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Original post by Talroth My answer to all the 'solutions' such as a mini-CIWS is to go a few grades up on ammo. If your little personal defense CIWS can shoot down 5.56mm rounds from a modern rifle, then I'm going to start shooting you with a .30cal. Does that stop it? Ok, I'll use .50cal. .50cal doesn't do it? Then I'll go to 20mm, then 30mm, or I'll switch back to 5.56mm and fire a LOT of them at you till your system runs out of ammo, and then I'll shoot you some more. You counter with "Well, I'll use a laser with a mini fusion generator to power it forever!" and then I'll counter that with "I'll bury you in hot lead one way or another. Either you get shredded or broiled."

Actually it doesn't take a lot to make a bullet miss you. You don't have to stop the bullet in its tracks like you would have to a guided missile. Think of your high school physics and maths.

A small vector change can mean the difference between a hit and a miss. A small object travelling at similar speed to a heavy object, could still deflect it enough. Also, if the pCIWS used a system like a Metal Storm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm ) or even using plasma bursts ignited with a laser (yes this would be powerful enough as they are using a similar idea in an experimental "rocket" by igniting air into a plasma underneath the rocket from a ground based station. they ahve got a small craft to hover with this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightcraft ).

Don't be so quick to dismiss these ideas as they have had real world tests that are successful in their own way. If you apply Moore's law to such technologies (looking the rate a tracking system can lock onto and deflect a bullet - which can currently be done by the way, and the power of lasers) then you can see that within 50 years such technologies, to the effectiveness needed for this game, could actually exist in real life.

50 years ago, lasers as powerful as the ones in your portable DVD player would ahve taken up an entire room, being able to fire a million rounds a second (metal storm) was science fiction, being able to track and intercept a bullet fired from a gun was not even thought possible. These technologies I have been talking about exist today. They are in no way science fiction, other than the application of it in real world systems (that hasn't been done, they are all experimental technologies), and the ability to have them portable on a personal scale.

Upping the calibre size does not make all that much of a difference to the interception system. Yes, there is a maximum sized calibre that it could intercept. But when you are going for an arms race here (in calibre size), then the system could be designed to handle anything that could normally be carried by a person. Also, if the enemy used a metal storm type attack against it, this kind of system would allow a person enough time from the initial detected attack to seek cover. It would protect them for a short amount of time, but maybe not indefinitely (it won't be impenetrable, but it might be effective enough to make ranged combat more of an area denial thing than such lethal situation as it is today).

That idea of a "small vector change and it misses!" works very well with asteroids and the like at half AU+ scales, but starts to break down at the range of 200 feet.

Suddenly it becomes far harder to deflect something enough to be sure it is going to miss you. It can also become nearly impossible to do so if you use a soft forward casing on the bullet, and a self stabilization rear end (something we can do even now on a 20mm, I think there are even as small as .50cal rounds with the technology being tested. The era of the smart bullet.)

Simply 'deflecting' them slightly isn't going to work, they'll curve right back at you and you have to track and intercept them again.

CIWS works great on large things like ships because they are big enough to carry lots of ammo for the weapons, and the stuff shooting at them is either very big (and few in number) to do any real damage, or small enough to shrug off (Ignore and repair later.).

A laser based system isn't going to work that great against a solid projectile. Either I design the rounds to resist the effects of the lasers, or I use it against you and design my rounds to melt and disperse slightly before being deflected much, thereby either hitting you with a solid slug, or a slag of half melted bits. Either way you're hurting, and I have more on the way at you.

And speaking of lasers, if they develop to be small and portable enough, yet with the power to work in part of a CIWS that can take on thousands and thousands of rounds from small arms fire,... I'm just going to take that tech and build a bigger single laser, and shoot your ass with it!


Basically it boils down to this:

You build armour to stop my ranged weapons, then I'm building better ranged weapons to take you out. If armour can stop my 35mm autocannons mounted on jeeps, then what is my sword going to do to it?

You develop super speed soldiers, then I develop super speed autocannons mounted on jeeps and deploy extensive minefields around my positions. If you try to close in for hand to hand combat, then you have some issues to face.

It's really not as simple as that, the armor and suits augment the natural soldiers abilities, expanding their natural human abilities. Humans are much more dangerous than a auto cannon or mounted turret since they are flexible enough to figure ways around them.

How are u going to defend against a 5 ton weight toss by cyber soldiers over a wall? of if they had shields of depleted uranium carried by multiple soldiers pushing on ur position. Or attacks from multiple angles?

The solider won't just stand there and take shots even if they have CIWS. They have their augmented agility, armor, strength and speed combined with human intellect. What does a turret have? Armor? In combat it's the turret which will lose, since its mounted and fixed. Even simple unguided parabolic weapons launched over cover can take it out (mortar, rockets). Now mount that turret on a robotic body and then you've got a chance :D Mounted on a vehicle, it's still no where near mobile enough to survive for long in the future battlefield, imo.

Range weapons are nice but against armored and mobile targets they will have to be ultra fast and guided to have a chance of hitting at long range, also doesn't hurt if they have massive warhead, esp with advances in CIWS, you'll need countermeasures.

All in all fixed weapons and the like will not last long in the future battlefield. Augmented cyber soldiers can close upon a position fast enough under cover (be it advance squad deployed CIWS or just plain old 1 foot tick uranium shield carried individually), to engage in close range ( not necessarily hand 2 hand but close enough for their weapons).

-ddn

Who says they're fixed weapons? Mounted and deployed weapons are NOT the same as a pill box bunker. They are easily mounted to light jeeps or armoured carriers, all of which are going to be far cheaper than your nano enhanced cyborgs. You field a bunch of super soldiers and I field a a greater number of regular soldiers armed with weapons designed to kill your super soldiers.


So I can't take my armoured cars into a building, well, guess what, your super soldier with his 13 tones of Depleted Uranium armour isn't going anywhere in any building except the basement. (Not to mention your soldiers aren't going to be all that happy about being rendered sterile, DU isn't a 'safe' metal, it is a 'safer radioactive material'.)

A human isn't more dangerous than a human with an autocannon. (Auto cannon being an automatic repeating cannon, a machine gun firing 20mm+ rounds, not a completely autonomous robot.)



Another option if you really want swords to come into your game, have it set in somewhere that has been completely disarmed by a super power, and have them breathing down the necks of anyone that even thinks of making a firearm, but doesn't care if they whip out the swords to butcher each other.

Going back to the OP's issue, I think this discussion shows well enough that pursuing realism isn't generally a very profitable goal. Just as with relativistic (or even Newtonian) spaceflight being a complete pain for a space sim, many game designs benefit from being a little less than perfect copies of reality.

After all, reality sucks in many ways - I certainly don't want to log in and role-play a 9-5 desk job [wink]

If you want sword-fighting cyber-soldiers, go for it! Just make sure to make it fun to play, and I doubt anyone will quibble with your backstory...

If you really want a good solid back story for a realistic reason why armies moved back to using swords and hand to hand fighting, use the good old Third World War story line.


The Third World War was one week of open fighting after nearly sixty years of a second cold war. The remaining living humans reformed civilization on the smoldering bodies of nearly nine billion dead, and set about laws to keep such devastating warfare from ever happening again.

By dividing the parts of the world that could still sustain life into 1000 equal sections, the 1000 nations of Earth were born. Each nation controls their own horde of advanced nuclear weapons, all averaging out at multiple giga tonnes per warhead. The law states that any nation who attempts to rebuild any form of firearm or ranged military weapon will be 'removed from existence'. No one or two nations would have the power to do much damage to the world with their own horde, but any attempt to use theirs as weapons would result in their destruction after other nations had used their nuclear weapons to destroy the incoming attack, others would raze the offending nation to glass.


And there we have dudes running around in high tech gear shanking each other with blades!

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Original post by Talroth If you really want a good solid back story for a realistic reason why armies moved back to using swords and hand to hand fighting, use the good old Third World War story line...

Amusingly enough, that was the other half of Frank Herbert's rationale (apart from the personal shields).

I see there's alot of counterarguments which made think about alot of things I didn't account for which is a good thing. As many has suggested I shouldn't go for realism and I know this, however I think it is vital to start with putting an realistic setting to make sense. After everything or most of it does I can start tweaking things to actually make it a game.

EDIT: Talroth* Making up a story to explain why everyone is forced to use melee feels a bit ''forced'' to me. I'm not always this stubborn but for this partical game concept I want it to have it as realistic as possible, as realistic as modern melee combat can be that is. ^_^

1) Armor - Like many of you pointed out armor isn't going to help alot, its opponents will simply use larger cal. bullets and the fact that it'll probaly have to deal with guided-weapons and auto-turrets just makes it worse. So I'm changing that to have it rely on cloaking instead. The idea I started with was that the speed and evasiveness would help avoid most damage and that if it did get hit the armor would absorb most of the damage. The cloaking/speed/evasiveness should works and just sounds alot better since they all cover the same thing - avoidance. It would still have armor but, it wouldn't rely on it, it would simply protect from penetration. It'll also need to have EMP-protection, altho I haven't researched it much yet.

2) Unit - Giving every member in the army this Tech. will make the opponent equip every men with weapons specifically to counter it, so I thought about making it just another unit-type on the battlefield. Not only is this realistic from a financial point of view, with all the technology ramping up the suit will certainly cost a couple million (f:fully equipped modern soldier costs +-$17.000), this makes sense in alot of ways. Tanks and Fighter Aircrafts didn't replace the infantry either aswell as strategy.

3) Target - What better shield is there then the opponent's own men. Since you'll be mostly operating in close range I doubt any of the members will be shooting you if there's a risk of hitting their own comrades. The NanoT Soldier's speed, evasiveness, cloaking ontop of the opponent's confusion and risk of hitting its own men is what will make it extremely lethal and give meaning to why it uses close range combat. It'll rely on all its equipment to hop from group to group and then rely on honor/political-correctness/respect/younameit of its opponents as psychological protection while killing them off.

Critism is more then appreciated.

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That idea of a "small vector change and it misses!" works very well with asteroids and the like at half AU+ scales, but starts to break down at the range of 200 feet.

You are so wrong on many counts here. As an amateur astronomer and someone who did a double major in physics in collage, I can tell you exactly where you are wrong.

With Asteroids, we need to deflect them by at least the radius of the Earth to ensure that they miss. Same with bullets, you need to deflect them by at least the radius of the person to ensure a miss.

The Earth's radius is around 6,370km. The mass of an asteroid around a 100 m in size would roughly be 29,000,000,000 kilograms (based on an approximation of 2.9 grams / cm^3 and assuming a cubic asteroid - I know that asteroids aren't cubic, but it simplified the maths and we know that asteroids do get bigger than 100m^3).

You can't deflect this the same way you would deflect a bullet, but hitting it with another object because to send up a mass of a comparable ratio, and accelerate it to nearly the same speed as that asteroid. We can't do that. So we need to give the asteroid a small nudge and have that vector change exist over a long time.

Where as a bullet, the ratio of masses are a lot more similar to anything we could do when dealing with an asteroid.

P=mv

Inertia is equal to mass * velocity.

A .45 bullet's mass is 16.2g and an average velocity is 840m/s. Therefore the Inertia is 13.608kg/m/s.

A .25 bullet's mass is 2.3g and using the same average speed of 840m/s we can work out its inertia at 1.932kg/m/s

An asteroid has a mass of 29,000,000,000kg and and average speed of 75,600,000m/s. Therefore it's inertia is 2,192,400,000,000,000,000km/m/s.

The space shuttle has a mass of 2,029,203kg and can reach a speed of 7,860m/s in orbit this gives is an inertia of 15,949,535,580kg/m/s.

As you can plainly see, the ratio between the inertia of two different bullets and an an asteroid and the space shuttle is of several orders of magnitude of scale. This is why we need so long to potentially deflect asteroid as compared to deflecting bullets.

Bullets are easy by comparison. To see this better, all you need to do is to use the inertia as the magnitude of the vector in the collision and you can see that because the magnitudes of the bullet's vectors are far closer than in the case of an asteroid, the result of that collision will produce a greater change in the resulting vector.

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CIWS works great on large things like ships because they are big enough to carry lots of ammo for the weapons, and the stuff shooting at them is either very big (and few in number) to do any real damage, or small enough to shrug off (Ignore and repair later.).

The CIWS systems on ships are not trying to defect the incoming missiles, but to destroy them. In the personal CIWS you are not trying to destroy the incoming bullet, but to deflect it. It is a completely different concept.

But just let's say they were trying to deflect the missile with bullets, it is again a matter of mass an inertia. Look again at my explanation of why deflecting an asteroid is different to defelcting a bullet.

In most of the counter-arguments, it seems that people are assuming above-normal technology for the Nano-soldier, but not the other side. We've already reached the point where non-projectile weapons are in serious development; why not follow up to the next logical conclusion? The pressure wave of a thermal baric weapon can damage the eardrums of people within two miles of the blast radius; in most cases, the pressure kills them before the giant wave of flesh-destroying fire. A 1 psi change in open atmosphere will make your eyes pop out; a thermonuclear device usually causes a 4 psi change. Its already possible to adversly affect the nervous system through direct electical interface; how long until it is indirect?

The point is, when something becomes a game-breaker, you change the game. When you have something that physically stops a physical projectile, a sledgehammer won't help; its a step in the wrong direction. Unless you go pure sci-fi, with energy shields, protheans, and talking vegitables, things simply won't feel right. By trying to be realistic, your idea feels, in turn, unrealistic.

Now, just as a thought which ignores all thoughts of realism or physics, you could choose the route of pure speed; think The Flash with a pickaxe.