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[Muz]

With nanotechnology, armor piercing is going to be relatively useless. An AP bullet just shatter when hitting them, probably resulting in no more than a bruise. Heck, there'd be dampening with the armor too, which means it could survive heavy impacts. Explosions will be even more useless.

The best way to damage such heavy armor is to knock them around. Armor would probably be weakest at the back.. slamming a guy into a wall would do much more than gunning him with 9 mm AP rounds. That's why you need melee combat.

Rocket launchers would still work. They'd have enough mass to knock down armored foes. But they'd have less effect than a 2-story tall robot wielding a combat golf club. Also, note that with better armor, rockets would glance off the weak points.

Lots and lots of completely unbased assumptions is what I can see here.

Meh, the whole thread is full of unbased assumptions. Like.. all of them, since the first post.

I could list them, but then you'd be finding little flaws in them. There will be flaws since it's future tech and everything is an assumption based on current and past techs. And then we'd have an annoying argument about science facts, which is not where science fiction is supposed to go.

Anyway, to add.. cannons will work very well against heavy armor. And you need power armor for a guy to be able to lug cannons around.

Oh and future servos will be much faster than the clumsy stuff you have today. Like.. cockroach fast - 200 miles per hour, since we already have scientists who are trying to build a cockroach's speed into bot legs.

Power armor + super speed + cannons = Win

[Footkerchief]

FASA came up with that crappy explanation twenty years ago, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then.

Good criticism except that FASA can do no wrong, ever, at all.  At least as far as BT is concerned.  Oh, and ignoring that their entire first mech lineup was straight out of Macross (did the Marauder ever actually go away?).

[Il Palazzo]

Muz: I did not single out your post for no reason. While most other posters take one "crazy idea" and try to analyze logically if it'd be feasible(like with the rods-from-god, Aqizzar's infantry, or possible advantages of foot over tread motivator units), you presented your guesses as if they were well known facts and didn't need explaining nor warrant discussing. E.g. why do you say that nanotech will make AP useless? What exactly do you assume about this tech? Why would a nanotech-based armour be weak at the back? Why wouldn't explosion work against it? Why would a cannon work, if neither an explosion nor AP round does(what is it shooting then), etc.
It seems to me, that your way of inventing future weapons is not that of science fiction, but that of a fantasy. Which is fine, sure, but it improves the discussion in the same way as saying "my weapon idea is best because it's got magic in it".

[Muz]

you presented your guesses as if they were well known facts and didn't need explaining nor warrant discussing

Because I was lazy and you guys weren't really reading any posts anyway, there wasn't enough of a bonus compared to time taken in explaining all that, and long posts go by unread. But since you asked, it would be worth int now

why do you say that nanotech will make AP useless? What exactly do you assume about this tech?

Nanotech would allow us to make extra strong materials, which would undoubtedly be used for armor. The concept of Armor Piercing is to get past armor. It is extremely difficult to go through something with a tougher material - you can try firing off a piece of chalk into plywood for an example.

You'd need an AP-bullet with a nanotech-strengthened tip to get past that. Cost-wise, that would be like putting a microchip on every bullet. You can do it, but it's going to be expensive. It will be done in a specialized way, but with infantry being much smaller than tanks, AT guns and RPGs will be much less effective.

Also going with how armors work, there's shock absorption and there's damper. Plate mail was developed by people with no modern scientific knowledge and it was of taking several shots from primitive bullets because of the way it deflected them. It was outdated mainly because of speed and because guns were cheaper (though cavalry stuck around for a while). A plate mail with modern shock dampening would be able to handle much more impact.

Why would a nanotech-based armour be weak at the back?

Because all armor is weak at the back. I think the thought is that you can't heavily armor everywhere, so best to put it where it'd get hit the most. And the way that shock will be distributed around would mean that it's more effective to focus the shock dampening mechanics at the front not at the back.

I reaally don't want to explain shock absorption in armor and can't seem to find an article on it, but the simplest way of saying it is that it's going to combine typical dampening and distribute it by deflection. I'd say that futuristic ones would work a bit like water - you hit something and that energy is displaced somewhere else in the form of ripples. That way, it's focused throughout the armor, say with 4000N of force, the part directly hit would take 2000N of force and distribute it to the rest of the armor.

This would result in some more flexible part being able to "ripple" more, but the drawback is that the part will be softer. Better to have that at the back. This will still be armored, of course, but only about half as much.

Why wouldn't explosion work against it? Why would a cannon work, if neither an explosion nor AP round does(what is it shooting then)

AP can work as well as cannons, but due to the shock dampening system, attacking over a large area would cause more damage than a more focused one.

What makes power armor more awesome than plate mail, Muz?

Speed and strength. Power armor could probably be designed to run pretty damn fast, faster than an unarmored human, but it certainly won't be as slow as plate mail. It beats tanks because it allows the user extra mobility.



Rods-from-god makes far less sense, because of things like air movement (it takes a supercomputer to calculate the weather as it is, and it's not even that accurate), air resistance, and most of all - terminal velocity. It doesn't become much more powerful than a standard missile

Actually, RFG accuracy isn't much of a problem at all; most missiles these days are equipped with things that help fine tune accuracy. But a giant block from the sky is going to have to deal with the rotation of the earth.. any initial velocity will be slowed down significantly by wind and air pressure, making it off track. Calculating the air pressure is not easy.

My experience in weapons also tells me that ethics will get in the way. Nobody ever complained about the invention of swords, chain mail, RPGs, or assault rifles. But there's always a huge controversy when someone invents a long range weapon that wins against better ones. Like crossbows, gunpowder, precision munitions, and nukes. You won't have much resistance to the development of power armor, but developing a WMD like RFG will have similar resistance as nuke/gunpowder development. Heh, arguably ethics never stopped anything, but it's the reason the world still doesn't have a defense system against nukes.

[Jackrabbit]

What are the options for nuke deterrents, by the way?

[Eagle]

Make sure you have more/better nukes than your enemies.

[umiman]

The complete and total annihilation of all porn everywhere for all time.

[Jackrabbit]

Make sure you have more/better nukes than your enemies.

That would lead to rush nuke manufacturing, Mutually Assured Destruction and fear. What's a good tactic for deterring even the construction of nuke, like a laser grid system that shot them out of the air (although that's not a very good example, as far as I'm aware)?

[Psyco Jelly]

You have recieved the special forces NSG.

NSG stands for Networked Smart Gun, and is your first and last line of defense in combat.

It is connected to the brain of it's user, to easily transfer information from other guns and users. They will be sent in squads of six. The gun will use augmented-reality to provide a heads-up display of important information such as mission objective, the positions of the squad, and any detected hostile signals. In the case that a member of the squad is killed, the gun will self-destruct to prevent salvage and stop from overloading the other members of the squad with the rush of information in a dying soldier.

The NSG utilizes EMP bursts to disable the cybernetics  of any unguarded hostiles, as well as a magnetic field generator to disrupt EMP signals from possible hostiles. This would create a 'shields down' moment of vulnerability for  those firing, so it would automatically disable shields for a brief instant while the shot goes off.

For better protected targets, your new NSG can fire 'sticky' magnets out of it's barrel to neutralize enemy electronic equipment. Pain-ray and Neural disruptors can be substituted for the EMP blast to subdue targets unarmed with the sticky magnets.

It even includes a small multi-purpose laser with varying intensities, for melting through walls or use as a flashlight.

The computer in your NSG can receive updates from our satellite system while it is powered-down to improve accuracy. This will not occur while in use to prevent distractions in tense situations.
The satellite system can also read your position for emergency supplies or rescue.

When subdual of hostiles is no longer an option, the sticky magnets can be used as kinetic weapons, capable of damaging biologic tissue.

After reading this, take some time to get to know the other five in your squad. You must learn to work with them, or you could face enemy capture or possibly death.

[Il Palazzo]

Muz: thanks for answering exhaustively.
I do disagree with you on couple of points, though:
You say that it'd be too expensive to use nanotech for AP projectiles, while I say it's extremely cost effective. You pay (some imaginary) 1 unit of money for a bullet that can disable a powered armour, all covered in nanotech plating(whatever that is), which is bound to cost some 1000-100000000(a made up number) units to produce. This comparision is drawn from today's cost of tank's AP round vs cost of tank's armour plating(or the whole machine, if you like), and seems logical for any type of material used.
You also brought the weak armour on the back as a reason for using melee attacks, but it's so much more sensible to use AP rounds to pierce exactly this rear, weaker armour.

[Muz]

I'd agree if you used precision weapons to take them out. And it's going to be impossible to figure out how effective AP really would be, but the point was that it's going to be a lot less effective than it is now. Good thing about power armor is that it shouldn't be much more expensive than a tank. A tank is this big, heavy thing, with a ton of armor plating. Power armor is a lot smaller and needs less to fully cover it.

Rear armor is easier to pierce if they're facing the opposite direction, sort of what's done with anti-tank infantry. But it's going to be nearly impossible to shoot a guy who's running at a AT turret in the back.

Speed and mobility should also be a factor against ranged weapons, as tanks can't climb trees or zigzag against a turret. I'm still fond of melee attacks because of accuracy. Even today, you need several dozen or even hundreds of bullets to take down an enemy at range.

A guy in power armor with a nanotech-enhanced blade would be pretty damn scary. Sort of like hand cannons in the early gunpowder age - it has a lot of room for improvement, but it's going to give a huge morale penalty to the enemy. And like the early gunpowder age, bots/power armor are excellent tools for siege. How will you fight off a hundred men jumping into your trenches and caves with power armor and a blade that can slice through steel? With power armored men, of course!

[Baughn]

One thing you keep forgetting about nanotech - it can be used to build more nanotech. That's the whole point, in fact.

So the cost for making a nanotech-enhanced bullet is basically the design cost; the marginal cost is more related to its mass than any complexity.

[bjlong]

Baughn: Are you talking about nanotech assemblers? If so, we're quite a ways off from that, and even then, I doubt we'll be making nanotech cheap for a long, long time. I should mention that I work on the edge of nanotech, with NSOM technologies, to be precise. If you want, I could go into why I think this.

Also, I don't think I made this clear, but you are right about the singularity. I usually picture the singularity as involving transhumans, somehow, and often need to be reminded that this need not be the case.

E: When I say on the edge of nanotech, I mean that my work goes from the microscale to the nanoscale, and the stuff I work with is probably going to make a circuit board in the nanoscale soon. Not that I'm at the cutting edge. >_>

[Baughn]

Planar/convergent nanofactories, not strictly assemblers.

I think you're right that they're some time off, though not necessarily as far as you think. There have been some very promising developments in biotechnology lately that could be applied.

However, I also think we'll have nanofactories before we'll use nanotech on any large scale whatsoever, never mind full suits of armor; so any scenario that has suits of nanotech armor might as well also have nanotech bullets, and everything else that goes with having nanofactories.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Whoa? You guys seems to talk about nanotech like it will be like Magic(R) or whatever...
Still, I can't discuss this... My understanding and knowledge is not yet good enough...