Swords and Plowshares

Military SF & SFional equipment.

• I realized, my felinoids' tactics make much use of "rapid dominance", AKA Shock and Awe. Think about it: if you've got cat-reflexes, you need your enemy off-balance when you strike, or any advance will, almost automatically, result in being outflanked. (By the bye, don't read the Wikipedia article; whatever troll edited it has done everything in his power to obfuscate the fact that rapid dominance is expressly designed to minimize civilian casualties).
  
  Their name for it is more similar to "shock and awe" than to "rapid dominance", though—they call it "stunning crush", i.e. crush the enemy so rapidly his remaining forces are stunned. They like the paradox.
• The Rapid Dominance paper by Ullman and Wade (you can download it in PDF format, just Google "Rapid Dominance") quotes Sun Tzu among others, "War is deception". And remember how my felinoids have a big problem with deception, but not with stealth? Yeah, so their version is "war is stealth".
  
  Basically their ethics allows for feints and some misinformation, as long as a betrayal of trust is not involved. Similarly in their law-enforcement, they have a lot more leeway for listening devices, but no undercover work. Maybe I've just seen Reservoir Dogs too many times, but it boggles my mind that we're perfectly fine with the police using deception and betrayal, but have people seriously suggesting that phone-tapping is intrinsically immoral. That is not a reasoned moral position, that is a taboo.
• Do you ever consider what a future society's airliners are gonna be like? I hope so. If not, and you're a science fiction writer, well, why not?!
  
  In my books, though it hasn't come up, the humans' airliners are Blended Wing Body, something like a halfway point between a flying wing and a conventional design. Their military planes include a tailless fighter, laid out like the X-36, and a transport aircraft with "twin tilt turbojets" (basically an Osprey with the propellers replaced by turbojet turbines), roughly comparable in size to the Soviet An-8. I'm not sure what the attack aircraft is, exactly, except that it roughly fills the role of an attack helicopter like our AH-64 Apache or the Russkies' Mi-28 "Havoc". Maybe it'll be a compound helicopter, rotor for VTOL, wings with propellers (maybe jets?) for lift and propulsion. Or maybe a rotor-wing, where the rotor stops after VTOL and becomes a wing.
  
  The felinoids' commercial airliners are hybrid airships, specifically rigid bags of (heated?) helium, shaped for lift—essentially, a cross between a lifting body and a dirigible. I imagine it'd look something like the Aeroscraft:Their military aircraft probably split between tiltjet things (I imagine a cross between an AH1Z Viper and an A10 Thunderbolt, with tiltjets), for close air support, and something like an F22¹ on steroids (I imagine supercruise or even hypercruise, thrust-vectoring, maybe hypersonic ramjet or even scramjet flight) for air-superiority/high-speed interception.
• Power systems fascinate me. I think everyone, but certainly the military, in my future human society, is gonna use AMTECs for power, in pretty much every vehicle (yes, all the above airplanes: propellers and turbines work real well with induction motors). Frankly AMTECs are so awesome, I'm absolutely certain I've missed a downside somewhere. Fortunately I haven't specified many power sources, I can afford to figure out the downside without having to edit things.
  
  As for my felinoids, they use, again, dilaton alternators—quantum scale waterwheels tied to the fabric of spacetime itself. I don't know if they even use batteries (maybe something like a quantum-scale "spring"?); I think they can make the alternators any scale they need, even small enough to power a gun. I think their swords actually have a power supply, too, holding the blade's structure in place—I confess it's an idea I got from the good ol' General Products hull, though they're not invulnerable, just crazy tough. Whether or not the swords are always powered, I do know that, rather than grinding the blade to sharpen it, they can apply a charge to realign the molecules.
• The only AMTEC I could find size characteristics for was a disc 41 cm in diameter, and 12 high—a volume of 15,843 cm³, with a mass (I think) of 6 kg. So given the one my mechas have, volume of 1.265 m³ (just under 80 times as much), it has a mass of merely—get this!—479.076 kg. That's the weight of a large pickup engine.
  
  If we were gonna keep it as a disc, that'd be roughly 177 cm in diameter, and 52 high. Not unworkable, but I think I prefer it as a cube.
• I mentioned Captain America before, but apparently there's also some nonsense about how they choose Steve based on his answering "no" to "You want to kill Nazis?" Good God, hippies, if we can't all get behind killin' Nazis, what the hell we even have a society for?
  
  I think I need a scene with something comparable in my book; either one of the human protagonists or, more likely, one of the felinoids is simply going to say, "Yes, it seems that's necessary." Also, ironically, the full line is "no, I don't like bullies"—the felinoids would say yes, specifically for the exact same reason. A part of their ideology, symbolized by the dragon that hunts giants, is breaking the arrogant and humbling the great by force of arms. Holding power in feudal gift from the civilian populace, they consider it an act of vassalage² to bully the bullies.
  
  Set the scene thus (it's a motif in my books): some nasty individual does something horrible, or is about to, and is very impressed with himself...and then he turns around and, à la Alien, finds himself looking seven feet, 311 lbs of pissed-off ambush-predator right in the eyeteeth.