Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Halo was never a particularly good batch of sci-fi.

The enhanced strength of a powered exoskeleton wouldn't do damage to the wearer because it is infact an exoskeleton. The weight and stress is bore by the suit it'self rather than the wearer. Mechanical injuries would in fact be reduced since the exoskeleton would not be flexible enough to bend like that to begin with.

The enhanced speed of MJOLNIR is the real issue. Why would the armor increase someone's speed. Scratch that, why would you design armor to increase reflex speed. It's a game of diminishing returns. Say someone's reaction time is 0.02 seconds. Respectable. Now let's double his speed and we've got a reaction time of 0.01 seconds. Good, he's got a "whole" tenth of a second to act. Now let's double his speed again so his reaction time is 0.005 seconds. Uh oh, we've only gained an extra five thousandths of a second to act. Double it again and we're at 0.0025 seconds and gained so little time that the human brain can't even recognize it.

Now, let's get into the mechanics of reaction. It takes roughly 5 milliseconds for a signal to travel from your brain to your arm. However, human reactions tend to be in the .150-.3 range. This implies that the rest of the delay is from the brain deciding what to do. Ergo, in order to make someone react quicker artificially, we'd need to make a suit that acts before the user has even decided how he wants to react. Which actually is pretty dangerous to the user simply because they might dodge the anti-tank rocket just to toss themselves off a building or under the treads of a tank. QED, it's really not a good idea to try to increase reaction speeds unless you can make your soldiers think faster. Break out the amphetamines.

edited 14th Dec '13 12:14:45 PM by Belisaurius

Sounds like tweaking the brain with cybernetics would have been a better option.

Halo is a video Sci-fi setting. Notorious for gaps in logic as it is.

I like the line between Minimech and Power Armor.

Wanna flip tanks over? this is the vehicle to do it.

Lol. Nice. That vehicle must give Mike Sparks fits of rage just by having wheels being so powerful.

One of the many weapons of questionable practicality I thought of is the Tunguska Cannon. It's basically a giant howitzer mounted on a spaceship that uses a nuclear detonation to propel its payload similarly to an Orion Drive. I honestly don't know whether this would send a massive projectile at the enemy at lethal speeds or blow up the turret firing it.

Well nuclear reaction propelled projectiles have been considered before. Though you may not want to have them launch from an enclosed structure.

A good suggestion would be more like EFP type warhead where it is set off in a place that it can't hurt the launching vehicle but still sends a super speed projectile screaming at the target.

I think Tuefel's nailed it about why powered armour is viable.

I'd also add that in my setting (and presumably any other setting where powered armour is a thing), powered armour is designed to fail safe rather than fail deadly. Think how in turboprop aircraft if there's a prop pitch control failure the prop automatically feathers to minimise drag rather than ramping up to max RPM or ending up stuck at the previous setting.

I'm not sure how you'd get powered armour to fail safe without compromising the wearer's ability to extricate themselves from danger, but I imagine that you guys can help.

Computers. The current exoskeletons use small scale computers to help control movements and prevent issues. Now use the advanced computation available to most star faring races and imagine how much processing power and computing ability you can cram into a small space.

Which is why I find the Too Powerful to use excuse kinda stupid. Calibration and careful design consideration can solve a shit load of problems in that regard.

Making sure the armor doesn't move in such a way that it injures the wearer should be childs play for any civ that can fling themselves across the stars and launch orbit to surface invasions.

No matter how advance the tech gets unless you are just obliterating everythign someone has to go down there and drag the other assholes out of their bunker to sign the surrender.

The powered-suits in Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" were easily capable of killing their users, though not through strength amplification, but through the fact that if the heat fins on the back are damaged the suits overheat the user.

That makes sense.

That is a bit different though.

Thinking on it further, my setting's powered armour might have a "limp home" mode designed for serious failures, where the motors etc. are restricted to avoid accidentally exceeding safe limits whilst still allowing the wearer to survive long enough in a warzone to get back home (hence the name). With the computing power available (as Tuefel pointed out), it might be possible for the armour's onboard computer to work around failures intelligently to allow near-full operation of the suit.

Another option may be to make it so that the powered armour is never truly inoperable - merely degraded. This could be achieved by, for example, making sure that the suit is still capable of reasonable performance when unpowered, or installing non-powered back-ups of systems if practical.

Compartmentalization. Each limb can function independently in a pinch.

You might loose an arm and a leg but you can still move your remaining limbs and crawl home.

Again, a smart idea (though I'd question the wisdom of anyone whose powered armour can be completely disabled by the loss of a limb). This might also feed in to my intelligent troubleshooting, as the computer can tell what can't work and attempt work-arounds that either minimise the effects or neutralise the issue. Of course, there isn't much you can do about a completely lost limb, but other less catastrophic damage would be easier to deal with.

An internal medical system of some sort would definitely be useful, even if it's as simple as injecting a cocktail of drugs to prevent the wearer dying or going into shock in the immediate future.

The Legacy of the Aldnetta novels power armor can pinch off damaged limbs and keep the suit sealed. But they can regen lost limbs or replace them with advanced cybernetics.

That would alleviate some of the issues with such a system, of course.

However, there's no reason that in the event of a limb loss the suit couldn't self-seal to prevent loss of pressure/ingress of dangerous chemicals or water or whatever. It's not like there'll be anything to lose as a result.

I think the suits frequently have some sort of self sealing function in case of fragment, weapon, or projectile penetration.

I have seen that feature a few times in scifi.

Ah, I see.

I remember watching a TV programme where a material with tiny capsules embedded in it was shown. When the material tore, these capsules split open to seal the gap with a material that wasn't quite as strong, but could hold it together.

Perhaps the self-sealing works along the same lines?

Something like that. A layer that seeped in to fill in a space. Sometimes they had spray or slap on patches.

I think the fluff for the Armor in Mass Effect had an undersuit that formed a seal to patch holes and protect wounds.

The Starshiptroopers Roughneck Chronicles had spray on patches and acid neutralizers. The armor patch was a foam based spray. They also had a air scrubber for suits whose air supply has been contaminated.

While not the best animated CGI show it had some interesting looking scifi gear.

The power armors from the Aldenatt series used rail gun weapons that fired DU rounds or DU rounds with a bit of anti-matter.

Once you get around the author shoehorning in his politics here and there it is a pretty neat verse to read up on.

I also reccomend checking out the Hammers Slammers series of books.

edited 17th Dec '13 5:39:42 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I've written that into my book.

Here guys check out this Light Tank design The thing that is neat is the gun. It fired Telescoped Caseless ammo that could supposedly be burst fired.

It's a PT-76....only 30 years after the real thing was made by the Soviets.

Personally I was more impressed with the Expeditionary Tank. If part of that looks familiar it should. Some of that technology was salvaged into the Stryker MGS.

The Expenditionary tank looks more like the one I linked. Probably because they were part of the same over arching program. Though the one I linked was dropped because the gun was deemed too small for use or consideration.

What I was more interested is the gun and ammo system. A burst capable, rapid fire Caseless Telescoped ammo. I don't care much for aluminium armor.

While light it doesn't protect very well against any form of heavy weapon commonly used by infantry. Never mind anti-armor weapons.

The Expeditionary Tank is certainly interesting but apparently it was two tons too heavy and too tall compared to the M8 AGS.

Sadly that program was scrapped for the late 90's "modernization" programs. Which in turn were scrapped for being largely impractical and too expensive.

Here is something for you to dig into. The Army is looking for Air droppable Light Armored Vehicles again. They want currently existing designs only and no new designs. Tracked or Wheeled accepted.

The turret does look nearly the same but looking at the MGS it appears they have since modified it a bit.

Neat looking though. I do like the look of the External Gun Turret type tanks.

edited 25th Dec '13 7:14:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Very interesting, thanks! And the Expeditionary Tank does indeed look cool. According to the article it had problems with serious jamming (both for the machine gun and the main gun) though, which I think you'd want to minimise in such a design.

To shine some light on the equipment side of things, what would be good design elements for a future radio (or just plain communication) system? The main things I've come up with are frequency agility and high encryption. Basically make it a pain to jam or intercept. Light weight would be handy too.

Check this stuff out