Elydo

I somehow don't think it's a coincidence that just after the revelations about the extent of electronic surveillance undertaken by US agencies come to light, the Russian government has bought more than a few typewriters.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

I think they would as long as Sandy Mitchell keeps writing them, even if some purists don't like humour in their Grimdark (Grimdark!). The Cain series is one of the most popular ones, I believe. The great thing about the Cain books though, at least in my opinion, is not only has Mitchell managed to subvert the whole nature of the 40k setting, he's done with the highest consistency and adherence to the lore of any of the authors. No anti-gravitic skimmers falling off fucking bridges here.

My response was more directed to StellarRat, who was postulating fully autonomous robotic systems. You mistake the obvious outcomes of a course of action being the asme as people actually seeing those outcomes and/or beleiving any such thing would actually happen. And regarding Pearl Harbour specifically, the target itself was a surprise even after it became obvious to the Americans that the Japanese were planning something (months after they'd started) because the atoll was deemed too shallow for torpedo bomber attack, and any other form could be detected and countered. Plus the US at large refused to believe the more... outlandish stories about Imperial Japanese fervour.

Heh, the nuclear bombing of Japan is a very long discussion that is invariably more complicated than most people think. It was a significant part of my Masters in War Studies. And I'm not certain having it such a discussion would be useful, but I'll see if there's any cry for it. I would say that humans desensitise to horror pretty quickly, or else they break and become unable to function. Humans are also vengeful, and Pearl Harbour was seen as a betrayal of the highest order, on multiple levels. The further stories of atrocities from the Pacific theater and the unrestrained propaganda of the age all led to an american public that saw the Japanese as as subhuman as the Japanese saw everyone else. Dehumanising those you fight on a grand scale is often an unavoidable consequence of war, as diminishing the 'other' is an inherent part of most humans psychology. It frees us from being crippled by empathy. If we ever do develop free thinking AGIs, I'm of the opinion that they should be treated as individuals with the same legal standing as humans. So press-ganging them into any role, let along that of combat tools, would be slavery of the highest order and morally unconscionable. I wouldn't expect most people to even think about it. At least science fiction tries to ask these questions before we need the answers. And the people in the field are aware of the issue at least.

I'm sure we'll see greater autonomy of mobile weapons and robotic platforms, yes, but they're not going to fully replace infantry. Public opinion would be against that, just look at the discomfort with drone strikes, a tactic developed to reduce the risk to human pilots or soldiers that would otherwise have to do the strike (and cost of deployment of significantly more assets and higher operational visibility, true). A feeling that in part really boils down to 'unfairness' and 'cowardice'. Plus films like Terminator really have put a fear of autonomous weapons deeply set in the greater consciousness of humankind. Irrational or not. Plus I'll refer you to the Mobile Infantry. Humans are simply better at the unpredictable nature of life than any AI we've developed. Look at the space program, where we do send robots to explore and investigate, and they do good work. But no-one suggests an onsite human wouldn't be able to be much more efficient and adaptable. It's just getting humans onsite is far more... well, let's say difficult. Robots work best as force multipliers, not replacements. Not to say we won't see efforts made to use them as such, I just don't think they'll be successful. Another series that explores this topic (IMO) is Keith Laumers Bolos. I wonder what it says about me that I can relate to a Bolo far more than any human I've ever met? Edit: Because any excuse to link to TvTropes and ruin all your lives. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RockBeatsLaser

If not to Heinlein's level. I'm sure someone will mod the Colossus or its ilk back in at some point. And then we'll get 'Sleezy to make it look incredible.

I am really looking forward to the book that will cover the Battle of the Webway. I made damn sure at last years weekender to find out if they were doing one (otherwise I was going to pitch it myself, heh. I'm sure that would have been successful) but they've already planned for it. I think they had an author in mind as well, but I'm not certain. Everything is subject to change regardless, but next time I see the BL guys I will again pester them.

You guys failed to mention "Hurl wellness at your injured comrade with an overhand motion"

Much like the T80 as a deployable vehicle that was in the early design docs. : D

Heh, yeah, the timescales involved in the research are... optimistic. Not least due to the idea that more scientists = faster results.

With no objective statement on how advanced the technology in question is there's no way of knowing if reverse engineering it would be possible or not. Give an AK-47 to a Bronze Age human and they'd likely use it as a club. Give it to someone from the 18th Century and I'd expect them to recognise the principles involved, though they might not be able to replicate the technology. Give it to someone from the 19th Century and I'd absolutely expect them to be able to replicate it. Though in the case of an AK-47 it's a particularly simple design, thus why it's so reliable and widespread. The differences between each case being the technology gap and basic familiarity with the principles involved which would allow for any reverse engineering to be successful. Your argument would have alien technology effectively be 'magic', so advanced we couldn't even speculate as to it's operation, or simply so incomprehensible we can't even suggest 'why' it works, not the case with a plasma gun. Not sure what paradigm you're using for your chemical rocket here but with relaxed enough parameters of course it's possible, though the logistics would be insane. How are you defining "chemical fuel" and what restrictions are you placing on the rocket? I'm assuming most of the mass of the universe would be required to be turned into whatever "chemical" fuel you're using, refueling occurring regularly at c-fractional speeds, gravity slingshots (if they're allowed) and probably even energy-to-matter transformation to get even more fuel but it would be possible. Regardless of how massive the objects becomes as it approaches higher fractions of c it'll remain at that velocity until you can create more fuel, top it up and then start accelerating it again. There really is no point to it, but if we really wanted to and spent enough time (a long long loooooong time) dedicating ourselves to it, we could do it. None of the problems are insurmountable. With loose enough parameters that impracticality becomes irrelevant. Theoretically. Y'know, it occurs that the effects of this experiment on the universe, and any other races within it, could well serve as an appropriate justification for invading us to make sure we don't do it...

I think you're underestimating properly motivated engineers, not to mention properly motivated humans in general, with extinction at stake. Even without such motivations during my degree course we were shown examples of rapid design and manufacture that really redefined how fast processes can go when necessary. Drawing board to successful battlefield adoption within weeks. A different proposition to reverse engineering unknown technology yes, but just look at examples of Cold War industrial espionage, or even the various attempts around the world to copy US fifth-gen fighter technology. That's without actual examples of what they're trying to replicate. Yeah, it's massively impractical. But we could do it, it just comes down to engineering. It'd probably be a project requiring the efforts of a significant aspect of our worlds population, but it could be done. A lot would depend on the particulars; are you allowing ramscoops, are you allowing gravity slingshots, are you allowing a massive organisation of c-fractional refueling logistics just to prove it can be done even though there's no point to the whole exercise?

No, the HH books are canon, and some of the best writing BL have released. The lore is pretty consistent and they're fleshing out one of the key elements of the entire mythos is a way that's adding to the universe rather than diminishing it. A lot of the technology from the time of the Heresy was still being innovated upon and improved as well as better access to rare materials allowing for widespread adoption of things that are mythical 10,000 years later. Fellblades, Volkite guns, jetbikes, the Legio Cybernetica. Supposedly Imperial Knights are still around, we "just don't hear about them"

Ah, could this be the crux of our disagreement? I'm not thinking it's quite so impractical from an engineering standpoint. Knowing it can be done is the vast majority of the battle as far as engineers are concerned. That's why there's usually an explosion of people managing to accomplish engineering feats very quickly after the first breakthrough shows it's possible. Plus, knowing how it works can be irrelevant to be honest, if it does. Staying in the game, with lasers we'd need to know what bits to make and how to put them together. With the alien plasmas both those steps are already done for us and we can play with them like Lego. Although in the OG game we don't actually make human variants of the alien weapons, rather we just reproduce copies of the alien guns. Producing fully human examples would take longer I'd agree, and would require the operational theories to be better understood.

Both are my actual points, maturation of technology allowing for unforeseeable manifestations and applications. A bolt-action rifle is a maturation of a musket, the same theory and approach but vastly different in function and effect. An AESA is still a system operating with the principles of radar, but is vastly different than RADAR. That they are so different despite being the same technology in essence is my point. To get back to the earlier discussion, in the OG laser weapons are at the RADAR stage of their technological development whereas the alien plasma weapons could well be closer to an AESA stage of maturation.

Hmmm. I'm going to take a break as I'm getting the feeling we're missing the subtle particulars of each other's statements and I need to recharge my ability to phrase things in a non-autistic way. I do intend to return to this interesting conversation. I did specify external antennas. As another example I'll offer the difference between early RADAR and current generation Active Electronically Scanned Arrays.

I wasn't trying to suggest the plasma would use pressure to breach the target, in my above speculation the plasma round actually would be using temperature to melt through the armour. Comparing it to a HEAT round has turned out to be wildly distracting it seems, I see similarities because of my particular worldview I guess, heh. Not the first time I've run into difficultly because I'm natively seeing something counter-intuitive to most. I saw the primary mechanic of both being the focusing of an omnidirectional force for the purposes of a tight effect on target. The particulars of each are of course wildly dissimilar. Don't you wish that mechanic was in the game? : D Again though, I'm talking about potential applications of the technology we can't even theorise about due to being too many steps removed from whatever innovation would make something amazing suddenly obvious. I keep thinking about how smartphones these days don't even have external aerials. In the early days of radio who could have imagined that was possible? Give it a couple of decades of metamaterial research and I can't even pretend to know what might be possible due to being able to hack the laws of nature. Though none of that is likely to allow for EM field manipulation of the type we're talking about, I know. This is where the fiction element of sci-fi comes in. The one or two (as few as possible) steps beyond 'real' that allows for the story, and making those steps as plausible as possible. Suggesting that they could be a hitherto unknown manifestation or manipulation of the universe, and plenty of those have actually happened. It's just the ones in real life are typically even more outlandish than what authors speculate, heh. So I take up the position of the only thing I can be certain about is that I can't predict some things we'll be capable of in the future, even if I completely understood everything we currently know today. As someone more informed than I, what's your take on ball lighting?

I do know what HEAT rounds are, I was talking about their effect on target not the construction of the projectile. A HEAT round is a shaped charge that uses an explosion, and the Munroe Effect, to generate a jet of fluid metal from a lining that breaches armour. The jet isn't a plasma and doesn't melt through the target, it uses hydraulic pressure. Now skyball the properties of a hypothetical packet of plasma with a containment field you can manipulate however you want throughout the flight. Rather than an orb, compress it down and shape it into a more oval configuration oriented along the perpendicular linear axis to the target. Just before impact, really compress the leading protrusion to get as tight an impact area as possible. On impact, use the containment field to focus the bolt such as to create a plasma torch that would lance through the target rather than 'splash' over it. My analogy of an "EM HEAT round" was in reference to focusing of an otherwise omnidirectional force for the purposes of breaching a target. Edit: I wonder if hydraulic principles can be applied to plasmas. I honestly don't know. Oh dear God I'm doing that engineering thing of making everything a fluid from a certain perspective. It's like we're Jedi "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." That point of view being "Everything is a fluid and can be treated as such"

Having looked into it further, I've discovered the typical lack of any consistency regarding 40k lore. Some sources state that terminator suits were directly designed for work in starship fusion cores and other highly dangerous industrial environments, some state terminator suits were adapted from those industrial suits, some say that the Tactical Dreadnought Armour project merely took inspiration from those sources and others with the intent to completely replace power armour, which I'd never heard before. I'd complain about this but I know from experience that GW proper doesn't care and the Black Library lore guys really like it that way. More creative freedom to them given they've effectively fostered an environment where anything at all could be false memories of times past, creative misinterpretation or even deliberate misinformation. It's quite genius in a way, even if it does piss off the pedant in me heh. But it does allow for certain minor-ish) levels of derision of places like Lexicanum, who will wildely extrapolate from the slightest fluff hooks and then insist they're canon when the creators themselves don't intend any such thing. Sometimes I wish BL had full control of the lore though, then we might not get some of the abominations that have been released recently because 'the models are cool (debatable)' never mind that trying to justify them in universe requires you to give up on caring about whatever you thought you knew. But then I think it might not be that different. I shudder to think what some BL guys would come up with if they had carte blanche with ALL the fundamentals.

Given how close we are to cracking fusion, and the ramifications of the capability, it's insane it doesn't get more funding. On the other hand I could say similar about nuclear technology in general, it astonishes me that when anyone even mentions building a new plant they're still talking about water reactors. I have to assume no-one, not even the environmentalists, actually want the energy problem solved because there are plausible approaches that are never mentioned whilst fucking biofuels are still promoted. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer rather than a pure scientist, but my general assumption regarding any technology (without even having to consider anything about whatever technology it is, we engineers are casual like that : P) is that not only will it get smaller, more efficient and find broader applications over time, but that along the way innovation and pure/mad genius will lead to potentials and applications that could never have been imagined or theorised by anyone standing outside familiarity with the technology. Given a brand new weaponisation of laser technology (in the OG) my automatic assumption is that they will not have reached their full potential. They might not be the laser equivalent of muskets but we're probably still at the lever-action era as an analogy. But the alien plasma tech, assuming we could reverse engineer it, would already be matured. They would have refinements and features we couldn't even predict due to not having even started with developing the capability. Maybe they have ways of manipulating the containment field such that the release of plasma onto the target is specific to maximise damage, auguring through any armour akin to an electromagnetic HEAT round and then having the rest of the packet bloom into the target beyond rather than just venting it over the surface (which would be similar or possibly even less effective than generating plasma through ablating the surface of the target itself. Also, spaced armour anyone?) The fun comes from humanity having a fresh perspective on this new but mature technology, free of any blindspots of the original developers and thus potentially capable of coming up with new ways of utilising it that the aliens wouldn't have thought of, thus why our guns could actually have some advantages over the alien weapons despite our only copying the technology.

True, but my point was in relation to all the other games that merely take the "lower tier = weaker" approach. At least "This is science and this over here is magic" (Clarke's Third Law) is a better justification than that... Plus even in the realm of directed energy weapons there are variations between approaches. You can't just say "a laser" and know the specifics. The energy of a photon is determined by the respective wavelength but that leaves aside aperture diameter, pulse duration etc. The same goes for hypothetical plasma weapons, given that we lack the physics to make such things even in game who's to say they wouldn't be more effective than the laser-induced surface plasma explosions we do understand the physics for. The effectiveness of technology increases as the technology matures, so it's a reasonably safe assumption that their mature plasma weapon tech could well make a better weapon than our brand new laser weapon tech. Much like the difference between musket balls and hollowpoints.

Sadly, the original game also gave the most sensible explanation in-universe for that first step as well; lasers were prototype human technology that needed the last refinements put on to it, whereas plasma tech was entirely beyond our level until we sidled up to the aliens, coshed them over the head and rummaged through their pockets for loose science. Lasers were one of the early projects that needed no unlocks, available right from the start. So they're better than your starting ballistics as the're the pinnacle of what humans can accomplish at the time, but next to the chosen weapons of an interstellar civilisation they still come up a bit short. The laser weapons also had the unique advantage of not needing ammo, so no manufacturing costs for endless clips and no reloading in combat meaning they had a certain viability for the entire game.

I mentioned that as an option, one of many. Not as a suggestion. I put forth that they are underpowered for being a weapon you equip every soldier with, an option I don't think is appropriate anyway. I don't think they're overpowered as it currently stands; they do a lot of damage per shot and put a lot of shots downrange but not all those shots are going to hit. I do think they aren't balanced properly as it currently stands but how to alter that balance is tricky. Even beyond the given variables of shot count, ammo count, ap to fire, ap to reload, damage, accuracy etc. you have weapon weight, accuracy penalty after moving, suppression. The existence of the Predator armour, which offsets some of those to alter the role the weapon can play. If there was the option of giving them larger cells, both in terms of capacity and inventory size, then that would make them akin to the ballistic LMG and justify the high reload ap cost. As I'm really doubtful the team are going to be wanting to change any art at this point I think we should figure out a balance solution with the assets we currently have. Personally I would them to be much better at inflicting suppression, have a lower reload cost and maybe, MAYBE, five more rounds in the cell to give an extra shot, but the numbers will have to be run to see if that makes them overpowered, keeping in mind they need to be balanced for Pred armour as well. (Given the predator armour apparently isn't dexterous enough to throw a grenade, how can it reload... anything?) Interestingly, I regard the alien plasma cannon as pretty much a grenade launcher. And the animation for the 'caster only seems to suggest one shot. Even the name "plasmacaster" would lend itself to a such a weapon. But I like dakka so I'd rather retain the LMG type.

Xenonauts is a global organisation, they can steal stuff from anyone. And I know the MGL wasn't designed until 1980 (by my info) but someone was probably kicking the idea around before that. Or we just just say we developed it ourselves, my point is that the technology of the time allows for its existence. Although it'd still be overpowered for the game. Regarding either cooking off or sympathetic detonations, is that mechanic in the game? Anyone? I haven't seen it happen so I'm guessing it isn't.