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  1. #1
    Henry X's Avatar Protector Domesticus
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    Default Military Science Fiction

    So I'm writing a science fiction novel, or trying at least and I'd like to do a little crowd-sourcing if my fellow poster here wouldn't mind.

    Essentially, what we are doing is just discussing is how warfare would be in the future. Will it still be highly mobile, large scale battles, as I believe it will be like (I'm talking about ground combat in a world where space combat is very likely).

    What is the current evolution of weapons? Will the bullpup design be the new normal? Will bullets still be the preferable method of bringing things down? What about rail guns?

    And while I'm on this, what about having practical walkers? And why are two main guns on a tank impractical?
    Last edited by Henry X; November 24, 2012 at 04:58 PM.
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  2. #2

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Generally I'd think if you have a battleship in orbit any large concentration of troops just begs for a kiloton warhead being dropped on their heads and the more mobile the warfare the less likely alot of troops actually engage before its over (aka headquarters, communication lines and similar being cut off)

    Anyway all depends on the time period in the future. Would you use walkers when you got hover tanks? Would you care about bullpup design when the weapon is integrated into power armor anyway thus negating human ergonomics to the question where and how to mount weapons to it?

    Assuming sufficient power supplies railguns would be the future since they can be scaled independant of chemical propellants aka while a bullet can only be accelerated based on the kind of explosives you can use as propellant it would be easier to transfer more energy to a railgun slug since there are no moving parts or the necessity to contain an explosion. It's all about getting all the energy from somewhere and have the rail charge fast enough to accelerate some kind of slug to the wanted velocities.

    Concerning main guns on tanks. Why would you want two squeezed in the space where you could have one better one? All depends on available tech though.
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  3. #3

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Mangalore View Post
    Generally I'd think if you have a battleship in orbit any large concentration of troops just begs for a kiloton warhead being dropped on their heads and the more mobile the warfare the less likely alot of troops actually engage before its over (aka headquarters, communication lines and similar being cut off)]
    If you've got a warship in orbit with a decent supercomputer you don't even need a warhead theoretically. You just need a huge rock, a material dense enough to survive re-entry mostly intact. Drop it on them. Avoids all the mess of a warhead, gives you the same results.
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  4. #4
    Henry X's Avatar Protector Domesticus
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    I was actually trying to figure out how one could realistically have ground combat when you could just drop warheads on them from orbit and the only conclusion I could come up with was an ethical one about making it a war crime to do such as it could cause some sort of unnecessary civilian or environmental damage. And there's always planetary shields.

    I've never really been fond of the idea of power armor. I like it in the sense that it protects you, but including the weapons in it just seems a little odd.

    See, you've reminded me about the idea of hover tanks. This is good. Creating a story is easy. Crafting a world is not.

    And with railguns, what I'm leaning towards is making them incredibly high-powered sniper rifles.
    Quote Originally Posted by Carl Jung was right View Post
    We just don't get films which accurately portray military decision making like Dr. Strangelove anymore these days.

  5. #5
    Aanker's Avatar Concordant
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    It's almost impossible to discern. There are so many variables and potential developments that could occur from the point in time where we are currently at into the future. General trends, I think, won't be of much help either. For most of the 18th-19th centuries, warfare was highly mobile and had turned so after the rise of cannonry that ended the dominance of castles (which resulted in the high prevalence of siege warfare in Medieval times). But when the technology outran the tactics, artillery became more powerful and the machinegun was realized to its full potential, we once again saw a rise in static warfare (mostly characterstic of World War I but I believe one particular writer on World War II described the later phases of the war as infantry equipped with AT weaponry sitting in trenches, defending against attacking tank formations).

    Another tricky question is that of ground fighting forces. Allow us to posit that there in this future exists a colony, run by mankind. It is under attack by another (human) force. Suppose that this attacking force has absolute dominance in space: it would have the unprecedented advantage of being able to bombard the colony at will, obliderating infrastructure and farms. The defender would perhaps be unwilling to accept the immense losses and surrender (provided that a colony cannot exist below ground to protect its vital structures), but we must also consider the fact that the attacker is in fact looking to actually gain something. A colony blasted to the point of being unrecognizable would serve little value and depending on the time and funding it takes to rebuild it, the endeavour would have been a net loss for the attacker, unless the purpose was actually to completely extinguish life on the enemy's world (but we can see that this is rarely the case in the real world). So perhaps ground forces would have some use in securing territory without causing total destruction.

    As far as open warfare goes, the argument of the nuclear weaponry being able to wipe out large congregations of enemies applies. Furthermore, why would you want open field battles? Territories on Earth arose not so much due to rational disposition of people as they did according to need. Some peoples acquired less than adequate territories for civilization while others happened to settle in bread baskets. On a world to be colonized it might be more interesting to settle in high-yield areas for maximum profit. The settlements might be fewer and concentrated to a few, specific areas, with a lot of vast, useless territory where no one would put soldiers.
    Last edited by Aanker; November 25, 2012 at 06:35 AM.

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  6. #6

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    I don't know... Making a realistic prediction of warfare centuries from now seems fruitless to me. Ultimately though, if technology has advanced so far that we have interplanetary warships, I don't think there's much room left for ground combat. even if orbital bombardment weren't an option, the battleships in orbit could simply drop tousands of drones into the atmosphere to destroy any significant targets.

    The only way I could theoretically reconcicle ground combat in such a setting would be for boarding actions against important ships, or capturing significant structures (HQs, research stations, ect...)

  7. #7

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Robots and drones will likely do most of the actual fighting.

    To keep the human element, you need a plot device that neutralizes this foreseeable trend, like large scale electronic warfare/hacking, Rules of War that prohibit certain technology or so on.
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  8. #8
    Sanguinary Guardian's Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Henry X View Post
    So I'm writing a science fiction novel, or trying at least and I'd like to do a little crowd-sourcing if my fellow poster here wouldn't mind.
    Nice idea friend, I too am trying to write something of the like.

    Quote Originally Posted by Henry X View Post
    Essentially, what we are doing is just discussing is how warfare would be in the future. Will it still be highly mobile, large scale battles, as I believe it will be like (I'm talking about ground combat in a world where space combat is very likely).
    I think it depends on the combat style of a said faction. I like to think that the infantry will be completely mechanized so that it can be mobile and support the armour elements of the army. Someone said that big concentrations of troops beg for orbital bombardment, yet if you putr boots on the ground, it means you want to capture this place. And if you want to capture it, you have to capture it relatively intact, so orbital bombardment can be a double-edged sword.

    Quote Originally Posted by Henry X View Post
    What is the current evolution of weapons? Will the bullpup design be the new normal? Will bullets still be the preferable method of bringing things down? What about rail guns?
    Bullpup design allows you to have an assault rifle in carbine size, at the cost of reach in melee. New weapon designs use both standard and bullpup designs (FN SCAR: standard configuration, FN F-2000: Bullpup). The new trend is the modular and flexible nature of weapons. FN SCAR-H for example can take both 7.62x51mm NATO caliber and the Russian 7.62x38mm caliber rounds simply by swapping the barrel. You can turn it into a carbine or a sniper rifle again by simply changing the barrel and putting on the appropriate attachments. I think that such flexibility in weaponry will become the norm in the future as it vastly reduces the expenses of developing many different weapons. Bullets will be the preferable method of killing unless something more efficient, deadly and cheap is introduced. I know that using bullets in the future sounds a bit archaic, but if it works, why fix it?
    Railguns I use them as AT weapons (Tiberium Wars style), though I'd like opinions on that as well.

    Quote Originally Posted by Henry X View Post
    And while I'm on this, what about having practical walkers? And why are two main guns on a tank impractical?
    Walkers literally beg to be shot in the legs or to be taken out by air. However, if you make a walker small (aka 5-6 metres tall), fast, heavily armed and well protected, I think it can be viable. Just, don't give it four legs.
    Two main guns on an MBT's turret is impractical, because modern day MBTs like the M1A2 Abrams or the Leo2A6HEL can take out anything in one shot. In simple words, overkill. Moreover, two 120mm guns need more space, thus making the turret bigger and the MBT as a whole, a larger target.




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  9. #9

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Well, why are we assuming all planets will be united? I'm sure there is room for war between different states on one planet. Also, while extra-planetary invaders may have the capacity to just bombard the planet to destruction, they may not want to. They may have objectives that are not compatible with that.

    Btw there are far more habitable objects that aren't planets than there are planets. Perhaps in future our solar system willl have four Earth-like planets: A terraformed Venus, Earth, a Mars increased in mass with mercury, the asteroid belt and every other inner solar system object, and a fourth similar planet made out of the combined moons of the gas giants. This could be the developed world. There are literally trillions of rocky objects in our solar system people could colonize. These could be the home of alternative non-mainstream views (like the new world was) that people flee to if they don't like the developed world of the 4 planets. They could perhaps be the home of terrorists.

  10. #10

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by irelandeb View Post
    Well, why are we assuming all planets will be united? I'm sure there is room for war between different states on one planet. Also, while extra-planetary invaders may have the capacity to just bombard the planet to destruction, they may not want to. They may have objectives that are not compatible with that.
    Well, the general, fairly logical assumption, is that if the sci fi world is large scale enough to warrant a multi-world political landscape, the world might have its internal politics, but will present an external face to the rest. Mostly due to dealing with the possibility of things like planetary invaders.
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  11. #11

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidin View Post
    Well, the general, fairly logical assumption, is that if the sci fi world is large scale enough to warrant a multi-world political landscape, the world might have its internal politics, but will present an external face to the rest. Mostly due to dealing with the possibility of things like planetary invaders.
    It's also a logical assumption humans should abandon their differences and live for each other, a brotherhood of man. We haven't abandoned our baser evolutionary instincts yet, and while we live in these bodies we will not.

  12. #12

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by irelandeb View Post
    It's also a logical assumption humans should abandon their differences and live for each other, a brotherhood of man. We haven't abandoned our baser evolutionary instincts yet, and while we live in these bodies we will not.
    That's...pretty irrelevant. For all I care the world can be five hundred years in the future, and the "nations" can basically be Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. Everyone's human, everyone's "earth origin", perse, as far as species goes, but all three places will still have their own internal politics. The sheer distances will mean they're all separate nations, but at the same time with their own outrageously unique internal politics. They'll want to present a united front to the other two. And that's only assuming your FTL isn't fast enough to make the other star systems a relevant setting. You do that and suddenly you're going beyond planet and continent. You're moving into united system territory. It's sort of an analogue to the 16th century colonization, just insanely scaled up from the ships. You have a fast enough FTL, you've got to watch your politics among the humans alone, forget whatever intelligent extra-terrestrial life you insert into the landscape. Nevermind the military machines you start having any one of these nations start throwing around. That's another bag of beans on its own.
    One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
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    Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

  13. #13

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidin View Post
    That's...pretty irrelevant. For all I care the world can be five hundred years in the future, and the "nations" can basically be Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. Everyone's human, everyone's "earth origin", perse, as far as species goes, but all three places will still have their own internal politics. The sheer distances will mean they're all separate nations, but at the same time with their own outrageously unique internal politics. They'll want to present a united front to the other two. And that's only assuming your FTL isn't fast enough to make the other star systems a relevant setting. You do that and suddenly you're going beyond planet and continent. You're moving into united system territory. It's sort of an analogue to the 16th century colonization, just insanely scaled up from the ships. You have a fast enough FTL, you've got to watch your politics among the humans alone, forget whatever intelligent extra-terrestrial life you insert into the landscape. Nevermind the military machines you start having any one of these nations start throwing around. That's another bag of beans on its own.
    I think you misunderstood. I was sarcastically dismissing the idea that one can predict how national politics will work in the future we are discussing.

  14. #14
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Henry X View Post
    So I'm writing a science fiction novel, or trying at least and I'd like to do a little crowd-sourcing if my fellow poster here wouldn't mind.

    Essentially, what we are doing is just discussing is how warfare would be in the future. Will it still be highly mobile, large scale battles, as I believe it will be like (I'm talking about ground combat in a world where space combat is very likely).

    What is the current evolution of weapons? Will the bullpup design be the new normal? Will bullets still be the preferable method of bringing things down? What about rail guns?

    And while I'm on this, what about having practical walkers? And why are two main guns on a tank impractical?
    Given the current cost of high-tech weapons and trainned personnels, I don't think large scale battles which both side exchange fire and take heavy casualty will ever happen again, except WW3.

    We're more likely to see AI-controlled cockroach and spiders killing random people without trace than super SMG or giant robot soldiers etc.

  15. #15

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Considering how big the advantage of air superiority is today, I think wars between nations in the future will be in large part influenced by what goes on in space. it is the ultimate high ground after all. Also, who's to say that all orbital strikes would be massively devastating? I think it would be very much precision based, maximising destruction on a very focused area, with potential of greater destruction is necessary.

  16. #16
    Sanguinary Guardian's Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Loger View Post
    Considering how big the advantage of air superiority is today, I think wars between nations in the future will be in large part influenced by what goes on in space. it is the ultimate high ground after all. Also, who's to say that all orbital strikes would be massively devastating? I think it would be very much precision based, maximising destruction on a very focused area, with potential of greater destruction is necessary.
    Without being a physics expert, I believe that the kinetic energy required to drop such a shell, no matter its guidance system would make it like a small meteorite. Besides, if the enemy concentrates their troops in a city, you don't usually drop such munitions in there, unless collateral damage is none of your concern, in which case you can just nuke the place.




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  17. #17

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Sanguinary Guardian View Post
    Without being a physics expert, I believe that the kinetic energy required to drop such a shell, no matter its guidance system would make it like a small meteorite. Besides, if the enemy concentrates their troops in a city, you don't usually drop such munitions in there, unless collateral damage is none of your concern, in which case you can just nuke the place.
    you could just melt the place with a high powered laser, or a plasma bolt.

    Alternatively, the spaceship could deploy a few dozen aerial bombardment platforms at a high altitude inside of the atmosphere, which could drop munitions from there.

    As for bombarding targets within a city, I imagine it being much like Israel's recent bombardment of Gaza.
    Last edited by Loger; November 25, 2012 at 02:21 PM.

  18. #18
    Sanguinary Guardian's Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Loger View Post
    you could just melt the place with a high powered laser, or a plasma bolt.
    High-powered laser would require a huge reactor. Plasma is actually ionized gas which becomes less effective as the range increases.

    Quote Originally Posted by Loger View Post
    Alternatively, the spaceship could deploy a few dozen aerial bombardment platforms at a high altitude inside of the atmosphere, which could drop munitions from there.
    Which would be excellent targets for AA defenses and fighters. And that also creates a need for big ships to house these platforms.

    Quote Originally Posted by Loger View Post
    As for bombarding targets within a city, I imagine it being much like Israel's recent bombardment of Gaza.
    So, collateral damage is no primary concern.

    @Gaidin: It all depends on the doctrine. Still, a half-destroyed city is better than a completely razed one.

    Bottomline is, that if you want to capture and control, you need boots on the ground, no matter what.
    Last edited by Sanguinary Guardian; November 25, 2012 at 02:49 PM.




    H ΕΛΛΑΔΑ κι ο ΕΛΛΗΝΙΣΜΟΣ είναι αξίες ιερότερες από οποιαδήποτε ειρήνη!

    Despite all we have lost so far, our fire still burns...

  19. #19

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Sanguinary Guardian View Post
    @Gaidin: It all depends on the doctrine. Still, a half-destroyed city is better than a completely razed one.

    Bottomline is, that if you want to capture and control, you need boots on the ground, no matter what.
    Of course. I'm just saying, your doctrine for choice between Nuke and Huge Rock when picking what to drop on the city and other regions will determine what you actually want to do with the planet in the long run. The rebuild time is somewhat moot as taking over a planet is a helluva long haul project anyway. If you don't want to spend fifty years on recovery at the absolute minimum, you need to be in a different field, if you see what I mean.
    One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
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    Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

  20. #20

    Default Re: Military Science Fiction

    Quote Originally Posted by Sanguinary Guardian View Post
    High-powered laser would require a huge reactor. Plasma is actually ionized gas which becomes less effective as the range increases.

    Which would be excellent targets for AA defenses and fighters.And the need for big ships to house these platforms.

    So, collateral damage is no primary concern.
    Assuming this is some distant sci-fi scenario, I think sufficient energy could be produced for a powerful laser.

    as for AA and fighters taking drone platforms, it would depend on who gets the first strike, I suppose. Perhaps the orbiting mothership will be able to protect the platforms by destroying incomming AA missiles, and crippling or destroying any incomming fighters. On the other hand if the groundbased defence platforms were also lasers the situation would become a lot nastier, as they would theoretically also be able to damage orbiting spaceships.

    Lots of interesting things you could do in a setting like this, though, that's for sure.

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