Simon_Jester wrote:I strongly suspect you could design guided munitions to home on shield bubbles. Their structural properties strongly suggest some kind of interesting visual or thermal signature, to me at least.
Unless the field is visibly affecting the surrounding material, then no, it is undetectable, since it does not affect radiation under most configurations. A much more interesting target is the huge amount of heat being pumped out by the generator.
Plan B: chuck a grenade with an impact fuze instead of a timer.
Plan C: You have a millimeter radar and a quick-reaction onboard computer... a few onboard explosives and you've got yourself the walking equivalent of a TROPHY/ARENA system. It would be incredibly effective, considering that they only need to cover a miniature volume surrounding the user.
On the downside, the suit would have silly-looking bricks like these all over the surface, allowing multiple launches in all directions of counter-explosive streams:
Artillery is also effective at dumping cluster bomblets into an area (already common), or simply interdicting roads and such by physically damaging them so vehicles and troops can't pass (a major artillery mission). They also retain some deterrent value at keeping troops from staying in the open- even if the effective lethal blast radius is vastly reduced, that just means it isn't totally certain death to be caught out in the steel rain.
They'll retain their role as area denial, but at greater cost than today compared to their effectiveness. This might be compensated by the increased accuracy future technology would have ie. every shell is a guided missile.
I wonder however if any sort of artillery bombardment can render terrain impassable for
foot infantry. If we go along the lines of shielded jeeps driving power armor around, then the troops can carry the jeep around any sort of terrain until they find something they can drive on again.
A suitable analogy would be SEALs troops carrying around their raft until they find water.
The recoil from being hit by an exploding shell is often less than the recoil created by firing it, especially for low velocity recoilless guns.
Excuse my english. What I wrote was agreeing with you here, since I was still talking from the POV of the firer.
Another consideration for the heavy weaponry argument is that the user of this equipment is lugging about hundreds of kilos of complicated anti-recoil systems
just to knock some-over over. I think there's a limit to how efficiently you're using all this sort of equipment.
It would make sense that a vehicle or gun platform would mount oversized recoilless guns to drive away attackers on foot, but in infantry vs infantry combat, that extra weight matters.
By the way, this violates momentum conservation as it is now defined in physics so hard. Just saying.
Humm.
At the same time, the physics would have been violated enough with the teleporting momentum... When I see an object striking a field, I tend to imagine it being snooker. The cue hits the ball, and bounces away in a near-perfectly elastic collision.
The only difference with my field is that in a glancing shot, instead of a half-half distribution of momentum, all of it goes towards the object being struck.
I find it difficult to explain, but here's something to go on.
The main problem is that they're much bigger and unwieldier than a dagger- too much so to be a good backup weapon. There's a reason backup weapons are usually light, handy, and concealable things like daggers and pistols.
True, but you have to take into consideration the
reach of your objects.
You are 3m from your opponent. If both of you raise your arms and point your weapons, then you will not touch other.
You both fire, and the one with the better gun/armor combination wins after a few seconds.
This excludes scenarios where you and/or your opponent start the field merge moving, in which case you have a split second to anticipate the trajectory before you open fire.
Let's imagine that both opponents standing in each other's line of fire the THE situation to avoid. If the movements lead to this point, both opponents disengage and try something else, and at worst, they jump back and try and seperate the fields to reposition themselves for a more advantageous attack.
The Gun/sword combos come into play if you have a stick or sword long enough to allow you to touch the opponent's gun. With a quick swipe, you can mess up the aim, slide into the area he is not pointing at anymore, and fire at will.
The opponent will have to move his gun around and mess up his aim momentarily so that he can swing around at you once more. He can move backwards, but risks you doing the same and separating the fields. He can move into the area your sword isn't covering anymore, but risks YOU pointing your gun into this area in anticipation, leading to the scenario you want to avoid.
A counter to this method is to shoot with one arm as drawn back as you can, firing next to your ear or something. You'd position your sword in front to intercept the opponent's sword, and shoot when you have an opening. This swordfight will have nothing to do with today's swordfighting in the respect that you do NOT wish the keep your sword between you and the enemy. You want to keep the opponent's sword away from your gun or arms, and if his sword strikes you, it means practically nothing. The best move is to strike his sword out of the way, and move into the opening to disrupt his line of fire using a combination of your own line of fire and sword.
As this thing evolves in my mind, I find a few more counters and anti-counters.
You could use a weapon in both hands. This way you'd cover much more possible zones you opponent could dodge into, and aiming both slightly to the left and slightly to the right would remove the possibility of sidestepping just as the fields merge. The disadvantage is that your opponent has a longer reach than you, and can still nullify the advantage of a second weapon by overlapping one of your lines of fire with his own. Since this would lead to the undesirable situation, with two guns pointing at each other, you;d have to keep them constantly aiming at something else. This boils down to gun vs sword on one hand (literally
) and an unsustainable gun vs gun on the other.
Another possibility is to use gun-swords, as in barrels built into the blade. You'd have the advantage of BOTH the long reach and the double lines of fire, but the new disadvantage of only being able to fire where you're pointing with with your swords, which is unlikely to be straight at the opponent.
One final possibility is field skimming.
I mean... you take a tiny step forward, the fields merge, you fire, and program your suit to step just outside of the limit for merging before you even finish firing. The bullets/explosive shells/mortar rounds/grenade strike your opponent, and whatever return fire there is is stopped by the now separated fields. Repeat from a different direction until you succeed.
wrote:I'm not entirely sure this would work except at supersonic speeds, unless the field start's acting as Maxwell's demon while standing still. Getting compression of the airflow into the engine isn't the real problem that stops turbines or ramjets from being efficient...
I'm under the impression that it works much better at supersonic speeds. The incoming airflow would be powerful enough to send shockwaves from slamming against the immobilized front rushing back up the tube. This rarefies air behind the wave, and compresses it after, creating pseudo waves of air. These waves have a frequency. As the 'length' of air sitting still in front of the field increases (flow rate has an upper limit when starting from zero relative V, only increase is in pressure and density of the air), the shockwaves become muffled, or at the very least, less effective at creating sharp density differences in the incoming air. This is compensated by increased frequency of these waves.
In the end, they smoothed out into a pseudo-continuous flow of very high density cold, slow-moving air that would react perfectly in the carburetors. The rate of expansion of the gas under its own pressure would add to the exhaust velocity.
At very low speeds, a 'hard' field is required to create a sharp shockwave and start the process. At very high speeds, the field has to be 'softened' to accommodate for the increased air pressure threatening to destabilize the whole process.
Or it could be that I have no idea how ram-pulsejets work.
PS: I found what I was looking for: Acoustic resonance in the air, and this field-ramjet is a variant of the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_detonation_engine, with the supersonic combustion caused by the high pressure oxidizer.
Please make sure to be conscious of that shift in government and what long term effects it would have. What kind of people emerge from the ruins of a corrupt old order, in time to rapidly rebuild and remake their countries to face a new tomorrow? They may be rather odd.
Don't worry, this is a worldbuilding thread and we'll get around to thinking of everything given enough time
What I see emerging from the rapid development of these countries would be a sort of ultra-optimistic super-consumerist nation that might look down on others for not succeeding like they did. We'd need a veritable fascination in education to make this work, coupled with the inevitable mass exodus away from the agricultural domain. Within society, it'd create a sort of education-tied class separation, and since education costs money, it'd be tied to wealth to a smaller degree. That might be better than a strict rich/poor divide, but since 'anyone can get educated and be one of us' to the uneducated is harsher than 'anyone can get rich' to the poor... I don't know. I'm sure the new Indonesian middle class would handle things differently than the rich Qatari foreign investors and the plethora of Gulf immigrants have in their country.
You are NOT, however, doing away with expensive aircraft. Bombers can still hit strategic targets (a railroad bridge is too big to shield conveniently, and if it isn't, the power plant that sustains that shield is). Reconnaissance planes are still too dangerous to allow to roam your rear areas at will, as are strategic bombers and cruise missiles, so fighters are required- and all these aircraft still need the full panoply of expensive avionics that makes a plane like the F-35 cost more than its weight in silver.
Very true, but at the same time, you have to remember that this is 100 years in the future, and nothing forseeable is slowing down the progress of electronics and computer speeds/hardware power.
Also... why are we doing away with tanks again?
Tanks: Highest velocity gun possible mounted on a turret, on top of a hull with all-terrain mobility and the heaviest armor allowed without sacrificing mobility too much.
Take away armor and replace it with a shield. take away the main gun and turret and replace it with multiple grenade launchers, and switch priority over to troop transport. I can't call that a tank anymore, and there comes a point in down-armoring where it becomes cheaper to create a disposable transport like a Jeep than a high-survivability one.
You might want to rethink the nature of the war to be consistent with the actual extant motives for conflict in the setting, instead. You don't need the Great Asiatic War to have interesting things in your setting.
I need something that both divides Asian geopolitics and sets up multiple conflicts around the surrounding zones. In my mind, the USA had its Vietnam, the URSS has its Afghanistan, and China has its Pakistan.
In fact, that reminds me. China and India don't even have to fight each other directly. China could make a military pact with Pakistan to help if stand up to Indian military pressure against its borders, in return for well... complete exploitation. Well, it's that or being taken over the big bad Indians, in their opinion.
Now, Pakistan is officially an independant entity with its own army. India could decide to invade Pakistan, or conduct a punitive strike of some sort, with casus belli being harboring terrorists, assassinating diplomats, unpaid loans, trade restrictions, pick one. India fully knows that the Pakistani-Chinese pact extends to having troops on the ground.
So this is how India invades Pakistan, but it's Indian soldiers shooting at Chinese soldiers with Chinese equipment while Pakistani civilians die.
Fighting a war with someone to make them sell you rocks at good prices is SUCH a stupid plan unless you plan to conquer them outright. There is no way in hell they'll make more favorable economic agreements after you bomb the crap out of them than before.
I... uh, messed up?
In the scenario above, India wouldn't touch any Chinese territory, and to the candid eye, India is killing Pakistani soldiers.
The main issue then is that China should have been able to see this coming- you aren't pitching their government as stupid. If they weren't willing to face confrontation with a nuclear power they wouldn't attack one in the first place. If they were the ones being attacked, they would threaten India with retaliation, and cheerfully try to suck Indian soldiers into attacking them in unfavorable areas. The Indian army would have to move thousands of kilometers to be a threat to core Chinese territory, giving them a very long supply line, much of it through bad terrain like mountains and jungles.
This sounds like a Germany vs Russia to me.
Russia has the advantage when driving out German soldiers within its own territory, but to move onto the offensive, it suddenly has the longer, more vulnerable supply chain.
This doesn't necessarily actually work, because the drones require considerable maintenance teams and support structure in their own right- someone has to maintain the damn things even if they're being driven by guys with Xbox controllers in Beijing.
Support structure, yes, but these things might also be the sort of nightmare drone people are scared of today: The stuff you airdrop over the battlefield, then let them kill all in sight until they break down or are destroyed. Chinese industry might find it more sustainable to rebuild the losses than to send a maintenance team 'over there' to recuperate and repair them. An infantry platoon can then wipe up the mess and disruption the drones caused, and do the detail work.
OF course, we run into the wartime crimes problem of leaving the drones activated after the fighting has ended, or dropping them into a built up area and expecting them to distinguish between civilian and disguised soldier. Bad stuff are going to happen.
By the time you are fighting a war on this scale, public opinion doesn't matter to speak of. Especially since China is not a democracy.
Not to the Chinese, but tactics like indiscriminate drone-dropping can help the Indian cause by rallying foreign support to its side. It'd also be grounds for countries pressured into playing along with China during the rare metal price spike crisis to withdraw and become more independent, or the very least end the Chinese monopoly over its markets.
[Groan]
Massive airlift only makes things worse, because the transport planes are hugely expensive and relatively easy to shoot down- they just plain can't carry that much. The only historical cases of massive airlift being used to support large populations or armies were in cases where there wasn't an enemy in a position to shoot down the planes.
Yes, but I'm not picturing China as being the winning side either.
In fact, this whole thing could be a lesson in humility. China thinks it can win a way solely by dropping drones into battlefields without any boots on the ground, then when it is pushed back, it believes its mighty airforce numbers are enough to continue the war by airlift.
Aircraft with fields are pretty much immune to non-shielded missiles and weapons. A conventional weapon has to match speeds with the aircraft to enter the field, which is pretty much impossible if it want to catch up with it. Field-deploying missiles might be rare at the start of the war, so China thinks it has uncontested air superiority. We might even see desperately stupid attempts of Indian and Chinese jet fighters unable to shoot each other down, so they practically play leapfrog and ram into each other, with a small chance of breaking away before all goes to shit.
During this period, airlifts would work.
Then, missiles are build with fields on them, the air war is brought back to sanity, and the previous airlift strategy breaks down.
Except the Chinese have to be stupid enough to go on the strategic offensive by throwing money into a hole in the ground. What are they expecting to win here, anyway?
With the Indian army crushed in Pakistan, or having at least suffered a severe blow, China can move onto putting military and economic pressure on countries previously protected by India, such as Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and would be able to move into the Middle Eastern theater to complete WORLD DOMINATION hue hue hue I mean access the second biggest market in this world.
This is... very unrealistic. Resource cartel tactics don't work well if you actually try to lay down hard embargos on people for very long, because your precious natural resources lose all value in a hurry if you do not sell them to anyone. Once the supply shock has forced your rivals to stop using the stuff for six months, you may find that you've permanently damaged the demand for your product, and that your monopoly will never again give you the same leverage it used to.
No no no its not hard embargo.
Let's stay with Uranium for now.
China forbids Kazakhistan from selling its U238 to the West. China buys ALL uranium production from regions within the pact, giving away in the process dollars. Then, it becomes the sole supplier of uranium to the rest of the world. If you want to buy uranium, you have to buy it from China, at Chinese prices with Chinese conditions. You can still buy as much as before, but it will cost you everything else.
The best part is that China will sell these resources in yuans, so while the dollars it paid off to the cartel members devaluate, its own currency becomes very valuable, for a net profit, without even having to sell anything.
You've got this sort of cartoonish "DO AS I SAY OR I WILL CUT OFF THE WORLD'S UNOBTAINIUM" image of how this kind of economic power actually works. It sounds like a cartoon villain.
"WE BUILD FOR CHINA.... ONLY CHINA."
But two generators create a merged field?
That field would then be an ellipsoid- because it's being repulsed by the two generators, one at each focus.
Yes, but I thought we were talking of only one field. Sorry.
Solution: use an impact fuze, grenade goes off when it hits the shield. The grenade will be stopped by the screen just as sharply as it would be by a brick wall.
Humm.
Would robbing all of the grenade's momentum be considered a deceleration?
As I see it, the grenade promptly stops, the kinetic energy is conserved by being converted into internal molecular vibration (an insignificant amount of heat) at both the object and the generator, while the impact fuze won't feel a thing.
Solution: throw grenade, which stops and falls inside the shield in quite a lot of cases.
I'm counting on the soldiers to either be able to step sideways in half a second, or be immune to grenade explosions. Grenades launch shrapnel, which has very low armor penetration.
Solution: throw larger grenades.
You're making this difficult
But that's all specifics. Grenade spam might be very effective in some cases, and completely useless against others. It's one tactic amongst many and I haven't tweaked the setting enough to favor one method over the other.
Not denying it- point is that this is exactly the sort of thing that I think a
good author would do to rein in the stereotypical REIGN OF THE SUPER-SWORDSMAN crap. You're the world's greatest swordsman... the enemy brings grenades. Shit.[/quote]
There's actually very little swordsmanship. If you read the little excerpt of tactics I'm thinking up of, you'll see that there's little sword vs sword swinging.
We could have phases of course. Suits might get uparmored ridiculously fast compared to handheld weapon power, requiring a drawn out sword duel culminating with a melee strike to a weakpoint, the gun becoming a secondary weapon. On the other hand, we could have, especially at the beginning, guns being much more powerful than armor, leading to merge/shoot first/win fights while dodging explosives.
, but you are still right. 
