Take a setting like Cyberpunk 2020, Ghosts in the Shell, Deus Ex, netrunner, etc.
>how does warfare work on such settings?
>what military trends that actually exist now would be more favored then?
>which ones would fall down the wayside?
>would such settings even go to war when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
>what kinds of weapons would you see?
But OP, the whole focus of cyberpunk is that corporations become so strong that they supplant nation states as the prime denomination of sovereignty.
Governments are weak and ineffectual.
As such, wars don't really happen. It's sabotage and espionage in order to destroy profits.
>would such settings even go to war when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
yes because taking and holding territory is still an thing and transmitting minds and rebuilding bodies takes energy and material which are limited and can be destroyed by enemy action
but even corporations/estates would want resources that might be rare in their immediate area but abundant in areas belonging to other corporations, what happens when 2 equally strong corporations go head to head with each other.
War probably wouldn't look much different than it does now, save with even more use of remote technologies like drones and killbots.
A major theme in cyberpunk is national boundaries get blurred and security threats come from independent groups rather than governments. Which is basically exactly what we've been dealing with for the past twenty years.
There's a good chance though the strongest military powers--corporation or government--would have large and varied militarizes for the purpose of fighting and winning any kind of war. Because "plan for everything" is generally a sound military strategy if you have the money for it.
Massive numbers of mercenaries and independent contractors die in a variety of new and interesting ways.
what happens when that setting expands throughout a whole solar system?
Independent contractors, terrorist bombings, false flag attacks.
I think you should check out Infinity. The game setting is basically exactly what you're looking for. Large scale warfare is less common, with most conflicts being a series of deniable ops, often done while the public conflict resolution is happening at a negotiation table.
Ghost in the Shell was mostly proxy wars in the parts of the world that don't do the whole cyborg thing.
So small squads, high degree of competency amongst its members, operating on at least a modicum of secrecy. Armament depending on the situation.
>how does warfare work on such settings?
>what military trends that actually exist now would be more favored then?
Drones, cyberwarfare, fake news, highly mobile strike-forces, spec-ops type operations
>which ones would fall down the wayside?
Conscription will completely disappear. Large military conflicts will remain very rare.
>would such settings even go to war when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
With dwindling resources, definitely yes. You'll always need oil, rare earths, uranium, water and land to grow stuff.
>what kinds of weapons would you see?
We have more or less reached the maximum of what firearms can do. Improving them will be almost impossible. New weapons should appear - stuff like man-portable railguns, smartguns with intelligent ammunition, power armors, combat drugs to fight sleep deprivation and stress, more remotely controlled or intelligent drones, maybe lasers, EMP weapons to take out electronic stuff, personal ECM systems, and of course classic firearms with modern optics.
Advances in sensors and weapons imply large conventional forcs and direct fire weapons are not as common as before. Local air defense to stop missile raids and drone swarms is probably very common - every infantry company or tank platoon probably has an AA laser and box of AA missiles attached so they don't get wiped out the first time an artillery spotter sees them.
Infiltration and stand-off missile strikes are the main two tactics, short of total automated drone/nuclear war. Obviously the latter is hard to pass off in a proxy, and the former is very risky.
So PC groups, small commando groups, spies, hacking all have a good place.
Weapons...smart explosives of every kind, reduced down from the anti-tank size to anti-human. Smart cluster bombs, smart mini-grenades, etc.
Not him, but I think it would depend on who is fronting the money and human capital for the expansion.
If its still nation states, you would have large portions dedicated to that nation, flotillas of colonies that are close together but separated by a good margin from any others allied with another nation. This would obviously decrease the typical cyberpunk blurring nation states thing, but at this point it isn't really cyberpunk anymore. They'd be armed, but unless one nations is significantly more advanced in tech than another, resources are plentiful enough that you don't really need to go to war.
If you have megacorps doing the expansion then you likely have a similar situation to above, but allied to the corp. This scenario, as I see it, has a lot more interaction, in the form of corporate espionage and outright, but small scale, conflict.
Both scenarios probably have independent colonies. Older independents would be private colonies for the rich and aimless, newer ones might be small communes since the tech to build them, and the resources for them, are now plentiful.
A good example of this is with example, let's jump to shadowrun.
Shadowrunners are easily denyable assets that operate through a network of "Johnson"s, so if anyone starts to climb the Web they can always "cut" a link and just reestablish with a different team or the same one.
I was sent with my team for a "burner" job, a MegaCorp who didn't name itself was in the middle of trying to absorb a lesser company, the catch is they raised their price, and it was our job to lower it without actually damaging company property.
We sniped tires off of moving supply trucks
We burnt the last fifteen years of transactions after making a copy of everything and sending it to our employer.
We leaked juicy stories of affairs and cheating about the chairs to news outlets.
By the time we were done the stocks prices had dropped by 15% below the original asking price.
In conclusion, everything is a shadow war that only has one rule, everything has a price.
without going too sci fi, let's assume someone got useful graphene out of the lab and somebody else invented room temperature super conductors as good as the ones today, what kind of weapons would you see happening.
They are weakened by the conflict and get OPA'd by other corps.
>They'd be armed
Reminder there is a long-standing international treaty which states sending weapons into space is illegal. Meaning if governments run the show in this setting, then either they're covertly ignoring this, openly ignoring it and opening themselves up to sanctions, or something happened which threw this treaty out the window in its entirety.
All three are totally plausible, but it's fun coming up with the reasons.
So basically a Cyberpunk setting couldn't exist once you start expanding to a local system?
what happens if thou really start growing in it and, you got something like 50 trillion people living in the solar system and Corporations (along with nation/estates) were the ones that started it and try to keep a tight grip on it?
Graphene is bretty good for armor, and of course structural material in general, plus minor energy storage improvements.
A superconducting ring OTOH is the holy grail of energy storage, only limited by the strength of the material keeping it from flying apart.
So gauss/rail guns at the personal scale would be practical, and planes powered by scon rings could probably fly 20x longer than if using the same mass of jet fuel.
Graphene also justifies the invention of the Gauss guns as a replacement for chemical firearms, since it could improve armor enough to stop the standard old guns easily.
Extensive extra-planetory habitation isn't really associated with cyberpunk, even if you can explore similar themes.
At that point it kind of just becomes regular science fiction. Cyberpunk implies near future set on Earth and maybe a couple off-world colonies on the Moon and Mars.
I don't think you quite understand exactly how much power the typical megacorp has, if they move, stop trading, or anything it will send ripples though your economy. Besides they already have some of the best gear imaginable, instead of selling to your blackops they supply their own. In order to be a megacorp they are basically a sizeable superpower with nearly unlimited capital and all of the fancy R&D toys.
They can basically do whatever they damn well please.
Did you think them solving the Implant rejection problem didn't involve ANY human experiments?
>we
>everyone is murrican
I'm not the guy you responded to (I'm just OP) but the way I see this happening is that with the advent of anti-satellite weapons (missiles) the powers that be and the corporations that back them decided to start deploying anti-missile systems to outer space, which in turn created a bit of an arm races, until they started to deploy lasers at which point they just did away with the treaty.
The problem is you just have so much SPACE. There is enough space for every planet in our solar system between us and the moon, yes that includes jupiter and saturn (though not its rings). You could feasibly fit thousands of Oneil Cylinders in that space, and we haven't even gone past the moon to orbit the sun yet. Resources are your only consideration and you have the raw minerals for that just in the asteroid belt, more if you consider cracking some small moons.
And as the expansion gets more robust, the easier it is for a random group of shmucks to build their own colony somewhere, away from corporate influence, with blackjack and hookers.
You can easily play the cyberpunk completely straight if you keep it to an individual colony. It 100% works, since chances are intercolony travel will be fairly expensive, and even moreso if your corporate overlords are keeping their loyal workforce under check. If might even work as a small flotilla. But if you take the solar system as a whole, it seems to me it will break down the tropes we usually recognize as cyberpunk.
Ok so let's go with that then.
>everyone is murrican
Only those of us who matter.
Proxy wars utilizing small to mid-sized groups of private mercenaries discretely employed by multinational corporations. Drone strikes. Sabotage. Terrorist attacks.
In most cyberpunk settings, governments have lost the money and influence to wage large scale warfare. Multinational corporations have stepped in but, for the most part, maintaining large armies is not great for quarterly earnings.
>cyberpunk with space and war (and a Tzeentchian demon prince wannabe)
Has anyone else read the Autumn Rain books?
>We have more or less reached the maximum of what firearms can do
Nope. Not even close. Tracking rounds. Flechette ammo, smart guns, target locking, miniature rocket ammo, and on and on...
are they good? I was very pleased the last time I took a recommendation for a book in Veeky Forums
Then it kind of looks like Hardwired by Walter John Williams, with orbital corps having all the power because they can send asteroids down the gravity well
The final plot device is a bit of a let down, but overall they're a very good read.
We have off world colonies in the Expanse and Blade Runner
what tropes would be essential for a Cyberpunk setting anyways?
Blade Runner is really only cyberpunk in the barest sense of the word. The only thing it really contributed to the genre was the visuals and the existence of mega-corps. Most things you associate with cyberpunk--AIs with 10,000+ IQs, data hacking, gang wars, psycho-sexual drug trips--are absent from it.
>The Expanse
Haven't watched it yet, but it looks kind of cyberpunk-y I guess. Honestly it reminds me more of those old Privateer games than anything else.
Another question is could super soldiers even exist in this setting?, and could you do a military inside a cyberpunk setting or story?
Why would super soldiers and militarie not exist?
Social friction between an elite and the lower rungs of society is essential. Otherwise you lose your -punk. Elites are usually megacorps, but there are other stand ins, like government bureaucrats.
I'd argue the ability of said lower rungs to strike back with relative ease is also essential. Relative, meaning that the means of doing so are available fairly widely, but the knowhow or courage to do so isn't.
The often quoted High tech, low life, dichotomy cements the atmosphere. Low life usually meaning high crime rates, gangs activity, but also brutal crackdowns from the authorities.
Then you have some techy trappings, that may not be essential as a group, usually have at least a few present. Things like cyborg bodies/brains, automation and robotics being nearly omnipresent, a high degree of automated surveillance, advanced AI, networked tech and the ability to hack it to name a few.
If you have the ability to just move to a colony that is your idea of a utopia, then some of those essentials won't be present.
I mean I'm just wondering, if thou could have something like it, a military science fiction story, that's in a very cyberpunk setting.
>a military science fiction story, that's in a very cyberpunk setting.
Absolutely.
Cyberpunk is honestly a perfect venue for a "modern" Tom Clancy style story. Honestly a great way to use genre fiction as a vehicle for exploring modern themes around the War on Terror and global politics.
That said I haven't read a story like that yet except I guess the first Nexus book. But it's more to do with law enforcement and espionage than killing cyber-enhanced sandniggers.
I mean the way I imagine it coming allot would be that the Corporations would crack down on such environments because they consider people either resources or a market and they would not want to lose either.
Ghost in the Shell is an obvious one. They are technically police, but when your police have mini spidertanks you might as well be military, and most are former military anyway.
Super soldiers, sure. I don't know if you'd want your players playing as one though. Kinda defeats the "underdog" thing. Though you could play it up.
>I've got another 10 years payments due on this body
>Have to work long hours of patrols just to keep up the maintenance, all guaranteed by SmileTech tm.
>Have to get full authorization to activate anything besides human standard abilities from a reliable SmileTech (tm) Security Specialist
>This usually takes about an hour, but could be up to 14 days. We're sorry for the inconvenience, have a Smiley Day (tm)
>Nevermind that you were crippled in a warehouse accident AT SmileTech and the fine print of the workers agreement allowed them to outfit you with an experimental cyborg body, which you'll need to pay for of course, they did save your life after all.
Like I said earlier if you limit your view to just a few colonies it works. But there will always be people able to wriggle out from under corp influence.
Realistically, a corp couldn't just glass competing colonies, because this would easily be mutually assured destruction in the same way as realistic space combat is more akin to submarine combat on steroids. If you shoot a competing colony, they'll know, and they'll have plenty of time to shoot back at your giant glittering colony.
You could think of a few explanations as to why these other colonies wouldn't come up, or why you couldn't just move to them though. I think I said somewhere that once someone is on a megacorp colony, they probably aren't leaving unless they have massive capital and aren't wanted. You could also say that the tech for building colonies is proprietary and closely guarded, in which case that is a great plot hook.
I still think that it would be very hard to keep humanity so closely under thumb though. Eventually you'll have a very wide variety of living spaces and cultures spread out across the solar system.
>Kinda defeats the "underdog" thing
I mean, not really. And there's far more to cyberpunk than just "skeevy lowlife vs. jackboot".
I'm thinking less attacking competing colonies and more like sending that hippie colony down the nearest gravity well, so only Corporations would be allowed to establish their habitats or colonies and anybody else gets another asteroid sent their way, or gets sent down to down a gravity well.
I'm thinking less about having them be a playable class and more about being a boss encounter which they have hopefully heavily prepared beforehand.
>how does warfare work on such settings?
Probably a lot like modern warfare with more droids and political bullshit.
>what military trends that actually exist now would be more favored then?
Drones, drones everywhere, and hacking to disable said drones, and soldiers to recover destroyed drones and do house to house searches.
>which ones would fall down the wayside?
Large military formations fighting other large military formations. Even today most nations use the brigade as the core of their army as opposed to the division. Smaller units tend to be more strategically flexible allowing you to move say 5,000 soldiers across the world in a week as opposed to 20,000 in a month, or 100,000 in two months.
>would such settings even go to war when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
Probably not between developed nations but the reasoning is more about more to lose less to gain, but as long as backwards shitholes exist to act as the playgrounds of superpowes than wars shall continue in some form.
>what kinds of weapons would you see?
This is a lot more speculative because modern warfare isn't actually moving towards cyberpunk in this regard. Cyberpunk weapons are oftentimes fairly advanced, at least for corporations and presumably the military. The thing is that modern militaries are using very old equipment, the vast majority of pilots and tank crewmen are young enough that their fathers could have flown or driven the same machine, all assault rifles are essentially the same weapons that have been used since the 1950s just with different layouts and mechanisms. However since cyberpunk tends to be about more advanced technology one could easily look at cold war technological developments and apply them to modern warfare.
>Stealth everything (stealth tanks, stealth planes, stealth helicopters)
>Caseless ammunition, multipurpose weapons (look up the OICW)
>All aircraft are either stealth or go really fucking fast
Flechettes weapons are a retarded concept that got abandoned by the USA in the early 1990s. Smart ammo (micro missiles and stuff like that) will be too expensive and is useless for grunts - for vehicles, small AA missiles are already developped by the UK. Smart weapons are useless in most cases as you rarely see the target long time enough to aim (exception: snipers and marksmen). Better ammo could be made, but would require to ditch The Hague Convention first.
They are not police and military but something inbetween. They work directly for the Ministry of Interior and as such are something like Russian MVD Vityaz or the French DGSI.
>Smart ammo (micro missiles and stuff like that) will be too expensive and is useless for grunts
Grunts are one of the least efficient ways of deploying force, small, well equipped expensive teams are vastly preferred over big hoards of grunts that are cheap to equip
In a general thread sense, the Android universe has a few big conflicts and interplanetary war, even as megacorps dominate (though the US government is still a very powerful force)
On the other end of the scale there's Hardwired, where military force is totally corp based, but are also totally extraplanetary (orbital dominance being often mentioned, because it's easy to throw weaponry down a gravity well)
>When corporations reign supreme, wars dont really happen
>What is the East India Company
that's what I'm thinking that even if we expand through the solar system sufficiently powerful companies will go West and East India company to be able to keep growing and keep profiting
Well the different East/West India companies of different nations didnt go to war to eachother as much, however they did go to war with the local populace of the colonies
So I doubt that when we have the Solar East Mars Company, they will go to war much
If humanity, and with that the megacorporations are confined to earth, I assume that war will still be something that happens a lot
The corp's fuck over eachother covertly, and fuck over poor people on the other side of the globe openly
But if, like earlier said, you have megacorporations that colonize the solar system, you'd almost only have colonies belonging to the corporations.
Maybe if there would be some independent colonies on very lucrative locations it would be possible to see the East India Company style wars
>Maybe if there would be some independent colonies on very lucrative locations it would be possible to see the East India Company style wars
Well that's what I'm imagining, for example corporations competing for land claims in Asteroid belt thanks to the large resources there, or trying to muscle in the claims of each other in the rings of Saturn.
Reminder the Asteroid Belt is fucking huge and you can easily find large asteroids whose nearest neighbors are thousands of miles away.
If there's gonna be any resource competition in the Solar System, it's gonna happen on the terrestrial planets and Jupiter's Gallilean satellites.
What about Titan though?
Also, most of the asteroids are very small, and would be hard to build bases upon them
You have Ceres, and surely a few others of at least some okay size, but most are only a few kilometers across
How would want to build a base on such a small object?
Or orbit around them?
>Grunts are one of the least efficient ways of deploying force, small, well equipped expensive teams are vastly preferred over big hoards of grunts that are cheap to equip
>Muh special forces meme
The most effective way of deploying force is through significant numbers of tanks, aircraft, infantry, and artillery. Every major war has been won through the usage of large formations of soldiers with special forces providing a relatively minor role in the eventual outcome. The NKVD weren't the guys who broke the back of the German army during Operation Bagration, it was a force of 3 million men thousands of tanks, and tens of thousands of big guns.
user, micro missiles like this one are out of the prototype stage. Slightly larger kamikaze drones like Switchblade have been used since the late 00s.
Expanse isn't cyberpunk
No, it's nukes. Nukes ward off conventional war; and in cyberpunk, corporate maneuvers probably discourage it further.
So if you are only going to use small groups, it's wasteful not to give them the best gear and training.
So military Sci fi couldn't be fine ibuprofen a Cyberpunk setting?
>So military Sci fi couldn't be fine ibuprofen a Cyberpunk setting?
what?
>when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
Those are transhumanist settings, not cyberpunk.
And even if millions could "upload themselves" to somewhere, that somewhere could be deleted. Genocide with a command line.
Then you smash some together until you have a big enough ball for your purposes.
There's even a neat concept, where you take a mostly metal asteroid, drill a hole through the center and fill it with water, then weld it shut. After that you heat it up with a solar mirror, the metal softens and the water in the middle expands, creating a metal sphere.
Not the most practical idea, but if people are in space enough then pretty much every idea is going to be tried.
shit, I blame autocorrect, it should read:
So military Sci-fi stories couldn't be made in a Cyberpunk setting?
Not him, but:
>What is Ghost in the Shell?
It would largely be SpecOps, Counter-Terrorism, or Police Actions, not a full-blown World War type of scenario.
Quantum cryptography is what will win or lose future wars.
how so?
Big all out war stories?
Not really.
Plenty of other military stuff can though
You could do something like SLA Industries does, with entire planets designated War Worlds for the three main corporations to duke it out on.
That sounds more than a little stupid, but I don't know the setting
It's less stupid when you consider that SLA Industries owns at least 90% of the known universe. They class planets as residential, manufacturing, strip-mining, leaving alone (such as certain alien homeworlds), and inter-corporation brawl sites.
Ah, not very cyberpunk then
I said drones would be used. What probably won't are small antipersonal missiles.
Nah. In-universe cybernetic implants were a thing ten years ago, but bio-engineering rapidly surpassed it so now there's an area way down in the slums of their capital world, Mort, that's called Rust Alley because of all the beggars with implants that have run out of power down there.
It's really more of a bio-punk setting, but does the rounds in that 'cyberpunk systems' image a lot.
>nations
>caring about international law
You're a funny guy user, real funny.
Interesting fact: gas warfare was already illegal at the start of World War 1, they just didn't care.
>how does warfare work on such settings?
Mostly skirmishes consisted of surgical strikes and assymetrical warfare.
>what military trends that actually exist now would be more favored then?
Stealth vehicles, combat drones, quadrepedal vehicles ala Tachicomas and LS3, Future Soldier program, heavy use of cyber warfare and powered exoskeletons. Also, when situation escalates, precise use of BVR combat.
>which ones would fall down the wayside?
Conscriptions, since the use of combat drones, proxy warfare, exoskeletons and BVR combat will reduce the needs of mass combat tactics.
>would such settings even go to war when a significant part of your population can download themselves in a new body?
Yes, social feud are always an integral part off humanity, and the means of upload and reupload will leads too "ressurection" program, then the morality of combat will be shifted.
>what kinds of weapons would you see?
Drones of various type and roles, lethal beam weaponry like lasers and plasma, coil weaponry, , some ressurected old weaponry and maybe some not-so-wonder-again equipments like portable force field that can be used as non-lethal weapons.
bump