On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Roger Burton West <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 03:21:01PM -0600, Zan Lynx wrote:
>>It seems to me that the best offense against TL6 and 7 infantry is good >>old razor wire, mines and artillery. Add in some TL8 artillery delivered >>mines. The original story I'm drawing this from mentioned the use of long-range artillery before the Flocks were deployed - and that on multiple occasions, after a given area was pounded flat with both shells and pigeons, and as they were getting ready to send in the (robo-)infantry, more enemy fighters would crawl out of the basements, or caves, or just somewhere in the woodwork, requiring another application. > A hybrid of the two ideas would have separate sensor and payload > systems. The idea of a distributed omnipresent sensor net is a good one > (assuming the multiple data feeds can be resolved into something > comprehensible) (It's already possible for a minor research project to take a large set of photos, and generate a 3D model of a full city in less than a day; it should be entirely feasible in the near future to take 50,000 live cameras and sensors and keep a live model of the target zone updated in realtime.) > , but the drives for the sensor drones (long endurance, > good sensors) are not the same as the drives for the payloads (cheap, > blows up well). > > So why not go with a non-exploding pigeon network, which links back to > home base (a dozen miles away, or in orbit) and calls in pinpoint > missile strikes, giving them active updates all the way in to the target? > > This potentially lets you kill the low-tech guys even when they're mixed > in with noncombatants. I'm entirely comfortable with remodelling the Flock setup. Hm... Another option is to make the interchangeable module larger, and/or add another one - and possible even a variant Pigeon which can go and swap other pigeons' modules in and out. The basic pigeon chassis is already pretty cheap - if the expensive sensor-module can get swapped out, and one or two explosive-modules swapped in as nearby pigeons identify a a target, then the cheap Pigeon-chassis can take the place of calling in a guided-missile from however far away. Some interesting logistics could be done by hot-swapping battery-modules, too, allowing for indefinite loiter times. (To put another way, this system would consist of: cheap Pigeon-chassis, with two hot-swappable modules; battery-modules; sensor-modules; and boom-modules. And a modified Pigeon that can swap such modules in and out of other Pigeon slots - which might even be managable with an 'arm-module'.) This might allow for the best of all the ideas given so far. Of course, I'm still entirely open to new ideas, too. :) Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
