On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > DataPacRat replied to me:
>> > Or the users of this fiendish weapon are really trying to >> > exterminate the entire enemy population, and Our Steel-Jawed >> > Heroes are the ones fighting against the Terrible Menace. >> >> Our Heroes were looking for a system which can identify, and /keep/ >> identified, anyone who attacked them - and anyone who supported them >> by, eg, storing ammo, hiding insurgents and supporting their claims to >> be innocent civilians, and was otherwise someone who would be >> considered part of the attackers' forces if their actions were known >> in full. (Admittedly, the original fiction included a sufficient >> quantity of attackers that certain target areas ended up being >> essentially depopulated, at least before the non-combatants started >> kicking out the combatants and surrendering...) > > If you want robots to replace HUMINT '15 minutes into the future,' > as you put it, you are looking for a miracle, not science fiction. > > "You were observed -- three times in the last 48 hours -- talking > to a known contact of the man who has the same first name, shoe > size, and date of birth as the local terrorist leader. That means > you're an unlawful combatant, too, and you're hereby sentenced to > indefinite internment without the possibility of a trial." > > "But, but, he is the only grocer left in the village. Everybody > knows him." > > "Mark that grocer for intensive interrogation, then. One more > case before lunch?" > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahid_Malik#Problems_at_US_airports > > And "non-combatants" who are able to kick out combatants must > have been combatants themselves until the decided to change > sides. > > http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iKXQC2HwynedmTU1YcjQQFpyPA_g One perspective: The original story's setting included several urban neighbourhoods in the Good Guys' country that were pretty much chock-full of active terrorists; some investigation revealed that most of the 'civilians' there were acting as support personnel, with very few simply trying to hide in their apartments or otherwise keep out of everyone's way and survive. Said terrorists simply didn't surrender - at all. Active attacks had dispersed radioactive dust through a number of Good-Guy government facilities, and otherwise caused enough ruckus to spur the Good Guys to do whatever it takes to get rid of them. Another perspective: The setting I'm actually going to be using is only partly based on that story - and, in contrast to how the story went, the 'Good Guys' who came up with and used the Flocks ended up going the route of (Evil?) Empire, and are now, some years later, the main antagonists for my setting's Good Guys, the newly-forged polity of 'New Attica' (consisting primarily of several habitats in orbit). Since, in orbit, you're already halfway to anywhere, the New Atticans could start dropping rocks on anyone they wanted... but they also have to deal with the fact that any Earthly nation with access to a fighter jet and 1980's missile technology (ie, all of them), could destroy any hab it wanted. So the New Atticans have gone for a policy of armed neutrality to try to avoid doing anything (other than simply being independent) to antagonize anyone, and the Earthly oligarchs are kicking off all the 'interesting' shenanigans that one set of governments can do to another short of outright war: espionage, attempted sabotage, name-calling, framing for socially-unpalatable crimes, and convincing third-parties to do extreme stuff and take the rap if it goes wrong. This latter scenario is mainly what I'm fiddling with the Pigeons for - as part of the background of materiel on hand which could be used by a puppet government in an attempt to take control of a New Attican hab without simply destroying it. (The main character is also something of an amateur roboticist, putting together junkbots from random bits she's salvaged from her day-job (orbital junk clean-up), which is part of why I'm looking at military-bots.) >> Okay - with 5 lasers and a ROF of 16 each, it looks like this tank >> could plink 80 Pigeons per second before getting saturated. > > It might get perhaps get one pigeon with every other four-round > burst, walking the bursts into each target. If all lasers can > bear because the tank is being swarmed, that gives ten targets > per second. (Can you tell it's been a while since I read the laser ROF rules? <ahem>) >> That's >> about $240k of materiel lost per second - so a Pigeon attack on such a >> tank would need to hide as much as they could from said tank, before >> as many as possible swarmed it at once, from as close as possible. > > How close is possible? If the terrain allows the pigeons to sneak > close without being engaged, it will also restrict them to just a > few avenues of approach. If the combat zone is somewhere where a lot of guerrillas have a lot of hiding spots, such as urban or forest... then that MBT is probably going to want some support of its own, anyway. >> If >> the Pigeon-net knew the tank was around, the HEDP self-destructs might >> be swapped out for HEATs... and, of course, whichever Pigeons survive >> the point-defense should try to aim for the most vulnerable points, >> which appear to be the two tracks. > > How many HEATs does the net have in stock? And who controls the > net if tank lobs a few HE shells into the base? If such an enemy tank gets within range to lob shells at the base - then friendly artillery hasn't been doing its job... <ahem> >> If a flock of 100 attacked such a tank from cover... then 20 would >> make it through the point-defense, and if they had HEAT warheads, the >> tracks' armor would be effectively 8, allowing 272 damage through per >> Pigeon, or about 2720 per track. So, for $300k, a $5.7M tank gets >> immobilized, to get swatted by artillery at leisure. (If nearby cover >> is unavailable - then the attacking swarm would have to be large >> enough to have some survive the trip from wherever they are hiding to >> make it to the tank, for a corresponding increase in cost.) >> >> How'm I doing so far? > > Lining up all your pigeons in a row for a few beehives, I'd say. > Like many enthusiasts for a neat new idea, you take a best case > for one side and a worst case for the other side. Well, I'm still trying to get the Pigeons /to/ work in a best case scenario - if they can't work for even that, then I should drop the whole idea. :) (I'm also well aware of planning for best- and worst-case scenarios; in fact, at http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/quotes.html , the fourth quote underneath the windmill comic gives a rather important view of the 'planning fallacy'.) >> Hrmph. And I was so looking forward to having this program be a >> primary spur to help jump-start the solar-satellite program, which >> would be useful as the basis for having actual manufacturing >> infrastructure in space... maybe I'll fall back on more general >> military energy needs, such as air conditioning. > > Separate the information gathering role from the attack role. > Beamed power from orbit to the intel base on the ground, and > beamed power from the intel base to sensor UAVs circling > above the ceiling of light air defenses (which puts them > into line-of-sight to the base, too). The UAV operators on > the ground watch the poor bloody infantry live and in color > as they slog through the ruins, and call in helpful advice. Hm... <copies whole paragraph for futher consideration> (As an aside - the story included another weapons platform I haven't even started considering yet, for the PBI: 'Proxy-Soldiers', humanoid remote-control drones, essentially the military version of the movie 'Surrogates'. For other reasons, I've already decided my setting includes reasonably large numbers of robots (at least some of which are reasonably indistinguishable from live people); it would be handy for a military to have already worked out a lot of the basics and enough time to have passed for such knowledge to have filtered into the civilian sector.) >> > A C1 robot brain would have IQ 4. Animals with that level of >> > intelligence don't usually bash their heads in. >> >> Then is the CompNav program basically pointless for robots? > > Computer navigation allows a robot to deliver a pizza to > Park Avenue 123, in minimum time and without going the > wrong direction in an one-way street (if that is noted in > the maps), and if there are enough terrain features it > allows the robot to navigate without GPS, by looking for > landmarks. > > Raw IQ in the 4-6 range allows it to figure out how to get > around an unexpected parked car where there was no car last > time. Fair enough - then I can chuck the CompNav program, and Datalink can be run on a C1 robot brain's single software slot. (I might throw in a 'brain' module to let some Pigeons do some fast analysis of flock sensor data even before it gets to the base and gets analyzed in full there.) >> Hm... I was hoping that when deployed that way, the first container on >> the spot would be one full of Pigeons, and could start launching right >> away, with the other containers adding their various supports as they >> arrived. > > Earlier you explained how all sorts of complicated analysis > gets handled by the base, and now you want to launch a flock > in autonomous mode? I can imagine an executive summary going something like "While the /preferred/ method of deployment is to install a full Flock and all associated support materiel in a preferred location, with ample artillery support, long ahead of time and without the enemy's knowledge..." Which, I know, isn't a real answer, but is the best I've got at the moment. 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
