Swords and Plowshares II

SF military stuff and just gear in general. Unfortunately heavy on reality check because you people are stupid.

• Read a guy, talking about a bunch of things we're actually doing that are like sci-fi and comics, who said in 30 years there probably won't be any manned combat aircraft, it'll all be UAVs. Sigh. Stop predicting the death of air forces, you chimps, it's never gonna happen. We're always going to have to have manned combat vehicles, and also actual boots-on-ground military personnel. Why?
  
  Jamming, my pets. EMPs. And oh yeah, hacking. Now sure, a whole bunch of tasks can be automated, but you are still going to need to put command functions inside the craft itself in some applications, and AI cannot take over every function of human personnel.
  
  Seriously, Hideo Kojima knows that. Are you actually less aware of military realities then him? If so, you probably need to kill yourself.
  
  Then again Kojima probably only knows that because it's a major theme in Gundam (especially Wing, consider the mobile dolls). Kill 'Em All Tomino may, in many ways, be an idiot, but not in every way. He's definitely right on this one.
• Or how about people who think the fact the soldiers in Avatar use helicopters, when they can do interstellar travel, is a flaw? I'm sorry, I must have missed how we stopped using cars when airplanes were invented, and then replaced the airplanes with space shuttles. Machines optimized for one environment are not optimized for another. Not only do you have to use different craft for orbit-to-surface/surface-to-orbit and orbit-to-orbit flight, but you can't combine an airplane with a tank or submarine, either. Airplanes can become "flying boats", because a boat only has to have buoyancy, but nothing that can withstand submarine pressures is gonna be light enough to fly. You can combine car and aircraft or tank and submarine, but neither tanks nor submarines will ever fly—the best you'd be able to do is a boat that can also become a car or helicopter.
  
  Now, admittedly, it's entirely possible to use a VTOL SSTO craft as a ground-support aircraft, à la the Pelicans in Halo, but there's no requirement to do so. And the company in Avatar is plainly not military, whatever Cameron's quaint conceits on the matter. I wouldn't be surprised if those helicopters they use are just 22nd century versions of the UH-1C, an improvised "gunship" variant of a utility aircraft; it might look scary but it's a lot wider than a dedicated attack craft. Attack craft, both airplane and helicopter, tend to prefer a one-in-front-of-the-other layout in their cockpit seating, while the seats in Avatar's aircraft are side-by-side, like a utility aircraft. Probably they're meant to be reminiscent of the Osprey, but no, Cameron totally doesn't hate Marines.
• And yeah, spaceplanes like the shuttle are sub-optimal for atmospheric flight, because, again, they're optimized for space. While they do speeds most planes only dream about, that's mostly because they're braking from orbit (the orbiter's velocity when it hits appreciable air density, at 122,000 m, is still Mach 25). And its cargo capacity is only 25 megagrams, the same as a Shaanxi Y9 transport plane...which has an empty weight of 39 Mg, compared to the shuttle's 68.6 Mg. Because a Shaanxi Y9 is not also carrying a big honkin' SSME and its propellant.
  
  God forbid I should stop anyone from criticizing Avatar in any way they can, but I don't think this is a way they can. We're never going to phase out ordinary aircraft, if for no other reason than that there are more fuel-efficient options than rockets for atmospheric flight. E.g., induction-motor turbines.
• I realized, since my felinoids can already throw a car (a 24th-century sedan weighs less than a megagram, to save battery life, and the felinoids are as strong as jaguars), they have little incentive to use powered armor to boost their strength. Our powered armor is a long way from letting its wearer throw a car (it generally can't lift more than 90 kg, and that without the "snap" necessary to throw things); I figure by the 2340s the tech will be there, and my Peacekeepers field a few elite units outfitted with powered armor who can stand toe to toe with the felinoids in terms of strength.
  
  Unfortunately for the Peacekeepers, though, the felinoids' armor is powered. It has power-lifting systems that counteract the armor's own weight, letting the wearer move as quickly as normal, while wearing a good 20 kg of high-tech armor. And remember, they can run as fast as a human on a bicycle; the Peacekeepers' powered armor can let them move at a fast walk, maximum, and weighs about as much as its wearer (which means a PK powered-armor trooper weighs as much as his felinoid counterpart, basically, just that his armor makes up a much bigger part of the total).
• Going along with those technological developments, both sides make much more extensive use of explosive rounds (the St. Petersburg Declaration ban on explosives under 400 g having become obsolete, but the expense of the explosive ones ensuring they're mainly restricted to use against armored opponents). Not only are under-barrel or dedicated grenade launchers much more common—I think both humans and felinoids use a grenade launcher with its ammo in a tube magazine, like a shotgun—but they actually make grenade rounds in small-arms calibers.
  
  Also unfortunately for the Peacekeepers, the felinoids are about 300 years ahead of humans—the two were about synched up at one point, but the felinoids never had nearly three centuries of intellectual stagnation and pointless, fetishistic antiquarianism the Renaissance. One effect of that technological superiority is, while small-arms explosive rounds can penetrate Peacekeeper powered armor, taking out the felinoids' armor requires the use of anti-tank rounds, generally of actual grenade caliber.
• I think the standard magazines in the Peacekeeper guns are gonna be 50- or 60-round "casket" magazines, and they'll still carry six spares like our soldiers do (only ours are only 30-round box), for a total of 350-420 rounds. The weight's the same, though, because caseless ammo is about half as heavy. Cool, huh?
  
  The felinoids' detachable tube-mags hold 50 rounds, and, because they're copper-tungsten alloy, they weigh a lot, about a kilogram per mag, or twice what a 30-round STANAG mag weighs fully-loaded, and I don't mean caseless. However, their whole military wears powered armor, and it cancels out the weight; besides, even though they have reduced stamina relative to humans, when you're a 194 cm bipedal jaguar and weigh 117 kg, a mere 7 kg (six spare mags, just like the humans) isn't that much.
• So this one dude has a whole website devoted to how the Empire from Star Wars could defeat the Federation from Star Trek. That's contemptible on a number of levels, since not only is that a rather puerile, pathetic-nerd thing to make a website about but those are neither of them real science fiction.
  
  But also, dude, transporters. I don't care how many hojillion watts a Star Destroyer's lasers can output (much good might it do them against Federation ships that can do real-time FTL, not hyper-jumps), the Enterprise D has 20 transporter bays, each with six pads. Even assuming each only has the energy output necessary to transport 100 kg, that is still—since it is energy-matter conversion—1.0788×10²¹ Joules. The Death Star's main weapon, it's true, outputs 2.2×10³² Joules, but I've only taken the energy of the 20 transporters' 6 pads; this says nothing about the cargo transporters in the at-least-2 cargo bays, the transporters on the God-knows-how-many-shuttlecraft of the 3 shuttle bays, or the energy responsible for the aforementioned real-time-FTL. Which, remember, is at least the equivalent of .068 solar masses...or 1.78803908×10⁴⁷ Joules. I.e., the engines of each (warp-capable) shuttlecraft in the Federation must output 812,745,036,000,000 times as much energy as the Death Star's main weapon. Just hook up the shuttlecraft power systems to the phaser arrays and every Federation starship is like 813 trillion Death Stars, except (since the mothership still has its own warp drive) capable of realtime FTL, which renders every laser in the Empire completely worthless.
  
  And that is why we don't bother the grownups, brat, they wreck your little dreams.
• That .068 solar masses number comes from a paper by David Waite et al. that I read on Los Alamos' archive site. Its title? "Reduced Total Energy Requirements for a Modified Alcubierre Warp Drive Spacetime" (emphasis mine). Because the original Alcubierre warp equations called for more energy than exists in the universe.
  
  In my own books I assume that the Alcubierre metric is a good starting point, but they've found a way to do it with much lower energy requirement (on the order of high-level fusion), and rather than doing a real-time FTL distortion their system is a short-lived, much longer-range one. That is, a space-fold. FTL comms also use the space-fold, either sending a radio wave inside a small space-fold metric, or else sending tiny space-fold metrics as a wave-form (the human and felinoid/dromaeosauroid methods, respectively).
  
  Then again—because I'm a real science fiction writer, rather than sword-and-sorcery or action/soap opera set in a poor facsimile of space—my setting uses dedicated re-entry capsules or space-planes, nobody uses ion engines in atmosphere (because they don't work, did you know?), and they don't have "Twin Ion Engine" be a major type of craft designed for maneuverability (ion engines give shit acceleration, and that's what maneuverability is). My ships have tower floor-plans rather than naval ship, and nobody's stupid enough to put giant picture windows on them.
• On a cheerier note...well, on a less contentious note, apparently the higher the yield on a nuke, the cleaner it is, in terms of radiation. I wonder, however, if that's not "relative to their energy output", since every fusion bomb uses a fission bomb as a "pilot light". The other explanation I can think of is that the stronger the bomb, the more of the reaction's dangerous byproducts either get burned away, or react further into an inert form.
  
  Apparently, however, even low-yield nukes are, as explained here, inappropriate for actual use, even as bunker-penetrators. Apparently, in fact, using a nuke as a penetrator makes more fallout. Basically, until we get to space (where nukes are a lot less scary), there's no use for them except as a deterrent. Of course the fact is that nuclear retaliation is itself contrary to the principles involved in the law of war, but there is the interesting question of how one enforces laws of any kind against the sort of entity that would make a nuclear strike in the first place.
• Apparently nuclear and biological are considered a different class of WMD from chemical and radiological. I guess it makes sense—the former are capable of apocalyptic effects, wiping out whole civilizations, while the latter are just really, really nasty. Poisoning wells is bad, spreading plagues is worse.
  
  I was thinking, would a venomous species feel that way about chemical weapons? Leaving to one side that a venomous species is unlikely to develop sapience (evolution tends to be minimalist), I don't think it'd make a difference. Man is the builder of fire, that doesn't change the fact firebombing is rarely if ever permitted (though obviously capable of misuse, most of our incendiaries are primarily used as defoliants).