Lets be right-brained for a second and imagine a (fictionalized) future for warfare

Yeah the whole kinetic bombardment idea is interesting to me but even at a large scale it seems like the damage is mainly tactical.

I'm curious what sort of superweapons would resemble the rod of god but be capable of widespread devastation.

Also, I thought that treaty only outlawed nuclear weapons and that the rod of god was a theoretical "loophole" that specifically subverted that.

>Laser Defensive Aid Suites and Air Defences
I can see this happening and lasers becoming commonplace amongst the traditional ballistic weapon.
>Autonomous drone swarms
I like this idea and I keep seeing it brought up by people. Is there something I'm not clued in on? I wasn't aware of any push for this technology.
>Hypersonic Cruise missiles
I have no knowledge of this area. Care to elaborate?
>Jammers galore
This is where I'm more experienced. This is very real and pretty much in existence.
>Remote Radio Frequency Directed Energy
What exactly is this? I've heard of the term DEW but what does being "remote" have to do with it?

I just looked it up. You're right. You can't put weapons of any kind on the Moon, but the only thing banned in orbit are WMDs.

I'm trying to write a story where there's geopolitical turmoil because a nation decided to put some sort of weapon in space because of a situation like that. I like the rod of god idea but like I said earlier it seems too tactical and "small scale."

Should I use artistic license and just scale it up and claim it can destroy entire cities or are you aware of a better weapon that might work as a threat from orbit?

>right-brained

What did he mean by this?

If a weapon were capable of destroying a city it would be by definition and weapon of mass destruction and banned by the outer space treaty.

One possible loophole would be a system intended to push asteroids out of collision courses being used to do the exact opposite. Tunguska event in a populated area.

Humanoid robots. Near perfect coordination, reflexes, and precision. No need for food, water, shelter, sleep, training or pay. Anything humans can do--carrying loads, operating vehicles, repairing equipment--can be done autonomously. Human combat roles limited to decision making where tactics and use of force require management.

Just a figure of speech meaning to think creatively.

>If a weapon were capable of destroying a city it would be by definition and weapon of mass destruction and banned by the outer space treaty.

That's a good point but this would be in an entirely fictional world. If I were to do it I'd write it such they they end up building the weapon over time by sending up what look to be innocent parts to a space station before sending up one final large shipment that makes the whole thing an operational weapon.

However, I really like your asteroid idea. What sort of system would it be though? A networked series of drones that attach to the asteroid and use thrusters to alter the course?

Humanoid isn't really the optimal design for robots unless they're designed to interact with equipment and environments intended for humans. I mean we're a bunch of apes with bodies evolved for doing ape stuff; then we build swords and guns to work with our body plan. With a robot you can work in the opposite direction.

literally this. but i guess it's easiest to think about things that look like us or perform like us

> What sort of system would it be though?

There's several options which mostly fall into the categories of blasting it (nuclear or kinetic device) or strapping something like a solar sail, ion thruster, or conventional rocket engine to it.

My favorite system is laser ablation. You point a powerful laser at the asteroid. This isn't a scifi death-star type laser intended to blow it up. It just gets a tiny spot on the asteroid hot enough to turn ice into steam; thus providing some thrust to gradually change its orbit.

Laser ablation sounds neat in a vacuum but something like

>United States declares war on France for their misuse of the -laser ablation- asteroid deflector.

doesn't sound too menancing?

Think of words like "mustard gas" and "plutonium". They probably sounded as menacing as "ketchup gas" and "helium" to the general public before they were used in warfare.

The best science fiction is science fiction that becomes science fact.
1. NEW EYES. Hydrophones, microphones, seismogram, every high resolution camera, infrared, geodetic, radar, and so on all combined into one cross-referencing super system that models the whole thing together with advanced kriging and resolution techniques accidentally discovered by nerds trying to get more FPS in vidja
There's both an active and passive component. Much like the hydrophone net through the ocean, there is now an installed undersea radar net.
2. The new weapon. Artillery on a global scale. Kinetic energy delivery, shaped, bunker penetration. Very hard to see coming and impossible to stop.
3. How these two things come together- First strike disabling of nuclear in the warehouse, missile intercept net on delivery of nuclear.
4. Blindness and invisibility. Being blinded in relation is a certain uncertainty. Hidden technology which masks a thing is wholly uncertain. Prepare for the worst in retaliation.
5. Absorbing retaliation. Center of gravity and decentralization. Center of gravity of which all military efforts are coordinated around is focus fired and destroyed. The counter: decentralized operation. Structured into cells, coordinated by protocol into a wide-spanning leaderless network.
7. The battle of the NNEMP. Unironically its mystery is the same as the global artillery.
8. PUNISHMENT doctrine. disabling the will.

this thread is triggering my almonds.

to be fair the humanoid form is extremely adaptive so its not totally out of the realm of possibility we would construct robotic soldiers roughly in our image

Humanoids are great for moving around though. I guess you could just make flying units, but they'd have to be rather small if you wanted to fit into buildings, and you'd have to consider weight limits.

I want antimatter bombs to be a thing. Too bad we can't contain a lot of antimatter.

>drone the size of a mosquito flies in through an air vent
>lands on your neck and injects nanobots
>they attach to your cerebellum and cause it to send maximum pain nerve signals unless you obey instructions from nanobots that have attached to your auditory nerve
>you live as a slave in labor camps to serve an AI until it can no longer find an economical use for you, at which point you are ordered to walk into a bioprocessor to be liquified into goop

>implying the us doesn't have space weapons

>right-brained
brainlet detected

Not sure, once you go far enough it's basically only useful to have human ground troops as a backup layer, with robots doing all the heavy lifting.

If you move aiming to a helmet HUD system (with some sensor on the firearm), you kind of remove a lot of established methodology. Why shoulder and cheek-wield a firearm? Why not aim and hold it via mechanical means? You can't cheek-wield without the helmet being designed to allow it, but if you don't need to aim on a on-gun sight, would you really need to cheek-wield? Maybe a holster that fits onto the arm and helps hold the firearm in place when firing, would be more efficient and dynamic. Then moving from that, eventually replacing the entire concept of a human aiming and moving the weapon, to a mechanised process. Perhaps initially attached to the human but quickly superseced.

Then again, ground troops generally have a broad use-case and aren't really what you use for actual targets or specific goals. You'd use your specific hardware that you've designed. So perhaps human ground troops will stay only due to the fact that it is unnecessary to develop them to the extent of being deprecated.

I think when tech goes too far, you make human ground troops a liability, a weak link in the chain.

this, it would take ages to make a human-body replica robot. Due to the nature of our bodies, it would be almost as weak as we are too. Which is terrible, you can have a far simpler, faster, stronger, more robust robot for less development, less maintenance, less resources and less money.

We are not, we are weak and inefficient. Stop deluding yourselves, a humanoid robot is ridiculous and has no applications except for interacting with humans or human-designed equipment.

Weak sure, but that doesn't have much to do with being humanoid does it?

The tunguska event wasnt an asteroid. Note the lack of any sort of crater. It was either a low to the ground airburst nuke test or, less likely, Nikola Tesla weaponizing his giant tesla coil at wardencliff.

Has anyone else reached the conclusion that robotic warriors may never be more cost effective than human/life form warriors?

That's not to say robots don't have advantages in some areas but overall, if I gave you all of the money in the world and all the worlds labor pool, you could not (at least right now) create a robot that can do all the things humans do and better - see, feel, hear, touch, logic, reason, plan, learn, grow, heal, think, etc, etc.

Maybe bioloigical life forms are the superior technology.

A machine of death has no need to feel, logic or reason. Simply the fact that they can sustain much more damage than humans makes them superior for fighting.

>the concept of manned vehicles has become a meme
>everything is a drone that is controlled remotely
>neural mesh: network of electrodes permeating the brain that acts as the perfect brain-computer interface
>drone pilots are connected to their vehicles eve online-style and can control their vehicles and their weapon systems as if it were their own body

only pussies use technology, personally I will fight ww3 naked and with bare hands

Another good point.

I agree. I imagine you'd see a decline of the human-on-human combat that still somewhat persists today and most things become drone on drone or drone-on-human combat, sparking an arms race for specialized hardware for various tactical uses.

In a commercial setting for sci-fi though it may be interesting to maintain the human element or at least have it in a position where it still exists and is on its way out. What sort of technology might you see on the battlefield that is futuristic, but not so much that it risks eclipsing the human troops? Should I go down the route of advanced mechanized units such as improved tanks, troops transports, and aircraft?

Asimov writes about a fictional "anti-nucleics" which counter nukes to stop or slow movement at an atomic level to stop fission or fusion from creating a nuclear blast.

The technology is very expensive in the fictional story so only the powerful have them.

I beleive he talks about them in The Foundation series.

Frank Herbert the writer of Dune also had some interesting thoughts on sheilding but his sheilds were to stop projectiles and knives.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzman_effect

The 2 hemispheres of our brains are responsible for different tasks. There is a theory that people favor one side of their brain more than the other. The left is more scientific and analytical which most people on Veeky Forums most likely favor.

While right brained people are creative and intuitive.

livescience.com/32935-whats-the-difference-between-the-right-brain-and-left-brain.html

Or the brain nanobots can cause confusion when you think about something forbidden. When you think about the NSA spying on you, you suddenly become confused and forget what you were thinking about.

None of your pictures are practical for warfare. Treaded tanks won't fall over backwards after firing. Tanks are even impractical. We have airplanes and drones and the ability to drop munitions hundreds of miles from boats.

Will noone mention the casaba howitzer?

Armour is so good that projectiles don't do anything, the only way to do damage is blunt force trauma. All future combat is melee, and space battles are boarding battles.

I don't care if this doesn't make sense.

I've been looking into plasma weapons (think lightsabers) but they don't really seem viable considering they react with anything they touch. And if your enemy has one you're both fucked.

For sci-fi, though, it'd be entertaining enough and you can wave away the negative aspects.

Literally Weaponized Autism

If they can do that, why not do more?

>THAAT

WRONG!

Sexbots

>future for warfare

It's peace.