Supersonic Swords and Gun-Kata

[Simon_Jester]

true but unless I missed something all that was talked was control over worlds Uranium supply lines not it's Hydrogen-3 supply lines, but my point was that controlling uranium mines isn't gonna give you absolute control over the worlds nukes.

Sorry; that was covered in my second sentence. I suppose I was trying to state a fact ("nukes do spoil, for the record") instead of trying to negate your position or anything.

[krakonfour]

That strikes me as rather odd and unlikely, but I'll take your word for it.

It's simple. It only affects the momentum of solids and sufficiently dense/fast flowing fluids. I try to keep it that way, so that I don't have to work out the infinitely branching possibilities of a field that visibly affects its surroundings.

I mean, imagine it could stop light. What do we call a photon with zero velocity? I'm not talking about polaritrons... as far as I could research, all I found was that actual zero velocity, zero wavelength photons cease to exist. In practical applications, we can pump a field to the size of a moon and start gathering free solar energy with near zero infrastructure.

So yeah... no visible effects.

This would hit diminishing returns pretty fast. Among other things, a tank has a fixed physical geometry- you know where to mount a given ERA brick to direct its blast against a rocket fired from 4 o'clock. A guy in power armor does not have this luxury, so the ERA bricks will often not be aligned optimally to deal with a threat (say, because the guy just raised his arm).

Diminishing... returns? Umm, I'm hoping you mean that the system becomes less effective over time.

As for the configuration of the ERA bricks, those come into play only AFTER the grenade or projectile has gone through the active defense system. There is no need to point them at the trajectory of the grenade, just place them on the parts you want protected.

Active DS à la TROPHY: Actively aims at the grenade. This thing fires miniature grenades into the path of the projectile. These counter projectile projectiles can be placed anywhere, and moved to and fro, as long as they have a clear line of sight to the incoming object. A simple solution to the user moving about is to place the explosive-firing mast on the shoulders or on the back.

ERA bricks: The ADS will likely fail if overwhelmed or unable to protect the user for some reason (runs out of ammunition for the left side for example). The grenade can still be countered when it hits the armor. Instead of regular plating, we can put bricks of explosives on top that activate upon impact. Of course, modifications are needed. Instead of being set off by a strong kinetic impact, they could react to an explosive shockwave instead. Plastic NERA helps in this aspect. They could also be configured to release their energy in a larger arc, to still be effective against off-angle hits.

Also, the system is very expensive compared to the threat (grenade with impact fuse), and you have a very serious target discrimination problem because if the ERA triggers in response to thrown grenades, it will also trigger in response to thrown rocks, and to showers of debris in general.

Once the initial cost is sunk, all that remains is the cost of the grenades vs the cost of the counter-explosives.
I'm assuming cheaper electronics in this setting, enough so to equip every soldier with this high tech millimeter band radar/ computer alert system. The power supply is derived from that of the field generator, with shrinking the field being a last resort energy reserve*.

As for target discrimination, we can handwave away processing time and costs. All that's left is having to distinguish between a rock and a grenade. Our tools are the radar and cameras using a shapre recognition system linked to a database of enemy projectiles. A smooth rounded shell is easy to distinguish from a jagged rock, for example. The radar can also help, if employed like this.

Of course, you can always confuse this system. Dummy grenades, grenades hidden within rocks, grenades with outlandish shapes or coated in a layer of rock, plastic grenades and so on, but it's safe to assume that the system will be set to fire at that weirdly shaped chunk of metal instead of ignoring it.

*: The returned energy has a significant proportion wasted as heat, so this will likely destroy the generator in the process.

Cluster bomblets are cheap, dumb shells are cheap. Also note that artillery is frequently used to wreck physical structures, including those which are probably not protected by shields.

The syrian pre-emptive bombardment of likely sniper and/or rebel positions taught me what I need to know about 'wrecking physical structures'.
What I meant about guided missile artillery was that artillery shells could be made accurate enough in the future that requiring planes over the enemy for precision airstrikes would not be necessary anymore. Their range could be considerably boosted too, to the point whjere we might not even need railgun technology.

Men in power armor require better footing than men in shirtsleeves. Moreover, artillery will also be used to strike at targets other than the enemy infantry themslves, which are often not going to be shielded.

I think we did this before, in the Iron Giants thread. Increasing the foot area will allow armored troopers to traverse terrain as easily, if not better, than men in boots. It's the same reason as to why a 60 ton tank can drive over rougher terrain than a 800kg smart car.

If the artillery has to be restricted to detroying structures instead of denying troops movement, then it's a win. Harassing fire, interdiction fire, covering fire all become much less effective.

On the other hand, the carrying capacity of the troops means that they will be able to position big guns much much closer to the enemy.

Where are you getting this 3m figure from?

It's the distance that you'll likely to be already reducing when the fields merge. It is under these circumstances that using a melee weapon in addition to a gun become a sensible thing to do. An explosion big enough to take out the opponent's armor will take you out as well, so no grenades within the field, a fact that can be used both offensively and defensively.

I'm sorry, but this makes no damn sense. Can you please back up and explain exactly why you think gun kata is anything other than silliness here? Three meters is plenty of distance to riddle someone with bullets regardless of what hand to hand weapon they're carrying.

Also, how much practical experience do you have with hand to hand weaponry?

Distance: 3 meters.
Maximal extension with arm and sword: 2-2.5m.
Look at this: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrime#La_piste


In practice, the opponents are at points G if you take into account the size of the suit and the reach of the robotic arms. A lunge and sidestep can be accomplished in 0.5 seconds with the leg strength I'm proposing for the armored troopers. If he shrinks his own shield before merging, he can reduce the distance to a minumum of 1.5m

Yes, of course it is easy to point a handgun in that time and kill the opponent.

A few problems:
-A light handgun won't do jackshit to the armor.
-Today's light MG that people have difficulty maneouvering in close quarters... won't do jackshit to the armor.
-You need a bigass recoiless cannon firing HEAT rounds (difficult to maneouver, subsonic) or a very long cannon with enough kinetic energy to deal some damage by penetrating (forget it)
-Your opponent will likely need many hits to take down. You might get the first shot off, the second one too, but after that, he's got your gun skewered on his sword and his own gun pushing up your chin.

This requires so stupidly much coordination that it would best be done by an actual combat drone, not a human being with 100 ms reaction time.

I'll get to the advanced in human/machine interfaces over the next 100 years by countries with little consideration for their troop's mental health a bit later.

Also, I love the image of some ULTIMATE GUN KATA WARRIAH who triumphs over enemy POWER ARMOR MOOKS this way, only to get slaughtered by a volley of grenades or a hail of antitank cluster bomblets.

This reminds me of the generals that did away with the pesky guns on the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter.
Why would volleys of grenades be the end-all solution? Do cluster bomblets even have an anti-tank version?

My point is, these soldiers could very well be wearing slimmed down versions of ceramic composite tank armor. The stuff that could cover your chest with 30mm RHAe protection and weigh only 50kg.
Grenade fragments will not get through. The other effects are greatly reduced when you're in a hermetic metal suit. The only useful effect remaining would be to blow away sensors, damage exposed components (like the gun you're holding), and the consussive effect.

One very easy counter to the sudden acceleration caused by multiple explosions going off around you is to bolt the headpiece to the body. Now, the explosion has to shift the entire frame, weighing several hundred kilos, instead of just the head seperately, and that will reduce the g-forces involved proportionately.

But then again, everything dies to the application of BIGGER EXPLOSIONS.

What background are you using here? This description is not very convincing in and of itself- you need either credentials or equations to convince people of the fluid dynamics.

The whole thing was silly. That effect would only exist if you switched on the engine during supersonic flight. Realistically, it would be on during the transition from low speed all the way up to supersonic regimes. This would provide a continuous, perfect compression of the air without having to worry about frequencies and whatnot.
Short version: You'd get the slow column of air at any speed.

Existing jet engines work perfectly fine with fast-moving airflow. Why would this be better again?

You'd get supersonic deflagration of the fuel.

So? That suggests that air power takes the form of zillions of sneaky drones with bombs at the low end, hypersonic aircraft at the high end, and all manner of crazy in between.

So? Cost.

Does the shield necessarily provide better protection than 10-20 tons of armor plate? Also, why are we removing the main gun? I liked the main gun, and it's got enough momentum transfer to be a credible antishield weapon.

The shield provides a different type of protection, which is overall more useful considering that it doesn't weigh 10-20 tons and stops fast-moving.... everything.

The main gun needs momentum trasfer to become an anti-shield weapon, not high velocity. That means that the long barrel thing can be replaced with a short fat barrel launching the heaviest explosive you can carry. Of course, why bother with trying to strike the shield when you can lob that same explosive and trying and get it through the shield? Then you don't need a gun at all, just a short-ranged mortar.
Think a bit more, and you'll realize that trying to catch an enemy power trooper and drive up to him close enough to lob the thing at him is much easier achieved if you just let an allied soldier carry the cannon and become a much more flexible walking field artillery thing.

This does not require an actual war, as noted. Ever heard of the Great Game?

Actually, I didn't. Thanks for pointing it out.

So... an unofficial war between India and China could still happen, as long as they use interposed forces...I'll think over it.

In the scenario above, India wouldn't touch any Chinese territory, and to the candid eye, India is killing Pakistani soldiers.

In which case India's demand is "lower your tariffs or I'll shoot this random guy, I swear to Vishnu I'll do it!" That's... incredibly dumb. As in, literally too stupid to be believed.[/Quote]

I did insist on the candid eye thing. In reality, the Indians are destroying the Chinese foothold in Pakistan, and with it, the Chinese hopes to apply military pressure on India to force it join the world price fixing pact. Now, they have to negociate on equal terms in the economic and political field.
The Indians might shoot a few Pakistani, but they would pose little to no resistance to the weapons of the new century. The real war is waged between Indian forces and Chinese forces under Pakistani colours.

Read Clausewitz. War is an extension of politics by other means, an act of violence intended to compel an enemy to do your will. In this case, there is no foreseeable means by which the act of violence CAN actually compel the enemy to do India's will, so the whole thing makes no sense from their perspective.

China tries to apply military pressure on the 'inferior Indians'. India crushes a country China thought was completely under its control.
-India gains allies that want to fight off Chinese influence, now that they have someone that has proven capable of standing up to it
-China has to reconsider how much force is necessary to make India submit in a total war, and decides that it isn't worth it
-China now has to deal with countries that don't feel so safe under its protection
-Unable to force India to open up its market, it will have to trade on equal terms with a big importer, so is now very happy to negociate half-measures.

The problem then is that each drone is a million-dollar piece of hardware (kind of has to be, just to be functional), and you're writing them off for every kilometer of ground they may gain.

We're already equipped the bottom-level footsoldier with today's cutting edge technology in active defense systems, and each of them requires a minimum of 10kW sustained power supply. I'm not so sure that the drones, nothing more than empty, refitted suits on autopilot, would cost THAT much.

You can't program them to march toward the enemy capital killing all in their path with any real effectiveness, unless you subject them to centralized control. This is because real armies need centralized control; they aren't just mindless mobs of berserkers wandering across the landscape. Mindless berserkers do not do very well when they run into fortified defenders.

Why would they be mindless berzerks? I don't undestand why you would compare a sophisticated program designed to track and kill on its own to a raging madman without a whiff of sense.

You could potentially use them to clear a small fixed area of enemies, but the drones will then need to be stood down, recovered, and refurbished... and the territory thus cleared must be held by actual soldiers, which loops us right back to square one. You still can't fight without meaningful logistics.

That just means that they are perfectly suited to a defensive war, where the area you have cleared out does NOT need to be taken back, just denied to the enemy. If the enemy has to resort to prepared defenses to take out your robots, then you've won: the attack has to be stopped.
Plus, these robots can be dropped behind the lines, which you cannot reliably do with live soldiers if you want to get them back.

And in any scenario, these robots are just tools. They enhance your field presence disproportionately to the number of soldiers you have. If India needs 1000 soldiers to take back a land held by 500 Chinese, then the latter is in a favorable position.

[quoteThe problem is not that China is likely to lose, it's that it's so likely to lose that only a person willfully ignorant of basic strategy would expect to win this way. It only makes sense if the Chinese grand strategy is being written by 15-year-old Internet morons who think "OMG SUPAR BADASS KILLBOT" and ignore how impractical it is to rely solely on such a weapon system to fight a serious war against a determined opponent in open terrain.[/Quote]

China has an established presence in Pakistan with multiple supply depots and drone armies that multiply its fighting power. They have a supply route which is difficult to maintain, and complete air superiority.
The Indians have a technological disadvantage, have zero presence in Pakistan, will have their routes into the country constantly bombarded, the land mined beforehand, and they are not equipped to shoot down aircraft.

India hopes that its superior numbers in the region and multiple routes into Pakistan will buy it enough time for it to stock up in field-deploying missiles to engage the Chinese aircraft, then it will move inland, with each step costing them soldiers before, during and after the battle.

The Chinese hopes that its technological superiority will hold off the Indians until the losses become unsustainable for them. They are confident that even if the Indians manage to crawl over Fortress Pakistan, they would have dragged out the majority of the Indian army and inflicted enough losses to regain the upper hand on the negociation table. "You've won Pakistan, empty, arid Pakistan, but you lost your army and we can build ourselves a new one" they would say. The air-drop resupplies are just to drag out the war a bit longer and increase the number of dead, irreplaceable Indian soldiers, and the autonomous robots can carry on the war in a region even if the area is lost and written off.

I don't see where a 15yr old wrote the Chinese strategy.

A typical surface to air missile is more than large enough to carry its own shield generator onboard. They're as large or larger than a human being.

Enough room, certainly. Do they also pack the
-Power supply to maintain the field during flight
-Propellant required to catch the enemy aircraft, chase it down AND MERGE WITH IT AT NEAR-ZERO RELATIVE SPEED?!
-Still carry a bit enough warhead to destroy the plane after all that is fitted on.

The problem is, even if the missile catches up with your aircraft, it has to chase you around with the least excess speed it can manage. Even a 650km/h missile will bounce off the shield of a 600km/h aircraft.
After it has miraculously brought itself alongside the aircraft, it has to slow down, so that's more propellant expended, and maneouver the warhead into the field, then explode before your aircraft automatically shrinks the field in retaliation* to expulse it once again.

The missile will very likely require multiple attempts at this game. Heck, the pilot could just wait for the missile to bring itself along side the plane, and twist the stick when he sees the missile's airbrakes and retrojets activate. The missile now has to bring itself back up to speed and do everything again.

All this requires a very smart missile that can stand up to the EW barrage during the whole chase, and have a stupid amount of propellant to stay in the air.

And anyone who knows shielded aircraft exist, and that this wonky shield-merge is possible, will have already designed shielded SAMs. Hell, people here thought of it in like 10-20 minutes of trying.

Thought of it. Built it, sold it, replaced the ENTIRE current stock of SAM missiles, mounted it into the new SAM lauchers and brought it into position to take down enemy aircraft?
Takes a bit more time.

Even that may not actually help much. Countries like Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh aren't exactly huge lucrative markets. Access to the Middle East is best achieved by sea around Asia and not by land across Central Asia (as the Portuguese and everyone since has learned).

Humm. That has got me thinking about sea warfare. How do you take down a completely shielded warship with an endless power supply and massive mounts for bracing multiple generators?

[/Quote]Meanwhile, this whole war costs trillions and pointlessly antagonizes a nuclear-armed military power that is NOT going to somehow cease to exist even after their army is temporarily "crushed."[/Quote]

It'll cost trillions to the Indians, but for them, it's either this or falling to the Chinese who'll cut off their economy. For China, well it has trillions. They'd gain a much bigger market if all goes well.

As for the nuclear status quo... how would yoou about nuclear retaliation when you can shield a few major cities and a command centers if all goes to shit?

Um... no? That's not going to work, because there's too much economic incentive for producers to defect, and it's practically impossible to somehow secure a world lock on all sources of Mineral X scattered across different continents.

Just economic incentive? What's China doing moving its armies around? Why does China have such a strong foothold in Pakistan in the first place? It's military pressure keeping them in place. I'm assuming that by the time China feels its in a position to play out this gambit, that it has secured strong enough ties with its neighbours that they won't fail under increased pressure.
If all you money was in Chinese banks, and their army's 'counsellors' are patrolling your streets, how sane do you have to be to refuse a massive increase in your country's export prices?

The point is, it makes the Chinese into Big Scary Villains instead of a realistic country that operates to improve its own position. It's like, you needed an antagonist, so you remade China as the antagonist, even if that meant making them do completely unrealistic things like randomly invading Pakistan or threatening to cut off the world's uranium supply if they aren't given one... MILLION dollars or whatever.

China didn't invade Pakistan, it gave it the massive loans it needed to develop the country in return for military presence that would fend off Pakistan's enemy, India.
It doesn't cut off the uranium supply either, nor does it buy all of it off the markets, just a majority.
It's like the OPEP crisis, as I said before. You can still get your uranium, but you'll be getting it at, say, 7 times the price. The remaining uranium producers either sell their limited production at low prices, or they seize the chance and follow your pricing without you even having to tell them what to do.
During the OPEP crisis, did the oil get cut off? Did the OPEP countries even control the entire world's supply of oil? Nope, just a majority.

For purposes of setting off an impact fuze, that will work quite nicely. Remember that the ONLY part of the grenade that is stopped is the part in contact with the field- which is exactly the same thing that happens when the grenade strikes a brick wall.

That depends entirely on the softness of the field. An extremely hard field will react to a millimeter of the grenade denting the surface. An extra soft shield would let half or more of the grenade penetrate before actiavting. Then it'll start rolling or something.
For practical purposes, you are right, you can make it detonate ON the fild.

Shrapnel coming at you from an explosion at your feet is likely to penetrate armor designed to resist against specific weapons fired from specific angles. Also, counting on people sidestepping in half a second is... unwise. Sometimes they may not have room to dodge. Sometimes they won't see the grenade.

On the other hand, not much is needed to stop shrapnel penetrating. Based on the Stryker's recent armor upgrade, 14.5mm of steel equivalent is enough to stop shrapnel from a 155mm shell.
The dodging is not human controlled, either, or only partially. The reflex is computer controlled, and if they caught in an area with no room to dodge or jump, then well, you can't make them invulnerable to unfavorable positioning.

It's not about swords as such, the point is that this sort of thing is exactly how you'd expect relatively mundanely equipped soldiers to respond to SHIELDED POWER ARMOR MAN WITH GUNSWORD AND SWORDGUN OMG BLACK BELT KATA HI-YAAA! or whatever.

I'm not proposing highly trained soldiers either. Computer aids deal with that.
And yes, relying solely on grenades to counter everything thrown at them with a shield on it does sound like what a mundane soldier to do.

Damn. It took my so long to type and research all that. Y DO I QUOTE THE SJ ?1!

[krakonfour]

I think it was mentioned before, but if a tank shoots a shielded soldier with a 120mm round, it's probably going to kill him just from sheer kinetic impact, when the shell rips the shield mountings off the suit and plows into his chest.

Let's calculate a bit.
Scenario one: The soldier expects to come under tank gun fire.
The shield is set to have a 2.5m buffer zone with a soft setting.

The round will transfer its momentum while travelling within this distance.

Itself is a 120mm round weighing 8.5kg and travelling at 1600m/s.
Momentum of the round: 13.6kNs
The field will transmit a force of 4352000N over the course of 0.003125 seconds.
The suit can weigh 500kg. This means, if the generator is firmly braced to the suit, that it will be subjected to 888.2g for three hundredths of a second. It budges 'instantly' by 8.5cm.
If the person inside has 20cm of padding on springs, and the electronics a bit less, then I don't see this as unsurvivable.

Scenario one: The soldier does not expect to be hit.
The shield is set to have a buffer zone of 1m with a hard setting.

The field will transmit a force of 27200000N over the course of 0.0005s, and would move the suit by 1.36cm, doing absolutely nothing to the user other than snapping the generator out of its bracings.

Of course, these calculations completely disregard additional factors that affect the collision. The most important ones are the suit's suspension, the suit being a set of hinged masses, some of the momentum being transmitted to the ground and air through friction, the generator being mounted on springs and/or placed inside a hydraulic fluid that absorbs the impact forces and so on. Reading into the effects of sudden accelerations, I find that short ones (sub-millisecond) are much more survivable than longer ones despite the hundreds of gees.

PS: Take into consideration that falling on your butt from 1m height is a 100G deceleration.

Even with shields making soldiers as tough as tanks, tanks are still better. You've shown how hard it can be to kill things at range with physical rounds and shown that even with shields a guy with a sword can still just run up and kill your soldier. A tank doesn't care how many times you swing your sword at it or poke it with a spear and can be armed with weapons that blow up people who try to mesh with it's shields and plant a bomb on it. Plus, given that these shields seem to be expensive, you need less of them to cover an army of tanks and APC's than you do to cover a bunch of combat cyborgs.

So the tank cannot hurt the shielded troopers, and the troopers cannot hurt the tank... One of these is not going to get fielded, and the cost of a tank is what? 10 million a pop today?

[/Quote]Thus in the end your setting actually calls for laser armed tanks fitted with laser ablating armor and not a return to melee combat. You would have seen this is you treated it as a case of armor out running the gun instead of trying to use shields as a means to get to melee combat.[/quote]

I don't really get the second sentence, but in my setting, lasers aren't terribly effective. Yes, they can easily reach the 200, 300kW range once mounted on a vehicle a hundred years into the future. And yes, they will go through the shields and blast everything...
But come on. How will you ever train the beam on one spot for the multiple seconds you need to go through any realistic amount of armor the power armored troopers are carrying? A small rock on the road and bump there goes your penetration attempt. The cost of going through fields is also a huge power and cooling station you're going have to lug everywhere.

I don't know. Maybe laser finally become effective enough to be widely fielded. Maybe they're useless dead weight that should be replaced by ten conventional guns.
For now, consider the setting hostile to lasers.

[Borgholio]

The field cannot simply "get rid" of any kinetic energy. If you have a shell weighing 12kg at 1400m/s for a KE round, or 18kg at 1000m/s for an HE round (your numbers for the shell are a bit light), then that is an incredible amount of force that needs to be resisted. If the generator has to physically resist any force that is transferred into the field, then what kind of bolt or weld could possibly hold the generator in place against the impact? It should be sheared off the first instant with the bulk of the impact hitting the soldier in the chest. No amount of padding will protect against a direct impact from a 120mm tank shell. Unless you're Iron Man.

[krakonfour]

The field cannot simply "get rid" of any kinetic energy. If you have a shell weighing 12kg at 1400m/s for a KE round, or 18kg at 1000m/s for an HE round (your numbers for the shell are a bit light), then that is an incredible amount of force that needs to be resisted. If the generator has to physically resist any force that is transferred into the field, then what kind of bolt or weld could possibly hold the generator in place against the impact? It should be sheared off the first instant with the bulk of the impact hitting the soldier in the chest. No amount of padding will protect against a direct impact from a 120mm tank shell. Unless you're Iron Man.

I wrote in an earlier post that the kinetic energy gets converted into heat back in the object. So the kinetic energy of the shell round vaporizes it when it hits the field.

There are many solutions other than bolting/welding that can be used to held a generator in place. First of all, it can be backed by a thick steel plate. This means that even catastrophic failure of the regular bracing would still hold the user within the shield. If the power line gets cut, the field won't switch off... it'll shrink and heat up the generator as energy gets pumped back and lost as waste heat.

Now as to actually absorbing the momentum, I thought of this configuration:
-Black box generator gets placed inside steel container
-BBG is held inside the container using springs.
-The whole thing is flooded in hydraulic fluid.
-The hydraulic fluid flows into pistons extending out of suit's back.
-The pistons are held down using electromagnets.

Upon impact, the generator pulls on its springs. The springs pull on the whole suit. It also pushes into the oil-filled container. The pressurized oil pushed against the piston heads. The electromagnets hold back the piston heads and gradually resist and absorb the overpressure.
If all goes well, the oil pressure is regulated and the BBG is pushed back into place with the help of the springs.
If the springs are broken, the oil system still works.
If the oil pressure is too high, the fluid will leak out to relieve the pressure
If all fails, the BBG will slam against the steel backplate.

In some configurations, the generator mounting is placed on a tail. The assembly doesn't have the whole weight of the suit to pull on, but it will swing away the force that could crush the user.

I'm also not sure you could totally legislate lasers out of existence. There would be a demand for such weaponry (and masers) because they're obviously effective at bypassing shields, and they aren't as WMD-like as nukes (which have met with mixed success as far as 'controlling' that technology goes.)

The problems still lie in effectiveness and cost. It is going to take a long time before they can do any crippling damage to slabs of ceramic composites, and those that do are either mobile nuclear power station huge (FEL) or laboratory-level flimsy (gas dynamic lasers).
Either way, I don't want them.

To complicate things even further, although you might not be able to restrict laser technologies totally, you might be able to regulate their usage in certain ways in a 'rules of war' manner. Restrict it to certain wavelengths (like near infrared, as opposed to visible or UV) due to hazards to civilians and human beings. Same with charged particle beams.

I restricted my presence of laser weaponry to US and Euro armies. They are the most technologically advanced on the planet, and have figured out ways to field them effectively. The rest of the world is scared of attacking them for that matter, even of their host countries have no way of funding a war, defensive or not.
You'd understand though that little of this technology is shared considering the amount of military tension there is.

I also suspect you're not going to be able to get away with any sort of 'swung' weapon (at least nothing like a hammer or sword) in melee combat, as most weapons I remember being used in combat tended to be piercing/stabbing (especially in close packed formations.) I'd expect any melee weapons to be some analogue to a bayonet mounted on the forearm (you can't lose it or drop it.) And even then you'd probably have some sort of point flank firearm analogue worked into your arm mounts as well (some sort of shotgun/flechette for short range work once you got inside the shield.) some sort of directional grenade might be an issue too (if you can adhere them to your enemy, again under the shield.)

Piercing/stabbing is positively useless when facing slimmed down tank armor. There is no way the robotic arms will provide enough thrusting force to deal meaningful force.
The point of swords was to have a special stick to disarm the opponent with, or at least disrupt his aim, during the 0.5-1 second interval you need to close into grappling range. They can then be used to keep the enemy's gun pointed away while you bring your own weapon to bear.
Hammers are more effective during the closing in part of the melee. They provide more force upon impact, and are harder to parry with a sword. When brought down upon your enemy's gun, they will push them away further, giving you a few extra milliseconds to position yourself. They have the added advantage of possibly destroying the enemy's gun (bend the barrel or something) and able to be smashed against the sensor head of the suit. The soldier's real head is in the chest, but I'm digressing here.

A bayonet on the forearm is interesting, but it does not have the same reach as a sword during the running-into-the-enemy-as-soon-as-the-fields-merge stage. It could be used as a follow-up weapon though.

I already mentioned sticky grenades somewhere in my first posts.

The preferred in-shield gun is a large, short shotgun shooting HEAT rounds. It is short enough to be swung away from the enemy, and can still go through the armor. The disadvantage is that it practically cannot be reloaded mid-fight. That's why a reasonable (lol) secondary weapon is a HEAT-revolver Dirty Harry wished he had.
More crazy can be found in shoulder-mounted guns, high explosive bolas, RPG firing hammers and... take your pick of whatever and replace the ammo with explosive shit.

I have this crazy idea that combat involves heavily shielded giant tracked vehicles (think of a Jawa sandcrawler lol) and the objective is to get your force within range of the enemy's lines (under their shields, close to their buildings, etc.) So you can deploy your troops and take and hold important facilities. The enemy might use artillery, laser-armed tanks or direct fire platforms (possibly unshielded - you could play up a tradeoff in that you could be shielded, or have a laser, but not both.) and contrive some sort of rock-paper scissors with defense (maybe vehicles have a specific anti-shield defense but they can't have that and the kinetic shielding on at the same time, so to protect against one you might have to expose yourself to the other.

I'll disregard the rest, but the rock-paper-scissors organization intrigues me.
For now, the soldiers have the following roles:
-Grenadier
-Melee
-Artillery

The grenadier spams... grenades... everywhere. He has different types of grenades for different situations, and has to be rather maneuverable to make the most of his throws. Well, launches. His advantage is in open terrain, where the enemy will be hard pressed to escape all the explosions. If some get too close to the enemy, he will get bashed to death within his own suit. He is at a disadvantage in closer range fights, and practically dead if his ammo runs out or someone merges with his shield.

The melee combatant lives to merge. His goal is to get close enough to the enemy so that their fields meet and open up, setting them up for a duel. He employs big HEAT round launchers and a variety of blades and hammers to outmaneuver the opponent in the enclosed space. He is both the most maneuverable and cheapest combatant. He favors built up areas or anything with lots of cover to escape to. His is at a disadvantage in open terrain, or when facing an opponent that can get past his shield.

The artillery guy sacrifices mobility for a big-ass gun. He fires specialized ammunition that can one-shot opponents if they get inside the field, and can do so from a much longer range than the grenadier. He is capable in both open and closed terrain. His main disadvantage is that if his gun is countered, his equipment becomes dead weight. His even more restricted by ammunition load than the grenadier, but he has some chance in melee combat. He can employ a variety of weapon that include flamethrowers and masers/lasers.

There's also this peculiar idea where you might have two APC crawlers end up coming up alongside one another and one side boards the other like this was an Age of Sail naval action lol. Actually sort of like how shipboard combat happened in Lensman, I think.

The problem is, the APCs can get through each other's shields as long as they make sure the opponent is immobile enough. If they do not stop and keep at a distance, the shells will bounce off and they'll be practically invulnerable. If they stop next to each other, the shields would merge and they'll one shot everything inside. Shields cannot form inside each other, so the soldiers an APC transports are vulnerable during transport, so all it takes is one good hit.

What I see as the ground vehicle of the future is some sort of missileboat on wheels. It follows the infantry platoon, probably automatically, and provides a close-in fire support by launching a ton of cluster bombs at the enemy. Other versions might forgo to explosives for a large, warhammer 40k large, siege gun that knocks opponents off their feet with its blast radius alone.

THought of this last night - take a standard rocket munition, mount it in a hollow cylinder longer and wider then the rocket is. The cylinder extends beyonds the rockets tip and is connected to the rocket with a reasonably brittle bond.
Fire it at a shield.
the front edge of the cylinder makes contact first, stops.
The edge is pushed through the wafer thin shield by the momentum of the rest of the casing behind it. We might be talking a few mm, but it's enough to penetrate.
THe shield dosen't like passing through solid objects. A neat hole is thus cut in the shield for the next second or two.
The deceleration of the cylinder reaches the clips holding it to the rocket. They break under the strain and the rocket continues under it's own momentum, through the hole.

You mean, a tandem charge weapon?
The problem here is that the field bends. If the cone hits the field, it is doing to dent it first before it is halted. Then the field will wrap around the intruding matter by bulging inwards.

Let's say the cone has three sections, each a millimeter thick.
Section 1 strikes the field. It is halted. The field covers it.
Section 2 slams against section one. The field is now in front of section 1, so both sections are halted.
Section 3....
You get the idea. It has to go on long enough for the field to be unable to extend any more, and opens up. Will momentum be enough to get over the stolen sections, and go through the crushed sections in front? It might if you are continuously thrusting.
Not saying it won't work, but it will be difficult. There's the additional difficulty of getting past the suit's active defense system.

The thing that comes to mind most immediately is giant, shielded bulldozers that are sent plowing into your infantry lines, columns, whatever.

Most likely, they are dispersed enough so that their fields won't be joined, and so that incoming fire in the form of grenades or cluster bomblets won't kill them all.

Unless you completely handwave the idea of shielded vehicles (and that would include walkers of osme kind) vehicles are still going to be better than shielded troops.

Of course shielded vehicles exist! How else do we get battlefield mobility. The sole problem is, you'll still need a shielded something to clear out built up areas and rooms, and on rough ground, the mobility of vehicles and suits is comparable.

And heck, the power troopers, with their weight and horsepower, are miniature walking vehicles 3m tall, mounting weapons previously categorized as anti-armor.

And I don't think you can completely handwave artillery, cuz artillery can get pretty big, and I don't think artillery munitions are, per round, all that expensive (a couple hundred per round for 155mm IIRC). Depending on how much your shielded supersoliders cost, you could probably easily afford to lob literally scores of such munitions at the targets and drown them in hundreds or thousands of kilos of explosive apiece. And if HE doesn't work, why not some sort of artillery shell that breaks up into flechettes or shot, or whatever prior to impact?

Submunition artillery were brought up, and I added that guided munitions would become standard too. My argument though was that they wouldn't be very effective at denying an area to troops or clearing them out anymore.

Also, even if the field protects them perfectly, they're going to be subjected to accelerations, and if the impact is hard enough the accelerations could be harmful if not lethal.

The main method of killing a power armor user is this, with or without the shield.

If someone is that gung-ho to have people fighting with melee weapons on a battlefield, you have to do alot more to constrain the enviroment they fight in. You might expect hand to hand more inside buildings and such than you would on an open battlefield.

If you feel safe enough from thrown and launched weapons, you might charge over a short stretch of terrain. Considering their running speed, a short stretch of terrain could very well be 400m (roughly 20 sec to cross).

Another possibility is to use gun-swords, as in barrels built into the blade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet

Bayonet: Tiny ass knife on a gun.
Gunsword: A sword with a barrel inside it.

Just some minor food for thought but the half-life for uranium-235 is 7*108 years and the half-life for U238 is 4.5*109 years, so as long as you don't use it for anything your uranium stock isn't gonna "spoil" in any signifigant way, meaning nukes cannot be completely written out by saying "X controls all the uranium production facilities"

Ummm.... okay? I never mentioned China cutting off uranium supplies, much less attempt to control nuclear weapon stockpiles.

[Simon_Jester]

It's simple. It only affects the momentum of solids and sufficiently dense/fast flowing fluids. I try to keep it that way, so that I don't have to work out the infinitely branching possibilities of a field that visibly affects its surroundings.

What honestly surprises me is that it doesn't even interact with light, nor does it give off any other detectable radiations (either EM radiations or more exotic stuff), nor does it have to emit heat from the power being pumped into maintaining it.

I mean, imagine it could stop light. What do we call a photon with zero velocity? I'm not talking about polaritrons... as far as I could research, all I found was that actual zero velocity, zero wavelength photons cease to exist. In practical applications, we can pump a field to the size of a moon and start gathering free solar energy with near zero infrastructure.

Point- although you'd hit diminishing returns, because the light absorbed by the Langston Field force-bubble increases with the square of its radius, while the power maintenance budget increases with the cube.

This would hit diminishing returns pretty fast. Among other things, a tank has a fixed physical geometry- you know where to mount a given ERA brick to direct its blast against a rocket fired from 4 o'clock. A guy in power armor does not have this luxury, so the ERA bricks will often not be aligned optimally to deal with a threat (say, because the guy just raised his arm).

Diminishing... returns? Umm, I'm hoping you mean that the system becomes less effective over time.

No, I mean that adding ERA to a man's armor is less effective than doing it for a tank's armor- and that this becomes even LESS effective when the ERA is being added to arms or legs instead of the torso. Plus, of course, the ERA bricks can physically impede movement- try bending your elbow with styrofoam bricks taped to your arms for an example.

So, the more of it you add on, the less actual protection you get per pound of random bulky stuff you're putting on your soldier. Diminishing returns.

As for the configuration of the ERA bricks, those come into play only AFTER the grenade or projectile has gone through the active defense system. There is no need to point them at the trajectory of the grenade, just place them on the parts you want protected.

The problem is that the ERA needs to be aligned in certain ways to be fully effective. You can't just tape bricks of it to someone at random and expect it to help much. On a tank, you sit down and figure out how to mount the ERA once, because it's got a fixed geometry and virtually all incoming weapons fire approaches the tank from a very narrow range of angles. An infantryman deals with a wider range of attack vectors.

Plus, of course, the bulk/ergonomics angle. Adding four inches of bricks to a tank's hull doesn't change its functionality much. Adding four inches of bricks to a man's arm means he can't even hold the arm in certain positions at all.

Active DS à la TROPHY: Actively aims at the grenade. This thing fires miniature grenades into the path of the projectile. These counter projectile projectiles can be placed anywhere, and moved to and fro, as long as they have a clear line of sight to the incoming object. A simple solution to the user moving about is to place the explosive-firing mast on the shoulders or on the back.

Mind you, the system is still bulky and awkward as hell, and will be prone to engage random flying debris. And good luck using it in a built-up environment, which is exactly where you're most likely to worry about grenades.

Also, the system is very expensive compared to the threat (grenade with impact fuse), and you have a very serious target discrimination problem because if the ERA triggers in response to thrown grenades, it will also trigger in response to thrown rocks, and to showers of debris in general.

Once the initial cost is sunk, all that remains is the cost of the grenades vs the cost of the counter-explosives.
I'm assuming cheaper electronics in this setting, enough so to equip every soldier with this high tech millimeter band radar/ computer alert system. The power supply is derived from that of the field generator, with shrinking the field being a last resort energy reserve*.

Hm. This is going to make the electronic warfare environment... interesting, because there are many many radar sets operating in a small space. Interference is gonna be a bear.

Tanks and AFVs operate with more separation, which makes radar-guided point defense easier to manage.

Of course, you can always confuse this system. Dummy grenades, grenades hidden within rocks, grenades with outlandish shapes or coated in a layer of rock, plastic grenades and so on, but it's safe to assume that the system will be set to fire at that weirdly shaped chunk of metal instead of ignoring it.

My point is that the active defense systems will do a lot of wild firing in the field, for questionable return on investment.

Cluster bomblets are cheap, dumb shells are cheap. Also note that artillery is frequently used to wreck physical structures, including those which are probably not protected by shields.

The syrian pre-emptive bombardment of likely sniper and/or rebel positions taught me what I need to know about 'wrecking physical structures'.

Expand please. Remember, blasting a building into rubble may not permanently wreck it as a fighting position, but it does reduce the structure's value as shelter for sleeping troops, as an elevated vantage point for enemy spotters, or as a command post for enemy officers.

Men in power armor require better footing than men in shirtsleeves. Moreover, artillery will also be used to strike at targets other than the enemy infantry themslves, which are often not going to be shielded.

I think we did this before, in the Iron Giants thread. Increasing the foot area will allow armored troopers to traverse terrain as easily, if not better, than men in boots. It's the same reason as to why a 60 ton tank can drive over rougher terrain than a 800kg smart car.

The increased area will help in some contexts, but not in others. For example, when a 60 ton tank gets stuck in the mud, it requires a truly epic tow truck (a tow tank, usually) to retrieve it, because the suction force holding it in place is proportionate to the vehicle's mass and weight, not its ground pressure. Also, using larger boot soles will not do anything to protect you from having the staircase of a blast-weakened building collapse under your weight, or rubble piles slide out from underneath you.

-Your opponent will likely need many hits to take down. You might get the first shot off, the second one too, but after that, he's got your gun skewered on his sword and his own gun pushing up your chin.

In that case, you want a heavily built firearm with a bayonet lug.

This requires so stupidly much coordination that it would best be done by an actual combat drone, not a human being with 100 ms reaction time.

I'll get to the advanced in human/machine interfaces over the next 100 years by countries with little consideration for their troop's mental health a bit later.

At some point it's cheaper to have an actual microchip do it, because the squishy meat parts of your brain still have to take time to assimilate information and act accordingly. It's not at all clear that they would gain the ability to detect incoming grenades reliably enough to sidestep with a few moment's warning.

This reminds me of the generals that did away with the pesky guns on the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter.
Why would volleys of grenades be the end-all solution? Do cluster bomblets even have an anti-tank version?

They wouldn't, and yes they do. My point is simply that it is far more likely that certain mundane weapons (like hand grenades) will retain utility than that all combat will take on a completely new and weird style of GUNSWORDGUNKATAOMG stuff.

Indeed, in my opinion this is more faithful as a representation of the fate of the F-4; you're the one proposing that the new weapon makes older weapons obsolete, while I'm the one pointing out that a cheap, old, proven-effective weapon should be left in place and will become and remain a major part of the overall tactical system.

What background are you using here? This description is not very convincing in and of itself- you need either credentials or equations to convince people of the fluid dynamics.

The whole thing was silly. That effect would only exist if you switched on the engine during supersonic flight. Realistically, it would be on during the transition from low speed all the way up to supersonic regimes. This would provide a continuous, perfect compression of the air without having to worry about frequencies and whatnot.
Short version: You'd get the slow column of air at any speed.

This is neither a credential, nor an equation.

So? That suggests that air power takes the form of zillions of sneaky drones with bombs at the low end, hypersonic aircraft at the high end, and all manner of crazy in between.

So? Cost.

If cost doesn't stop you from adding active antigrenade defense gun turrets to individual soldiers' helmets, it isn't going to stop you from building disturbingly clever cruise missiles that fly into enemy territory, use a news broadcast to identify where the enemy defense minister is giving a press conference, and fly there, or other equally bizarre shit like that.

Think a bit more, and you'll realize that trying to catch an enemy power trooper and drive up to him close enough to lob the thing at him is much easier achieved if you just let an allied soldier carry the cannon and become a much more flexible walking field artillery thing.

A two-ton cannon is too big for a human-ish person to aim even if he has the strength to lift it, and human arms really aren't designed for the kind of stability and precision that can be achieved by a well-mounted artillery piece.

The problem then is that each drone is a million-dollar piece of hardware (kind of has to be, just to be functional), and you're writing them off for every kilometer of ground they may gain.

We're already equipped the bottom-level footsoldier with today's cutting edge technology in active defense systems, and each of them requires a minimum of 10kW sustained power supply. I'm not so sure that the drones, nothing more than empty, refitted suits on autopilot, would cost THAT much.

The pricey part is control software- you add a whole different level of software to make a system fly/walk/maneuver itself than to have it operated by an intelligent crewman.

Why would they be mindless berzerks? I don't undestand why you would compare a sophisticated program designed to track and kill on its own to a raging madman without a whiff of sense.

Because if all they know how to do is kill what's in front of them, then strategically they are berserkers. They will get suckered into traps, they will be unable to maneuver to plug holes in their own lines and will thus get outflanked, and so on.

Making an army effective requires coordination, command and control. Making your combat drones capable of this without humans on the scene to issue orders makes things even MORE complicated.

That just means that they are perfectly suited to a defensive war, where the area you have cleared out does NOT need to be taken back, just denied to the enemy. If the enemy has to resort to prepared defenses to take out your robots, then you've won: the attack has to be stopped.
Plus, these robots can be dropped behind the lines, which you cannot reliably do with live soldiers if you want to get them back.

Dropping behind the lines only works if transport aircraft are expendable; using the drones on the defensive at least makes some sense... with a few caveats, the big one being that the drones won't react intelligently and can't easily report or interpret the situation for higher command echelons. If the drones have human operators this problem is reduced, of course.

And in any scenario, these robots are just tools. They enhance your field presence disproportionately to the number of soldiers you have. If India needs 1000 soldiers to take back a land held by 500 Chinese, then the latter is in a favorable position.

Not if deploying 500 drones (to increase the strength of the 500 soldiers) cost as much as deploying 500 actual soldiers would have. That's the real problem- using these drones may well be as good as or better than deploying human soldiers, but it doesn't grant a spell of protection from logistics.

China has an established presence in Pakistan with multiple supply depots and drone armies that multiply its fighting power. They have a supply route which is difficult to maintain, and complete air superiority.
The Indians have a technological disadvantage, have zero presence in Pakistan, will have their routes into the country constantly bombarded, the land mined beforehand, and they are not equipped to shoot down aircraft.

Why is India so much more primitive in all these respects? I mean, granted that if you assume India is primitive and ignorant of how to build effective combat aircraft or drones of its own, China may be able to preposition enough firepower in Pakistan to bleed the Indian army white. At least, to do so if the Indians cooperate by sticking their hands into a mincing machine.

The Chinese hopes that its technological superiority will hold off the Indians until the losses become unsustainable for them. They are confident that even if the Indians manage to crawl over Fortress Pakistan, they would have dragged out the majority of the Indian army and inflicted enough losses to regain the upper hand on the negociation table. "You've won Pakistan, empty, arid Pakistan, but you lost your army and we can build ourselves a new one" they would say.

Indian representative: "Do you not know how boot camps work?" [rolls eyes]

Unless of course you expect the Indian military to suffer so many casualties in the conquest of Pakistan that it runs out of military-age males... in which case the Indians themselves would at some point realize what is happening, and just stop attacking before they run out of men. You cannot force an army to bleed themselves white on the offensive.

Enough room [for a shield generator], certainly. Do they also pack the
-Power supply to maintain the field during flight

Yes, since the power supply only has to last a minute or so, you can run off batteries.

-Propellant required to catch the enemy aircraft, chase it down AND MERGE WITH IT AT NEAR-ZERO RELATIVE SPEED?!

It doesn't have to merge at near-zero speed, that's what the field is for- as soon as the fields collide they merge, right?

-Still carry a bit enough warhead to destroy the plane after all that is fitted on.

It doesn't take much, if you can get that close.

And honestly, a heavy surface to air SAM can be the size of a telephone pole, so there's more space to play with than you'd think.

Also, air defense lasers- this is a technology that already exists, and 100 years from now it will most likely be very widespread and easy to make work.

The problem is, even if the missile catches up with your aircraft, it has to chase you around with the least excess speed it can manage. Even a 650km/h missile will bounce off the shield of a 600km/h aircraft.

...Ah. I do NOT think you made this clear previously. Shields are massless constructs, they have no momentum, and yet they behave when impacting another shield as if they were rocks with momentum.

Thought of it. Built it, sold it, replaced the ENTIRE current stock of SAM missiles, mounted it into the new SAM lauchers and brought it into position to take down enemy aircraft?
Takes a bit more time.

How long have these force-screen generators existed?

Even that may not actually help much. Countries like Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh aren't exactly huge lucrative markets. Access to the Middle East is best achieved by sea around Asia and not by land across Central Asia (as the Portuguese and everyone since has learned).

Humm. That has got me thinking about sea warfare. How do you take down a completely shielded warship with an endless power supply and massive mounts for bracing multiple generators?

Torpedoes, munitions that dive into the water and explode against the hull, free electron lasers, nuclear-tipped antiship missiles.

Meanwhile, this whole war costs trillions and pointlessly antagonizes a nuclear-armed military power that is NOT going to somehow cease to exist even after their army is temporarily "crushed."[/Quote]It'll cost trillions to the Indians, but for them, it's either this or falling to the Chinese who'll cut off their economy. For China, well it has trillions. They'd gain a much bigger market if all goes well.[/quote]I really don't think it'll work that well. Large countries that try to fight limited wars this way tend to get ground up pretty badly, usually a lot worse than they expect. Throwing nuclear weapons into the equation doesn't make that less of a problem.

As for the nuclear status quo... how would yoou about nuclear retaliation when you can shield a few major cities and a command centers if all goes to shit?

Major cities are too big to shield in a reasonable span of time, and the flash from a nuclear airburst will still penetrate the screens like they aren't even there. Other prime nuclear targets which are impractical to shield: air bases, bridges and tunnels, pipelines and container ports that transport large amounts of crucial supplies, highway junctions, factories that assemble crucial spare parts for the war effort (say, the robot brains for those drones)...

Um... no? That's not going to work, because there's too much economic incentive for producers to defect, and it's practically impossible to somehow secure a world lock on all sources of Mineral X scattered across different continents.

Just economic incentive? What's China doing moving its armies around? Why does China have such a strong foothold in Pakistan in the first place? It's military pressure keeping them in place. I'm assuming that by the time China feels its in a position to play out this gambit, that it has secured strong enough ties with its neighbours that they won't fail under increased pressure.
If all you money was in Chinese banks, and their army's 'counsellors' are patrolling your streets, how sane do you have to be to refuse a massive increase in your country's export prices?

How the hell does China even get to that point, and what about countries far from China with their own supplies of the metals?

China didn't invade Pakistan, it gave it the massive loans it needed to develop the country in return for military presence that would fend off Pakistan's enemy, India.

It's like the OPEP crisis, as I said before. You can still get your uranium, but you'll be getting it at, say, 7 times the price. The remaining uranium producers either sell their limited production at low prices, or they seize the chance and follow your pricing without you even having to tell them what to do.

The main problem with this is that demand for strategic metals is 'stretchy' because stockpiles are fairly large (and easy to maintain), and demand is a relative trickle- especially for uranium; cutting off uranium today does not shut down nuclear reactors.

To maintain an embargo long enough to really hurt people, your Chinese metal cartel would have to keep up the embargo so long it would hurt them, by effectively shutting down their export industry for the duration.

For purposes of setting off an impact fuze, that will work quite nicely. Remember that the ONLY part of the grenade that is stopped is the part in contact with the field- which is exactly the same thing that happens when the grenade strikes a brick wall.

That depends entirely on the softness of the field. An extremely hard field will react to a millimeter of the grenade denting the surface. An extra soft shield would let half or more of the grenade penetrate before actiavting. Then it'll start rolling or something.
For practical purposes, you are right, you can make it detonate ON the fild.

Tune your shield down to where it catches the grenade gently and deforms around it, and you risk letting the thing pass right through- or be penetrated easily by bullets.

Shrapnel coming at you from an explosion at your feet is likely to penetrate armor designed to resist against specific weapons fired from specific angles. Also, counting on people sidestepping in half a second is... unwise. Sometimes they may not have room to dodge. Sometimes they won't see the grenade.

On the other hand, not much is needed to stop shrapnel penetrating. Based on the Stryker's recent armor upgrade, 14.5mm of steel equivalent is enough to stop shrapnel from a 155mm shell.

On the other hand, the armor will necessarily have joints. I don't want to think about some of the places grenade fragments could end up if it exploded right under my feet...

The dodging is not human controlled, either, or only partially. The reflex is computer controlled, and if they caught in an area with no room to dodge or jump, then well, you can't make them invulnerable to unfavorable positioning.

Ah. You mean to tell me that whenever you chuck something the approximate size and shape of a hand grenade at one of these suits, it automatically dives out of the way without user input?

Thaaaat sounds exploitable.

So the tank cannot hurt the shielded troopers, and the troopers cannot hurt the tank... One of these is not going to get fielded, and the cost of a tank is what? 10 million a pop today?

You've already equipped the soldier with so much expensive electronics and cybernetics that his suit will cost damn near as much as a tank would.

I don't really get the second sentence, but in my setting, lasers aren't terribly effective. Yes, they can easily reach the 200, 300kW range once mounted on a vehicle a hundred years into the future. And yes, they will go through the shields and blast everything...
But come on. How will you ever train the beam on one spot for the multiple seconds you need to go through any realistic amount of armor the power armored troopers are carrying? A small rock on the road and bump there goes your penetration attempt. The cost of going through fields is also a huge power and cooling station you're going have to lug everywhere.

Heat transfer alone, along with pulsing and small spot sizes, makes penetrating the armor considerably more practical. Meanwhile, to power the laser- well, tank engines are already 1500 horsepower gas turbines; you do the math.

Now as to actually absorbing the momentum, I thought of this configuration:
-Black box generator gets placed inside steel container
-BBG is held inside the container using springs.
-The whole thing is flooded in hydraulic fluid.
-The hydraulic fluid flows into pistons extending out of suit's back.
-The pistons are held down using electromagnets.

Upon impact, the generator pulls on its springs. The springs pull on the whole suit. It also pushes into the oil-filled container. The pressurized oil pushed against the piston heads. The electromagnets hold back the piston heads and gradually resist and absorb the overpressure.
If all goes well, the oil pressure is regulated and the BBG is pushed back into place with the help of the springs.
If the springs are broken, the oil system still works.
If the oil pressure is too high, the fluid will leak out to relieve the pressure
If all fails, the BBG will slam against the steel backplate.

What happens if the cannon hits you from the side?

The problems still lie in effectiveness and cost. It is going to take a long time before they can do any crippling damage to slabs of ceramic composites, and those that do are either mobile nuclear power station huge (FEL) or laboratory-level flimsy (gas dynamic lasers).
Either way, I don't want them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_tactical_laser

I understand that you don't like it, but your effort to develop these very intricate, detailed systems about how your weapon systems respond to varying threats means that someone is bound to think of it, and think less of you for stubbornly refusing to consider the role they might play. Part of the problem here is that you started with "how can I make X happen" and answered "well, I need Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4, and Y5." The problem is that this combination of factors has a lot of side effects you haven't considered.

Bayonet: Tiny ass knife on a gun.
Gunsword: A sword with a barrel inside it.

A gun barrel built down a sword blade is ergonomically impossible to aim well, and tends to be self-kinking as soon as you start using the sword as a sword. There's a reason people don't use them in real life.

[Lord Revan]

Bayonet: Tiny ass knife on a gun.
Gunsword: A sword with a barrel inside it.

A gun barrel built down a sword blade is ergonomically impossible to aim well, and tends to be self-kinking as soon as you start using the sword as a sword. There's a reason people don't use them in real life.

there's more to it then that, they were tried along with gun-axes but were found to be insanely inefficient as both a gun and a melee weapon, basically ending up with both the bad parts of a gun and a sword and this was during the time of muskets so back then the guns weren't all that efficient to begin with.

[Formless]

Eh... I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are "ergenomically impossible to aim well". More weight at the end of the barrel can actually help stabilize it. And there is more than one kind of blade that you can put on there, like a pure stabby smallsword or epee blade which benefits from a pistol grip. Or you could spring for a large bowie blade as opposed to a sword per-say (that's a real design, BTW. I have the pics to prove it if anyone's curious). It probably has more to do with the fact that power wise, you are talking about a pistol, not a rifle (which also effects accuracy at range). It can't have a very long barrel compared to a rifle with a bayonet. And the bayonet is just a variation on the short spear, AKA the most effective melee weapon you can learn in mere weeks of training rather than months or years. And you can always carry a sword at your side if you have the skill and the need-- a one-hander or a cutlass just isn't that heavy or cumbersome. A sword-pistol is great for showing off or for arming an anime/JRPG character, but as a weapon its biggest flaw is being redundant.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh... I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are "ergenomically impossible to aim well". More weight at the end of the barrel can actually help stabilize it... And there is more than one kind of blade that you can put on there, like a pure stabby smallsword or epee blade which benefits from a pistol grip. Or you could spring for a large bowie blade as opposed to a sword per-say (that's a real design, BTW. I have the pics to prove it if anyone's curious).

Er, that's not exactly the kind of "ergonomically impossible" I meant- I was concentrating more on the issue of the grip; even an epee hilt looks only vaguely like a seriously optimized pistol grip.

Also, these are of necessity going to be small diameter weapons which are useless in the combat environment we're talking about if everyone wears powered armor. Make a firearm larger-bore so it can fire ammo that's actually a threat, and your barrel is so physically large that it's at very high risk of becoming dented or kinked when you start forcefully banging on things with it.

[krakonfour]

What honestly surprises me is that it doesn't even interact with light, nor does it give off any other detectable radiations (either EM radiations or more exotic stuff), nor does it have to emit heat from the power being pumped into maintaining it.

Hands-on, it acts like a special magnetic field. Invisible, and doesn't 'emit' anything unless excited or disturbed. In this case, we have nothing to disturb it, just like light, gravity and chemicals don't affect a magnetic field. Same thing applies to the generator. It acts like an electromagnet. Electricity goes on, waste heat comes out and an invisible field is produced.

Point- although you'd hit diminishing returns, because the light absorbed by the Langston Field force-bubble increases with the square of its radius, while the power maintenance budget increases with the cube.

True enough.

The problem is that the ERA needs to be aligned in certain ways to be fully effective. You can't just tape bricks of it to someone at random and expect it to help much. On a tank, you sit down and figure out how to mount the ERA once, because it's got a fixed geometry and virtually all incoming weapons fire approaches the tank from a very narrow range of angles. An infantryman deals with a wider range of attack vectors.

Yes, but at the same time, the positions the soldier will assume aren't THAT varied under normal circumstances.
How would ERA bricks be used?
The soldier faces four threats. The first is grenades exploding from any direction. The second is HEAT rounds fired within the shell. The third is HEAT rounds fired using field-penetrating devices. The fourth is the momentum transfer from a particularly large weapon.

ERA bricks are useless against the fourth threat.
ERA bricks don't help much against the concussive effects of grenades. Worse, the fragmentation will damage them unless they are armored, which in turn reduces their effectiveness even more against HEAT rounds.
The second and third threats are what they would protect against. In a field-merge melee fight, they would be concentrated on the front, because any competent soldier would try and face the opponent within his field. If he can be struck by a field-penetrating missile, then it would be impossible to protect all of the soldier from something equal to a heavy weapon discharge. It would be best to concentrate on the vital areas, which include the user's enclosed shell and the generator itself.

If we have something like this: Spoiler

then there would be no point in protecting the artificial arms or the sensor head. The ERA brick would be fixed onto the chest and legs areas.
Taking into consideration threat three, we'd need ERA bricks on the back and the on the generator unit (if it is not mounted like a backpack).

Plus, of course, the bulk/ergonomics angle. Adding four inches of bricks to a tank's hull doesn't change its functionality much. Adding four inches of bricks to a man's arm means he can't even hold the arm in certain positions at all.

I'd think this is a small problem if the computer automatically adjusts the artificial muscles to compensate. The inner surfaces of the limbs, for example, don't need to be protected with bricks, because there is a very small chance that they would be hit. The upper flanks should be covered by the arms, so there goes the need for extra armor.

Mind you, the system is still bulky and awkward as hell, and will be prone to engage random flying debris. And good luck using it in a built-up environment, which is exactly where you're most likely to worry about grenades.

The system is designed to be used within the field's three meter radius. The outside environment should matter little at this point. As for the bulkiness and awkwardness, let's apply a good layer of '100 years of essential weapons technology development' on it.

Hm. This is going to make the electronic warfare environment... interesting, because there are many many radar sets operating in a small space. Interference is gonna be a bear.

The radar only needs to detect projectiles coming in from just outside of its field. Anything further is wasted power, unlike in an actual tank where detecting the projectile earlier is helpful. Also, at close range, a simple data link between the soldiers would allow them to create a virtual ADS unit with two radars and greatly help in removing the interference.

My point is that the active defense systems will do a lot of wild firing in the field, for questionable return on investment.

I trust advances in projectile detection technology would be sufficient to reduce the risk of 'wild firing' to something negligible or exceptional. Unless, you are being fired at by dummy grenades meant to resemble an actual grenade to both visual and radar feeds, in which case, it's a win because every dummy grenade they have is one less grenade they can hurt you with.

]Expand please. Remember, blasting a building into rubble may not permanently wreck it as a fighting position, but it does reduce the structure's value as shelter for sleeping troops, as an elevated vantage point for enemy spotters, or as a command post for enemy officers.

What I meant was that the Syrian Army has a habit of calling out tall buildings to artillery so that they can demolish the top floors.

The increased area will help in some contexts, but not in others. For example, when a 60 ton tank gets stuck in the mud, it requires a truly epic tow truck (a tow tank, usually) to retrieve it, because the suction force holding it in place is proportionate to the vehicle's mass and weight, not its ground pressure. Also, using larger boot soles will not do anything to protect you from having the staircase of a blast-weakened building collapse under your weight, or rubble piles slide out from underneath you.

The figures I'm looking at for the armored suits is 300-400kg. That doesn't sound like something that would get stuck in the mud very often, and it has arms to pull on surrounding objects, or the very least increase the number of contact points on the ground. What I mean is that a stuck tank can't kneel and crawl out of the mud.

Stairs and rubble... humm. The bane of an armored power suit's existence. But then again, just how many times is it expected to put itself in those situations? Do actual soldiers spend their time climbing stairs and piles of rubble? I think it's a small enough problem to be negligible.

In that case, you want a heavily built firearm with a bayonet lug.

I suggested that in the previous post, with the exception that separating the melee and shooting components of the firearm would be beneficial, thus, gun and sword.

They wouldn't, and yes they do. My point is simply that it is far more likely that certain mundane weapons (like hand grenades) will retain utility than that all combat will take on a completely new and weird style of GUNSWORDGUNKATAOMG stuff.

Let's use the rock-paper-scissors classification from the other post:

Grenadier (G)
Artillery (A)
Melee (M)

G vs G: Grenade spam, a lot of it. The one who spams more, or first, wins.
G vs A: Artillery blasts away Grenadier from maximal possible distance.
G vs M: GUNKATAMASSACRE unless Grenadier runs.
A vs A: Running around with big guns.
A vs M: Situational. A wins if he shoots first and far, M wins if he can rush over the distance.
M vs M: GUNSWORDGUNKATAOMG

So yeah, not all combat takes on the same form.

This is neither a credential, nor an equation.

Sorry, couldn't find any equations that would describe the effect of a magical field shutting down the momentum of an airstream past a certain threshold.

If cost doesn't stop you from adding active antigrenade defense gun turrets to individual soldiers' helmets, it isn't going to stop you from building disturbingly clever cruise missiles that fly into enemy territory, use a news broadcast to identify where the enemy defense minister is giving a press conference, and fly there, or other equally bizarre shit like that.

...seriously?
I'm just saying that it is entirely possible that seeing how active anti-projectile defenses are the next big step in defense technology, and it would be seriously developed and become a cheap, mature technology by the time this setting arises, while supercomputers never become cheap enough to be disposable, not having been developed at the same rate, especially if China has spiked the prices of its essential components.

Umm....
In Vietnam, there was a radio per platoon, and every man had a machine gun. In a few years, every soldier will be connected to a broadband battlefield network (super radio), despite the fact that the rifle hasn't advanced by leaps and bounds. It still isn't cost effective to equip all of the with miniature heat-seeking machinegunrocketlaunchers.
In this setting, the ADS is cheap, but the supercomputer is not.

A two-ton cannon is too big for a human-ish person to aim even if he has the strength to lift it, and human arms really aren't designed for the kind of stability and precision that can be achieved by a well-mounted artillery piece.

Two-ton cannon?
I was proposing something more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Bb7EXrcrI
Big-ass gun tube, lightweight, and all of its power comes from the huge explosive round. The recoil isn't terrible, because you aren't shooting long-distance. The accuracy doesn't have to be perfect either. Nothing says you can't plant it into the ground to help when firing, then pick it up and move after shot.

The pricey part is control software- you add a whole different level of software to make a system fly/walk/maneuver itself than to have it operated by an intelligent crewman.

The maneuver aids that allow the suit to dodge automatically presuppose that every soldier is equipped with software capable of handling the suit's movements on its own. Discrete work and tactical decision making is what you need the soldier for. In the case of the drone suits, you're removing those abilities and putting it in a situation where it doesn't need them beyond a pre-programmed level.

Because if all they know how to do is kill what's in front of them, then strategically they are berserkers. They will get suckered into traps, they will be unable to maneuver to plug holes in their own lines and will thus get outflanked, and so on.

All that sounds like things a bit of programming can't handle. Can't some modified, military version of crowd simulation software give the machine a certain 'feel' for the battlefield, with the crowd being enemy unit positions it is aware of? But of course, they will be outsmarted and eventually destroyed. The point is, the resources the enemy requires to take them down (in men lost, ammunition spent, time wasted) is greater than that of building and placing the robot on the field.

Making an army effective requires coordination, command and control. Making your combat drones capable of this without humans on the scene to issue orders makes things even MORE complicated.

Radio in the orders.

Dropping behind the lines only works if transport aircraft are expendable; using the drones on the defensive at least makes some sense... with a few caveats, the big one being that the drones won't react intelligently and can't easily report or interpret the situation for higher command echelons. If the drones have human operators this problem is reduced, of course.

I'm under the impression that even today, the 'higher echelons' can do away with battlefield reports. The amount of data being sent from various unit cameras, vehicle cameras, radio chatter and drone/satellite pictures is enough to give a decent image of the battlefield without the need for a man screaming on the mike over there. With the next era digital battlefield, things are going to become even clearer for C&C, to the point where the command center can be placer further and further from the battlelines.

Not if deploying 500 drones (to increase the strength of the 500 soldiers) cost as much as deploying 500 actual soldiers would have. That's the real problem- using these drones may well be as good as or better than deploying human soldiers, but it doesn't grant a spell of protection from logistics.

Even if the drones cost AS MUCH as a soldier, then it wouldn't be lives being taken with each fallen unit. In this setting, it costs less for China to build a drone than to make a suit designed to accommodate soldiers, then train them to use it, then stack on top the whole perishable supply line.

Why is India so much more primitive in all these respects? I mean, granted that if you assume India is primitive and ignorant of how to build effective combat aircraft or drones of its own, China may be able to preposition enough firepower in Pakistan to bleed the Indian army white. At least, to do so if the Indians cooperate by sticking their hands into a mincing machine.

It's primitive and ignorant the same way the French or British army is primitive and ignorant compared to the USA army.

In this setting, Indian soldiers are just as capable as Chinese soldiers, and as tactically sound. It's just that it didn't have time to develop the military enough to equip it with all the latest gadgets. China already has a standing army in the millions. By the time they decide to go on the offensive all over Asia, they could multiply that number by 3 or 4. India doesn't have the money or time (veterans take time, a competent command structure even more) to produce the same military effort.
India does build effective combat aircraft, but didn't have the time to stockpile the newest field-merging missiles. Drones can be built, but it is much more expensive for India to train a soldier and stick him in a suit, than to develop the drone construction industry in time. Also, in this setting, India resorts to buying military equipment from outside countries to boost the war effort past what its own industry can sustain. Russian exports, specifically, to deal with the field-merging missile shortage.

Indian representative: "Do you not know how boot camps work?" [rolls eyes]

You mean the meat mincer?

Unless of course you expect the Indian military to suffer so many casualties in the conquest of Pakistan that it runs out of military-age males... in which case the Indians themselves would at some point realize what is happening, and just stop attacking before they run out of men. You cannot force an army to bleed themselves white on the offensive.

Nah, of course not. China's objective is to push India on the defensive, so if it loses enough military force that it has to retreat and prepare for a counterattack in their weakened state, then China's objectives are fulfilled.

Mainly, India cannot interfere with the Chinese moving into the region because it has to keep its forces locked inside the border. Also, whatever cash it spent on the war would be cash India cannot sustain the markets (a penniless government looking to rebuild its military through taxing isn't healthy for the economy), and it would be forced to accept Chinese economic pressures.

It doesn't have to merge at near-zero speed, that's what the field is for- as soon as the fields collide they merge, right?

And honestly, a heavy surface to air SAM can be the size of a telephone pole, so there's more space to play with than you'd think.

That is is true, but only if you cover the whole missile, in which case I have to point back to the energy requirements, particularly it is the size of a telephone pole.

S-75 Guideline SA-2FC variant: 11.2m long and 0.5m wide.
Ignoring fins, we have a prolate spheroid with a field of 46.9m3 and 110m2. That requires roughly 131MJ to create and 8.47kW to sustain.
So a three minute flight requires a 132MJ (40kWh) battery, a generator that can handle a 47m3 field and a power supply that can drain 131MJ upon launch.

My main point is that you can;t just slap on an adapter for current missiles and use them against field-protected aircraft. You have to replace the entire stock of missiles and missile launchers.

Also, air defense lasers- this is a technology that already exists, and 100 years from now it will most likely be very widespread and easy to make work.

And in accordance with the lasers in my setting, a relatively thin ablative layer will keep laser effectiveness in check. Plus, missiles have the ability to roll, rendering the laser unable to aim at any one spot. While a pulsed laser can go through the armor and maybe wreck the missile, it is unlikely to recharge the capacitor and mow down more than few.

...Ah. I do NOT think you made this clear previously. Shields are massless constructs, they have no momentum, and yet they behave when impacting another shield as if they were rocks with momentum.

Sorry. I was thinking of missiles with only the tip shielded. Otherwise, yes, you can slam into a field-covered aircraft with a fully-field-covered missile.

How long have these force-screen generators existed?

Long enough as a technology, but not long enough to equip them to any and every unit and weapon due to high cost.

Torpedoes, munitions that dive into the water and explode against the hull, free electron lasers, nuclear-tipped antiship missiles.

Laser battleships with torpedo screens! YAY!

I really don't think it'll work that well. Large countries that try to fight limited wars this way tend to get ground up pretty badly, usually a lot worse than they expect.

Hasn't stopped them from trying, eh?

Throwing nuclear weapons into the equation doesn't make that less of a problem.

Nuclear...
India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear weapons. Would India deliver a condition to China that basically says that "If Pakistan nukes me, then I go nuclear with China"?

Major cities are too big to shield in a reasonable span of time, and the flash from a nuclear airburst will still penetrate the screens like they aren't even there. Other prime nuclear targets which are impractical to shield: air bases, bridges and tunnels, pipelines and container ports that transport large amounts of crucial supplies, highway junctions, factories that assemble crucial spare parts for the war effort (say, the robot brains for those drones)...

Yes, but it wouldn't be Mutually assured destruction anymore. Major cities CAN get shielded if they detect a missile launch. All you need is a shitload of generators lined up on the streets. They'd only have to be raised seconds before the missile arrives. And nuclear flashes aren't all that devastating to people indoors or in shelters... Nothing says that China can't reinforce its civilian nuclear drills once it goes on the offensive. It'd some police-state level of organization to get people into shelters quickly, but if it is going to save a significant portion of the city's population, then it is worth it.

How the hell does China even get to that point, and what about countries far from China with their own supplies of the metals?

China gets to that point by expanding gradually over the course of a few decades. Its exports become more and more important. One day, it says "I'm going one step further" and hits the resource market.

And while faraway countries might not feel the military pressure of China, they would still have the economic incentive to raise its prices along with China.

I'm China, he is the buyer and you are the faraway country.
I control a vast majority of the rare resources he needs. He cannot fulfill his demand for these resources without turning to me eventually. Your supplies are in 100% demand, but you cannot produce enough to satisfy that demand. You raise your prices by law of supply and demand.
You then see him turn to China to complete his 'shopping basket' of resources, at exorbitant prices.
You have two options: Keep gradually increasing your prices as everything you make is sold (market folly aside), or just jump to Chinese prices like they have been asking you nicely to do in return for a few rewards.

The main problem with this is that demand for strategic metals is 'stretchy' because stockpiles are fairly large (and easy to maintain), and demand is a relative trickle- especially for uranium; cutting off uranium today does not shut down nuclear reactors.

I'm counting on the development of nuclear energy and high tech industries (major contribution to the developing countries' boom) to increase demand and tighten the supply chain. Not as short as the agricultural chain, of course, but nothing that a few years can't handle.

To maintain an embargo long enough to really hurt people, your Chinese metal cartel would have to keep up the embargo so long it would hurt them, by effectively shutting down their export industry for the duration.

THERE IS NO EMBARGO.
The supply is constant. It's just the price which explodes.
Using the OPEP analogy, its like you can refuel you car for 50 dollars one day, then the next day, you have to pay 150 dollars. You can still refuel your car, you just have to pay more. Do you stop using you car, or do you rearrange your budget?

Tune your shield down to where it catches the grenade gently and deforms around it, and you risk letting the thing pass right through- or be penetrated easily by bullets.

It'd pass through just as easily with a hard field; it stops on the surface, and starts falling straight down. On a soft field, it starts falling 30-50cm deeper into the field.

On the other hand, the armor will necessarily have joints. I don't want to think about some of the places grenade fragments could end up if it exploded right under my feet...

Why do you think Anime Mecha have such impressive... protection?

Ah. You mean to tell me that whenever you chuck something the approximate size and shape of a hand grenade at one of these suits, it automatically dives out of the way without user input?

Define 'approximate'. It has to pass through both visual and radar inspection.

Thaaaat sounds exploitable.

That's only if the soldier is dumb enough to leave the option on all the time, and doesn't set it to dodge in a specific direction.
Against a sufficiently lethal/large explosive charge landing within the field, the suit might decide that it is worth risking a generator burnout to shrink the field in an emergency.

You've already equipped the soldier with so much expensive electronics and cybernetics that his suit will cost damn near as much as a tank would.

And you've got in your pocket enough technological marvels to make you a billionaire in the 90's.

Heat transfer alone, along with pulsing and small spot sizes, makes penetrating the armor considerably more practical. Meanwhile, to power the laser- well, tank engines are already 1500 horsepower gas turbines; you do the math.

1500 horsepower at the shaft, a generous 900 at the alternator, a good 300 in the laser, and about 250 on the target. That's 186kW on target. Unless you are lasing from under 1km with no dust or humidity in the way, and your firing apparatus is a huge, fragile 1m+ mirror, then its going to take you about 3-4 seconds of aiming at the same spot to go through the armor these suits are wearing (30mm). In any other conditions (like the target moves), then the time on target explodes.

So you have a huge ass 1500hp engine and a multi-ton laser emitting 930kW of waste heat, toting a very fragile meter-wide mirror and complex stabilization mechanism, just to fail to shoot down the casual footsoldier effectively?

What happens if the cannon hits you from the side?

Nothing changes? The force is applied from the direction the projectile hit the field, the generator lurches, and the springs and pistons deaden the impact.

]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_tactical_laser

100kW, 5-7 tons.
Even the HELLADS weighs nearly a ton and produces only 150kW, and it needs a few seconds for thin walled mortars and missile fins.
No, I just don't see lasers as an effective ground weapon that can be built to overcome armor more effectively than kinetic or explosive weaponry.

I understand that you don't like it, but your effort to develop these very intricate, detailed systems about how your weapon systems respond to varying threats means that someone is bound to think of it, and think less of you for stubbornly refusing to consider the role they might play.

I did think of them. I even said that the best equipped armies in the world field them effectively. I don't see them defeating reasonable amount of armor, and the versions that do don't seem a worthwhile investment.

Part of the problem here is that you started with "how can I make X happen" and answered "well, I need Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4, and Y5." The problem is that this combination of factors has a lot of side effects you haven't considered.

I just like doing this shit, you know, exploring all the possibilities and truncating them when they don't fit with reasonable measure. Do you, Simon, like reading my threads?

A gun barrel built down a sword blade is ergonomically impossible to aim well, and tends to be self-kinking as soon as you start using the sword as a sword. There's a reason people don't use them in real life.

[/quote]

You never get close enough to swing your gun at the enemy, that is why we don't have gunswords.
And they need as much aiming at a sub three meters distance as you need for a hip-shooting weapon. You'd aim them as you would aim a stab or a poke with the tip of the sword... keep the point towards the enemy.

And as far as I know, wrapping a barrel in several cm of metal reduces their susceptibility to damage.

[krakonfour]

there's more to it then that, they were tried along with gun-axes but were found to be insanely inefficient as both a gun and a melee weapon, basically ending up with both the bad parts of a gun and a sword and this was during the time of muskets so back then the guns weren't all that efficient to begin with.

Please expand. In which way were they insanely inefficient?

Eh... I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are "ergenomically impossible to aim well". More weight at the end of the barrel can actually help stabilize it. And there is more than one kind of blade that you can put on there, like a pure stabby smallsword or epee blade which benefits from a pistol grip. Or you could spring for a large bowie blade as opposed to a sword per-say (that's a real design, BTW. I have the pics to prove it if anyone's curious). It probably has more to do with the fact that power wise, you are talking about a pistol, not a rifle (which also effects accuracy at range). It can't have a very long barrel compared to a rifle with a bayonet. And the bayonet is just a variation on the short spear, AKA the most effective melee weapon you can learn in mere weeks of training rather than months or years. And you can always carry a sword at your side if you have the skill and the need-- a one-hander or a cutlass just isn't that heavy or cumbersome. A sword-pistol is great for showing off or for arming an anime/JRPG character, but as a weapon its biggest flaw is being redundant.

So you are advocating having the melee and shooting weapons separate entities?

Just a few points:
-Accuracy is not really important. You're at headbutting range, and you WILL hit the enemy unless he stops you physically from pointing the barrel at him.
-Low power means that while you cannot penetrate the opponent's armor with it, it is still dangerous to secondary objectives: joints, sensors, the enemy's gun even.
-Skill or grip are of little importance when it's a computer controlling a robot arm several times more powerful and accurate than yours could ever be.

Er, that's not exactly the kind of "ergonomically impossible" I meant- I was concentrating more on the issue of the grip; even an epee hilt looks only vaguely like a seriously optimized pistol grip.

Not really an issue. Without much recoil in play, the robot arm can adapt to the grip. The sword could even be modified to hook up into the end of the robot arm, without having to pass by a hand and its limitations.

[/Quote]Also, these are of necessity going to be small diameter weapons which are useless in the combat environment we're talking about if everyone wears powered armor. Make a firearm larger-bore so it can fire ammo that's actually a threat, and your barrel is so physically large that it's at very high risk of becoming dented or kinked when you start forcefully banging on things with it.[/quote]

Good point, but special ammunition can compensate for this weakness. Plus, at these ranges, a long barrel is not needed. The barrel can open up before the tip of the sword, avoiding the part which is struck the hardest. It could even be isolated from the sword (so its not just one metal block) or, at the extreme, turn into a gun and sword attached to the same handle.

[Formless]

Eh... I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are "ergenomically impossible to aim well". More weight at the end of the barrel can actually help stabilize it... And there is more than one kind of blade that you can put on there, like a pure stabby smallsword or epee blade which benefits from a pistol grip. Or you could spring for a large bowie blade as opposed to a sword per-say (that's a real design, BTW. I have the pics to prove it if anyone's curious).

Er, that's not exactly the kind of "ergonomically impossible" I meant- I was concentrating more on the issue of the grip; even an epee hilt looks only vaguely like a seriously optimized pistol grip.

Doesn't really matter-- it points directly away from your hand, which is great for thrusting. There are other bladed weapons that also have this kind of ergonomics: the Katar, the Pata (the Katar's big brother), the western push dagger, and {e: I originally posted the wrong dagger} some Philipino Kalis daggers. Plus there are all sorts of sword-canes with a crook that demand a similar adjustment to technique. A pistol with a sword grip suffers far more ergonomically than a sword with a pistol grip.

Also, these are of necessity going to be small diameter weapons which are useless in the combat environment we're talking about if everyone wears powered armor. Make a firearm larger-bore so it can fire ammo that's actually a threat, and your barrel is so physically large that it's at very high risk of becoming dented or kinked when you start forcefully banging on things with it.

Er, that's sort of true. But then again, its also true that velocity kills. The age old debate between .45 ACP and 9mm... but hey, black powder. And most of the models I've seen have the blade project quite a bit away from the end of the barrel much like a bayonet does. But as mentioned short barrels are less accurate at range compared to a rifle with a bayonet.

Like I said, the biggest flaw with gunblades is that they are redundant. Historically, people preferred to just carry a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other (yes, Pirate style). This also meant that you could use the pistol for parrying, just like in sword and dagger combat, but with a blunt/ranged weapon in your off-hand. Or you carry a rifle with bayonet, because its quick to learn and very dangerous.

You never get close enough to swing your gun at the enemy, that is why we don't have gunswords.

Not true either. It wasn't uncommon, once the line was broken and melee started, for soldiers to simply turn their muskets around and beat the enemy with the wooden stock. Its even theorized that this gave rise to the Native American gunstock war club, although it could be a coincidence; it still suggests that a rifle butt was and is an effective bludgeon, however.

So you are advocating having the melee and shooting weapons separate entities?

Its historically how it was done. There is a certain logic to it-- if you need multiple weapons you can always carry multiple weapons. Its like the difference between John Spartan, who can pick up and use anything he is trained for and can carry both a rifle and a sidearm, and Squall Leonhart who gets one and only one signature style of weapon because that's how his game was designed. Reality is more like the former character.

Just a few points:
-Accuracy is not really important. You're at headbutting range, and you WILL hit the enemy unless he stops you physically from pointing the barrel at him.

Yes, that's true, unless he has greater reach than you and can stab his bayonet into your trachea before you can slash his throat. Some suggested viewing:





To summarize all, although a swordsman can win in such encounters using exactly the tactics you expect (grabbing and displacing the tip) and some others that take special training ("listening" to the polearm's movements through the sword), these weapons not only outreach most swords but are amazingly quick because of their leverage. This is why they are so dangerous for the amount of training they require.

-Low power means that while you cannot penetrate the opponent's armor with it, it is still dangerous to secondary objectives: joints, sensors, the enemy's gun even.

Er... I'm not really sure if this is supposed to be directed at me? I'm sorry, but I have not actually been paying much attention to this thread. The premise struck me as silly the instant I read that there were Dune-esque forcefields involved. Once you cross a certain threshold, I stop caring that much for realism because it ties you into knots.

But of the weapons with a "punch" style forward pointing blade, the Katar was specifically intended for armor piercing (or at least chainmail piercing) so I think you might be misunderstanding the nature of these swords. Although against full powered armor, you might as well install power tools, like shears that open an opponent's suit like a tin can in a grapple.

[Simon_Jester]

Plus, of course, the bulk/ergonomics angle. Adding four inches of bricks to a tank's hull doesn't change its functionality much. Adding four inches of bricks to a man's arm means he can't even hold the arm in certain positions at all.

I'd think this is a small problem if the computer automatically adjusts the artificial muscles to compensate. The inner surfaces of the limbs, for example, don't need to be protected with bricks, because there is a very small chance that they would be hit. The upper flanks should be covered by the arms, so there goes the need for extra armor.

Still, though, I look forward to the ERA bricks bumping into things or getting damaged when the soldier tries to lie flat for some reason.

Mind you, the system is still bulky and awkward as hell, and will be prone to engage random flying debris. And good luck using it in a built-up environment, which is exactly where you're most likely to worry about grenades.

The system is designed to be used within the field's three meter radius. The outside environment should matter little at this point. As for the bulkiness and awkwardness, let's apply a good layer of '100 years of essential weapons technology development' on it.

If it only engages projectiles that are already less than three meters away, it won't work. Active defense systems in real life are designed to track and engage projectiles coming from a considerable distance. At three meters, you can't even rely on a single antenna or gun system to protect the soldier, you'd have to have him bristling with antennas and point defense mounts, and even sweeping the full area he occupies would be hard.

Radar is not normally at its best trying to detect and engage targets that are only milliseconds' flight time away. I mean hell, even swinging a physical gun mount to bear on the projectile is going to take more time than that.

I trust advances in projectile detection technology would be sufficient to reduce the risk of 'wild firing' to something negligible or exceptional. Unless, you are being fired at by dummy grenades meant to resemble an actual grenade to both visual and radar feeds, in which case, it's a win because every dummy grenade they have is one less grenade they can hurt you with.

Or unless the real grenades have been disguised to look like rocks, as we already discussed.

What I meant was that the Syrian Army has a habit of calling out tall buildings to artillery so that they can demolish the top floors.

Yes; everyone does that when the rules of engagement permit.

The figures I'm looking at for the armored suits is 300-400kg. That doesn't sound like something that would get stuck in the mud very often, and it has arms to pull on surrounding objects, or the very least increase the number of contact points on the ground. What I mean is that a stuck tank can't kneel and crawl out of the mud.

Hopefully so, but my fundamental point is simply that increased weight carries with it increased risks, and makes the suits awkward for fighting in the kind of built-up terrain they're theoretically designed for.

Hm. It occurs to me that in some situations, trapping a man in a power suit inside a building is an effective way to get a weapon past his defenses, either by shooting through a wall (which interrupts his bubble shield), or by planting explosive charges in the hall that will wind up physically inside his shield before detonating.

Stairs and rubble... humm. The bane of an armored power suit's existence. But then again, just how many times is it expected to put itself in those situations? Do actual soldiers spend their time climbing stairs and piles of rubble? I think it's a small enough problem to be negligible.

Not for infantry, it's not; part of the point of even having infantry is that they can cope with stairs and rubble.

Sorry, couldn't find any equations that would describe the effect of a magical field shutting down the momentum of an airstream past a certain threshold.

Then how do you know it does what you think it does?

If cost doesn't stop you from adding active antigrenade defense gun turrets to individual soldiers' helmets, it isn't going to stop you from building disturbingly clever cruise missiles that fly into enemy territory, use a news broadcast to identify where the enemy defense minister is giving a press conference, and fly there, or other equally bizarre shit like that.

...seriously?

I'm exaggerating (look up the SHROOMIRV), but the basic point here is that if Moore's Law has been underway for more decades by this point, there will be ubiquitous drone AI that is intelligent enough to pose a very serious threat, in a wide variety of screwy ways.

I'm just saying that it is entirely possible that seeing how active anti-projectile defenses are the next big step in defense technology, and it would be seriously developed and become a cheap, mature technology by the time this setting arises, while supercomputers never become cheap enough to be disposable, not having been developed at the same rate, especially if China has spiked the prices of its essential components.

China would build such weapons. Surely they don't suffer from their own price-spiking?

In this setting, the ADS is cheap, but the supercomputer is not.

The problem is that the way you've pitched ADS working requires insanely fast-acting, alert, sensitive computers with virtually zero lag time and brilliant target discrimination. That technology has implications.

Because if all they know how to do is kill what's in front of them, then strategically they are berserkers. They will get suckered into traps, they will be unable to maneuver to plug holes in their own lines and will thus get outflanked, and so on.

All that sounds like things a bit of programming can't handle. Can't some modified, military version of crowd simulation software give the machine a certain 'feel' for the battlefield, with the crowd being enemy unit positions it is aware of? But of course, they will be outsmarted and eventually destroyed. The point is, the resources the enemy requires to take them down (in men lost, ammunition spent, time wasted) is greater than that of building and placing the robot on the field.

It is almost certainly going to be more economical to remote-control the drones, especially if you can use shielded communications relay aircraft that are extremely difficult to take down.

I'm under the impression that even today, the 'higher echelons' can do away with battlefield reports. The amount of data being sent from various unit cameras, vehicle cameras, radio chatter and drone/satellite pictures is enough to give a decent image of the battlefield without the need for a man screaming on the mike over there. With the next era digital battlefield, things are going to become even clearer for C&C, to the point where the command center can be placer further and further from the battlelines.

The problem with that is the signal-to-noise ratio; so much data coming back from the front that a remote commander can't interpret it properly, because most of it doesn't actually impact what he should be doing, and the few pieces of information that do have been lost in the clutter.

Even if the drones cost AS MUCH as a soldier, then it wouldn't be lives being taken with each fallen unit. In this setting, it costs less for China to build a drone than to make a suit designed to accommodate soldiers, then train them to use it, then stack on top the whole perishable supply line.

This suggests that the design concept of the suits is fundamentally fallacious. If they're so expensive that it's cheaper to build a drone, drones will replace them for everything.

It's primitive and ignorant the same way the French or British army is primitive and ignorant compared to the USA army.

France and Britain don't have militaries of comparable size to the US; India does or should have one compared to China. Moreover, India even today is heavily engaged in active military research trying to develop its own weapon systems. They're not so far behind the curve that they'll completely fail to incorporate a new technology like personal shields.

India does build effective combat aircraft, but didn't have the time to stockpile the newest field-merging missiles. Drones can be built, but it is much more expensive for India to train a soldier and stick him in a suit, than to develop the drone construction industry in time.

India is the one launching a premeditated attack here; surely they would make sure they're prepared and properly equipped before doing so?

Indian representative: "Do you not know how boot camps work?" [rolls eyes]

You mean the meat mincer?

Unless of course you expect the Indian military to suffer so many casualties in the conquest of Pakistan that it runs out of military-age males... in which case the Indians themselves would at some point realize what is happening, and just stop attacking before they run out of men. You cannot force an army to bleed themselves white on the offensive.

Nah, of course not. China's objective is to push India on the defensive, so if it loses enough military force that it has to retreat and prepare for a counterattack in their weakened state, then China's objectives are fulfilled.

Are you familiar with the concept of "war mobilization?" A country mobilized for war is very hard to beat down in this way.

Mainly, India cannot interfere with the Chinese moving into the region because it has to keep its forces locked inside the border. Also, whatever cash it spent on the war would be cash India cannot sustain the markets (a penniless government looking to rebuild its military through taxing isn't healthy for the economy), and it would be forced to accept Chinese economic pressures.

...I really, really think you're underestimating the cost of this type of war for China, and overestimating how permanently a military setback reduces the strength of the country that experiences the setback.

That is is true, but only if you cover the whole missile, in which case I have to point back to the energy requirements, particularly it is the size of a telephone pole.

S-75 Guideline SA-2FC variant: 11.2m long and 0.5m wide.
Ignoring fins, we have a prolate spheroid with a field of 46.9m3 and 110m2. That requires roughly 131MJ to create and 8.47kW to sustain.
So a three minute flight requires a 132MJ (40kWh) battery, a generator that can handle a 47m3 field and a power supply that can drain 131MJ upon launch.

The power supply for the missile launch would have to come from a fixed installation (say, a truckload of batteries, or a truck-mounted generator that trickle-charges the missile's protective bubble shield as part of setting up the SAM site). Subject to that constraint, the battery pack to sustain the shield is pretty trivial.

And in accordance with the lasers in my setting, a relatively thin ablative layer will keep laser effectiveness in check.

It seriously concerns me that you have arbitrarily made SOME bleeding-edge technologies orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective (ADS systems so far in advance of today's as to risk failing laugh tests), while others are kept at exactly the level they are today (laser weaponry).

Sorry. I was thinking of missiles with only the tip shielded. Otherwise, yes, you can slam into a field-covered aircraft with a fully-field-covered missile.

Actually, I don't see why you couldn't do so in general- sure, the missile body gets sheared in half as the edge of the aircraft's field intersects the missile body, but by that point the warhead is through the aircraft's shield, and easily close enough to do massive damage. Hell, that might be the stimulus that triggers the missile's proximity fuze.

I really don't think it'll work that well. Large countries that try to fight limited wars this way tend to get ground up pretty badly, usually a lot worse than they expect.

Hasn't stopped them from trying, eh?

A few disastrous bad examples will make the historically literate person more cautious in the modern era.

---

Nuclear...
India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear weapons. Would India deliver a condition to China that basically says that "If Pakistan nukes me, then I go nuclear with China"?

Oh, easily, because it's blatantly obvious that Pakistan and China are cobelligerents. For that matter, it's also realistic that India might threaten to use its nuclear deterrent in case of:
-Certain types of attacks by Chinese forces on Indian soil directly (especially if India isn't "officially" at war with China, in which case it's an "AND STAY OUT" designed to protect India's industry and civilian population from attack).
-Any "Pakistani" offensive that threatens to break the lines and move onto Indian territory
-Any Chinese/"Pakistani" use of weapons of mass destruction of any kind (this might include killer robots slaughtering civilians along with military indiscriminately).

Remember that you don't have to only use nuclear weapons to retaliate against an enemy nuclear attack. Most countries that have nukes made it rather clear they would, for example, use them to defeat an invading army.

Yes, but it wouldn't be Mutually assured destruction anymore. Major cities CAN get shielded if they detect a missile launch. All you need is a shitload of generators lined up on the streets. They'd only have to be raised seconds before the missile arrives.

Good luck suddenly shielding an entire major metropolitan area on short notice- aren't you the one who insisted on how energy-intensive that is? I don't remember what figure you gave for instantaneous energy need to protect a given cubic meter, but raising a force-screen over the entire zone of effect of a nuclear attack would easily run to a billion cubic meters of volume to protect, or more. If protecting one telephone pole takes somewhere north of a hundred megajoules, that just plain isn't happening.

And nuclear flashes aren't all that devastating to people indoors or in shelters...

Being on fire is. The flash from a nuclear airburst sets things on fire.

Nothing says that China can't reinforce its civilian nuclear drills once it goes on the offensive. It'd some police-state level of organization to get people into shelters quickly, but if it is going to save a significant portion of the city's population, then it is worth it.

Ultimately, this just means more mouths to starve, if the infrastructure that supports the state is destroyed as collateral damage in a nuclear attack.

Also, the blast overpressure force that would slap a screen generator in a nuclear attack is staggering- probably on the order of multiple pounds per square inch of shield, integrated over many many square inches of screen. I'm not sure you even could anchor a generator to take that with realistic technology, without crushing the physical parts.

---

How the hell does China even get to that point, and what about countries far from China with their own supplies of the metals?

China gets to that point by expanding gradually over the course of a few decades. Its exports become more and more important. One day, it says "I'm going one step further" and hits the resource market.

And while faraway countries might not feel the military pressure of China, they would still have the economic incentive to raise its prices along with China.

At this point, it really stops being China's "fault" in any sense, unless China is specifically trying to inflate world prices beyond demand, and that just doesn't last. What I've been trying to get across is that you can't leverage global scarcity of a material you don't control all the supplies of, not indefinitely and not without limit.

The main problem with this is that demand for strategic metals is 'stretchy' because stockpiles are fairly large (and easy to maintain), and demand is a relative trickle- especially for uranium; cutting off uranium today does not shut down nuclear reactors.

I'm counting on the development of nuclear energy and high tech industries (major contribution to the developing countries' boom) to increase demand and tighten the supply chain. Not as short as the agricultural chain, of course, but nothing that a few years can't handle.

But a few years of this kind of thing will cause atrophy of the export market, see above.

THERE IS NO EMBARGO.
The supply is constant. It's just the price which explodes.
Using the OPEP analogy, its like you can refuel you car for 50 dollars one day, then the next day, you have to pay 150 dollars. You can still refuel your car, you just have to pay more. Do you stop using you car, or do you rearrange your budget?

Most likely, you stop buying more if there's a reserve available, and try to outwait the fucking price-gouging attempt. There's a reason this doesn't just randomly happen to commodities in real life very often.

---

It'd pass through just as easily with a hard field; it stops on the surface, and starts falling straight down. On a soft field, it starts falling 30-50cm deeper into the field.

Which means it falls DOWN, out of the divot it's made, into your shield bubble. Oops.

Thaaaat sounds exploitable.

That's only if the soldier is dumb enough to leave the option on all the time, and doesn't set it to dodge in a specific direction.

In the chaos of a combat situation, it will be hard to keep resetting the "dodge this way" option on the suit. It's easy for the soldier to think of which way to dodge, but not to preprogram a machine to do it. If the option is turned off in battle because of the risk, then it's totally useless- what's the good of a defense mechanism you have to turn off?

100kW, 5-7 tons.
Even the HELLADS weighs nearly a ton and produces only 150kW, and it needs a few seconds for thin walled mortars and missile fins.
No, I just don't see lasers as an effective ground weapon that can be built to overcome armor more effectively than kinetic or explosive weaponry.

Well, you've made suits damn near immune to kinetic weapons, and... what really bothers me is that you are positing NO advance in laser technology, but massive advances in other areas.

Part of the problem here is that you started with "how can I make X happen" and answered "well, I need Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4, and Y5." The problem is that this combination of factors has a lot of side effects you haven't considered.

I just like doing this shit, you know, exploring all the possibilities and truncating them when they don't fit with reasonable measure. Do you, Simon, like reading my threads?

...How do I explain this...

It's like, what I'm encouraging you to do is be more open to unexpected side effects of your ideas creating things other than what you originally envisioned. Like, maybe one side effect is that shielded equivalents of the AC-130 like to fly around potting soldiers with a big tactical laser in the multimegawatt range, and that this is actually effective, and will be a threat to shielded soldiers on the battlefield.

I've seen a lot of people over the years who come up with elaborate visions for how some specific combination of future technologies will create exactly the image they want. And always, I like to get them thinking about what other consequences might emerge, what other things they don't plan on are in play.

I suppose I am grousing because of a perception that you are not in the mood to be open to this about this setting- that you are simply repeating your previous ideas, not exploring new ones, and rejecting certain technical or social observations that might lead to new ideas that alter the vision of the setting. Perhaps that is inaccurate; I do not want to be unfair to you here.

Do you think I might be... not completely off base?

[Sea Skimmer]

The figures I'm looking at for the armored suits is 300-400kg. That doesn't sound like something that would get stuck in the mud very often, and it has arms to pull on surrounding objects, or the very least increase the number of contact points on the ground. What I mean is that a stuck tank can't kneel and crawl out of the mud.

This is rather wrong thinking, because a tank moves forward on a more or less even and continuous basis. Its ground pressure does not significantly if its in motion or stationary, subject to road wheel spacing. That's the whole point of tracks. On the other hand the ground pressure of a person can increase as much as eight fold over its static value when you put down a foot moving quickly. Meanwhile you can't make the feet on power armor very large, or indeed bulk in general cannot be that high, before the person becomes unable to stand or walk normally. A vast amount of the stuff in anime comically fails at recognizing this. Weight distribution can also reach epic fail status real quick unless one assumes actual ballast in the feet.

Your 400kg guy is going to have near main battle tank like static ground pressure, but it will skyrocket with every step. End result is less mobility before we consider things like speed or just the fact that vehicles don’t get physically tired, while a guy in powered armor still has to support his own weight ect..

Also thrashing around in mud doesn't help much, because its the suction that holds you. If you can't swim in it, laying down isn't going to blood well help, you'll just dig in deeper very quickly. Oh and the tank can still fight while stuck in the mud, a guy trying to swim in it sure can't.

All and all your shields sound like an excellent way to make a high speed armored bulldozer that goes around squishing people and blasting them with guns, plowing over stuff in general while now being nearly immune to infantry portable weapons as it should be able mount a shield absurdly stronger then any person ever could even with power armor. You may well have invented yourself a way to make armored vehicles effective without infantry support, particularly since this means we should have helicopter gunships to support them which are now protected like tanks too. A Chinook with nearly 10,000shp geared to a generator in the fuselage, and some banks of laser guided missiles and bombs is going to have a field day. Without a full cargo load it won’t even come close to needing all its power for just flying.

Oh and tanks have already been built with lower ground pressure then an unladen human. Probably build one for much less money then one of those giant complicated Appleseed suits too. Hell we might go build a decent helicopter for less. I like powered armor, but shields don’t let it become some game changing system, its more like the minimal to keep infantry survivable as weapons and vehicles become ever more staggeringly powerful.

Not for infantry, it's not; part of the point of even having infantry is that they can cope with stairs and rubble.

Aye, which is why things like the Appleseed suits are already borderline heading for pointless, as they simply wont fit in many rooms and hallways. The suits need to be as small as possible, because equipment carried outside of them like weapons, ammo and other supplies, like say a sleeping bag to the suit operator can get a decent nights rest rather then having his or her legs split apart all the time. Animie generally ignores stuff like this as hard as possible, often not even giving the things ammunition, or having them pull ammo reloads out of nowhere.

Also, the blast overpressure force that would slap a screen generator in a nuclear attack is staggering- probably on the order of multiple pounds per square inch of shield, integrated over many many square inches of screen. I'm not sure you even could anchor a generator to take that with realistic technology, without crushing the physical parts.

You would be talking about tens of billions of pounds of crushing force from a nuke, maybe trillions for a high yield one. Even if you could anchor it, the rock under it would be subject to massive plastic deformation, which is exactly what happens at the bottom of a nuclear crater over a rather large radius (depending on yield of course!). Many generators spreading the load would be required to make this work, or else a single one which is just giant and evenly spreads the load within itself.

[krakonfour]

Doesn't really matter-- it points directly away from your hand, which is great for thrusting. There are other bladed weapons that also have this kind of ergonomics: the Katar, the Pata (the Katar's big brother), the western push dagger, and {e: I originally posted the wrong dagger} some Philipino Kalis daggers.

Those are pretty interesting. I never knew they existed, except for the knuckle-duster dagger thing. They seem to do a very good job of protecting the hand, but I wonder how much the lose from limiting wrist movements.

Not true either. It wasn't uncommon, once the line was broken and melee started, for soldiers to simply turn their muskets around and beat the enemy with the wooden stock. Its even theorized that this gave rise to the Native American gunstock war club, although it could be a coincidence; it still suggests that a rifle butt was and is an effective bludgeon, however.

I was thinking more of modern military combat, where you are either at rifle range or handgun range, with very few circumstances in between.
Also, all this assumes that bludgeoning or stabbing the opponent is mortally effective. In this setting, it's only an accessory that has no way of actually damaging the enemy other than allowing your actual killing tool (the gun) to become effective.

So you are advocating having the melee and shooting weapons separate entities?

Its historically how it was done.

Yeah. I was just wondering if making a gun more suitable for melee use, at the cost of accuracy and barrel length (which matter little in this scenario), would be useful.

There is a certain logic to it-- if you need multiple weapons you can always carry multiple weapons. Its like the difference between John Spartan, who can pick up and use anything he is trained for and can carry both a rifle and a sidearm, and Squall Leonhart who gets one and only one signature style of weapon because that's how his game was designed. Reality is more like the former character.

True... but how is this relevant?

Yes, that's true, unless he has greater reach than you and can stab his bayonet into your trachea before you can slash his throat.

Umm, not really. Stabbing or trying to strike the armor will have little to no effect. You're aiming for his hands and gun.
I mean, there is no vulnerable trachea, just metal plating all over. It is extremely unlikely that you'll get to damage the suit's wearer at all... his gun however is pointing at you and shooting WH40K-esque ammunition at you.

So, in short, only the parrying aspect of melee combat is retained in this setting. Stabbing for damage is useless. Longer reach means that you will be able to strike first and push away the gun quicker... and then you will have the disadvantage of a long, unwieldy spear for the following seconds of combat. Why? Because there is no way you can stop him from closing the distance short of shooting his legs. And to do that, you need at least one hand free. And if you are one-hand wielding a spear, then it has as less parrying force (leverage) than a sword and can be swiped away in turn or overpowered.

Say you have a spear and sword, and the enemy has a sword and gun.
Fields merge, you both step forward, his gun is pointing at you.
1) You double-hand wield the spear. You smash the gun to the side first. You both get closer. His sword parries your spear, and his gun's line of fire returns to the intended position. Bang bang.
2) You double-hand wield the spear. You smash the gun to the side first. You both get closer. You reach for your gun and aim. His sword strikes at your gun. Your spear counters the sword, but with equal or less power. Both of you have your guns pointing at each other now. Disengage, restart from another position. The fight continues, with you having the inferior melee weapon.

[/Quote]Some suggested viewing:




[/Quote]

I wish I had found these videos, for another setting I was working on. Thanks a bunch for sharing.

Er... I'm not really sure if this is supposed to be directed at me? I'm sorry, but I have not actually been paying much attention to this thread. The premise struck me as silly the instant I read that there were Dune-esque forcefields involved. Once you cross a certain threshold, I stop caring that much for realism because it ties you into knots.

It's not Dune-esque fields of silliness, its force-melee-combat-fields-of-less-silliness. It's a scifi setting that adds one magitech element and builds on it. Mass Effect's E-Z for example.
And why stop caring for realism?

Although against full powered armor, you might as well install power tools, like shears that open an opponent's suit like a tin can in a grapple.

Power tools. Hummm. That does sound like a good idea, but how fast are they?

[krakonfour]

Still, though, I look forward to the ERA bricks bumping into things or getting damaged when the soldier tries to lie flat for some reason.

Tactics, tactics. The more the better. Every protection has a drawback and counter to it.

If it only engages projectiles that are already less than three meters away, it won't work. Active defense systems in real life are designed to track and engage projectiles coming from a considerable distance. At three meters, you can't even rely on a single antenna or gun system to protect the soldier, you'd have to have him bristling with antennas and point defense mounts, and even sweeping the full area he occupies would be hard.

Yes, they do engage targets from less than three meters away.


And no, their targets are not travelling at several times the speed of sound.

Radar is not normally at its best trying to detect and engage targets that are only milliseconds' flight time away. I mean hell, even swinging a physical gun mount to bear on the projectile is going to take more time than that.

The system I'm proposing doesn't rely on guns, but on mini-grenade launchers that are propositioned to cover certain arcs. The anti-grenade grenade is launched into the air at the required angle, and explodes, delivering a grenade/mortar/RPG busting stream of shrapnel.
Also, radars are fully capable of detecting targets microseconds away. The only limit to how quickly they react is processing speed.
Finally, the grenades aren't detected milliseconds of flight time away. However fast the incoming projectile is, it will still stop to a standstill against the field.

Or unless the real grenades have been disguised to look like rocks, as we already discussed.

There's still issues with density and radar signal. A rock just doesn't have the same density as explosives, and it gives off a much more homogeneous return signal than a grenade made up of multiple components. And just how do you fire grenades-that-look-like-rocks effectively?
There's still a guy in a suit. He can switch on, off or limit the system to certain targets. If he can guess that the weird exploding rocks you're shooting at him are dangerous, then he will increase the system's threshold to 'shoot everything'. If he knows that he is going to be showered in debris by a nearby explosion, he can tone it down to 'inactive'.

Hopefully so, but my fundamental point is simply that increased weight carries with it increased risks, and makes the suits awkward for fighting in the kind of built-up terrain they're theoretically designed for.

Hm. It occurs to me that in some situations, trapping a man in a power suit inside a building is an effective way to get a weapon past his defenses, either by shooting through a wall (which interrupts his bubble shield), or by planting explosive charges in the hall that will wind up physically inside his shield before detonating.

Yup.
Reminds me, even multimillion dollar tanks impervious to the current generation of anti-tank weapons, and the next, still fall to dirt cheap roadside bombs today.

Not for infantry, it's not; part of the point of even having infantry is that they can cope with stairs and rubble.

I've looked up the design specifications of stairs. Most hold 1000 lbs, so that fits comfortably with the lighter suits. The stringer ones hold 1800lbs and the weakest attic stairs sustain 250lbs.

So maybe we'd have light suits (200-300kg) perform the current infantry tasks, and much heavier suits (400-500kg) defend the infantry like an APC would today.

Couldn't find anything for piles of rubble.

Then how do you know it does what you think it does?

I based the operation on an extremely simple turborocket. The field can be modeled as a perfect compressor (air flow zero in front of it), and the section behind the field (as compressed air slides through) is a rocket.

I'm exaggerating (look up the SHROOMIRV), but the basic point here is that if Moore's Law has been underway for more decades by this point, there will be ubiquitous drone AI that is intelligent enough to pose a very serious threat, in a wide variety of screwy ways.

If the drone AI is very advanced, and we have human-piloted fighter jets, then necessarily, the AI on the fighter jet is more advanced than the disposable version. The drawback is that the fighter jet will have physical limits from having a human inside.
If the bomber is an automated drone, and the missile is a smaller automated drone, then air warfare is a clusterfuck.

China would build such weapons. Surely they don't suffer from their own price-spiking?

Yes, China is equipped with the latest weapons, which is why I said it has air superiority over the battlefield, and why it would consider air-drops in the middle of a war zone.

The problem is that the way you've pitched ADS working requires insanely fast-acting, alert, sensitive computers with virtually zero lag time and brilliant target discrimination. That technology has implications.

The ADS computer is pretty specialized in what it does. I don't know how exactly radar systems are affected by increased processor speeds, but I am certain that a multi-tasking supercomputer will be several times more costly than something built only to discriminate a target and aim a weapon.

Lemme check.

As expected. Zero information. Absolutely no numbers as to the CPU speeds or memory capacities of modern avionics and fire-control systems. The freshest information I found was 18MHz for a naval ballistics computer... in 1969.
So yeah, it's going to be pure speculation.

It is almost certainly going to be more economical to remote-control the drones, especially if you can use shielded communications relay aircraft that are extremely difficult to take down.

Yes, but it is impossible to micromanage them, and you still have to deal with situations where they have to act on their own. Individual intelligence is required.

The problem with that is the signal-to-noise ratio; so much data coming back from the front that a remote commander can't interpret it properly, because most of it doesn't actually impact what he should be doing, and the few pieces of information that do have been lost in the clutter.

And this is where the supremely advanced AI technology OF THE FUTURE comes into play.

This suggests that the design concept of the suits is fundamentally fallacious. If they're so expensive that it's cheaper to build a drone, drones will replace them for everything.

The premise was that drones are less effective than soldiers of an equal number. I'm sorry. 'so expensive' and 'less effective' are pretty vague for now, unless I get around to working out the cost of a powered suit and a drone.

France and Britain don't have militaries of comparable size to the US; India does or should have one compared to China. Moreover, India even today is heavily engaged in active military research trying to develop its own weapon systems. They're not so far behind the curve that they'll completely fail to incorporate a new technology like personal shields.

Their soldiers do have personal shields. While Indian and Chinese armies might be equal in numbers on the ground, it is very likely that the Chinese will have a technological edge, by virtue of having more money to spend on military R&D, and a vast advantage in the air, especially if air warfare turns out to be a drone vs drone pileup.
In this scenario, the stock of Indian field-deploying missiles exists, but is too small to make a dent in Chinese air superiority. Premature strikes, weapons trade embargoes, sabotage, effective countermeasures or simply too many planes to shoot down... I didn't develop the reasons behind this shortage.

India is the one launching a premeditated attack here; surely they would make sure they're prepared and properly equipped before doing so?

I'm writing this as if India doesn't expect a massive Chinese force coming in from the mainland in time to help those stationed in Pakistan. It could be confident that its ammunition stock is enough to wipe out all the planes in Pakistan and win the war before China can send reinforcements from the mainland. It turns out that its missiles are not effective enough, that China has more forced in Pakistan than expected, and manages to send enough reinforcements to force India into a war of attrition instead of the quick strike it was hoping for.

Are you familiar with the concept of "war mobilization?" A country mobilized for war is very hard to beat down in this way.

When was the last time a major developed country entered war mobilization for a war advertised as 'a short walk in the neighborhood'. And even if India enters war mobilization, it was bound to win the war in Pakistan anyways once it decided to pay for it. China's supply line was too long... it's objective was only to bleed India out after a certain point, and if war mobilization to replace the losses makes a serious dent in the economy, it's all the better for China.

It could go like this:
Stage 1: India attacks Pakistan. It expects a short, victorious war. China believes its forced stationed in Pakistan are enough.
Stage 2: India's attack fails. The Chinese confidence in pushing India out is reinforced, and forbids Pakistan from nuking the invaders.
Stage 3: India continues to send troops despite the losses. China is forced to send reinforcements from the mainland.
Stage 4: India's push is inexorable. It has replenished its field-deploying missile stocks and is regaining the aerial advantage the Chinese were counting on. The Chinese understand that they cannot win.
Stage 5: India loses less and less soldiers. China send less and less soldiers, and more drones, and adopts a 'kill 10 Indians for every Chinese loss' tactic.
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.

...I really, really think you're underestimating the cost of this type of war for China, and overestimating how permanently a military setback reduces the strength of the country that experiences the setback.

I never mentioned how much time it took India to get back on its feet.
I just said that following the war, India would assume a defensive, non-interventionist stance while it rebuilt its numbers. China would still have enough steam left to expand its influence over the region, and the economic negociations would tip in its favor.

The power supply for the missile launch would have to come from a fixed installation (say, a truckload of batteries, or a truck-mounted generator that trickle-charges the missile's protective bubble shield as part of setting up the SAM site). Subject to that constraint, the battery pack to sustain the shield is pretty trivial.

That doesn't make for a very stealthy launch site.

It seriously concerns me that you have arbitrarily made SOME bleeding-edge technologies orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective (ADS systems so far in advance of today's as to risk failing laugh tests), while others are kept at exactly the level they are today (laser weaponry).

The ADS system I proposed is much less performant than current systems, has a much smaller radar, and an equivalent processing/reaction speed. The downside is that it cannot shoot down tungsten slugs coming in at 1750m/s from any direction. The upside is that it's portable and deals mostly with grenades stuck on the surface of the field.

Lasers have physical constraints you cannot do away with. Fragility, inefficiency and sensibility to atmospheric conditions can be worked around. Having to concentrate the beam on a cm-wide spot for several seconds to go through one soldier's armor is a constraint that will magically dissapear, unless you managed to handwave the power and cooling requirements away.... and I only want one sort of magitech in my setting.

Actually, I don't see why you couldn't do so in general- sure, the missile body gets sheared in half as the edge of the aircraft's field intersects the missile body, but by that point the warhead is through the aircraft's shield, and easily close enough to do massive damage. Hell, that might be the stimulus that triggers the missile's proximity fuze.

I'll work out the numbers on the shield-shrinking counter-measure.
Based on the F-22's dimensions, I get a minimal field volume of 7800m3 and surface of 2200m2. That's 21.8GJ contained and 169kW to sustain.
If the field is generated 1.5m larger in each direction, then shrunk as it detects the warhead entering the field, then it would have to absorb 9.8GJ of energy. The way I see it, the missile triggers, the field shrinks, absorbs the explosion, then the plane has to eject a minimum of 30kg of boiling water.
One ton capacity means that with a bit of luck, the plane can survive about 30 missile hits, more if it has a cooling system to recuperate boiled water.

Oh, easily, because it's blatantly obvious that Pakistan and China are cobelligerents. For that matter, it's also realistic that India might threaten to use its nuclear deterrent in case of:
-Certain types of attacks by Chinese forces on Indian soil directly (especially if India isn't "officially" at war with China, in which case it's an "AND STAY OUT" designed to protect India's industry and civilian population from attack).
-Any "Pakistani" offensive that threatens to break the lines and move onto Indian territory
-Any Chinese/"Pakistani" use of weapons of mass destruction of any kind (this might include killer robots slaughtering civilians along with military indiscriminately).

The last one is debatable. India might not be so inclined to impose conditions on nuclear weapons based on acts that it would commit itself if it could. Plus, a robot attacking a civilian village or town can always be written off as a mistake or error, not something the human controller would intentionally do...

Remember that you don't have to only use nuclear weapons to retaliate against an enemy nuclear attack. Most countries that have nukes made it rather clear they would, for example, use them to defeat an invading army.

Doesn't the USA have a stock of miniature nuclear weapons and nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles that it has never used?

Good luck suddenly shielding an entire major metropolitan area on short notice- aren't you the one who insisted on how energy-intensive that is? I don't remember what figure you gave for instantaneous energy need to protect a given cubic meter, but raising a force-screen over the entire zone of effect of a nuclear attack would easily run to a billion cubic meters of volume to protect, or more. If protecting one telephone pole takes somewhere north of a hundred megajoules, that just plain isn't happening.

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.
Protecting a zone 4km in diameter would require 46.9 Petajoules. Clever placement of separate generators over only the volumes you need protected, (you're not going to place them in mid-air to make a perfect half-bubble shape, are you?) and only covering them with shield of minimal height (3m off the ground or something, 1m around the exterior of homes) and you could bring down that figure to 175.9TJ.
Now I'm not saying that's something easy, but if you have 30 minutes of access to China's current 713GW+ electrical grid, then you could cover roughly 10 of these zones.

Being on fire is. The flash from a nuclear airburst sets things on fire.

Well, it's that or being blown away and covered in radioactive ash.

Ultimately, this just means more mouths to starve, if the infrastructure that supports the state is destroyed as collateral damage in a nuclear attack.

It's highly unlikely that the enemy has enough nuclear warheads to carpet bomb important population centers like that. A country with only a few nukes would target major cities first and foremost.

Also, the blast overpressure force that would slap a screen generator in a nuclear attack is staggering- probably on the order of multiple pounds per square inch of shield, integrated over many many square inches of screen. I'm not sure you even could anchor a generator to take that with realistic technology, without crushing the physical parts.

Oh, it's a single-use only solution, and the generators can be built underground. The field will be forced out onto the surface. Not an optimal solution in terms of volume management, but you'd have megatons of rock to back you up. The blastwave lasts only for a few seconds anyways.

At this point, it really stops being China's "fault" in any sense, unless China is specifically trying to inflate world prices beyond demand, and that just doesn't last. What I've been trying to get across is that you can't leverage global scarcity of a material you don't control all the supplies of, not indefinitely and not without limit.

Not even a majority of a resource?

Most likely, you stop buying more if there's a reserve available, and try to outwait the fucking price-gouging attempt. There's a reason this doesn't just randomly happen to commodities in real life very often.

The question is then, how long can these countries that have grown increasingly reliant over the decades for scarcer and scarcer rare earth minerals sit on their reserves? A year? Two? China wants to dump its dollars into buying everything it can.

In the chaos of a combat situation, it will be hard to keep resetting the "dodge this way" option on the suit. It's easy for the soldier to think of which way to dodge, but not to preprogram a machine to do it. If the option is turned off in battle because of the risk, then it's totally useless- what's the good of a defense mechanism you have to turn off?

And that's where computer aids come into play. Who says the suit cannot detect the soldiers'thought command for it to dodge in a certain direction?

...How do I explain this...

It's like, what I'm encouraging you to do is be more open to unexpected side effects of your ideas creating things other than what you originally envisioned. Like, maybe one side effect is that shielded equivalents of the AC-130 like to fly around potting soldiers with a big tactical laser in the multimegawatt range, and that this is actually effective, and will be a threat to shielded soldiers on the battlefield.

I've seen a lot of people over the years who come up with elaborate visions for how some specific combination of future technologies will create exactly the image they want. And always, I like to get them thinking about what other consequences might emerge, what other things they don't plan on are in play.

I suppose I am grousing because of a perception that you are not in the mood to be open to this about this setting- that you are simply repeating your previous ideas, not exploring new ones, and rejecting certain technical or social observations that might lead to new ideas that alter the vision of the setting. Perhaps that is inaccurate; I do not want to be unfair to you here.

Do you think I might be... not completely off base?

Au contraire, I think practically everything you write is everything I could wish for, so...
Okay.
For your sake, I'll count and calculate and slide the scales for laser technology, and determine what their effect on the battlefield is. It'll take me some time.

[Formless]

Those are pretty interesting. I never knew they existed, except for the knuckle-duster dagger thing. They seem to do a very good job of protecting the hand, but I wonder how much the lose from limiting wrist movements.

Not much. Most swordfighting is in the whole arm or whole body anyway, not just the wrist.

I was thinking more of modern military combat, where you are either at rifle range or handgun range, with very few circumstances in between.

This is only true in the sense that a rifle can reach out and kill you at any range a pistol can, and a pistol can maneuver pretty well in the same tight spaces a sword or dagger would be useful in. Your main battle weapon is always the rifle or the carbine.

Please stop and do some basic cursory research. Military combatives are very much a part of standard training still. Why? Because combat can still happen at any range, especially in urban warfare. Human weapon did an entire episode on the USMC's hand to hand training, and they start the episode with bayonet technique; notably including the buttstroke. They also did an episode on Krav Maga (Israel's combatives system sometimes also taught as a self defense method), which demonstrates the buttstroke again. Here's video demonstrating Russian military combatives (aka Systema). There are even comparisons that can be made between modern combatives and renaissance combatives. I even used to know where to find an excerpt from the US Army Field manual on improvised weapons and knives, but I can't find it at the moment. They just don't give soldiers primary melee weapons except as tertiary weapons, like the dagger/knife, but it is part of the curricula.

Also, all this assumes that bludgeoning or stabbing the opponent is mortally effective. In this setting, it's only an accessory that has no way of actually damaging the enemy other than allowing your actual killing tool (the gun) to become effective.

If you can get past the armor into the squishy bits of your opponent, a stab should be fatal (though not necessarily disabling at first). Most armor has gaps somewhere. As for bludgeoning weapons, you said they have powered armor. I just assumed that it meant that a bludgeon would actually hit harder because of that.

Bludgeoning weapons were not only one of the weapons of choice against enemies in plate armor, some of them were actually more effective against armored opponents because they left a permanent dent which hindered the knight's mobility. And I doubt you want the armor to weigh more than a historic knight in full harness for ground pressure reasons-- it would be a shame if your soldiers were unable to walk in mud even with the power assist because of the suction.

Yeah. I was just wondering if making a gun more suitable for melee use, at the cost of accuracy and barrel length (which matter little in this scenario), would be useful.

Not likely. Again, it limits you to pistol-power ammo. Rifles and shotguns have shoulder rests for a reason. You need the shoulder rest if you don't want to lose control or have the weapon fly out of your hands. Unless you are talking about a laser pistol, of course. Then there is no recoil to worry about and its fair game. Good luck with the power pack, though.

True... but how is this relevant?

Seriously? You can't put two and two together? Human beings have two hands. If you need a sword AND a gun, put a sword in one hand, and a pistol in the other. You don't have to combine them into a hybrid weapon to use both weapons. This means you can use a proper cut-and-thrust sword as well.

Umm, not really. Stabbing or trying to strike the armor will have little to no effect. You're aiming for his hands and gun.

Why would you aim for a man's gun? You can't cut a gun open with a sword, stupid. They're both made of steel. Swords aren't lightsabers.

I mean, there is no vulnerable trachea, just metal plating all over. It is extremely unlikely that you'll get to damage the suit's wearer at all... his gun however is pointing at you and shooting WH40K-esque ammunition at you.

Then use a bang-stick. You know, like the kind they use on sharks? Shotgun shell on the tip of a stick? Hello? Plus, there are always gaps in the armor, even if they are covered in rubber or something. Joints need to move, or the armor is immobile. Joints can be broken, balance can be taken out by shots to the legs, etc. Do you know anything about hand to hand combat that wasn't told to you by miniatures wargaming and RPGs?

*Sigh* This is the kind of silliness that made me avoid this thread up until now.

So, in short, only the parrying aspect of melee combat is retained in this setting. Stabbing for damage is useless. Longer reach means that you will be able to strike first and push away the gun quicker... and then you will have the disadvantage of a long, unwieldy spear for the following seconds of combat. Why? Because there is no way you can stop him from closing the distance short of shooting his legs.

Spears can be reversed and used as staves, you idiot, just like the rifle can hit you with the buttstock. Also, parrying should always be followed up with an attack as soon as possible, or even combine the defense and the attack in the same tempo. And its not like this wasn't an issue in historic combat; its just that fighters found ways around their opponent's armor. What does a top heavy knight do when someone trips his ass? Or preforms that hip throw demonstrated in the combatives comparison video? Grappling, grasshopper, grappling is what you do not seem to comprehend.

1) You double-hand wield the spear. You smash the gun to the side first. You both get closer. His sword parries your spear, and his gun's line of fire returns to the intended position. Bang bang.
2) You double-hand wield the spear. You smash the gun to the side first. You both get closer. You reach for your gun and aim. His sword strikes at your gun. Your spear counters the sword, but with equal or less power. Both of you have your guns pointing at each other now. Disengage, restart from another position. The fight continues, with you having the inferior melee weapon.

So, people who actually practice with melee weapons tell you that a spear is a hardass weapon to fight with a sword, even demonstrating that a spear can use one handed thrusts to hit from outside a sword's reach... and you still favor your own ignorance.

Okay, first of all, the rifle IS a spear, you assclown. That's the whole point of a bayonet. Your descriptions of fighting sound completely incoherent because you don't grasp the physicality of fighting. The range, the positioning, the momentum, all of it is inconsistent in your arguments. Even if a sword parries a spear or bayonet, the bayonet can get back on line in a fraction of a second. Didn't you watch the videos I posted?

Also, bayonets can slash just like swords can. That's why some people consider them more comparable to glaives.

Second, in war you have objectives. Why am I fighting when I can simply pass by him and run towards my objective point, where I then place demolition charges or whatever my mission is? Better protection from ranged weapons means more bodies have to get in my way before I can't simply avoid all of them and keep going.

If I must engage, I'm going to first find a better tactical position relative to his body than "head to head". Instead, if it is possible I make passing steps, even small ones, so that I can take control of his elbow, not his hand. Either elbow. His hands are agile, his elbows less so. One such technique is shown here, but for knuckledusters. I could apply a similar principle to a rifle, stepping to his right, inserting my gun over his elbow and then either shoot the guy in the face, or stab into the vulnerable gaps in the suit (ideally, the throat). Or, once I have established control of his body I can then sink my body mass into his elbow, forcing my opponent to bend over or even fall. I can optionally now throw a buttstroke into his faceplate, but its not necessary. Once he is down he isn't a threat.

Or I can go to his left side, pushing his elbow with the middle of my rifle, possibly setting up a buttstroke to the face or chest. Then I can do a number of things. I could initiate a leg sweep and trip him. I could step on his knee with my full armored mass and crush it, crippling his mobility. I could pull my gun back and shoot him. I can push him away, then run forward through where he was because he is no longer in my way.

And if he attacks with his sword, I can parry it with my rifle, then preform a throw similar to this one. Or a number of other half-swording like techniques to disarm him or stab him.

The rifle/bayonet combo is hardly an inferior weapon to a sword and pistol. You just don't know what you are talking about because your understanding of melee combat seems to run entirely on game logic.

It's not Dune-esque fields of silliness, its force-melee-combat-fields-of-less-silliness. It's a scifi setting that adds one magitech element and builds on it. Mass Effect's E-Z for example.
And why stop caring for realism?

Because its fiction. And stop before you try and link me to the part of that essay, "But its only science fiction!", I am intimately familiar with it and believe Nyrath is full of shit. Atomic Rocket's flaw is that it is NOT written as advice for writers, its written as advice for world builders. The difference is that a writer is less like an engineer than he is a stage magician. His skill is determined in his ability to direct his reader's attention to the interesting parts of the story and plot, not in his ability to satisfy those who are unwilling to engage with the performance. And it is my opinion that the Hard Sci-Fi "fans" who nitpick the hell out of everything and make a point of finding the flaws with the setting are that asshole who refused to play along with the magic show on principle, and wouldn't shut up about it after you left the venue.

My advice is that if you feel like the worldbuilding is getting in the way of writing a good story because you are obsessed or want to cater to Hard SF fandom, step back and ask yourself what part of this story you enjoy. You might realize that it isn't science fiction at all that attracts you, or else that you should be making campaign settings for role playing games.

Power tools. Hummm. That does sound like a good idea, but how fast are they?

Speed isn't relevant. It could be a slow crushing claw, as long as it has the power needed to rip open the metal power armor. The point is to first get into position, then simply cut through the suit and make your own opening to stab him or whatever you plan on doing. But that requires some understanding of grappling technique and how it fits into CQC, which you appear to lack.

[Simon_Jester]

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).

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

The system I'm proposing doesn't rely on guns, but on mini-grenade launchers that are propositioned to cover certain arcs. The anti-grenade grenade is launched into the air at the required angle, and explodes, delivering a grenade/mortar/RPG busting stream of shrapnel.

Ah, I see.

Solution: thicker grenade casing, notched for fragmentation. 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.

There's still a guy in a suit. He can switch on, off or limit the system to certain targets. If he can guess that the weird exploding rocks you're shooting at him are dangerous, then he will increase the system's threshold to 'shoot everything'. If he knows that he is going to be showered in debris by a nearby explosion, he can tone it down to 'inactive'.

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.

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.

Yup.
Reminds me, even multimillion dollar tanks impervious to the current generation of anti-tank weapons, and the next, still fall to dirt cheap roadside bombs today.

Not often, though- it's very rare for a tank to be destroyed, rather than lightly damaged, by such bombs.

Not for infantry, it's not; part of the point of even having infantry is that they can cope with stairs and rubble.

I've looked up the design specifications of stairs. Most hold 1000 lbs, so that fits comfortably with the lighter suits. The stringer ones hold 1800lbs and the weakest attic stairs sustain 250lbs.

So maybe we'd have light suits (200-300kg) perform the current infantry tasks, and much heavier suits (400-500kg) defend the infantry like an APC would today.

Couldn't find anything for piles of rubble.

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.

---

If the drone AI is very advanced, and we have human-piloted fighter jets, then necessarily, the AI on the fighter jet is more advanced than the disposable version. The drawback is that the fighter jet will have physical limits from having a human inside.
If the bomber is an automated drone, and the missile is a smaller automated drone, then air warfare is a clusterfuck.

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.

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.

Yes, but it is impossible to micromanage them, and you still have to deal with situations where they have to act on their own. Individual intelligence is required.

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.

The problem with that is the signal-to-noise ratio; so much data coming back from the front that a remote commander can't interpret it properly, because most of it doesn't actually impact what he should be doing, and the few pieces of information that do have been lost in the clutter.

And this is where the supremely advanced AI technology OF THE FUTURE comes into play.[/quote]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.

Their soldiers do have personal shields. While Indian and Chinese armies might be equal in numbers on the ground, it is very likely that the Chinese will have a technological edge, by virtue of having more money to spend on military R&D, and a vast advantage in the air, especially if air warfare turns out to be a drone vs drone pileup.

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.

---

I'm writing this as if India doesn't expect a massive Chinese force coming in from the mainland in time to help those stationed in Pakistan. It could be confident that its ammunition stock is enough to wipe out all the planes in Pakistan and win the war before China can send reinforcements from the mainland. It turns out that its missiles are not effective enough, that China has more forced in Pakistan than expected, and manages to send enough reinforcements to force India into a war of attrition instead of the quick strike it was hoping for.

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.

Do you actually intend to make their high command this stupid? Because this sounds like some of the more poorly thought-out ideas that came out of the Imperial Japanese military during World War Two...

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)?

The power supply for the missile launch would have to come from a fixed installation (say, a truckload of batteries, or a truck-mounted generator that trickle-charges the missile's protective bubble shield as part of setting up the SAM site). Subject to that constraint, the battery pack to sustain the shield is pretty trivial.

That doesn't make for a very stealthy launch site.

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.

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

The ADS system I proposed is much less performant than current systems, has a much smaller radar, and an equivalent processing/reaction speed. The downside is that it cannot shoot down tungsten slugs coming in at 1750m/s from any direction. The upside is that it's portable and deals mostly with grenades stuck on the surface of the field.

Point.

Lasers have physical constraints you cannot do away with. Fragility, inefficiency and sensibility to atmospheric conditions can be worked around. Having to concentrate the beam on a cm-wide spot for several seconds to go through one soldier's armor is a constraint that will magically dissapear, unless you managed to handwave the power and cooling requirements away.... and I only want one sort of magitech in my setting.

Pulsing seems a fairly likely response. Also, look into things like diode lasers.

I'll work out the numbers on the shield-shrinking counter-measure.
Based on the F-22's dimensions, I get a minimal field volume of 7800m3 and surface of 2200m2. That's 21.8GJ contained and 169kW to sustain.
If the field is generated 1.5m larger in each direction, then shrunk as it detects the warhead entering the field, then it would have to absorb 9.8GJ of energy. The way I see it, the missile triggers, the field shrinks, absorbs the explosion, then the plane has to eject a minimum of 30kg of boiling water.
One ton capacity means that with a bit of luck, the plane can survive about 30 missile hits, more if it has a cooling system to recuperate boiled water.

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

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.

---

Remember that you don't have to only use nuclear weapons to retaliate against an enemy nuclear attack. Most countries that have nukes made it rather clear they would, for example, use them to defeat an invading army.

Doesn't the USA have a stock of miniature nuclear weapons and nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles that it has never used?

Some, yes. Also air-dropped nuclear devices that could be used either tactically or strategically. The key point here is that nuclear weapons CAN be used to fight enemy armies. No one's ever needed to do it, but the fact that it can be done helps explain why only once has anyone ever seriously tried to invade a publicly known nuclear power- the Yom Kippur War. And that did not end well; it got to the point where the US was willing to airlift in munitions to replenish all Israeli stocks, rather than let the Israelis try to win the war by going nuclear.

Even then, I can only assume the Arab states believed Israel did not actually have nuclear weapons and was bluffing, or thought they could soak up the Israeli nuclear stockpile because they thought it was small (i.e. if Israel had, say, a dozen twenty-kiloton devices, and divided them by shooting at multiple attacking countries, that would not actually stop those countries from prosecuting the war).

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.

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.

Protecting a zone 4km in diameter would require 46.9 Petajoules. Clever placement of separate generators over only the volumes you need protected, (you're not going to place them in mid-air to make a perfect half-bubble shape, are you?) and only covering them with shield of minimal height (3m off the ground or something, 1m around the exterior of homes) and you could bring down that figure to 175.9TJ.
Now I'm not saying that's something easy, but if you have 30 minutes of access to China's current 713GW+ electrical grid, then you could cover roughly 10 of these zones.

China would not get thirty minutes of warning time in the event of an Indian attack using ballistic missiles. Something like five to ten is more likely, and some of that time would have to be consumed in diverting full power to deflector screens. Meanwhile, the use of thousands or millions of individual screen generators would make it very hard to mount each individual generator firmly enough to withstand the multi-ton forces involved in shrugging off the blast wave.

Well, it's that or being blown away and covered in radioactive ash.

The screens will do nothing to protect against radioactive ashfall, both because they do not stop smoke or falling particulates, AND because the nuclear attack will wreck the local power grid badly enough that the screens fail after the attack, even if the generators aren't ripped off their mountings.

Ultimately, this just means more mouths to starve, if the infrastructure that supports the state is destroyed as collateral damage in a nuclear attack.

It's highly unlikely that the enemy has enough nuclear warheads to carpet bomb important population centers like that. A country with only a few nukes would target major cities first and foremost.

No, they would most likely target either key infrastructure (to cause as much short-term economic dislocation as possible) or enemy military bases (to reduce the size of the enemy's nuclear counterattack as much as possible). Only in videogames does it make sense to target nuclear weapons at a rival country's largest cities purely because they are large cities.

It so happens that many of the likely targets in a nuclear attack are "colocated" with major cities, so the major cities are wrecked anyway. But to give an obvious example, if an enemy firing nuclear weapons at the US blows up "Washington D.C.," the odds are overwhelming that they have nothing against the people of Washington personally. They just want to be sure they destroy the White House, Pentagon, and other command-and-control hubs of the US government.

So the interchange where two major freeways may be a more important target than the nearby city of half a million people- though a typical nuclear war planner won't shed any tears if the city is "accidentally" wrecked in the process of vaporizing that interchange.

Oh, it's a single-use only solution, and the generators can be built underground. The field will be forced out onto the surface. Not an optimal solution in terms of volume management, but you'd have megatons of rock to back you up. The blastwave lasts only for a few seconds anyways.

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?

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.

---

At this point, it really stops being China's "fault" in any sense, unless China is specifically trying to inflate world prices beyond demand, and that just doesn't last. What I've been trying to get across is that you can't leverage global scarcity of a material you don't control all the supplies of, not indefinitely and not without limit.

Not even a majority of a resource?

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).

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.

[Beowulf]

You can't have a shielf fully encapsulating an aircraft or missile, BTW: no lift and no thrust means you fall out of the sky. So your wings and control surfaces must protrude out into the air stream and your engine nozzle must extend out the back of the shield.

[Simon_Jester]

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.

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.

[krakonfour]

Please stop and do some basic cursory research. Military combatives are very much a part of standard training still. Why? Because combat can still happen at any range, especially in urban warfare. Human weapon did an entire episode on the USMC's hand to hand training, and they start the episode with bayonet technique; notably including the buttstroke. They also did an episode on Krav Maga (Israel's combatives system sometimes also taught as a self defense method), which demonstrates the buttstroke again. Here's video demonstrating Russian military combatives (aka Systema). There are even comparisons that can be made between modern combatives and renaissance combatives. I even used to know where to find an excerpt from the US Army Field manual on improvised weapons and knives, but I can't find it at the moment. They just don't give soldiers primary melee weapons except as tertiary weapons, like the dagger/knife, but it is part of the curricula.

Thanks for the plethora of videos. I'll watch them when I have time.

If you can get past the armor into the squishy bits of your opponent, a stab should be fatal (though not necessarily disabling at first). Most armor has gaps somewhere. As for bludgeoning weapons, you said they have powered armor. I just assumed that it meant that a bludgeon would actually hit harder because of that.

In another post, I detailed how the soldier survived close-range grenade explosions. One of the solutions was to fully enclose him in a solid shell to negate overpressure and burn damage. Added to the fact that it has NBC protection (no openings) and remotely controlled limbs, then it is safe to say that no amount of stabbing will harm the user, unless you can jam the blade into the joints, in which case you've only restricted movement.
Bludgeoning... you can hit harder, you can bring the hammer to supoersonic speeds with the artifial arms, but you're still hitting something meant to withstand close-range grenade explosions.
So these two techniques, which featured prominently in your videos, cannot hurt the soldier inside. But, just like any other armored vehicle, you can achieve a soft kill with melee weapons. Striking the cameras and antennas, smashing the joints until they grip and lock up, making the armor fall over, going for the weapons or the arms themselves... all useful, potentially crippling when combined, but do not ensure a hard kill unless they are followed up with a volley of gunfire.

Bludgeoning weapons were not only one of the weapons of choice against enemies in plate armor, some of them were actually more effective against armored opponents because they left a permanent dent which hindered the knight's mobility. And I doubt you want the armor to weigh more than a historic knight in full harness for ground pressure reasons-- it would be a shame if your soldiers were unable to walk in mud even with the power assist because of the suction.

The armor plating on these suits is about 3cm of ceramic composites, with ERA bricks on top of the 'outside' surfaces. The rest is steel with padding. The user sits in a cylinder with its own spall liner and stuff. The artificial limbs have less armor, mostly because the muscles act like hard plastic.
A fully armored horseriding knight's suit weighed up to 70kg. Regular suits weighed 20-35kg. Today, soldiers carry 35kg on average. The ground pressure of these loaded men varies therefore from 791kg/m2 to 1208kg/m3 with feet flat on the ground, and 9500kg/m2 to 14000kg/m2 when tiptoeing.
In this setting, I'm envisioning 250kg light suits and 450kg heavy suits. The light suits have feet that can fit on stairs. The heavier ones have the largest feet they can mount without hindering movement.
Standing, they have 2708kg/m3 and 1750kg/m3 respectively. Tiptoeing, they get up to 16250kg/m2 and 10500kg/m2.

So basically, these suits can go wherever a fully armored man might tiptoe, and more places than a tank can.

For comparison:
Ground pressure of a city car: 22500kg/m2
Ground pressure of a tank: 10500kg/m2

Not likely. Again, it limits you to pistol-power ammo. Rifles and shotguns have shoulder rests for a reason. You need the shoulder rest if you don't want to lose control or have the weapon fly out of your hands. Unless you are talking about a laser pistol, of course. Then there is no recoil to worry about and its fair game. Good luck with the power pack, though.

It is highly unlikely that AP bullets will be used, so barrel length and round velocity are of little importance. All that matters is the caliber and how many explosives can be packed in the miniature HEAT round. The recoil for a slow firing cut down shotgun would therefore before disproportionately low compared to the caliber. Then you have additional factors, like artifial muscles with gun stabilization aids holding the gun, and the fact that the gun butt can hooked into arm itself while firing, spreading the recoil through the electromagnet joints into the whole suit. Yes, it is still better to fire against the shoulder. Yes, the enemy is putting effort into making the weapon fly out of your hands. Even so, 300kg+ of suit and user count for something when handling recoil.

Why would you aim for a man's gun? You can't cut a gun open with a sword, stupid. They're both made of steel. Swords aren't lightsabers.

Cut? Humm.
You're aiming for the man's gun and firing arm because its the only between you and a volley of anti-tank ammunition. The sword grants extra reach, but it could be a blunt stick for all it's worth. Swatting away the gun away, crushing the fingers, striking the joint, bashing the forearm or grappling it.... heck, with the power armor force, you could damage the gun itself with a forceful strike, but I never mentioned cutting.

Then use a bang-stick. You know, like the kind they use on sharks? Shotgun shell on the tip of a stick? Hello? Plus, there are always gaps in the armor, even if they are covered in rubber or something. Joints need to move, or the armor is immobile. Joints can be broken, balance can be taken out by shots to the legs, etc.

The hammer/RPG combo weapon from the first page, and the explosives-on-a-pike somewhere afterwards, work in a similar way to the weapon you're proposing. I've also mentioned attacking joints several times.

Do you know anything about hand to hand combat that wasn't told to you by miniatures wargaming and RPGs?
*Sigh* This is the kind of silliness that made me avoid this thread up until now.

Never played with wargaming miniatures, and I'm not into any RPG's, online or otherwise, so... I guess I'm silly even without those things.

Spears can be reversed and used as staves, you idiot, just like the rifle can hit you with the buttstock. Also, parrying should always be followed up with an attack as soon as possible, or even combine the defense and the attack in the same tempo.

-Reversed or not, it's weaker one-handed than a sword, which was my point.
-Buttstock hits amount to using your weapon as a club... since your gun is the only weapon capable of doing real damage in this scenario, you'd want to leave the bashing to a sidearm.
-Every time I mentioned melee strikes, I've taken time to remind that all this is just to allow you to negate the enemy's fire and fire yourself. Did you take the time to understand that firing is a follow up attack?

And its not like this wasn't an issue in historic combat; its just that fighters found ways around their opponent's armor. What does a top heavy knight do when someone trips his ass? Or preforms that hip throw demonstrated in the combatives comparison video? Grappling, grasshopper, grappling is what you do not seem to comprehend.

Never said that these suits were immune to all techniques. They're not necessarily top-heavy; one of the suit designs proposed had the generator and powerpack (100kg) hanging as low as possible. And finally, grappling is the 'hand-to-hand combat' I mentioned several times but did not touch upon, not because I didn't comprehend it, but because I was concentrating on close-range weapons first.

So, people who actually practice with melee weapons tell you that a spear is a hardass weapon to fight with a sword, even demonstrating that a spear can use one handed thrusts to hit from outside a sword's reach... and you still favor your own ignorance.

Read, please.
The spear is hard to fight with a sword. Yes. The spear, one-handed, has a longer reach than a sword, one-handed. A gun-and-sword combo vs a gun-and-spear combo while wearing armor that renders you impervious to both spear and sword thrusts is very far from the scenarios in the videos or your own experience.
I'd be favoring my own ignorance only if I told you to stop mixing up this setting with your personal knowledge of squishy humans with flak jackets fighting, and ignoring everything I tell you about how thick the armor is, how direct attacks with the melee weapons means fuck-all, and that they have a gun on the other hand that looks nothing like the modern rifle.

Okay, first of all, the rifle IS a spear, you assclown. That's the whole point of a bayonet. Your descriptions of fighting sound completely incoherent because you don't grasp the physicality of fighting. The range, the positioning, the momentum, all of it is inconsistent in your arguments. Even if a sword parries a spear or bayonet, the bayonet can get back on line in a fraction of a second. Didn't you watch the videos I posted?

The rifle is a spear once equipped with a bayonet. Amazing. What type of gun are these power armored soldiers using again? Are they going to bash and stab tank armor with the only weapon they have capable of damaging it?

Also, bayonets can slash just like swords can. That's why some people consider them more comparable to glaives.

See above.

Second, in war you have objectives. Why am I fighting when I can simply pass by him and run towards my objective point, where I then place demolition charges or whatever my mission is? Better protection from ranged weapons means more bodies have to get in my way before I can't simply avoid all of them and keep going.

Because the can step inside your shield and shoot you in the back. Or maybe it's that hail of grenades that will go through the shield and explode at point-blank.

If I must engage, I'm going to first find a better tactical position relative to his body than "head to head". Instead, if it is possible I make passing steps, even small ones, so that I can take control of his elbow, not his hand. Either elbow. His hands are agile, his elbows less so.

The suits are designed to make 2m hops in any direction at a moment's notice. They're pretty agile. A 'better tactical position' than head to head.... when dealing with an enemy that see through his back, spin on the spot faster than a human, has 360 degrees radar and mine-detection x-rays that can penetrate walls.... and you have to run up to him... is fucking impossible. Elbow-catching is hand-to-hand combat range, and if he had any skill with the spear as you say, then he will stay outside the reach of your melee and grappling techniques. If you manage to get in close, all while avoiding the gun trying to point and shoot at you, and catch his elbow, then he can do the same, and it's all fair game.

One such technique is shown here, but for knuckledusters. I could apply a similar principle to a rifle, stepping to his right, inserting my gun over his elbow and then either shoot the guy in the face, or stab into the vulnerable gaps in the suit (ideally, the throat). Or, once I have established control of his body I can then sink my body mass into his elbow, forcing my opponent to bend over or even fall. I can optionally now throw a buttstroke into his faceplate, but its not necessary. Once he is down he isn't a threat.

A perfect execution.
On the ground, he's still a threat though, unless you manage to immobilize his gun.

Or I can go to his left side, pushing his elbow with the middle of my rifle, possibly setting up a buttstroke to the face or chest. Then I can do a number of things. I could initiate a leg sweep and trip him. I could step on his knee with my full armored mass and crush it, crippling his mobility. I could pull my gun back and shoot him. I can push him away, then run forward through where he was because he is no longer in my way.

Another good technique, but I'd prefer something to push the elbow other than your gun. You have two hands free, right?
Pushing him away would need you to exit his field, and thus shooting range, faster than he can bring his gun to bear.

And if he attacks with his sword, I can parry it with my rifle, then preform a throw similar to this one. Or a number of other half-swording like techniques to disarm him or stab him.

Why don't you try and parry with your own sword, instead of your flimsy-barreled HEAT shotgun?

The rifle/bayonet combo is hardly an inferior weapon to a sword and pistol. You just don't know what you are talking about because your understanding of melee combat seems to run entirely on game logic.

When the pistol has equal usefulness as the rifle, and frees a hand for a dedicated melee weapon, then I'd choose the sword and large-caliber sawed-off shotgun 'pistol'.
And which game are you referring to, please?

Because its fiction.

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? Why would you even argue anything based on real-world applications of melee weapons then? You could just say that the fluffy bunnies did't want it that way, so the spaghetti monster changed it for them.

Atomic Rocket's flaw is that it is NOT written as advice for writers, its written as advice for world builders.

And that makes it full of shit?

The difference is that a writer is less like an engineer than he is a stage magician. His skill is determined in his ability to direct his reader's attention to the interesting parts of the story and plot, not in his ability to satisfy those who are unwilling to engage with the performance. And it is my opinion that the Hard Sci-Fi "fans" who nitpick the hell out of everything and make a point of finding the flaws with the setting are that asshole who refused to play along with the magic show on principle, and wouldn't shut up about it after you left the venue.

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

My advice is that if you feel like the worldbuilding is getting in the way of writing a good story because you are obsessed or want to cater to Hard SF fandom, step back and ask yourself what part of this story you enjoy. You might realize that it isn't science fiction at all that attracts you, or else that you should be making campaign settings for role playing games.

Okay.

Power tools. Hummm. That does sound like a good idea, but how fast are they?

Speed isn't relevant. It could be a slow crushing claw, as long as it has the power needed to rip open the metal power armor. The point is to first get into position, then simply cut through the suit and make your own opening to stab him or whatever you plan on doing. But that requires some understanding of grappling technique and how it fits into CQC, which you appear to lack.[/quote]

The 'getting into position' is what my question about how fast they are was about. A huge crushing claw might be terribly effective, but if the opponent is impossible to catch with it, and for every swing you make with it, he returns ten strikes with a sword and 500 rounds of ammunition, then it isn't worth it.

[Simon_Jester]

...Added to the fact that it has NBC protection (no openings) and remotely controlled limbs, then it is safe to say that no amount of stabbing will harm the user, unless you can jam the blade into the joints, in which case you've only restricted movement.

Note what Skimmer said about suits that put the operator entirely in the torso- basically, sheer physical bulk makes it a lot more difficult for them to fight and maneuver effectively. Carefully reread his criticism of such suit designs; it raises some important questions.

Atomic Rocket's flaw is that it is NOT written as advice for writers, its written as advice for world builders.

And that makes it full of shit?

As Formless notes, it is very hard to write good fiction with the mindset of someone who is more concerned with airtight worldbuilding than with making stories interesting.

The only reason I think it's even worth bothering to play with and pick holes in worldbuilding is because a sense for the limits of a technology or social system can help us identify weaknesses that have dramatic value.

A few years ago, Purple came in with a very very detailed image of how a very regimented society built up out of self-sufficient apartment blocks in a very planned city would work. We had an interesting thread on that- not because we spent a lot of time detailing how those apartment blocks should be "optimally" laid out, but because we got to talk about other aspects of it. For example, pointing out that it is a bad idea to lay out subways on a gridiron pattern. And that there is a reason why real cities have multiple modes of transportation and do not rely solely on their subways, other than just being "untidy" and insufficiently totalitarian or whatever.

Ultimately, we came away with a sense of what life in a very urban, very rigid social dystopia might be like, and what things the dystopia would NOT do to the people if it wanted to endure. That's an example of how picking things apart in fiction can be worthwhile- but it's tricky to do it right without getting bogged down in minutiae.

[Jub]

Might I ask what other side technologies were discovered in this setting while on the path to these shields? Also, what other current problems have we solved using the computing power of super computers that, according to both Moore and Kryder's law, should be roughly 8.8 billion times faster than what we have today with storage capacity to match. Is fusion a viable power source? How is the environment looking? What is the education level of the average person? Do we have space elevators? How has 3d printing matured? Are there AI's helping us with internet searches? Do the AI's also help an average person with other day to day tasks? What does the average home look like? The average vehicle? Do people still work, or has that largely been automated? These are all additional questions that you'll need to answer for this setting to work, you'll also need to use them to explain why lasers haven't matured at all while everything else seemingly has.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. I do think Kraken can reasonably have Moore's Law come to a halt short of a ten-orders-of-magnitude increase in computing power. Moore's Law doesn't guarantee perpetual exponential growth of computing power, after all. Sooner or later you're bound to hit physical obstacles that prevent you from making the computer faster.

[Jub]

Hm. I do think Kraken can reasonably have Moore's Law come to a halt short of a ten-orders-of-magnitude increase in computing power. Moore's Law doesn't guarantee perpetual exponential growth of computing power, after all. Sooner or later you're bound to hit physical obstacles that prevent you from making the computer faster.

It hasn't happened yet and we've made the leap from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to micro transistors and haven't really hit any snag that have held us back from the predicted rates of growth. Do you think that a business man in 1982 thought that he'd be able to hold an iPhone in his hand instead of a Zilog Z80 with a 4Mhz clock speed? Besides, even if we hit a few physical snags along the way as multithreading matures we'll gain increases in speed without the need for an increase in clock speed. For storage we can look back at the turn of the millennium and see how storage has moved from hard drives with tens of Gigabytes to systems where multiple Terabytes of data might be stored, or we could look at SD cards that can hold 128 GB of data on a card the area of my thumb nail and see that within a few years 256 GB SD cards will have dropped in price and become affordable.

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.