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[Insanegame27]

You can't climb an icy cliff with just one icepick.

[Egan_BW]

At least take two icepicks and a knife. Cutting things is damn useful. :V

[Parsely]

Do you mean ice axes? I thought you were referring to ice picks. Also, if they need to climb a bloody cliff then why can't they just plan for that, instead of assuming they're always going to need to manually climb something? You'd also think that if they were survival minded that they would always be equipped with knives.

[i2amroy]

Honestly there's no real reason to not have them changeout their load out at all unless they have access to some sort of teleporter to get around that cuts out travel time totally (in which case there's no reason to have a fixed load out when you can literally bring in arctic troops for arctic missions and desert ones for desert missions regardless of where they are actually located). Barring that what you want isn't a standard load out that can work anywhere, but rather a "base load out" that then gets customized slightly during travel time, with them stashing a handful of useful things (like ice picks) in their travel vehicles depending on whether they need them or not.

Because doing something like carrying ice picks is honestly a waste when 98% of the time they are literally just going to be dead weight slowing you down (there are vast many more places on the earth that don't have icey cliffs than do). Similarly putting on enough insulation on the suit so that they could actually survive in arctic temperatures is going to guarantee that they overheat and die of heat stroke in the space of a minute or two in a desert if they don't swap it out. There is no real "base load out" that is guaranteed to work in any scenario, but there is very likely a "base load out" that can be customized slightly in their half hour or so of travel time to match up with any scenario. It's honestly like the real military; we don't have a single load out for the army that gets used everywhere, we have a base set that then gets customized with a variety of weapons/armor/etc. depending on the mission.

Of course it's a story and you can do whatever the hell you want to do, but realistically there is no tactical benefit to having a single fixed load out with zero customization, and there's quite a bit of actual drawbacks (such as the protagonist fleeing to the arctic and laughing as the crack squad dies in minutes from exposure while he's in his warm coat or traveling to a desert and laughing as they collapse from heat stroke in their parkas as he runs away in his shorts and t-shirt.

[Tack]

Plus the whole "gorget fixed visor" thing is a trope only seen on heavy weapons guys, and there's kinda a reason for that. They only ever move at "menacing trudge". Any type of running or acrobatics will see it slap you for your insolence. Wing suiting with one, I don't even want to think about.

[Arx]

Do you mean ice axes? I thought you were referring to ice picks.

The term ice pick also commonly refers to a mountaineers' tool known in the USA as an ice axe.

And, to be honest, it looks a lot more like a pick than an axe.

[Parsely]

Do you mean ice axes? I thought you were referring to ice picks.

The term ice pick also commonly refers to a mountaineers' tool known in the USA as an ice axe.

And, to be honest, it looks a lot more like a pick than an axe.

But I'm American, so I grew up thinking that's what an ice pick was, so certainly you can see how utterly incredulous I was at the idea of soldiers armed with fucking ice picks.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

What if the contact point on the K-Rod were made much larger to put it's energy into the impact more than penetration? Just a larger explosion/shockwave effect scaling with the side of contact point and mass of the rod?

Edit:
Also just adding on my previous stuff, the rods themselves don't sent civilization back to Neolithic age. Actually guns are still used in the story. The rods are just used to knockout large cities, manufacturing areas, and military installations like missle silos.
I was asking because the main character will go through several ruined cities on his journey and I wasn't sure how to describe the impact areas. I know for the outskirts it will be mostly collapsed/damaged buildings and the closer to impact the more destroyed the buildings get and more over grown the vegetation is so the outskirts are like a ring of old buildings around a sort of oasis.

Also for a different story, that uses similar rods, how would tungsten carbide dust umm act in the air. Would it settle quickly and be difficult to kick up or would it remain in the air? And how would inhalation of this dust affect a person?

[Culise]

Do you mean ice axes? I thought you were referring to ice picks.

The term ice pick also commonly refers to a mountaineers' tool known in the USA as an ice axe.

And, to be honest, it looks a lot more like a pick than an axe.

But I'm American, so I grew up thinking that's what an ice pick was, so certainly you can see how utterly incredulous I was at the idea of soldiers armed with fucking ice picks.

9/10 Trotskyites agree, ice picks are indeed the weapon of choice for the coming proletarian revolution. 

[Rolepgeek]

What if the contact point on the K-Rod were made much larger to put it's energy into the impact more than penetration? Just a larger explosion/shockwave effect scaling with the side of contact point and mass of the rod?

Edit:
Also just adding on my previous stuff, the rods themselves don't sent civilization back to Neolithic age. Actually guns are still used in the story. The rods are just used to knockout large cities, manufacturing areas, and military installations like missle silos.
I was asking because the main character will go through several ruined cities on his journey and I wasn't sure how to describe the impact areas. I know for the outskirts it will be mostly collapsed/damaged buildings and the closer to impact the more destroyed the buildings get and more over grown the vegetation is so the outskirts are like a ring of old buildings around a sort of oasis.

Also for a different story, that uses similar rods, how would tungsten carbide dust umm act in the air. Would it settle quickly and be difficult to kick up or would it remain in the air? And how would inhalation of this dust affect a person?

It would settle/be smashed into the earth without too much difficulty. But keep in mind these are imprecise bunker busters, basically. It's hard to control exactly where they hit, so it you're not going to use an airburst nuke to wipe out the cities, with rods preserved for bunkers, you'll need a few dozen for saturation, even for a small city.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

That doesn't really answer the question of increasing surface area of impact and increasing mass of the rod so what if instead of 1 foot of contact if it were 50 feet?

[Amperzand]

A 50-foot-wide plate is going to go all weird in reentry and probably fail as a weapon. A fifty-foot-wide cylinder or sphere is going to be absurdly large and heavy, with behavior more like a meteor than a bunker-busting rod. At that point you might be better off using nice, cheap rocks, the differences won't likely be that large.

The reason rods work is that they're super narrow and don't waste too much energy passing through the atmosphere. If said rod is overly large, you just have a manmade meteor, not a fancy kinetic penetrator.

As for the dust thing, you wouldn't have any concerning amount of dust, since it'd be attenuated around a large area, and likely smashed into the ground hard enough to stick.

[GiglameshDespair]

Rods from God are an awful idea for a weapons system, anyway.

[i2amroy]

Rods from God are an awful idea for a weapons system, anyway.

Well they're a great idea for the one specific thing they were designed to do, act as bunker-buster weapons for places like Cheyenne Mountain Complex or Mount Yamantau; places that are essentially built under mountains and get designations on "what if" plans that essentially amount to "keep nuking this place until it's gone from the face of the earth", and RftG also have the advantage of not leaving enemy places nuclear uninhabitable wastelands for long periods of time (which could be a drawback if you would be nuking areas you would then need to advance through.

In general though, yeah, kinetic weapons are too impractical to use on a high tactical/low strategic level compared to conventional or nuclear explosives.

[Insanegame27]

All of the feedback you guys gave here is the exact reason I haven't actually wrote the description of the suit in the book yet.


Yes, I meant ice axes. I didn't know what they were called and saw that they were practically picks in CoD, and they were used for more mobility on the ice, so I called them ice picks. I did mean ice axes.


I'm changing the idea slightly, they would never be inserted into extremes (arctic, deep-sea, aerobatics) without a change in loadout (which will be loaded onto the insertion helicopter if there's such a mission on the roster). The base suit would still follow my original guidelines earlier. For partly rule-of-cool reasons, I still want them to take the ice axes (it's gunna take a lot of practice to stop calling them picks now XD). How effective would an ice axe be versus a knife?

For similar reasons, I also want to keep the faceplate, although less of a focus and removable so that it isn't a problem on desert missions or light diving or wingsuiting etc. It'd be more or less so that you have more of a chance of an open-casket funeral than to stop a .50 cal bullet. It'd primarily be there to stop shrapnel from frags and burns from HE getting on the face and to prevent that flying sheet metal from decapitating you. Also if it cracks from something in battle you can remove it for the visability.


MY SCHOOL BLOCKED TVTROPES ON ME! NOOOO! Now I can't check what tropes my suit falls under (not without going to my ipod). My school has utilised the greatest weapon of all time: The website blocker. Known to cause people to abandon cities to try and find a way around the filter, it is only a matter of time before they go insane from a lack of Google and TVTropes and Wikipedia.




RE rods from God: I hated how CoD Ghosts did the whole rods from god thing. It felt like a cheap way of killing billions of people. Thanks for clearing the thing up a bit!