Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

We have discussed this before I think in the Sci-Fi tactics thread. No harm in discussing the equipment here though.

Just like there is now organic SHORAD and MRAD systems that are road mobile to deal with air threats, some sort of anti-smart cluster munition system for a high mobility force is really needed. You will likely need multiple units to ensure good coverage. They should have some built in resistance to ECM/EW measures for tracking and targeting and be able to readily network with other units. The weapon system would preferably be something that can engage multiple smart weapons quickly. Basically a reasonably sophisticated counter measure that offsets or interdicts smart munitions various capabilities. This could be gun fired, though rapid gun fired actively guided rounds gets a bit complicated if you have multiple rounds in the air at once, fire and forget would be much better needing only initial designation and letting the munition sensor system handle the rest. Laser DEW systems are more or less at the point they could zap sub-munitions but again I would emphasize multiple units ensure coverage and saturation of the area to be covered. I would be wary of atmospheric conditions with lasers as the environment in terms of atmosphere is more likely to play merry hell with DEW type weapons then kinetic based systems.

Some sort of road mobile tracking and targeting complex that can help direct said defenses to broaden their area of tracking and targeting as well as ensure higher degree of accuracy for the collective units. The intercepting units should be able to do their own tracking to a point but not go whole hog with it. The weapons systems should ideally be multi-role to minimize the need for additional weapon systems. They should be able to defend themselves from basic infantry so at least some equivalent of a defensive machine gun or similar weapon system. More importantly all the units should be able to perform their roles both on the move and in static positions.

Emphasis should be on shot accuracy and kill rate over saturation to hit. Saturation to hit requires a lot of ammo to be carried and is more easily overwhelmed. The fewer shots needed to intercept the better. The faster an intercept can go from detection, tracking, targeting, shot fired, intercept and back into tracking and targeting before the next shot the better. So anything that boosts that is a plus.

Most of the system should be automated as human's simply don't have the ODA loop speed to react to that kind of rapidly fluctuating threat environment.

edited 13th Feb '16 2:29:54 PM by TuefelHundenIV

And oldie, but I'm x-posting from the sci-fi tactics thread:

Sf Debris raised a good point in his review of The Star Trek The Next Generation ep, The Pegasus.

The reason a superweapon or some wild new Game-Breaker tech might be put off the table by one or more sides in a conflict:

• The war was so horrible that a peace treaty was signed to stop the fighting. To get the treaty signed, Weapon X was given up.

• A chess game between both sides, one gives up Megadeath Rocket because the other side will give up some other things (territory, agree to force cuts etc).
  • Or that's what one side wants the other to think.

• A democracy (or a government that says it's one) has to play to the masses. A treaty was signed giving up the Megadeath Rocket because the populace wanted the war to be over.

The problem (and nice drama fodder) it that a treaty signed Upteen years ago can seem like a stumbling block to those in the present. General Ripper Jinx and Insane Admiral Janeway might seem off their rocker.

But from their perspective, why should they be handicapped by a treaty signed when they were still recovering from a wild party at the academy? Not their fault President Peacecraft was facing bad poll numbers.

The hero(s) would say, banning the Megadeath Rocket is to protect the peace, General Ripper & Co says it's more about the peace treaty. And comes now evidence that the other side is violating it. (or are they?) And they need the Megadeath Rocket to be built, painted candy apple red and have "Suck it Bitches!" written on the side...

A good plot point that sidesteps the usual Idiot Plot of "General wants to start a war because reasons".

Did some article crawls today. Saw some things I thought you folks might appreciate.

Neat Compacting "Egg like" drone" Nano Wire laser on silicon in attempt to simplify photonic chip design. Laser Welding Neurons Scientists may have created Macro Scale Quantum entanglement at room temperature Air Mule Untethered flight A compact VTOL capable craft.

Random thought.

Take out the enemy's active defenses with weak but rapid attacks. Like taking out a TROPHY system with a bushmaster. Then launch one powerful blow for the knockout.

Would this be plausible and what would you use to do it?

Well a 20/25/30 mm Bushmaster wouldn't be intercepted by something like Trophy, specially due to the size of the projectile being too small as well the volume of fire being too high, the system would probably ignore the rounds and let the armor soak the damage.

The problem is that depending of the target, it won't really matter, lighter vehicles may resist some rounds from auto cannon rounds but MBT and heavily armored AF Vs would just soak the rounds unless they hit some sensitive spot like the engine block at the rear or small vulnerable areas.

Although there the RPG-30, which has a precursor round used to fool the APS fired shortly before the main charge, it is stated to be able to defeat Trophy and Quick kill but life fire tests have never been conducted and both Raytheon and Raphael stated their APS systems can prioritize targets and pick the larger threat.

Also once you get to scifi, you will probaly run into laser active defences which cant exactly run out of ammo.

Especially since those are being used for ships now.

They can still going out of heat sinks and reactor power, though.

I wouldn't exactly say lasers never run out of ammo. Since power plants (modern at least) can't exactly change their output on a dime, if you designed a power system that could support the needs of all your defensive laser weapons (and ignoring wear and tear, heat, etc) at a certain installation at peak load, the cost of having to run said power plant at that rate all the time "just in case" you will need to fire everything will be astronomically wasteful. Now you could certainly try to find non-critical tasks to do with the output, such as pumping water (if a land installation) to recover a fraction of the unused power, but you definitely wouldn't want to deal with that situation in a spaceship.

Instead, I'm guessing that what a spaceship or other sort of sci-fi defense installation would do is employ the use of incomprehensibly massive capacitor banks that put anything that your power company (or most universities) has to shame. Ones that are charged by your (far less wasteful and much more modestly-sized) power plant but which store the charge until needed. That lets you fulfill the enormous power and energy requirements when you have to fire off your lasers, but without having to sustain a ridiculously unsustainable power generation system. The trade-off, though, is that those capacitors eventually run out of juice, meaning that your ammo-free laser system is, effectively, out of ammo.

Even modern lasers, like you mentioned the Navy's, operate on that principle. We're talking recharge rates that can be in excess of 10-20 times what the firing time was. (Imagine a sustained full-power firing time of a minute followed by a dozen minutes to recharge.) Now granted, I'm sure that after unloading your initial 100% charge, you could game the recharge rate by taking it up to 63% rapidly and then firing again, but that would be assuming everything is ideal, which ignores that we still have the power generation as the limiting factor in the first place.

Not exactly modern here, but something we already have the science down for AFIAK.

Doesn't He-3 fusion allow for rapid changes based on load due to proton capture being possible for power generation, as well as the fact that gaseous fuel allows you to change the amount you input?

Fusion.... solves a lot of issues.

Or am I wrong that a gaseous/liquid fuel + not getting your power from the build up of heat = highly variable output? I am honestly curious if there is another concern I am forgetting about here

edited 17th Feb '16 1:39:43 AM by Imca

With lasers, heat dissipation is probably going to be more of a limiting factor than power supply. High-powered lasers need some pretty beefy temperature control systems because many lasing materials tend to only function as such within a certain temperature range. If they get too hot or too cold, they stop working entirely. A rapid-firing military-grade laser might run into some rather serious issues with that. The idea there would be to force the laser defenses into heat shutdown, then deliver your killing blow.

Fusion systems would still rely on good old-fashioned steam for the most part, at least initially. Even if you had direct energy conversion up and running, you're still gonna be dealing with a fusion reaction, and that heat has to go somewhere.

You're probably thinking of cold fusion, which is purely hypothetical. Not to say a fictional setting can't use it, but I think that a typical sci-fi setting would transition to using laser weapons long before cold fusion is cracked.

edited 17th Feb '16 2:08:03 AM by nman

@APS Overwhelming:

Typically, you need multiple large sources of damage. Otherwise you're better off just chugging 250 rounds of HE, APFSDS and whatnot out the barrel of a 242 Bushmaster in a continuous burst and hope for the best.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the system is expended or unaware or the variety that allows a single attack in when down such as a shield based APS.

There is Aneutronic fusion, which doesn't require steam and has the advantage of generating electricity directly from the fusion buuuuuuut it needs much higher temperatures and boron as a catalyst.

@Fusion Power

You could use thermocouples instead of steam but it's not a lot of energy. Also, keep microturbines in mind as they could massively shrink the size of a steam turbine.

@APS Overwhelming

Solid penetrators would be difficult to defeat with lasers. The muzzle velocity doesn't offer a good engagement time and sabot rounds have a very small profile. I imagine that a very powerful laser could damage a penetrator or throw it into a spin but that would need to be an amazingly powerful laser.

Another line of thinking is to try to soft kill the APS using shrapnel and overpressure. The obvious answer would be to intercept attacks further out but I'm thinking that you could "drill" through an APS either by loading the shots up with heated chaff or firing faster than the system can respond to.

@ Fusion: He-3/He-3 fusion is aneutronic meaning you dont need steam, nor heat to get the energy from it, AND you don't need a boron catalyst either with that one.

It is not cold fusion, it neads heat to get going, its just the heat is not the only place you can generate the power.

But yea, it does have the more extreme temperatures needed, which means heat management does become an issue.

Switching over to my own thing here though, I wonder what the viability of running the ship on D/T fusion during normal power loads, and then switching over to HE-3/HE-3 during peak power draw and combat would be, especially id you used the heat already present from the previous reaction to help get it going.

edited 17th Feb '16 11:30:38 AM by Imca

On that RPG-30 I doubt it will ever work as advertised. Namely the tracking target systems for modern APS Hard Kill are reasonably sophisticated and capable enough to engage multiple targets even sorting target based on threat priority. Also if the weapon rocket follows the decoy too closely it will just get swatted alongside the lead rocket or targeted by multi-launcher systems.

Your best bet is to basically fire more shots then the system can handle at once. That or have some means of futzing with the targeting and tracking of the defensive system so it can't track incoming as well.

The RPG-30 would be more effective if the lead round used something more like chaff or carried a countermeasure to improve the follow on rounds chance of being missed by the APS hard kill measures.

edited 17th Feb '16 3:47:31 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Clearly they need one of those if they ever hope it to work.◊

Like you said, the "temperature" section of the article, it gives you specifics about the operating temperature being higher than "standard" fusion, which runs into the same problems of operation.

edited 17th Feb '16 2:21:31 PM by nman

Angelus: What no love for the M202 Flash like Launcher that can fire all four shots at once or if we go with video games why not guided double shot RPG's like Nod's rocket launchers in Command and Conquer 3? Come on dude. :p

That or use the classic multi-shooter AT ambush where armor rolls up too close to prepared ambush sites and gets hit from multiple angles in rapid succession and has external mountings picked apart by medium machine gun fire with AP ammo.

edited 17th Feb '16 4:35:52 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Nothing beats the feel when you get 4 kills with this thing using a single shot.◊

For defeating the APS without spamming the target the best I've read about are top down attack missiles and ordnance that uses configurable EFP charges that either make the regular kinetic penetrator or the long rod penetrator depending of the target, the missile flies outside the APS range and fires a much harder to defeat EFP charge with a high probability of success.

The only reason top profile attacks with the modern ATGM's that have them still work so well now is there are only a couple of hard kill systems that can deal with the top down attack approach and only one that I can recall that can handle steep angle of approach. In the future that is likely to change. There is also the issue that such missiles have to approach much closer to the target vehicle to make their attack pass compared to their shell , bomb, or rocket delivered counterparts. That is partly because the MANPAT variants are still using the smaller EFP warheads though in theory they should be able to pack the larger ones. So again that is likely something that will change in the future as technology shifts around.

As for multi-mode EFP warheads there have been very few multi-mode ones that can do long rod, aerostatic slug, and/ or EFP fragmentation. To the best of my knowledge nearly all the anti-armor ones are the aerostatic slug variety with a few of the newer ones including an EFP fragmentation ring for MPAM ^note multi purpose Anti-Material basically everything short of heavily protected vehicles type effects. However that is also likely to change in the future as the trend is towards increasingly multi-role warheads and the US has already experimented with that and found it reasonably effective as have other big military nations.

What the biggest advantage of EFP warheads is the ability to make what amounts to stand off attacks against enemy armor aimed at one of the weakest parts of tank. As noted above it becomes more of a question of how far that stand off attack can me made from and still be successful in penetrating the target. That more or less boils down to velocity and density of the EFP projectile(s) in question.

We also could see guided munitions start to use terrain following with pop up attack as the sophisticated equipment needed for such an approach to steadily decrease in size and weight permitting smaller and smaller munitions to carry them. That could also include ECM or EW packages in future weapons but that is beyond 20 minutes into the future type speculation.

edited 17th Feb '16 5:38:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV

@Tuefel

Well, not the only reason. Top down attacks often target the less well armored tops of tanks as well as deny armor sloping.

Bel: You misunderstood. We are not talking about the passive armor scheme we are talking APS systems. In this case what I covered is still accurate. That is from the info available the only big reason top attack missiles can get by APS hard kills is very few of them can take the high vertical approach of some top down attack weapons. If you want to get into passive armor you also have to start looking at some of the soft spots on top now being covered by additional equipment and even ERA bricks in some cases as has been seen on the more fully kitted out Russian T-72's.

Until we learn more about thew new Russian Afghanit, systems like Drozd and Arena at most cover 65 degrees vertical from the mounting and Arena because of how the projectiles work in their own top down attack can do a decent job of clearing low angles to. Otherwise the best high angle coverage goes to systems like Trophy and Iron Fist which use turreted and tilting launchers to knock down threats meaning they can cover higher angles.

edited 18th Feb '16 12:47:18 AM by TuefelHundenIV

@Tuefel

True, but irrelevant. Missiles don't do top down attacks to counter APS systems, they do it to bypass armor. Modifying an APS to deal with top down attacks would be as easy as covering the sides and rear.

Super late, but @Anti-smart munition complex:

I had the bizarre idea of essentially using a cluster munition to defeat cluster munitions - I'm imagining it launching a series of small munitions into the air that split into tiny HE explosives that then detonate and shower the air with thousands of pieces of shrapnel. The idea being that no matter how agile the missile or what have you is, above a certain "projectile density" it can't possibly avoid them all. It can also act as a nasty anti-personnel weapon when it's not protecting the formation.

The major problem I can foresee is ensuring a good spread and avoiding fratricide with friendly infantry (since you can't really control where the shrapnel goes).

It would definitely be useful if the complexes can make use of networks (imagine each complex autonomously selecting a target and thereby avoiding "wastage" by multiple complexes engaging the same munition), so long as they're not network dependent. In other words, they should be able to maintain an acceptable degree of functionality even when their network has been disabled or otherwise compromised.