Not nearly as effective as they are in video games. A hard-kill countermeasure is preferable, IMO.

Hardkill is kind of tricky with drone swarms in real life. With unguided kinetic options, you have the issue of aiming shots at the mobile individual target in most cases or trying to get a big enough area of effect to knock down multiple units at once. The more drones in a swarm the more you have to down in a given time frame to effectively defeat the swarm.

So you basically need a way rapidly and effectively disable or destroy as many drones at once as you can. Lasers seem to do ok with the smaller drones as they can burn them down fairly quickly and rapidly switch targets plus lasers are effectively instantaneous contact with a target. Microwave units can swat several drones at once and again rapidly engage their next target set. Like kinetic options, they have their own drawbacks. Microwaves have short effective ranges and lasers are notably affected by environmental conditions. Both are power hungry. Dispersed swarms will make microwave less effective.

Guided weapons can be effective on an individual to individual level but they also tend to be expensive and a dispersed swarm will require multiple shots. Maybe some sort of self-guided gun fired rounds or bullets which is still speculative cold work if you can contain a compact guidance unit that can track targets on its own.

Jamming works well against the more crude versions but fully modern military drones are all becoming hardened against easy jamming and several varieties carry additional onboard sensor equipment that allows them to search, track, lock, and attack targets on their own. Drones can be given something akin to an expert system that can drive them using onboard sensors instead of being actively guided by remote. Some of the Attack Loitering Drone munitions include a feature where during their attack phase they self-direct and self-guide to the target unless you wave them off. They only have to get close enough to be able to use their own board sensor equipment in terms of active guidance.

The novel and possibly game-changing factor for the C-UAS (Counter Unmanned Aerial System) like the Coyote is you can potentially create a drone swarm of your own for a comparable cost to the one might be fending off. Of course, such systems require a certain degree of sophistication and complexity to work. The Coyote example doesn't operate on its own, yet. It is effectively a radar-guided drone munition. You would need a sophisticated enough self-contained self-guiding system to make a counter swarm truly work to its maximum potential. Relying on some sort of active ACLOS (Automatic Command Line of Sight) guidance places limits on how many you can guide at once without some interesting fire control sorcery. Said sorcery might be feasible though. It may be feasible now to create a counter swarm with tech on hand but that would depend a lot on how they build the units that make up your counter swarm.

Yeah, the whole point of the swarm concept from a computing point of view is that the swarm does not require any sort of centralized control. They may not be there yet in terms of deployable systems but that certainly is one direction in which it will be developed.

Of course, the larger the swarm and the smaller the individual units, the harder they will be to track and target individually. It may reach a point where you cant count on entirely killing a swarm, but only on degrading their total capacity as a swarm to damage targets.

For sci fi, you need merely add a self-replicating capacity, a la a bunch of little 3D printers, to come up with some true nightmare scenarios. It certainly has some promise in an alien invasion scene.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 12th 2019 at 9:21:33 AM

That's not quite 15,000 feet. Last I remember my geology, the crust depth it takes for pressure and mantle/magma proximity to cause temperatures too hot for humans to handle doesn't occur until after 25,000. (For example, the Kola Superdeep Borehole didn't encounter temps above 100C until below 20,000.)

If the mine shaft that far down doesn't have good HVAC systems (or any at all) it might from time to time build up heat from workers/equipment to be unbearable but natively be that way? I'm not certain about that.

Especially when you consider the deepest mine on Earth presently in reality is about 4 km down in South Africa.

Sci-fi is increasingly using drone and drone swarms as one of the possible threats. I think it was "Black Mirror" that had an episode that is one of the more recent concepts I have seen. Though I like that LAM drones or drone-like weapons have been part of sci-fi for a while.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 12th 2019 at 10:36:00 AM

I just checked out "Black Mirror", which I was previously unaware of. Really interesting.

Don’t binge watch it. It’s some seriously depressing shit

I made it all of an episode and a half into Black Mirror before I was done. Tuned into the latest episode (at the time) of The Orville and of course it was the fucking social rating episode where Orville decided to be Black Mirror instead of Star Trek.

Edited by AFP on Jan 12th 2019 at 6:04:46 AM

We've all heard of delayed aging, and humans in Sci-Fi living much longer lives, but what about delayed Prime?

By that I mean, what could you biologically change so that a human being who's either in Olympian or Special Forces level of conditioning, would remain in their physical peak for a decade or longer?

Like take Lebron James for example. No matter how much he takes care of his body, he's just not the same player he was even five years ago, even though, physically, he's very much more capable than everyone in this thread.

What could a Basketball Player of the Future(TM) or a Soldier do to make sure at 45, he's (literally) the same guy or gal he was at 25?

Jas: If can affect the aging process you will likely affect the range of prime shape.

This would also, as a side effect, cause the retirement age for the military to be 30-40 years. 20 would seem too easy, unless you split it up by MOS. I.e, Infantry can retire at 20 years, but Finance and Civil Engineers may only retire after 40 years.

In cases where the development of drones in Sci Fi (forgive the non linking I’m new here and using a phone that does not agree with me) has reached the self replication stage (which for me it should not be the case that the drones themselves replicate but have a central nexus or hub that can replace damaged or destroyed units) the thought occurred to me, in a sci fi setting with pirates, the easiest way to take a ship, would be to launch torpedos at the victims ship, filled with anti personal drones and a quantity of matietials enough to replace x number of drones. The torpedos impact, bore through outer plating and disgorge their lethal cargo. Seems a cheaper and safer (from the pirates point of view ) easier time then boarding themselves.

At the speeds at which most starships would be traveling a drone wouldn't survive the impact of collision. Past 10 kilometers per second molecular bonds don't mean much so solid matter doesn't stay solid.

Ignoring that there's also the possibility of the enemy's own repair drones taking up arms to "repel boarders". Mind, this is actually pretty interesting but it makes more sense just to fill the torpedo with fuel and hit the target with a half ton of metal traveling at ludicrous speeds.

Edited by Belisaurius on Jan 13th 2019 at 12:14:28 PM

see while I agree with you, my thought would be that if a space craft is not burning its engines, it would allow for the torpedo to slow on the point of contact(how is another discussion, then again if these are fired by the launcher full the losses suffered if you lose a couple won’t be that bad) without suffering Critical Existence failure. I’m trying to find a way to prize ships without having to use emps on hardware, makes it hard to fly away :)

I explain boarding with spaceships being easier to disable than destroy. Fuel and ammo stores have blow out panels, reactors have emergency shutdown and flush procedures, crews have simplified space suits, etc.

Aside, I call this the Zombie Spaceship Effect where a warship could be torn in half and still keep shooting.

Boarding becomes a mostly simple if not easy affair of boarding a ship to clear out resistance while towing it away from it's allies. Even badly damaged a ship hull is far, far easier to repair than build from scratch.

Adding to the tension is the possibility of the ship being repaired at any moment by the crew or even the boarders.

"At the speeds at which most starships would be traveling a drone wouldn't survive the impact of collision."

Not necessarily. Its the relative difference in speed between the torpedo and the target that creates the impact energy. If the torp can match velocity with the target before contact, it could effectively "dock", which would allow it to disgorge its cargo safely.

Mind you, that makes the torpedo much easier to intercept. You would want to somehow neutralize the target's point defenses first.

I do agree with both your comments, I agree that the ship needs to be point defenseless for this to work on anything that can change orientation quickly. I’m thinking of a ship with more mass thus allowing the torpedo to contend with fewer point defense emplacements.

So I am writing about my protagonist's soldier uniform, and I am really stuck on how to describe their helmets. In particular I want him to either have the M1 Helmet, the WW 2 Stallhelm or its Fallschrimjaeger equivalent. How do you go about describing these things in words ? Also this took place in another universe so I cannot just say "They wear M1 helmet" or something along those lines. Thanks all

I asked this a long time back but never got an answer, would there be any reason for an aquatic race to fill there ships with fluid rather then just wearing a hardsuit inside them?

The extra mass seems like it just wouldn't be worth the effort since AFIAK liquids weigh way more then gasses do.

Immy: No idea but here is a limited stab at it. They would likely need more water than any other race and they would need to circulate, filter, and clean the water inside a hard suit as it would likely accrue waste and bacteria growth over time. The only reason they would need to completely fill their ships is if their locomotion is completely dependant on it being immersed in water and they can't readily replicate that with a hard suit.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 16th 2019 at 12:38:01 PM

TBH I am less looking for a jsutification since them using hardsuits is just fine, it was more a legitimate question about if it is even something to bother with, or if for the most part they would just come to the conclusion of using hardsuits (and then probaly turning the hull into a vacuum, since if they cant survive in atmos any way why bother)

How's their locomotion? How do they move? Aquatic races likely wouldn't have much in the way of legs or weight-bearing legs.

If they move more akin to squid and fishes then a full-fluid environment may be necessary.

Immy: That is about as good as you are likely to get. If they can obviously create an enclosed environment in a sort of "suit" no need to bother. The only exception, as already noted, is if their means of getting around means hard suits are not actually practical.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 21st 2019 at 6:06:55 AM

The point is that humans can't live in that sort of environment without massive cooling systems. The old Aperture Science Innovators facility has no obvious source of cooling, never mind the power to operate it, and has deteriorated to the point where such systems should no longer be working regardless. Even 50 C is way too much; anything above the mid-20s is going to be unsustainable for long-term habitation.

Also, given the high temperature and humidity that should be happening that deep, the fact that the facility still has wood and fabric materials intact is just plain nuts.

There are other problems, like air pressure: coming up from a deep mine shaft can give you the bends just like ascending rapidly from a deep dive. Fortunately, Chell moves slowly enough through the facility for that not to be a serious issue.

Again, I'm not suggesting that the world of Portal should obey rules of realism. I'm stating quite the opposite: that realism is out to lunch, and there's no point in worrying about it. It makes no sense to cherry-pick bits of it and claim, "Well, that part is realistic."

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 21st 2019 at 3:16:17 PM

x-post from the Gun pr0n thread:

Army vs. Marines: Which Service Had the Better Bullet?

This company is building ‘barrier-penetrating' 5.56mm rounds for the Marines