Sci-Fi Civilian Vehicles, Equipment and Technology

Policing still requires close in work so just saying use rifles makes no sense. You still have to get close and using the possible strength enhancement opens up possible options Mk 1 Humans can't do unassisted. Like hefting around full coverage class IV plus bullet resistant shields, carry heavy breaching equipment, and the ability to mount heavy personal armor across nearly every arc to encase an armored officer in heavy protection.

They would be great in the SWAT or even the riot role.

Plus having the police shoot every problem is not something that flies well in the current climate.

Officers could also leverage heavier or more broad coverage less than lethal weapon options, carry special apprehension or arrest equipment they couldn't heft on a normal duty belt, and even make it easier to possibly subdue a suspect via brute force. Say lifting someone up off of the ground and holding them, doing so negates a lot of strength and martial advantages a person could possibly have.

You’d be surprised how quick a duty belt can get unworkably heavy.

An officer in powered armor could conceivably carry an entire patrol vehicle’s worth of supplies on their person. This would put things like heavy duty loudspeakers, police computers, full-size medical kits and heavy weapons at their fingertips even on a normal foot patrol.

And speaking of foot patrols, an officer in powered armor could do those all day without ever getting tired, which is definitely a perk.

Depending on the design of the armor it may also provide enough protection that ordinary criminals and civillians would pose no real threat. This could make it a lot easier to apply non-lethal solutions in a situation an unarmored officer might feel threatened.

A while back we had a Sci-Fi police thread I don't know if it is still around or it got archived.

Edit found it. Meh, this thread is doing more or less the same thing but with more flexibility in subjects.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 13th 2018 at 6:00:26 AM

Ford tested some upper body exoskeleton like support vests to reduce worker fatigue. Now they are looking to expand the use of the vests to 15 of their assembly plants.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 27th 2018 at 5:54:18 AM

Okay here's a fun question, robot battles are cool and all, so are mecha. We got people working on Mech battles right now.

What would be a smart way to make the weapons for this stuff impressive, but not lethal so nobody dies?

Double armor on the cockpits and a ban on armor piercing rounds. I'm assuming this is sport fighting. High explosives can batter a robot and we've seen in Robot Wars and Battle Bots that impacts can disable a robot without breaching the armor.

Melee armor piercing like pneumatic stakes might be allowed on the grounds that you can more easily avoid aiming for the cockpit. It might make an interesting meta where the best counter to a heavily armored opponent is a fast melee mecha.

Edited by Belisaurius on Nov 26th 2018 at 8:06:14 AM

Take the people out of the robot. That way you are free to have mechs obliterate each other.

Yeah but then it's no longer a Mech Battle. It's just scaled up Robot Wars. Sure that's cool but it kind of misses the appeal of a Mech Battle.

Not, really. The appeal is giant bipedal machines shooting at each other. The more destructive the better.

They could probably knock each other over without too much danger to the human occupants.

You know, I feel in the futurw power armour would be a term use for military aplication of enchancer armours and I feel they would be A LOT of variation around.

Also Im making a sort of sci fi feeling and I like the idea of a medical holoscanner that proyect how a wound looks like for the inside out, kinda like in After earth(bad movie, good sci fi visuals), or a scanner that allow you to analise blood.

It appears to me that the biggest breakthroughs most recently are in the areas of deep data analysis and social control. Cambridge Analytica bought facebook data on 100's of millions of people, and customized target political ads that successfully polarized American and British society. The Chinese developed a social media platform which basically encourages people to rate one another on how well they conform to social norms. Its only a matter of time, I think, before AI is applied to public surveillance data, and starts using targeted advirtising to influence what we do everyday.

Dystopia rising, anyone?

I just had a thought - I might be mistaken, but it seems to be a minor trope in sci-fi-flavoured settings for futuristic motorcycles - futurecycles, if you will - to have wheels like the ones in Tron, just a circle with no spokes or anything in the middle. I realize that they look pretty cool, but do they offer any kind of performance benefit? For that matter, I've seen some designs which go the other direction and instead make the wheels almost spherical in shape, akin to the Batpod in The Dark Knight, yet you don't see these as often despite arguably being more practical (since they can tilt more, while Tron-style wheels tend to be fixed and flat, perhaps even more so than real-world sport bikes).

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Mar 31st 2020 at 6:43:16 PM

Tron style wheels add a lot of complexity for no real advantage. You can buy actual versions, but they cost upwards of $55K.

Solid spheres for wheels can do some things normal wheels cant do. As you lean to one side or the other, the effective radius of the wheel grows shorter—thus you effectively are using a smaller wheel, which will turn the mc faster, faster than a normal mc. Being spherical also opens up the possiblity of abandoning an axel for each wheel and suspending the entire sphere on rollers. This would allow the mc to move sideways, parking for example. If you are asking why we dont have these yet, there is a team designing this [1]. Sadly, all this comes at the expense of additional weight. In order to take advantage of the "sides" of the sphere, the entire surface must be treaded like the contact surface of a normal tire, and that gets heavy (and adds manufacturing costs). Heavier means slower and harder to control.

Edited by DeMarquis on Mar 31st 2020 at 1:56:48 PM

Interesting... so they have superior handling, but it's too good to the point of being twitchy? Unless I've misunderstood all of that.

If I understand what I am reading correctly, it's more that once you begin a turn with spherical wheels, it's rather difficult to come back out of it. The shortened radius makes the turning action very quick, but the extra weight creates a momentum that is difficult to overcome. So drastically over-turning is the risk.

So interesting discussion we had in weapons and technology was the idea of uploading your consciousness into robot bodies and how customizable that would be. How many subcultures would pop up from civilian use of robot bodies?

If uploading is that easy, then bodies take on the same function as clothes do today. So take a look at the fashion industry and tell me now many sub-cultures you see.

A question about other systems for a story I'm writing that involves colonization of systems outside the Solar System: would the stars in Alpha Centauri be able to provide energy like the Solar System's Sun if there were colonies in Alpha Centauri using solar power?

...why wouldn't they? They are stars, a touch brighter than the sun.

The luminosity is a wattage. So if you know a star's luminosity, you know how much energy they output. From there, it's a matter of distance. you can harvest energy form our sun, but around Jupiter it already becomes pitiful and around Pluto the sun would just be another star in the sky, though also the brightest.

A simple way to calculate is the surface of a sphere. The sun's energy leaves uniformly. So at the sun's surface, the total energy output is divided over the sun's surface into an energy density (watt / square meter). You calculate a sphere the size of the earths' orbit, and the same amount of energy would be divided over that area. For a different star, you use their particular luminosities. So a star with half the luminosity has half the sun's output.

The only remaining issue is what light they output. Red dwarfs emit primarily red and infrared light, which is harder to capture than high-energy photons from a blue giant. But two of Alpha Centauri's stars are similar to the sun, so a solar panel developed here on earth would work similarly. For Alpha Centauri C, you'd probably need special solutions

If they have large scale interstellar travel, they have multi-megawatt lasers. So put some solar power satellites into orbit close to the star and beam the power to the habitat.

Depending on the physics of the interstellar travel, mind you.

Wormholes and warp bubbles (bubbles, not waves) are no good as energy sources by themselves, but negative matter generators associated with them and [potentially] energy transported by them can be.