Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

How about how effective it is from Strategic threats down to tactical. Also if it can swat nukes with ease what is stopping it from swatting conventional weapons or even aircraft?

edited 2nd Feb '16 4:32:50 PM by TuefelHundenIV

And what about them stops folks from being creative such as driving a truck bomb into a place carrying a nuclear warhead?

By "obsolete" he may have meant "impractical for most purposes" not "impossible to use."

Also, delivery systems like truck bombs have some serious limitations if you're trying to wage war in a very mobile fashion. Plus, if you want to take out a wide variety of targets with your truck nukes, you have to get a lot of truck nukes into the enemy territory, which ups the chance that one will be found, either due to an inspection or something mundane like getting in a highway accident short of the target.

Just use those and aim low

"Colonel Ourumov, our truck nuke cannot reach the target! We have two flat tires!"

Ah yes, the Atomic Cannon. That and the Davy Crocket are why everyone decided to just take the nukes away from the Army before they got someone killed.

Like the enemy?

Lets just say the range of the Davy Crocket was not friendly for allied troops.

Not with that attitude it wasn't.

Ivan: No worries comrade. Americanski Davy Crockett kill comrades but they make Yankee glow in the dark.

Well it was safe for the immediate launch troops with a range of either 2km or 4km, but the guaranteed fatal radiation dose out to ~150m and probably fatal dose out to 400m means that, yes, it wasn't a really good weapon, not if you expected to be attacking over that ground in the near future.

edited 2nd Feb '16 7:13:34 PM by MattII

^ That's the thing. Davy Crockett was an area-denial and mass casualty weapon. Designed to destroy large clusters of enemies (especially vehicles) and leave an area impassable for a time owing to radiation. No mechanized unit in the 1950s and early 1960s could have driven through the immediate aftermath of a Crockett and made it through before dying of horrible radiation poisoning.

Weapons like that were why the Soviets went whole hog in designing vehicles for the NBC-contaminated battlespace. Stuff like the BMP.

I can't be the only person who always parses that acronym as "Bitmap", can I?

The big problem with the Crockett was the very high risk of wind blowing an unhealthy dose of that radiation back on the launching troops. It was pretty much a dirty fallout bomb as noted above.

And the US in the 1960s seemed keen on giving crazy lightning dudes Davy Crockets so they could eventually kill him and steal his money.

At least they didn't try to make potato cannon out of one

But seriously, using nuclear weapons on a tactical scale would be difficult. In part, this is due to the blast and fallout radii. Weapons grade uranium doesn't grow on trees so it's not like every regiment is going to have one, either.

Plutonium is relatively easy to "farm", though.

$4000 per gram isn't exactly pocket change.

It is for governments.

Also surface skimming and low flying VLO cruise missiles are a thing, while they wouldn't have the same range of higher flying ordnance they'd still get far enough to destroy targets with nuclear warheads far enough from the main battle group.

You wouldn't necessarily detonate the warhead above the enemy either to stall or inflict damage to their forces.

New Nano scale Lattice Am I the only one who thought armor and possibly stronger and lighter materials for vehicles.

Lighter and stronger everything, really. Overall you'd see a downswing of the effectiveness of weaponry on armor as vehicles simply mount more armor. We could also expect to see lighter, faster vehicles that weren't possible to build before but that's akin to putting people on motorbikes and having them dodge bullets.

I'd figure on the downside though a vehicle made with materials like that would be like driving a blinged out Bentley and doing the same job a beat up old rusted Ford Ranger could do for a tiny fraction of the price.

If you folks are every struggling with a unique idea to land and lift off something big from a small strip of land.

It had one accident but worked for the other tests. Interesting idea.

"How about how effective it is from Strategic threats down to tactical. Also if it can swat nukes with ease what is stopping it from swatting conventional weapons or even aircraft?"

It doesn't stop it.

That's why the first order of business in any conflict in my 'verse is knocking out the D.E.A.D systems, either use of special forces, or highly highly specialized and expensive strike aircraft to penetrate deep into territory.