile afterward to trigger the fuze.

The screen is two dimensional. You cannot shoot out of your own shield.

Nor, because of the chargeup time, can you "flicker" it to fire through a gap very reliably.

That actually seriously limits the applications. Aircraft may be unshieldable now, because you have to somehow ensure that the exhaust from their engines doesn't just beat against the inside of the shield for no net propulsive effect. Screened aircraft can't fire missiles because the missiles will crash into the plane's screen forcefully. Infantrymen can't fire out of their own screen, or 'over the shoulder' of a screened comrade, except by making very specific physical moves to extend a weapon beyond the screen.

An even simpler method is to extend the exhaust tube outside of the shield.

Very hard to do this for an aerodynamic aircraft body. They don't have long tailpipes like a car does.

[Formless]

I would not propose to ignore it, but I do propose that we cannot assume it will go on forever.

Please try to understand that Moore's Law is NOT a law of nature, it is an empirical projection from current trends.

To elaborate, Moore's law specifically states that the number of transistors per integrated circuit will double every two years (give or take). The increase in speed and memory is a consequence of this, but the law itself is not actually about speed or processing power.

The obvious limiting factor is miniaturization. At a certain point you can't shrink a transistor any further, and thus can't fit any more transistors onto a given chip. It will definitely happen once the transistors hit the atomic level, but quantum tunneling is already predicted to be a problem by 2018 or sooner, as it theoretically should cause circuits to short out. At that point, to get any more power you need to find a fundamentally different computing architecture, like, say, quantum computing (which currently requires massive refrigeration units to create a very small number of qubits, and I don't see this changing soon).

In fact, slowdowns in Moore's law are already being predicted starting this year for the doubling to happen every three years, not two.

[Zeropoint]

While their theoretical performance is high (70%), their current efficiency is 26% at most.

That's not really much of an argument against their use, given that a) as you note, that's their current efficiency, and we can expect it to improve over time since it's not a mature technology, and b) it's not a terrible level of efficiency already--firearms have efficiencies in the low 30s (per the Wikipedia article) and we still find them to be eminently suitable as weapons on a wide variety of scales.

[Simon_Jester]

The catch is that with a gun, the energy that goes into propelling the bullet is stored in a very compact, stable form- explosives are really good at storing large amounts of energy to be liberated on demand. So needing three times more energy in the form of explosives than would 'in principle' be needed if all that energy went into firing the bullet is... not that much of a problem, really.

Lasers require electrical power, and that presents problems, because electrical power has different strengths and weaknesses. It's great for stable storage in small quantities, it's great for being produced continuously by a fixed generator, but it's lousy for storage in vast quantities at high density. Thus, doubling the power requirement of a laser weapon, and therefore doubling the amount of machinery and combustible fuel required to operate it, can really impede the utility of the weapon.

As long as you have an application where laser efficiency and reliability is high enough, fine, you're good. But you're restricted in terms of what applications you can implement at all, because of the places where you physically can't carry a laser powerful enough to do the job you intended it to do.

[Formless]

Break one rule, insert one magitech device, and you've opened the road for ALL the rules to be broken and ALL the handwaving you could wish for.
Is that what you're saying?

No, that too is horseshit. This is a persistent problem with your posts addressing me, which we call "quote spaghetti": its bad form to quote single lines without first reading all the way through a paragraph to get an understand of context or the full argument. In context, I am saying that an author's purpose is to write a good story. Worldbuilding doesn't always help that, and can even get in the way or slow the writing process to a halt. Its not just sci-fi writers either-- I absolutely cannot stand Tolkien because his books were really just written to show off his big, overworked world of Middle Earth. The reason the Lord of the Rings trilogy is so long is because what should be a simple story of endurance is instead taken off the rails repeatedly so that Tolkein can show his audience places and things that ultimately don't matter. The best example, which few Tolkien fans can argue against, would be the encounter with Tom Bombadil who was excised completely from the movies because he simply feels out of place with the tone of the story, though not necessarily the setting. People would be left wondering "why not have Tom Bombadil take the Ring to Mordor if he doesn't seem to be affected by its magic?" It can be explained easily, and in the book the Council of Elrond considers it and explains why it wouldn't work, but that's all dead air that could have been avoided by simply not including the character in the story. Which is what the people who wrote the script for the movies wisely did.

And even non-speculative ficton writers can fall into this trap, since they have to do research on the locals they set the story in or the time period. Speculative fiction has it worse, though, because of how much more you feel you have to do.

So there are limits, but they are story related and are often the same constraints that force you to limit how much detail goes into your worldbuilding.

And that makes it full of shit?

It presents itself as a tool for writers, but if you have read enough works that are written by writers for writers they have an entirely different focus. Orson Scott Card, for example, has a book for science fiction and fantasy writers and he deals with the issue of worldbuilding quite differently from Nyrath's "all the hard science I could find and as much pretentious arguments about what OUGHT to be realistic or should NOT be featured in your story" (like stealth in space-- a topic which has been disputed, and ultimately the board decided him to be overestimating the abilities or usefulness of telescopes at defeating stealth techniques at range)

I hate pretension more than I hate writers who bullshit their physics and technology. Every writer has to allow for fundamental conceits like alternate history, fictional places, character shields, etc. but only a few will tell you that there are conceits you should never use or you aren't writing "good" genre fiction.

On that note, since you asked, pretension is also one of the reasons that I attack your presentation of weapons and armor, because you have presented this as if it were a realistic extrapolation of the powered armor and the shielding you propose as a conceit. Equip your character's mini-mecha with swords if you like, but don't tell me that its superior to use one than a bayonet on a rifle when I already showed the swiftness with which a bayonet can move and find targets-- much faster than any sword.

The other reason I argue those things is that your readers live in a physical world, and that means that if they come across a description of physical actions those actions need to make physical sense: and if the character is human they need to act like one. So your mecha can jump (or more likely, use a jetpack)? Then why don't the users use the jump-packs to leap over each other's lines of pikes? Your characters can make pistols powerful enough to pierce armor? Okay, then how powerful would a rifle be by comparison? And how does the user avoid having this happen to them every time they pull the trigger? Or for the shotguns, this? How come a concussion grenade doesn't smear the target against the walls of the very mecha that they are piloting? The point of a concussion weapon is to transfer momentum into the target to either dismember or cause internal hemorrhaging/brain damage. Oh, and the same question applies to bludgeons.

Some of it requires a bit more knowledge than others, like the bayonet's speed relative to a sword. Or that gaps in armor is an inevitability, for the exact same reason historic plate armor had gaps-- the human body puts such constraints on the armorer. Ditto the top-heaviness of them. Fewer people will notice, and for the purpose of writing a story it may seem less important. But these are still problems you have to deal with, even if ultimately the decision is to simply draw attention away from it through proper understanding of tension and energy in writing a scene. You seem like you would rather argue the point with the people discussing them with you than accept that they are problems once pointed out.

That's where our opinions differ. But since it has no impact on this thread, have fun with it!

It has an impact on any stories you might write, and this thread supposedly has to do with stories you plan on writing. You can take my advice or leave it, but there is at least one thing that I can warn you about: if you do so much worldbuilding just to make a dime a dozen war story with elements that had to be cut anyway, someone else who bullshitted the technology and wrote a superior story about war will outsell you. Or at the very least, if your story is just as good you will have wasted more effort for the success. Your competitors will be writing things more like Star Wars than the Ideal Atomic Rockets novel, and the market has already demonstrated people's taste for the latter.

[krakonfour]

My suggestion is that you persistently sit down and think, whenever you come to a conclusion in your setting: "how could this be made into an interesting story, or part of a story?"

So far, all I have is a vague idea of a war story involving a Chinese and Indian protagonists that fight on opposite sides during the India/Pakistan conflict. Chinese guy is a run-of-the-mill son of a factory worker family that hates being a nameless member of the masses like his parents.
At 19, he heads for a career in the army. He is a cold bastard at first, but when he gets assigned to Pakistan and is forced to abandon the Pakistani people to the horrible Indian invaders, contrary to what propaganda had stated their mission was, he begins to doubt all the beliefs he took for true.
The Indian guy is a rich kid slacker that his dropped into the army by his dissapointed parents. He used powered suits to play combat sports, so he relies on that skill in the army. His superiors however don't trust him and never promote him. He doesn't get along with the other soldiers either, that come mostly from poor families. He stops seeing war as a game after the Indian forces plow through Pakistan with zero regard for civilian safety, and many of his comrades die while doing so.

These two characters end up fighting each other, the have to set aside their differences and preconcenptions about one another to survive.
The way I have it now, a Chinese squad is sent to secure a village that a drone has wiped out. An Indian team had actually hacked it and used to to lure in the Chinese squad. The Indians crush the squad and force them into a corner. In desperation, they manage to reactivate the drone in 'kill all mode' and inflict heavy losses to the Indians, causing them to retreat. The two protagonists are separated from their respective groups by their one-on-one fight, and find themselves having to work together to disable the drone.

The rest of the story happens after war. It involves the two forming a mercenary squad of disillusioned soldiers, and having to run away from basically everyone after they are used and conned by an American agency posing as Qatari hirers with the intention of igniting inter-gulf-state tensions.

As you can see, little here is influenced by the exact details of the setting.

For example, "we can screen small things, but not big things" is simply a brute fact when taken by itself. But can it be made interesting? Well, for one, your characters are going to be surprised and impressed by large screened installations, reflecting on how much power or persistence it must have taken to create such a large screen-bubble. For another, you may well see, in-story, innovative characters being the first to try screening a large object with numerous smaller generators, and having to fiddle and jury-rig a lot to make it work properly.

Yeah, the drone in the story would be an example of a basic rule applied to the setting. Something like 'drones exist and are used, but you somehow always need boots on the ground'.
However, I'm posing fields as relatively mature technology in the military field. I mean, they've been simplified to the point where most soldiers and all planes and vehicles are equipped with them.

Please look up existing airplanes armed with lasers for more reference material on this context.

Yes, I did. The huge ball-shaped turret is not something you can fit on the nose of a supersonic jet fighter. It'll mess up the aerodynamics if placed anywhere else except as a prolongation of the cockpit canopy or between the jet engine exhausts, and neither of these can shoot dead forward. The only way to make the laser fit inside the craft's streamlined body is by having a tiny lens with a narrow field of vision.

How many of these things can be controlled for by fast-acting, fast-reacting hardware and software? As Jub points out, computers are going to get a lot smarter and quicker in the future, especially for relatively simple tasks like "establish feedback mechanism to keep beam trained on target."

Computer speed may increase, but it will not help with the physical limitations of bending glass mechanically. And, as far as I know, active lens are either accurate or fast, not both. You could have a supercomputer telling the actuators what to do at blinding speed, but you cannot physically apply these changes to the mirror's surface.

And even so, the point remains that the bestest super-active adaptive mirror ever cannot compensate for the whole vehicle rocking because of bumps and depressions on the ground.

PS: A bit of research showed me that the adaptive optics used for retinal imagery can change configuration at a rate of 10-100Hz. So they can actually be very fast, but the limitation of how much they can compensate for remains.

1) The drones do still need onboard software control, but this control may well be limited. Sort of like how if the chain of command just ceased in a real military, individual soldiers would probably sit tight and try to defend their own territory, but would be a lot less likely to do complicated things like organize offensives or used combined arms coordination between different branches.

True. I wonder how drone vs drone warfare would look like if they were both left to their own devices.

2) Satellites can be force-screened, yes? All you need is an onboard solar/nuclear plant to power them- can it be done?

Yes, but they are pretty vulnerable to momentum transfer, since they have to absorb all of it. Also, they cannot be very well protected from laser attacks, and those can cope from practically half the hemisphere is it orbiting over.

3) Large aircraft, screened against long range missile attacks, become a good choice for relaying communications in this setting. The screen allows them to safely fly high and slow above your side's airspace, without being an easy target for enemy ASAT weapons or missiles.

They'd be a big fat target for any ground-based laser weapon too. Maybe stealthy drones, which provide a tiny target to lasers, would work better than a large aircraft. There could be a whole chain of them too, flying in formations that disperse if one of them is attacked.

Alternatively, they might try to deliberately make the battlefield "complicated," so that the attention and thoughts of the enemy armchair commander are spread too thin and he misses something important.

This is unlikely to work as a general strategy, since the 'armchair commander' will likely be in a position where he can dedicate a much larger number of people towards figuring out the battlefield and applying his orders, and unlike the field commander, his command center is unlikely to be attacked so the personnel will be able to devote themselves to their work.

Think about one of the things that people complain about in strategy games: the AI can direct its soldiers in more than one place at one time (say, attack your base and defend against an attack on its base simultaneously), while you can only view one part of the map and command one unit of troops at a time.

If a single enemy general is commanding a huge force of drones, he's effectively playing Starcraft against an AI where every individual unit is aware of the situation and will do exactly what it sees fit to ruin his day.

The other side of the coin being, of course, that general of the human-commanded army will receive reports tailored to the situation by the soldiers in boots, while armchair commander has to sift through the drones relaying just about every bit of information they receive.

Another upside to a drone army we haven't mentioned yet: tirelessness. Soldiers take breaks, need to rest and are less effective at night than during the day. A drone army can support a 4-day long drive through enemy territory then push an attack for several days on end without a hitch. They'd have the advantage of endurance, and you can't rout them.

The way you combat this is to give the general a bigger and bigger staff who can keep closer tabs on each little piece of the tactical picture, while the general concentrates on "big picture." But if you're doing this to economize on manpower and relying on the drones' autonomous intelligence, you're still at least somewhat limited by the coordination problem- you have, say, one guy per four or ten or 100 drones or whatever.

I think this disadvantage can be absorbed by the personnel numbers I mentioned above. It would require a large pool of trained personnel however...

Also, perhaps one of the reasons why the Indians lose air superiority is that their laser weapons are more crude, so that they can only mount effective anti-air lasers on fixed ground installations, while the Chinese have them on their own combat aircraft? Thus, the Indians cannot redeploy air defense lasers to cover a fast-moving battlefield, nor can they use their own laser planes to penetrate Chinese airspace, while the Chinese can rapidly redeploy lasers to cover any place they wish?

Interesting. A technical explanation for this would be limitations on the cooling system. While a power supply and the laser installation can be carted around, a dedicated cooling system probably needs a fixed installation.

Another option to have them use different types of laser.
The Indians could use liquid-fuelled lasers that are cheap and very powerful... but run out of expensive and hard to make chemicals quickly. Their LED/Solid-state lasers could be too inefficient to mount on vehicles, requiring the power supply and cooling system of a fixed platform. The Chinese could have developed powerful LED/Solid state lasers that are both efficient and cool enough to place on their airplanes, allowing continuous air superiority.

If fact, if this divide is established, the Indian airforce would be forced into a defensive war where Chinese planes attack and can lase all day long, while the Indian planes can only fight back with sort of short-lived burst of power before having to land refuel again. Furthermore, it is unlikely that they'd use their limited laser fuel supply to shoot down incoming missiles, so they'd be forced to fly over AA installation that would shoot down missiles for them.
In the end, however good the Indian planes are, they simply cannot mount an offensive.

Can't the Indians effectively bottleneck the Chinese forces trying to counterattack in Pakistan by taking advantage of the problems with their transportation network?

They planned to do that, but at the end of the Pakistan invasion, they didn't have enough forces to maintain the bottleneck.

Come to think of it, since you DON'T want this war to have decisively altered the balance of power as far as I can tell...

That would require nukes.

Why not actually have it both ways? The Indians are able to temporarily delay any Chinese buildup to a counteroffensive by striking at the railways and highways China counts on to supply forces in Pakistan, but the Indians are badly overextended and dealing with tens of millions of hostile Pakistanis, a considerable fraction of whom become guerillas, support for guerillas, or even suicide bombers (there would probably be Pakistani suicide bombers if you invaded them today, anyway).

Eventually, the Indians and Chinese realize that this war is stupidly expensive and sign an agreement demilitarizing Pakistan and in general backing off before either side finds the temptation to go nuclear irresistible.

Sounds reasonable.
I wonder how the rest of the world reacts to this whole war. They'd get even better battlefield coverage than we have of the Syrian civil war today, and they'd see Chinese troops abandoning the Pakistani people they were supposed to protect, leaving in their midst minefields and killer drones. The Indian troops would advance carelessly through the country, making villages and towns their battlefields, and (according to my story) experimenting with chemical weapons, failing and covering up.
Both countries would come out as monsters.

Where possible, yes- but you may not always be able to get that kind of information, so there are doctrines for fighting through an air defense network with planes. Look up "wild weasel."

Would that strategy still work if unjammable lasers are used instead of missiles as an AA defense?

They would really only remain effective against aircraft the enemy doesn't see fit to screen properly on account of them being deemed too expendable. Possible examples might be low-speed drones and certain kinds of cruise missile.

Considering that laser air defenses are just as effective against these sorts of threats, the Stinger-type missiles might end up being a stock that is used up without being replaced. The essential units would be equipped with lasers to simplify the supply chain, while expendable units would be equipped with Stingers.

Melt hundreds of kilograms of metal? Umm... that's just enough energy to boil 30kg of water from 1 degrees C. Water is a cool thing, after all.

Water has roughly ten times the specific heat capacity of metal. The problem is that the actual parts of the generator are presumably made out of metals or plastics, so if a huge amount of energy is dumped into them all at once, it may damage them before the onboard cooling system can drain off the surplus heat.[/quote]

If the heat flux manages to melt the immerged generator, it can just be ejected and replaced. The cost of the generator compared to the plane is tiny, and it's mass isn't signifigant enough to not allow the plane to mount 5 or 6 of them. The soldiers carry 60kg variants. 300kg of ejectable generators doesn't sound too bad.

Depending on how fields formed by two generators being merged act, you might not have to reform it when one of the two generators is switched off. The field's focal point could be switched to the next generator in line.

In fact, it might be beneficial to have all six generators on at the same time. When a missile hits the field, the first generator is switched off. The energy it contained rushed back in, melting it and vaporizing some water. The remaining energy is shared between the 5 generators that are left, creating a bubble with 5/6 of the volume.

My honest impression is that nuclear war remains frightening enough that, rather than obsess over being able to fight one and win, most nations put most of their energy into:
1) Avoiding the need to fight one in the first place (i.e. don't piss off a nuclear power), and
2) Deter any possible nuclear attack by threatening retaliation.

So even a 100 years in the future, current MAD scenarios dominate.

So only the open-air volume protected by the screen costs energy to create? You don't need as much energy to create a 1 km 'sphere' that is mostly underground as you would to create a 1 km 'sphere' suspended in midair?

It costs the same amount of energy to create a bubble anywhere, regardless of what it interacts with. The only difference is that if it is formed underground, it shifts above ground instantaneously.

If it had gone on for five years, we would have. It's a big risk to take as a way of making a power grab.

Possibly. In that case, China would have to wager on the supply reserves being used up in as little time as possible. Maybe some maneuvering beforehand would help?

On one side note, I think you really should consult with an economist on this part, though there's none in this thread. Also, I think you need to think very seriously about whether the Chinese are coming across as cartoon villains here. So far, China has shown no interest in actually sabotaging anyone else's economy, because they themselves are trying to develop wealth by trading with others. Beggaring your trading partner is bad for your long-term trading prospects.

China hasn't shown that kind of interest because the money is in America and Europe, as you have said. However, if the wealth is transferred to the rising Asian and Middle-Eastern hotspots, it might evaluate things differently.

Also, I have yet to write about what motivated China to do this in the first place.
Imagine the USA, currently with the strongest army in the world and the strongest economy. It is China's first client. In this setting, it gradually loses its economic health. It's not hard to think of them as going broke at the peak of the second-world's power curve. Now all it's left with is companies running away, a falling GDP... and the strongest army in the world. China might feel threatened. It could have done this to wipe out the offensive capability of its ancient partners. Instead of attacking them with military force, and risk a nuclear war, it attacks their wallet and makes sure those planes are never refuelled.

I also read in another article that the USA is set to become the world's number one oil producer in 2030. That might contribute to its downfall after the oil is used up.

That actually seriously limits the applications. Aircraft may be unshieldable now, because you have to somehow ensure that the exhaust from their engines doesn't just beat against the inside of the shield for no net propulsive effect.

It might be set to have a very bendy field. The jet exhaust would push through like a solid object, and create a hole for itself easily. Another option would be to shift the whole field forward. The rear of the plane would protrude, and poke through as well. It would create a massive weakspot however.... Also, the field would create a lot of drag if the plane tries to go supersonic, because it would be reacting with the incoming airstream. The field would have to be deactivated in that case, meaning that pilots would have to choose between going fast and being defenseless, or travelling slowly with the shield up.

Subsonic shielded aircraft razing the ground and firing lasers... might make for interesting aerial combat.

Screened aircraft can't fire missiles because the missiles will crash into the plane's screen forcefully.

They'd simply drop them through the shield and be done with it...

Infantrymen can't fire out of their own screen, or 'over the shoulder' of a screened comrade, except by making very specific physical moves to extend a weapon beyond the screen.

True.
The guns would require a special extended gun barrel or 'pointer stick' that would create a hole in the field when they want to fire outside of it.

No, that too is horseshit. This is a persistent problem with your posts addressing me, which we call "quote spaghetti": its bad form to quote single lines without first reading all the way through a paragraph to get an understand of context or the full argument. In context, I am saying that an author's purpose is to write a good story. Worldbuilding doesn't always help that, and can even get in the way or slow the writing process to a halt. Its not just sci-fi writers either-- I absolutely cannot stand Tolkien because his books were really just written to show off his big, overworked world of Middle Earth. The reason the Lord of the Rings trilogy is so long is because what should be a simple story of endurance is instead taken off the rails repeatedly so that Tolkein can show his audience places and things that ultimately don't matter. The best example, which few Tolkien fans can argue against, would be the encounter with Tom Bombadil who was excised completely from the movies because he simply feels out of place with the tone of the story, though not necessarily the setting. People would be left wondering "why not have Tom Bombadil take the Ring to Mordor if he doesn't seem to be affected by its magic?" It can be explained easily, and in the book the Council of Elrond considers it and explains why it wouldn't work, but that's all dead air that could have been avoided by simply not including the character in the story. Which is what the people who wrote the script for the movies wisely did.

Okay.

And even non-speculative ficton writers can fall into this trap, since they have to do research on the locals they set the story in or the time period. Speculative fiction has it worse, though, because of how much more you feel you have to do.

So there are limits, but they are story related and are often the same constraints that force you to limit how much detail goes into your worldbuilding.

Sure enough.

It presents itself as a tool for writers, but if you have read enough works that are written by writers for writers they have an entirely different focus. Orson Scott Card, for example, has a book for science fiction and fantasy writers and he deals with the issue of worldbuilding quite differently from Nyrath's "all the hard science I could find and as much pretentious arguments about what OUGHT to be realistic or should NOT be featured in your story" (like stealth in space-- a topic which has been disputed, and ultimately the board decided him to be overestimating the abilities or usefulness of telescopes at defeating stealth techniques at range)

Not going to argue Atomic Rockets for Nyrath's sake. A thread arguing technological assumptions is not going to help either.

I hate pretension more than I hate writers who bullshit their physics and technology. Every writer has to allow for fundamental conceits like alternate history, fictional places, character shields, etc. but only a few will tell you that there are conceits you should never use or you aren't writing "good" genre fiction.

I politely invite you to re-read this thread.

On that note, since you asked, pretension is also one of the reasons that I attack your presentation of weapons and armor, because you have presented this as if it were a realistic extrapolation of the powered armor and the shielding you propose as a conceit. Equip your character's mini-mecha with swords if you like, but don't tell me that its superior to use one than a bayonet on a rifle when I already showed the swiftness with which a bayonet can move and find targets-- much faster than any sword.

You don't like my explanation, so instead of showing me why a rifle with a useless-in-this-scenario bayonet is more helpful than a gun in one hand and a sword in the other, you call me pretentious.

The other reason I argue those things is that your readers live in a physical world, and that means that if they come across a description of physical actions those actions need to make physical sense: and if the character is human they need to act like one.

Okay...

So your mecha can jump (or more likely, use a jetpack)?

Yes they can jump.

A simple calculation can give us the leg-force, based on the dodging maneuvers from before, and we can work out the jump height from that:
400kg suit + 75kg soldier moves by 1.5m in 0.5 seconds.

Acceleration required:
v=at
d=vt so d=at^2
Therefore a=1.5/(0.5^2)=6m/s^2
Force:
F=ma=475*6=2850N

A sidestep mostly uses the muscles on one side of one leg. Based on this, which studies the forces involved during a sidestep cutting maneuver, I can say that the artifical muscles in the suit provide about 7 times as much force than a human. Extrapolating on jump forces, and supposing the muscles configuration of the suit and the human are identical in practice, the force applied during jumping is about 9000N.

With a 1.5m long leg, it gives us a 3.8m/s launch speed and a peak height of about 1.5m, at the cost of 6.9kJ

Result: It won't be able to clear its own height.
And no, no jetpack silliness. Using the latest solid rocket fuel technology, you'd need 2kg per second of operation just to rise at a rate of 20km/h. You'd need your own mass in rocket engine to use the jetpack for a minute and a half.

Then why don't the users use the jump-packs to leap over each other's lines of pikes?

The lines of pikes would only work if there are no grenades in play, because massing your forces under the same shield is the worst thing you can do when a hail of explosives is dropping through your fields.

Your characters can make pistols powerful enough to pierce armor? Okay, then how powerful would a rifle be by comparison?

Zero more effectiveness in terms of penetration. They use explosive rounds, not AP rounds. Therefore, the effectiveness is tied to caliber, not round velocity, which means barrel length and chamber pressures don't matter much.

And how does the user avoid having this happen to them every time they pull the trigger? Or for the shotguns, this?

Because it is not a human hand pulling the trigger, but a robotic arm with a locking mechanism to absorb the recoil through the suit's 475kg. Also, since they just need to accelerate the projectile enough for it to travel less than 5 meters, then the chamber pressure will be so low that the recoil will barely noticeable.
If fact, you could do away with propellant charges altogether and use a gas-piston gun.

How come a concussion grenade doesn't smear the target against the walls of the very mecha that they are piloting?

Remove overpressure effects from being inside a hermetically sealed chamber, remove penetrating fragments and remove burns from the equation, and all you've got is hot gas trying to spread it's energy against the surface of a near-half-ton-suit. Do grenades under a car smear the dudes inside against the windows? All they have is seatbelts!

The point of a concussion weapon is to transfer momentum into the target to either dismember or cause internal hemorrhaging/brain damage. Oh, and the same question applies to bludgeons.

This isn't 2mm thick medieval plating we're bashing. It's this thing encapsulated in tank armor.

Some of it requires a bit more knowledge than others, like the bayonet's speed relative to a sword. Or that gaps in armor is an inevitability, for the exact same reason historic plate armor had gaps-- the human body puts such constraints on the armorer.
Ditto the top-heaviness of them. Fewer people will notice, and for the purpose of writing a story it may seem less important. But these are still problems you have to deal with, even if ultimately the decision is to simply draw attention away from it through proper understanding of tension and energy in writing a scene.

Are you manga-phobic? Can you sit down for half an hour?
I'd like to point out this section of this story which I greatly liked. There's a story, and there's characters, and there's mecha suits with weaknesses, that are exploited by the protagonists.

Eden: It's an Endless World, Volume 3

Not trying to make a point here, but it is still relevant to the topic.

You seem like you would rather argue the point with the people discussing them with you than accept that they are problems once pointed out.

And you prefer to to attack me and worldbuilding in general instead of addressing the topics at hand. Plus, you are blind to the problems I've already discussed and accepted necessary modifications in the setting because of them. The laser weapons for example, or the China-India war. But that's not good enough for you?

It has an impact on any stories you might write,

Which again, is not an impact on this thread.

and this thread supposedly has to do with stories you plan on writing.

I invented a story just for this post, three weeks after I started the thread. And if you read it, you'll realize that the actual setting I'm discussing has little impact on the plot.

You can take my advice or leave it, but there is at least one thing that I can warn you about: if you do so much worldbuilding just to make a dime a dozen war story with elements that had to be cut anyway, someone else who bullshitted the technology and wrote a superior story about war will outsell you. Or at the very least, if your story is just as good you will have wasted more effort for the success. Your competitors will be writing things more like Star Wars than the Ideal Atomic Rockets novel, and the market has already demonstrated people's taste for the latter.

[/quote]

If I write, I won't adapt my writing to people's tastes. I don't plan on selling anything either, and as a non-commercial writer with an audience of 1, I have little competition.

PS: Star Wars was a successful film franchise that fit into the mold of successful space operas before it. LOTR started a literary genre. That's enough fans of built-up worlds for me.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, I did. The huge ball-shaped turret is not something you can fit on the nose of a supersonic jet fighter. It'll mess up the aerodynamics if placed anywhere else except as a prolongation of the cockpit canopy or between the jet engine exhausts, and neither of these can shoot dead forward. The only way to make the laser fit inside the craft's streamlined body is by having a tiny lens with a narrow field of vision.

So don't use supersonic jets?

And even so, the point remains that the bestest super-active adaptive mirror ever cannot compensate for the whole vehicle rocking because of bumps and depressions on the ground.

Questionable; there are such things as stabilization systems, you know.

True. I wonder how drone vs drone warfare would look like if they were both left to their own devices.

They might completely ignore each other to go after preprogrammed targets- weird but plausible behavior.

Yes, but they are pretty vulnerable to momentum transfer, since they have to absorb all of it. Also, they cannot be very well protected from laser attacks, and those can cope from practically half the hemisphere is it orbiting over.

An ASAT laser weapon doubles as an anti-aircraft laser, but yes.

They'd be a big fat target for any ground-based laser weapon too. Maybe stealthy drones, which provide a tiny target to lasers, would work better than a large aircraft. There could be a whole chain of them too, flying in formations that disperse if one of them is attacked.

If they fly far enough from the front or take advantage of clouds as cover, the ground-based lasers will not be very effective at shooting down planes slantwise through tens of kilometers of dense air.

This is unlikely to work as a general strategy, since the 'armchair commander' will likely be in a position where he can dedicate a much larger number of people towards figuring out the battlefield and applying his orders, and unlike the field commander, his command center is unlikely to be attacked so the personnel will be able to devote themselves to their work.

True to an extent; my point is that by doing enough different things the numerous intelligent sub-units on the ground may be able to overwhelm the analytical capabilities of the limited number of intelligent staffers on the other side who have to rely on dumb robots to observe what's going on. This already happens in real warfare on a regular basis- look up the concept of "OODA" decision loops. It's not the be-all and end-all of warfare but it does matter.

Another upside to a drone army we haven't mentioned yet: tirelessness. Soldiers take breaks, need to rest and are less effective at night than during the day. A drone army can support a 4-day long drive through enemy territory then push an attack for several days on end without a hitch. They'd have the advantage of endurance, and you can't rout them.

Not necessarily. Drones don't get tired, but they do get broken suspensions when someone accidentally drives them over a ledge. They get bogged down in bad ground a human being would have avoided. They (probably) won't take cover when they get shot at, which means a lot of superficial damage which humans would have avoided.

Think about, say, tanks. One of the big limiting factors on an armored advance is that the tanks physically break down and need maintenance, and you have to wait for the repairmen to come up and fix them before your army can fight at full strength.

Interesting. A technical explanation for this would be limitations on the cooling system. While a power supply and the laser installation can be carted around, a dedicated cooling system probably needs a fixed installation.

I say, ignore the technical explanation- the point is simply that one side has weapons which are more mobile and flexible, and tend to show up at the most inconvenient possible places.

Think about German tanks in 1940. The British and French had lots of tanks, pretty tough ones, but they often weren't as mobile as the German tanks, and they weren't organized to be in the right places at the right times, which made them less useful. The Germans still weren't unbeatable though; look up Arras and the Gembloux Gap.

If fact, if this divide is established, the Indian airforce would be forced into a defensive war where Chinese planes attack and can lase all day long, while the Indian planes can only fight back with sort of short-lived burst of power before having to land refuel again. Furthermore, it is unlikely that they'd use their limited laser fuel supply to shoot down incoming missiles, so they'd be forced to fly over AA installation that would shoot down missiles for them.

I don't know about you, but I would definitely use my lasers to shoot down incoming missiles to avoid horrible burny death.

Indeed, that might be what they're best at simply because missiles have to fly within effective range, while the enemy planes don't. But your basic concept remains- giving Chinese units a marginal advantage in quality, flexibility, or mobility of a weapon system can give them a major (but not insurmountable) edge in battle.

Can't the Indians effectively bottleneck the Chinese forces trying to counterattack in Pakistan by taking advantage of the problems with their transportation network?

They planned to do that, but at the end of the Pakistan invasion, they didn't have enough forces to maintain the bottleneck.

It's... at least vaguely possible, but hard, to manage that.

Where possible, yes- but you may not always be able to get that kind of information, so there are doctrines for fighting through an air defense network with planes. Look up "wild weasel."

Would that strategy still work if unjammable lasers are used instead of missiles as an AA defense?

The details would change, but since the enemy still has to use radar to detect you, and since it is still possible to build a missile that will home in on an enemy radar, the basic idea will probably still work in some form.

Considering that laser air defenses are just as effective against these sorts of threats, the Stinger-type missiles might end up being a stock that is used up without being replaced. The essential units would be equipped with lasers to simplify the supply chain, while expendable units would be equipped with Stingers.

Alternatively, the lasers are too bulky and require large trucks to move around, while portable missile launchers can fit on jeeps or a man's shoulder.

If the heat flux manages to melt the immerged generator, it can just be ejected and replaced. The cost of the generator compared to the plane is tiny, and it's mass isn't signifigant enough to not allow the plane to mount 5 or 6 of them. The soldiers carry 60kg variants. 300kg of ejectable generators doesn't sound too bad.

But if the generator is destroyed the screen collapses and cannot quickly be re-established.

My honest impression is that nuclear war remains frightening enough that, rather than obsess over being able to fight one and win, most nations put most of their energy into:
1) Avoiding the need to fight one in the first place (i.e. don't piss off a nuclear power), and
2) Deter any possible nuclear attack by threatening retaliation.

So even a 100 years in the future, current MAD scenarios dominate.

If they don't, it has more to do with the rise of ABM technology to shoot down an enemy's missiles than it does to do with theater screens to cover cities from nuclear attack.

So only the open-air volume protected by the screen costs energy to create? You don't need as much energy to create a 1 km 'sphere' that is mostly underground as you would to create a 1 km 'sphere' suspended in midair?

It costs the same amount of energy to create a bubble anywhere, regardless of what it interacts with. The only difference is that if it is formed underground, it shifts above ground instantaneously.

In that case the generator should be as close to the surface as possible, so as to cover the maximum area, to the greatest possible height, for the minimum energy startup cost.

China hasn't shown that kind of interest because the money is in America and Europe, as you have said. However, if the wealth is transferred to the rising Asian and Middle-Eastern hotspots, it might evaluate things differently.

Also, I have yet to write about what motivated China to do this in the first place.

Still, check an economist.

China might feel threatened. It could have done this to wipe out the offensive capability of its ancient partners. Instead of attacking them with military force, and risk a nuclear war, it attacks their wallet and makes sure those planes are never refuelled.

Wouldn't China's own nuclear deterrent tend to discourage the threat more effectively than deliberately crashing the world economy? I mean, if you crash the US economy with a rare-earths shortage, they are MORE likely to do something belligerent and dumb in the short term, not less.

They'd simply drop them through the shield and be done with it...

Missile falls into high speed airflow outside the screen, goes into a tumble and breaks up or fails to lock onto the target?

Infantrymen can't fire out of their own screen, or 'over the shoulder' of a screened comrade, except by making very specific physical moves to extend a weapon beyond the screen.

True.
The guns would require a special extended gun barrel or 'pointer stick' that would create a hole in the field when they want to fire outside of it.

This in turn makes the weapons relatively bulky and impractical for close combat... so essentially, the heavily screened soldiers can't shoot.

At that point it might actually be more cost-effective to forget the screens, trading that extra margin of protection from enemy bullets for the ability to lay down some bullets of your own.

[Zeropoint]

And even so, the point remains that the bestest super-active adaptive mirror ever cannot compensate for the whole vehicle rocking because of bumps and depressions on the ground.

No, but turret stabilization systems--the kind that are already designed, field-tested, and installed in every modern AFV--certainly can.

[Jub]

Krakonfour I have a couple of questions about your setting, I asked them before but I think they must have gotten lost in the quote spaghetti. You did answer a few questions about computers and the like, but you didn't much get into the other stuff I asked.

Were any other exotic effects discovered in the invention, proving, and testing of this shield technology before it came into common military use?

How did tactics change and what wars were fought between the modern day and the invention of these shields? What tactics are military commanders still holding onto that they shouldn't be? What new tactics are being tried that aren't working?

How has the design and manufacturing process been changed with the increase in computing power? What if any effect have 3d printing and nano materials such as carbon nanotubes had on these processes?

What is the state of space exploration in this world and how much cheaper might it be to mine rare earth metals among the asteroids or from the moon instead of buying through China? In the same vein, what happened to Canada's supply of these same resources?

How have these changes in technology changed society? Are there still TV networks and cable providers, or have telecomm companies switched to being solely providers of bandwidth and allowed the internet to fill the niches of telephone and entertainment services? Are people even more interconnected and always online than we are today?

What sort of computing power does the average person have in their home? Their pocket?

How has the education system changed in the face of the changes above?

What jobs have been entirely automated with the advent of cheap robots? What jobs are on the cusp of facing this same fate? What happened to the people who were deemed unnecessary?

What has become of our current social ills? What is now taboo that wasn't before? What has become acceptable that we would cringe at today? Does religion still hold the same sway as it does today? More? Less?

These are some questions that I would consider when doing near future sci-fi and that I feel might provide some new avenues for you to explore.

[Beowulf]

Shielded aircraft still have a problem, even if you do manage to get the exhaust through the shield: you need to have your aerodynamic surfaces exposed to airflow for critical functions like being able to maintain attitude, or for that matter, getting lift.

Ejecting munitions is probably going to end up being problematical, as it'll fall to the bottom of the shield, move through, and then have the higher winds beneath the aircraft pushing the munition back into the shield.

[krakonfour]

So don't use supersonic jets?

Which reminds me:
The best application for a laser on an airborne platform is a helicopter. Very stable, can pop under the horizon quickly and does not have the aerodynamic concerns of jet planes.
Also, they can increase their effective range rapidly by gaining altitude, much faster than any supersonic plane can do by crossing the same distance.

Questionable; there are such things as stabilization systems, you know.

I know, but we're talking about maintaining a laser beam within a millimeter-wide crater hole for pulsing to be effective. For a continuous beam, your dig rate falls sharply if you deviate for more than one spot-width. In the case of an infrared laser firing through a 1m lens, the accuracy required is 0.17 mm at 5km.

They might completely ignore each other to go after preprogrammed targets- weird but plausible behavior.

It would be bewildering to have drone armies rush past each other without firing a shot. But then again, the simplest programming would have them try and engage a hostile... which would read to drone armies rushing past each other, guns blazing and never turning back.

If they fly far enough from the front or take advantage of clouds as cover, the ground-based lasers will not be very effective at shooting down planes slantwise through tens of kilometers of dense air.

Won't the incoming radio signal be weakened similarly? If the laser defenses are so powerful that the relay plane must fly just on the edge of the horizon, won't you be better off bouncing the radio off the mesosphere or something?

PS: Couldn't find accurate atmospheric attenuation tables, but the 1MW YAL-1 is supposed to have 8-20km effective range before the spot size blooms up to 1km diameter.

True to an extent; my point is that by doing enough different things the numerous intelligent sub-units on the ground may be able to overwhelm the analytical capabilities of the limited number of intelligent staffers on the other side who have to rely on dumb robots to observe what's going on. This already happens in real warfare on a regular basis- look up the concept of "OODA" decision loops. It's not the be-all and end-all of warfare but it does matter.

Will do.
Another thing: Won't doing all these 'different things' to confuse and overwhelm the enemy's command center reduce your efficiency too, in terms of actually reaching your objective and destroying enemy forces?

Not necessarily. Drones don't get tired, but they do get broken suspensions when someone accidentally drives them over a ledge. They get bogged down in bad ground a human being would have avoided. They (probably) won't take cover when they get shot at, which means a lot of superficial damage which humans would have avoided.

Repairs vs fatigue. A reasonable tradeoff.
Also, it seems drone efficiency varies a lot depending on the battlefield. If they are set up on a dry plateau with a clear sky overhead, they are much better than a human army. If the terrain is a soggy forest or a city ruined by bombardments, humans would gain an easy advantage.

I say, ignore the technical explanation-

But that's the fun bit!

I don't know about you, but I would definitely use my lasers to shoot down incoming missiles to avoid horrible burny death.

Yes, they should if its that or dying, but:
-Their defensive capability is also their limited offensive capability. It would be better to delegate the defensive task to ground-based installations (which they're defending anyways) instead of giving up their sole usefulness.
-Their offensive laser might not be nimble/accurate enough to shoot down an opposing missile.

The details would change, but since the enemy still has to use radar to detect you, and since it is still possible to build a missile that will home in on an enemy radar, the basic idea will probably still work in some form.

Radar... are there any other equally effective line-of-sight detection systems being developed? I'm thinking of optical or thermal imaging.

But if the generator is destroyed the screen collapses and cannot quickly be re-established.

Having multiple generators sharing the field should negate this problem.

If they don't, it has more to do with the rise of ABM technology to shoot down an enemy's missiles than it does to do with theater screens to cover cities from nuclear attack.

If lasers become mature enough, it is going to be the ICBMs that are phased out first, followed by kinetic weapons in general. Buuuuut that's another, crazier setting.

In that case the generator should be as close to the surface as possible, so as to cover the maximum area, to the greatest possible height, for the minimum energy startup cost.

The field, from the surface, would be seen as a hemisphere opening up to the ground. The volume and height is the same however deep the generator is, because it starts at the surface.

Wouldn't China's own nuclear deterrent tend to discourage the threat more effectively than deliberately crashing the world economy? I mean, if you crash the US economy with a rare-earths shortage, they are MORE likely to do something belligerent and dumb in the short term, not less.

Aha! But it's not the world economy, since that has shifted already to the ME and FE states.
Humm. Maybe this whole event could be tied to an arms race linked to the invention of shield technology. China hits the US while they are both converting their armies and tactics to combat with shields, a costly process. If it succeeds, the US wouldn't have the money to build itself the new generation of weapons, and if it attacks, its own army would be vastly outmatched.

Missile falls into high speed airflow outside the screen, goes into a tumble and breaks up or fails to lock onto the target?

Uhhh.... no?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzPvaxTBkck#t=83

This in turn makes the weapons relatively bulky and impractical for close combat... so essentially, the heavily screened soldiers can't shoot.

The close combat guns are low-powered gas-shooting pistols with large HEAT bullets. Anything that would be used beyond the range of in-field melee fighting would be completely different from a CQC gun. Also, the stick used to create a hole int he field does not need to be thick or heavy. You could stack toilet paper rolls for all it matters.

At that point it might actually be more cost-effective to forget the screens, trading that extra margin of protection from enemy bullets for the ability to lay down some bullets of your own.

And just how is shooting a shielded enemy with bullets going to be useful? The premise of the setting was that fields have removed this tactic from the battlefield.

[krakonfour]

No, but turret stabilization systems--the kind that are already designed, field-tested, and installed in every modern AFV--certainly can.

See my previous post on the sub-millimeter accuracy required.

Shielded aircraft still have a problem, even if you do manage to get the exhaust through the shield: you need to have your aerodynamic surfaces exposed to airflow for critical functions like being able to maintain attitude, or for that matter, getting lift.

Ejecting munitions is probably going to end up being problematical, as it'll fall to the bottom of the shield, move through, and then have the higher winds beneath the aircraft pushing the munition back into the shield.

This isn't a problem.
Air goes through the field untouched. It is only at supersonic air velocities that the interaction between the field and the airstream might occur. This is because the field only activates when the total momentum of the particles interacting with the field reached a threshold you can set yourself.

Let's calculate:
Cross-section of a jet fighter's field: 24m2
Thickness: Should be zero, but let's set it at 60 picometers (width of oxygen molecule).
Air particle density at altitude 10000m (0.4atm): 10.75*10^24 particles per m3
Windspeed: 400m/s

At any given time, the field interacts with 15.48*10^15 particles with a total momentum of 0.329 milliNewton.seconds
That's really minuscule. Unless its a really large plane trying to go hypersonic, the momentum of the air goes unnoticed and the airspeed inside and outside the field is exactly the same.

Krakonfour I have a couple of questions about your setting, I asked them before but I think they must have gotten lost in the quote spaghetti. You did answer a few questions about computers and the like, but you didn't much get into the other stuff I asked.

Spaghetti is yummy.

Were any other exotic effects discovered in the invention, proving, and testing of this shield technology before it came into common military use?

Well, the effect was hard to detect at first because it the field kept being generated outside of the testing instruments... as I have it, it was discovered and developed like electromagnetism. Even the mechanism for generating the field is similar. I think the real question is how the field can be applied to non-military fields. One domain I can think of is nuclear physics. Wouldn't researchers just love to have particle accelerators fitted with fields at the receiving end, neatly stopping their experiments for them? And space too! Imagine not having to worry about debris strikes anymore... and energy applications. Charge up a disposable field, and you'll get an interesting heat source as the field shrinks and feeds back its energy to the generator!

How did tactics change and what wars were fought between the modern day and the invention of these shields? What tactics are military commanders still holding onto that they shouldn't be? What new tactics are being tried that aren't working?

I thought about this for a bit, and concluded that without an ongoing war, the decisive advantage of a field-protected unit over conventional weaponry would lead to a crazy arms race. You know, the type of situation where if you didn't buy generators for your troops, you'd up being completely defenseless.
Between today and the implementation of shields, I see Iran and Iraq going to war again and minor conflict surrounding the Korean unification. More interesting, the wars that weren't fought as the declining US and Euro economies prevented them from carrying out an interventionist policy overseas.
The tactics are not standardized yet. There hasn't been hundreds of years of warfare to et familiar with the usage of shields, only a few decades of tension. Furthermore, the spread of shield technology coincided with the appearance of usable, rugged electro-polymer muscles, meaning powered troopers could exist.
One of the things that commanders held on to was the feeling that shielded units were invulnerable to ranged fire. I'm sure there was a craze for melee engagements somewhere, until people developed all the specialized grenade spamming and field-penetrating weapons that opened up the range of the usual engagement a bit.

Things that don't work...humm. Flamethrowers. That line-of-pikes tactic from before. Artillery as anti-personnel and area denial weapons. Lasers in the ground-combat form, simply not effective yet. Missiles in air warfare too. And, I might have mentioned it briefly, chemical warfare. Gassing shielded troops works, but it fails against the spread of hermetically sealed power troopers.

How has the design and manufacturing process been changed with the increase in computing power? What if any effect have 3d printing and nano materials such as carbon nanotubes had on these processes?

Increase in computing power means you can replace humans in ever more delicate, 'manual' tasks. The automobile industry can be 100% automated, for example. Really, it's a social shift towards intellectual labor, because manual has become worthless. Really worthless, as in zero blue collar jobs beyond supervision or repair work.
3d printing has no effect on mass production in general.
Carbon nanotube production is dropped down the list of 'must-have tech' when high velocity weapons fall from favor, but regain popularity as the next step in anti-laser armor.

I'm tinkering with the idea of bacteria-assisted production of delicate objects, such as nanomachines or microchips. The bacteria could be genetically programmed to ingest heavy metals, then stick onto the target surface and die. A chemical scrub removes the organic material, and now you've got your metal deposited with much greater precision than mechanically possible.

What is the state of space exploration in this world and how much cheaper might it be to mine rare earth metals among the asteroids or from the moon instead of buying through China? In the same vein, what happened to Canada's supply of these same resources?

The moon is not a good source of heavy metals, and once China completed its objectives with the rare earth price spike, prices fell again and the need to develop a heavy duty space program fell again. The supply of such raw material is sufficient for a long time to come, and it is going to be cheaper to ramp up recycling programs than to capture asteroids.

Canada's supply was monopolized by contract to the US and its allies. Problem is, the rest of the world's demand became much higher than that of the declining US industry, so they just signed the pact with China and granted themselves access to a much larger, more stable supply.

How have these changes in technology changed society? Are there still TV networks and cable providers, or have telecomm companies switched to being solely providers of bandwidth and allowed the internet to fill the niches of telephone and entertainment services? Are people even more interconnected and always online than we are today?

That's a very, very broad question... considering I started this as a military scenario. One thing for sure is that Middle Eastern and Far East countries all enjoy 100% internet access, and the need for ultrafast nationwide connection means that the network is nationalized. A citywide wifi like in Toronto is easy to set up.... so, permanently connected world?

What sort of computing power does the average person have in their home? Their pocket?

Nearly zero. You have the screen at home, and the internet connection is good enough to have the CPU, GPU and memory in a dedicated server somewhere else. Like Cloud computing, taken to the extreme.

How has the education system changed in the face of the changes above?

For some countries, it became a national priority, especially in the Middle East. You see how China's industrial capacity exploded? Imagine the same need for education.

What has become of our current social ills? What is now taboo that wasn't before? What has become acceptable that we would cringe at today? Does religion still hold the same sway as it does today? More? Less?

These are some questions that I would consider when doing near future sci-fi and that I feel might provide some new avenues for you to explore.

I'll think a bit more about these questions.

[Simon_Jester]

The best application for a laser on an airborne platform is a helicopter. Very stable, can pop under the horizon quickly and does not have the aerodynamic concerns of jet planes.
Also, they can increase their effective range rapidly by gaining altitude, much faster than any supersonic plane can do by crossing the same distance.

Downsides: they have to fly low and slow even if they don't want to, and are unusually vulnerable to ground fire.

If they fly far enough from the front or take advantage of clouds as cover, the ground-based lasers will not be very effective at shooting down planes slantwise through tens of kilometers of dense air.

Won't the incoming radio signal be weakened similarly? If the laser defenses are so powerful that the relay plane must fly just on the edge of the horizon, won't you be better off bouncing the radio off the mesosphere or something?

It is much easier to build a radio that will be detectable to an antenna a hundred miles away than to build a laser that will burn holes in that antenna from a hundred miles away.

PS: Couldn't find accurate atmospheric attenuation tables, but the 1MW YAL-1 is supposed to have 8-20km effective range before the spot size blooms up to 1km diameter.

I am not at all sure that's accurate.

Will do.
Another thing: Won't doing all these 'different things' to confuse and overwhelm the enemy's command center reduce your efficiency too, in terms of actually reaching your objective and destroying enemy forces?

Not necessarily. There are all kinds of battle plans that rely heavily on feints, distractions, diversions, misdirections, and maskirovka. The point is that all these things will be unusually effective against a commander who has to make detailed tactical decisions about how to operate his troops, while thousands of kilometers from the battlefield, without benefit of input from sentient lifeforms actually operating on your behalf.

The details would change, but since the enemy still has to use radar to detect you, and since it is still possible to build a missile that will home in on an enemy radar, the basic idea will probably still work in some form.

Radar... are there any other equally effective line-of-sight detection systems being developed? I'm thinking of optical or thermal imaging.

Thermal imaging exists (look up IRST); optical imaging is still unsatisfactory but may improve.

If lasers become mature enough, it is going to be the ICBMs that are phased out first, followed by kinetic weapons in general. Buuuuut that's another, crazier setting.

Lasers aren't really very satisfactory for shooting down ICBM warheads as they fall on you, because they're already armored to resist meteoric reentry. They're effective at shooting down the missiles in the boost phase, but that requires you to be close to where the missile launches from.

The field, from the surface, would be seen as a hemisphere opening up to the ground. The volume and height is the same however deep the generator is, because it starts at the surface.

That makes very little sense; I can't imagine a mathematically rigorous reason for that to happen which wouldn't routinely cause the field to uselessly screen a random underground space, and to reliably form perfect hemispheres aboveground.

At that point it might actually be more cost-effective to forget the screens, trading that extra margin of protection from enemy bullets for the ability to lay down some bullets of your own.

And just how is shooting a shielded enemy with bullets going to be useful? The premise of the setting was that fields have removed this tactic from the battlefield.

I'm not sure yet, but it really does bear thinking about- personal screens limit the means of offense in ways that not all armies may find desirable, especially if they have ways of coping with screens that you haven't thought of yet, or develop new ones over the course of your story.

[Formless]

You seem like you would rather argue the point with the people discussing them with you than accept that they are problems once pointed out.

And you prefer to to attack me and worldbuilding in general instead of addressing the topics at hand. Plus, you are blind to the problems I've already discussed and accepted necessary modifications in the setting because of them. The laser weapons for example, or the China-India war. But that's not good enough for you?

Okay, Krakenfour, I've been busy, but once I got back, it took me a short bit before I realized that you didn't comprehend this whole "quote sphagetti" problem. Certainly once I realized you kept repeating certain points over and over I knew what was going on; then when you started cutting sentences into fragments (really? really?). So I am going to try my best to get to the point.

First, you asked me why I don't care that much about realism and worldbuilding. You have no one but yourself to blame for that, so don't whine to me that I keep talking about it.

Second, continually asking me to "reread the thread" is getting annoying. I tried, and it put me to sleep. Simon, I mean, managed to do that-- his posting style is rather dry and longwinded (and I'm going to stop there because I don't really want to insult Simon at this time). The political situation struck me as completely implausible, because laser weapons are hardly as destructive as WMDs, and not comparable to dum-dum bullets because they would actually have a place in war as shield penetrators. Laser blinding may be another story, and is already banned, but there are other forms like masers that don't pose such eye hazards. It would be enough to just say the power consumption and storage issues have not been overcome. However, you seem to use this request for me to reread the thread like a bludgeon, whether its an irrelevant request like the first time you did it (really, what about "I hate pretension more than technobabble" do you not understand? Oh, I guess you were insulted but felt like interjecting for no reason. The essence of quote spaghetti) or whether you are trying to excuse your stupidity by... repeating it. Essentially.

Everything I have read from you has failed to convince me that your ideas are valid. Swords vs Bayonets: you still don't understand that if you can train soldiers in the latter faster, then you can field more of them and simply overrun soldiers trained in the former. The only times when swords were the primary battle weapons of choice rather than sidearms, peacetime carry, or specialist weapons (like greatswords) was when combined with a shield to protect from polearms. er.... you know, This kind of shield. Plus ignoring all my points made up till that point on an invalid premise that your proposed technologies will make it moot. You have to demonstrate these things, which you seem to be incapable of doing (probably because you have little understanding of any form of interpersonal combat). Your points about guns are even stupider to the point of being ludicrous. You really didn't want to remind me of that, because it makes you look delusional. The troops use heavy armor, so we shoot bullets that cannot penetrate.... heavy armor. You don't see the problem with this? You can barely (if at all) fit more explosive power into a 12 gauge slug than you can fit into a rifle cartridge (in terms of gunpowder), hence less energy. A gun that can penetrate the armor on the center mass can kill the man inside; indeed, you could utterly destroy these mini-mecha by having ordinary soldiers carry shield generators at the squad level, then set up death zones where in order for the armored troops to enter they immediately put themselves at all but point blank range of anti-material/tank rifles and machine guns. Rule of thumb: if it can penetrate an actual tank's armor at that range (and a .50BMG can if you hit the right spots even today) it'll skewer a powered armored soldier. Meanwhile, the squads are quite mobile enough to get out of the way of tanks and have an effective umbrella to protect themselves from artillery, the traditional infantry killer. You need a 20mm cannon before warheads start to become practical, and pretty soon you are talking about a grenade launcher rather than a firearm. And if you have a grenade launcher, how the hell does any mecha combat turn into a melee?

Then it gets worse, because you demonstrate complete ignorance of both guns and bombs. Have you never heard of torque? Handguns don't just go straight back into the user's hand, they flip upwards as well. There comes a point where you simply do not have enough grip strength to keep it in your hand unless the barrel of the gun counter-levers it down; in other words, unless it is a rifle, because that same weight makes it impossible to hold upright otherwise. And good luck trying to shoot a grenade launcher one handed, that's pure Schwarzenegger action movie cheese. There is a limit to how much a robotic hand will help with grip strength, because a recoiling gun is rotating and will usually defeat your hand the same way a martial artist defeats a strangle hold-- by breaking through the weak area of the thumb. Numbers may be your thing, but they are meaningless if you don't know how they relate to the real world. Ask Connor MacLeod sometime if you want to hear a good rant. And don't get me started on the proposed Piston Gun: that's literally saying you want to take a pop-gun to a machine gun fight. You'll fucking die, and your projectile will drop at your target's feet because it lacks the energy of a bow and arrow. Good job. You made yourself sound crazy.

Bombs. I take it you do not know the difference between a blast wave and a shockwave. A concussion grenade kills you by transferring kinetic energy not through the hot gasses, but by transmitting it from one medium to another at faster than the speed of sound. That's literally what defines a high explosive, the fact that the shockwave created by such an explosive can do that. Thus, it would not only knock over a mini-mecha, but rupture the pilot's organs, killing him. These weapons literally turn you into a pulp from the inside out. That's why they are used.

Related, but at least it doesn't make me irritated with you, jumping. Can the man inside actually survive this maneuver? In many ways, jet fighters are limited by the physical abilities of the pilot. The same applies here: will the jerk from accelerating over such a short timespan cause the guy inside to slam his head into the helmet/cockpit of the robosuit? If so, then a jetpack might actually be a better option because it creates a smoother acceleration. Most of the interior safety features on cars exist to protect the passengers from these kinds of effects.

jerk, by the way, is a less well known unit of measurement to guage how smoothly something accelerates, and it is exactly this: change in acceleration over time. It reads as either m/s^3 or ft/s^3 depending on if you are using metric or imperial units. Rollercoaster designers apparently came up with it, and they use it to determine the safety margins both for the passengers and for the ride's structural integrity. You might want to study the way they build the passenger seats so you know how they work. Its kind of annoying how many mecha anime show their pilots getting thrown around their poorly designed chairs because all they have is a seatbelt, if that. Hell, Star Trek is even worse about this-- some of their crew don't even have chairs! Its a wonder the Voyager crew didn't suffer more head injuries on that show.

This isn't 2mm thick medieval plating we're bashing. It's this thing encapsulated in tank armor.

That's hilarious, because it gives me the image of a guy in a fat suit trying to wave a sword around.

You do realize that, artificial supermuscle or no artificial supermuscle, bulk is a consideration for any practical armor? First of all because of the issue of moving. Again, medieval plate was designed the way it is so that the person inside lost as little of his agility as possible. This isn't just seen in the weight of the armor (which was actually something like ten or twenty pounds less than what modern marines carry) but in the bulkiness, which is less than the kevlar and ceramic plates that modern soldiers wear.

Observe what a bear suit can do, and how it moves. Notice that while the thing can protect the wearer from getting hit by a truck, he is still knocked around visibly by baseball bats and he is clearly quite stiff and has difficulty walking in the second suit. Another video where the wearer specifically says that uphill is difficult, and its clearly the bulk, not merely the weight that is slowing him down. This is the militarized version by the same creator, and you will notice that while the wearer is noticeably more flexible (probably because he talked to real soldiers), you can see that it is much less bulky AND that they placed the protective armor very carefully and left a lot of gaps in a lot of the same places as on medieval plate. He also mentions all sorts of issues he sought to solve, like heat and simplicity of use.

Bomb suits are pretty similar. Mostly made of kevlar and ceramic, the thing cannot be put on by just one person, and the presenter couldn't even walk effectively. Again, its very hot and stifling inside precisely because of all the bulk. This video actually shows the process of putting it on. Imagine what it takes to put the bear suit on... anyway.

Lets talk space suits. Notice all the elements that goes into it, like the diapers-- you can't take it off, and you have to be in it for up to 6 hours! Also a sophisticated temperature control system (more so than the other two suits I've shown due to the extreme environment of space). Pads to prevent the suit from bruising the wearer (remember all the notes I made about kinetic energy and blast issues?). Again mentioned is the need for an assistant. Limited field of view, because the helmet is locked onto the upper torso (no danger of the neck getting damaged). And of course spacesuits are notoriously limiting on mobility and dexterity, and this does not go unmentioned.

Your mini-mecha needs elements of all three of these suits (and more); the mobility and usability features of the militarized bear suit, the sheer armor of the blast suit, and the life support features of the space suit. Unfortunately, even with the technologies you have proposed, its unlikely that you can mesh the mobility of the first one with the features of the other two suits. Remember, the soldier needs to wear this for an extended period of time, because getting out of it could get you killed. You can't just put it on at a moments notice, because you won't be able to get back into it very quickly. And if you get attacked outside of the suit, then it doesn't matter what features it has. So ambushes, guerrilla warfare, and night attacks become the death of your suited soldiers. It just doesn't seem practical for war. And all of this is due to the sheer bulk implied by all the features you have tried to fit onto it. That's why you don't try to stuff that many features into one kit, unless its a proper vehicle like a tank.

This probably sums up all the issues I have with the suit itself. The combat forms that you do in them is the rest. Now, I still think of those aspects as more important to any real story simply because they are physical and appeal to viewers on a different level than technical accuracy; but I'm sure there are opportunities to learn from these very real objects.

It has an impact on any stories you might write, and this thread supposedly has to do with stories you plan on writing.

Which again, is not an impact on this thread. [...] I invented a story just for this post, three weeks after I started the thread. And if you read it, you'll realize that the actual setting I'm discussing has little impact on the plot.

I've seen enough threads like this that I can't always tell, and you have done two of them so far so why not give you the advice? If it has little impact on the plot, the setting (or element of the setting) should be discarded. Period. Consider it a corollary to the writerly adage "murder your darlings".

PS: Star Wars was a successful film franchise that fit into the mold of successful space operas before it. LOTR started a literary genre. That's enough fans of built-up worlds for me.

Commonly believed, but also completely false. The Well at the World's End is one of the books that not only preceded Tolkien, but is believed to have inspired him. There are others. Lovecraft, for instance, isn't just an inspiration for horror writers but sci-fi and fantasy as well, and he was most definitely contemporaneous to Tolkien, and technically predates him by decades. Tolkien is simply the most ripped off genre writer of all time. Fitting when you consider the suspicious similarity between his work and Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung operas.

It would be a mistake to assume that Star Wars was built as a world the same way Tolkien did so. Lucas started with an archetypical hero's journey epic, and cleverly added details to the ship models and sets that created the cinematic illusion of a world that felt real. Its an approach I obviously appreciate (once you know the difference), but things like the Incredible Cross Sections, or the Essential Guides and other attempts to flesh out the Star Wars universe were done later as ad-hock justifications for what was seen onscreen, ofttimes written by overt fandom like Curtis Saxton or the EU novels. That's the brilliance of the latter method-- hint at just enough that the mind fills in the gaps, and people will go out of their way to justify the setting and their suspension of disbelief. Its just a shame that the same books like ICS have twisted some fans understanding of how it worked.

[Simon_Jester]

By the way, krakon, I agree with Formless about two things:

1) You need to think very seriously about the bulk of this armor and how it affects what men can do inside it. How hard it is to put on or take off, under what conditions that can be done safely. Even if you change nothing else, you need a realistic appreciation of that.

2) You need to start thinking a lot harder about how to make stories appealing, because otherwise people (like me) will just converge on your backstory/setting and pick it to pieces. Your geopolitics isn't very impressive (SUDDENLY CHINA VILLAIN, SUDDENLY HUGE CONVENTIONAL WAR BETWEEN NUCLEAR POWERS), so you need that to not be the focus of people looking at your ideas for the first time.

Second, continually asking me to "reread the thread" is getting annoying. I tried, and it put me to sleep. Simon, I mean, managed to do that-- his posting style is rather dry and longwinded (and I'm going to stop there because I don't really want to insult Simon at this time). The political situation struck me as completely implausible, because laser weapons are hardly as destructive as WMDs, and not comparable to dum-dum bullets because they would actually have a place in war as shield penetrators. Laser blinding may be another story, and is already banned, but there are other forms like masers that don't pose such eye hazards. It would be enough to just say the power consumption and storage issues have not been overcome. However, you seem to use this request for me to reread the thread like a bludgeon, whether its an irrelevant request like the first time you did it (really, what about "I hate pretension more than technobabble" do you not understand? Oh, I guess you were insulted but felt like interjecting for no reason. The essence of quote spaghetti) or whether you are trying to excuse your stupidity by... repeating it. Essentially.

I do think you've misunderstood a few details by not reading the huge sleep-inducing thread, but that's irrelevant to your argument, and reading it all would be onerous, so whatever. Yes, you have good cause to critique some of krakonfour's basic assumptions. Having engaged with him on a previous, entirely different setting, I've been there.

The problem is that right after you get into talking about how krakon shouldn't be wasting time trying to argue with you about how unconvincing his ideas are, you present a whole pile of detail criticisms about why they fail to convince you, which are basically just your opinion.

You come out and say that having melee warriors fight with swords is less "convincing" than have them fight with bayonets. Really? When have literary audiences, or film audiences, or anyone of that sort ever looked at a sword fight and gone "why the hell are they using swords instead of more logical spears/polearms/whatever?" Once you get the reader to buy into the premise of hand to hand combat, you will never fail to capture the reader's imagination by choosing swords.

Plus ignoring all my points made up till that point on an invalid premise that your proposed technologies will make it moot. You have to demonstrate these things, which you seem to be incapable of doing (probably because you have little understanding of any form of interpersonal combat). Your points about guns are even stupider to the point of being ludicrous... [snip extended commentary on technical details]

I could get into an extended bickering match with you on the technical details, but I think that would be missing the point.

If you do not want such a bickering match, then you might want to think twice about making technical critiques. If you do want one, I have a lot to say about your arguments, some of which are good, some of which are bad, and some of which are ludicrous if you're keeping track of the details. I do think you show a persistent tendency to fixate on single interpretations and fail to consider alternatives- but to get into that would be to get bogged down in the details.

If you don't want that, don't invite it.

[Formless]

The problem is that right after you get into talking about how krakon shouldn't be wasting time trying to argue with you about how unconvincing his ideas are, you present a whole pile of detail criticisms about why they fail to convince you, which are basically just your opinion.

You come out and say that having melee warriors fight with swords is less "convincing" than have them fight with bayonets. Really? When have literary audiences, or film audiences, or anyone of that sort ever looked at a sword fight and gone "why the hell are they using swords instead of more logical spears/polearms/whatever?" Once you get the reader to buy into the premise of hand to hand combat, you will never fail to capture the reader's imagination by choosing swords.

...not sure if you understand my purpose entirely. I'm basically trying to back up my claim that his attempts at realism are pretentious, even though I actually think watching mecha suits fighting with swords is a cool image. I'm not allergic to anime or anything. But then, so would mecha fighting with bayonets, and in how many places do you see that? Not many.

So, not sure what your problem is. If you have a reason to think that my criticisms are off base from a realism standpoint, say so. But I'm not just here to talk about story and presentation-- I can do that in any thread (and I sometimes feel like Connor, always talking about this same issue... its important, but I can always change things up). If you want to tell me what fights I should and should not pick, maybe you should mind your own business?

[Formless]

Ghetto edit: for that matter, my thesis that trying too hard to be realistic can tie you into knots is best done by finding the limits of your own technical knowledge, or by finding intractable problems that can only be solved by ignoring realism. Of course, that is kind of hard to do when you refuse to concede that you are ignorant or that there are things you can't make realistic no matter how you try.

[Simon_Jester]

...not sure if you understand my purpose entirely. I'm basically trying to back up my claim that his attempts at realism are pretentious, even though I actually think watching mecha suits fighting with swords is a cool image. I'm not allergic to anime or anything. But then, so would mecha fighting with bayonets, and in how many places do you see that? Not many.

See, I got confused because on the one hand you were talking about the goal of setting up imagery and the criticism of pretense, and on the other hand you were talking about how bayonets are better than swords from a technical perspective.

Somehow it got lost in the shuffle that you were trying to say that assuming swords are logically preferable to bayonets is a pretentious claim... or am I misunderstanding you yet again?

So, not sure what your problem is. If you have a reason to think that my criticisms are off base from a realism standpoint, say so. But I'm not just here to talk about story and presentation-- I can do that in any thread (and I sometimes feel like Connor, always talking about this same issue... its important, but I can always change things up). If you want to tell me what fights I should and should not pick, maybe you should mind your own business?

I do disagree with you about some of your realism criticisms- but I felt it would be poor form to respond to your post with another pile of quote spaghetti. You did in fact make some points krakonfour really should keep in mind, even if I think you're overestimating the torque of a pistol frame or whatever.

Maybe later when I have a bit more time to play with.

Ghetto edit: for that matter, my thesis that trying too hard to be realistic can tie you into knots is best done by finding the limits of your own technical knowledge, or by finding intractable problems that can only be solved by ignoring realism. Of course, that is kind of hard to do when you refuse to concede that you are ignorant or that there are things you can't make realistic no matter how you try.

Mhm.

Me, I try to avoid being willfully ignorant at the limits of my technical knowledge myself, and know damn well that some things can't be realistic (space triremes are fun!)


Krakonfour, again you should listen to this part. While we can enjoy ourselves talking realism, you need to be aware that at some point, literary merit trumps analysis. And that too much determination to stick to a bad premise in the face of facts can ruin the only real thing you gain from analysis- which is a deeper understanding of the science, history, and other forces that make things the way they are (or could be).

[Formless]

Somehow it got lost in the shuffle that you were trying to say that assuming swords are logically preferable to bayonets is a pretentious claim... or am I misunderstanding you yet again?

You've got it right. And it must be said that there is realism and then there are realistic claims (the latter being uncommitted to whether the premise is realistic so long as the conclusion is a realistic outgrowth of it). I object that swords are more realistic weapons in this scenario than bayonets on rifles, if for no other reason than you get more firepower from a rifle. The suit fits into that only as a substitute for any other armor. Perhaps I came off more abrasive than even I intended. I had to revise my post from a more traditional quote-by-quote when I realized that it would only bury everything in pasta, and so some of my irritation at specific talking points was probably showing through.

I do disagree with you about some of your realism criticisms- but I felt it would be poor form to respond to your post with another pile of quote spaghetti.

Fair enough. I will say, I can and do pick my battles-- I was avoiding any argument with you precisely because, overall, we seem to agree on most substantive points here. Even if your writing style isn't very appealing to me.

Mhm.

Me, I try to avoid being willfully ignorant at the limits of my technical knowledge myself, and know damn well that some things can't be realistic (space triremes are fun!)

Mind powers are fun! Sadly, my childhood dreams of studying ESP as an adult were crushed when I learned about research bias. Probably why I can't decide which I like better: sci-fi or fantasy.

[Connor MacLeod]

Ask Connor MacLeod sometime if you want to hear a good rant.

I'm not sure how to take this statement did I make the rant or was I on the receiving end of it (given my past history, etither could apply lol.)