Grrl Power #1028 – Nope field
You would think that force fields would change warfare considerably, but honestly I think at most they would cause a fairly temporary disruption. The first ironclads and tanks probably had a few months of feeling pretty invincible, but really all they did was force someone to invent a better canon or landmine or armor piercing whatsit. A force field is the next step. They just raise the bar higher for anyone on offense, so instead of the lone insurgent being able to take down a blackhawk or whatever with a lucky RPG, now it takes three hits in rapid succession, or five, or two RPG’s followed by a TOW or whatever, depending entirely on the properties of the shield.
It’s got to be wildly demoralizing to score a direct hit on something and not even fuck up the paint job. A lot of people would probably jump straight to movies like War of the Worlds or Independence Day where the shields are effectively invincible. Eventually they’ll figure out how much damage a shield can take, and the problem won’t seem as insurmountable. They’ll be downright surmountable, or I dare say, mountable, especially once people get their hands on the inevitable next generation pew pews.
As many of you mentioned in the comments under the previous page, locks do in fact exist for raising and lowering ships. Thank you to the 270th person to point that out. I’m well aware, and so are Deus and Sydney, but Sydney was trying to picture something compatible with structures like the Hoover Dam. A single lock that could elevate a super shipping container that far in a single go would be a far more impressive engineering feat than the dam itself. It would be possible to do in a series of enormous yet shallower locks, but at a certain point, it’s probably more efficient to offload the ship, move the shipping containers up an elevator, and reload them on another ship that just travels between locks, or really, once you get to that point, just stick ’em on a train.
And yes, you can totally get power out of a river without having to build something as crazy as the Hoover. A series of smaller dams is probably geographically much more realistic for the Zambezi anyway. It’s just when you’re talking about dams around Sydney, the first and probably only thing she’s going to picture is the Hoover dam. She’s not especially worldly or well traveled, and the Hoover dam has been blown up and earthquaked in movies plenty of times, so that’s her mental image of a dam.
Man, it is so hard to type “dam” without typing “damn” and then having to erase the “n.” I guess I don’t have that much cause to talk about dams that much online.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: It’s done!
210K words of weapon building, dinosaur fighting, harem satisfying, lumberjacking, moderate diplomacing, bad guy chopping action. Also some humor.
March’s incentive isn’t quite ready yet, but it shouldn’t be as delayed as last month’s.
The new vote incentive is up! Lorlara is attempting to break office harassment rules.
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Regarding the cologne that smells like an old D&D manual…I have discovered Schroedinger’s Cologne, for I am both simultaneously attracted and yet repulsed.
(It had better not be 4e, or it’d be 1000% repulsed, not 50%!)
I NEEED this Cologne. I’d just use it as a room spray for my library.
1st edition DMG or 2nd edition Player’s Handbook = best scents.
And somehow Deus is more attractive. ^_^
No no… Second Ed Vampire the Masquerade. Why go with D&D at all?
I’m responding to the subtext joke at the bottom of today’s page, that’s why. It specifically says D&D, not VtM or anything White Wolf. It just doesn’t say which edition. *sigh*
Also–FIRST COMMENT!!!
Heheh, haven’t ever gotten that on this webcomic, and rarely on others!
I completely relate to Syd in the first panel. I do actually hiss like a cat when I go out in the sun. And flinch like I’ve been punched when I walk into a glare of it in the house. I hate windows sometimes. And polished hardwood floors ain’t much better then mirrors some days.
I also hiss when sunlight surprises me. I need welder-spec [prescription] sunglasses and a hat to fend it off. And to be honest, I -like- wearing masks because with broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses, mask …and full coverage clothing, even in summer, I can use less sunscreen.
The sun never bothered me until I had cataract surgery now unless I wear sunglasses the entire lens they put in glares up talk about lens flare! Plus I was near-sighted now I’m far sighted… And before someone says “they have multi-focal lens why didn’t you get them?” I’m on medicare ‘nough said..
I wasn’t on Medicare, but my co-pay for the chemo that caused the cataracts in the first place had cleaned me out. So I’m also in the same boat: Bargain basement lenses.
I hear that I had been on chemo for 7 months (kidney cancer 2nd time) then they removed the shrunken tumor and 2/3 of my only kidney don’t get me started on the bills too…
r/UsernameChecksOut
Are repelled by garlic or a crucifix as well?
I can honestly say no to garlic. I probably have garlic in everything but sweets and my coffee.
The crucifix thing? kinda? I mean I see them only on people trying to use their religion as a weapon. The churches around here are really laid back on them. The nice religious people I have known don’t carry them. They just humbly carry on with their faith.
But I have practically been attacked by born again people telling me to join their church. Not find Jesus or join Christianity. But their specific church while clutching one of their crucifixes.
I can see one major problem with that shielding on a fighter jet. The jet only remains airborne due to the physics of air passing over and under the wings at different velocities. This means that a shield that prevents the passage of an antiaircraft missile is also going to prevent the passage of air that keeps the aircraft aloft. This assumes of course that Deus hasn’t also incorporated some form of antigrav to provide the missing lift while the shield is active.
Also the apparent gas turbine engine needs air in the front to the compressor and a way for the flaming hot exhaust to exit, so as to not cook the crew, melt the plastic aircraft bits ( like the nose radar dome) and eventually set off the detonators on any external ordinance.
Well, the nose radar dome, if Earth tech, is probably made of something like Tencate Systems RP51 resin over glass, so it is good to something like 350C continuous exposure. The pilot is going to be pretty much well done by the time the nose cone gets to something like that, unless the plane is booking at Mach 2 or better.
Perhaps it automatically switch on when there is a solid moving object nearby?
Mass Effect works like this – Kinetic Barriers activate when something approaches at a high enough velocity. In game terms, that means melee strikes tend to penetrate the shields, while weapon projectiles are blocked. It also makes a good point that if they just deflected everything, you wouldn’t be able to sit on a chair without it being launched away from you. I would assume most forcefields work on a similar principle, or they are more like a “mesh”, allowing air and exhaust particles through while blocking anything larger than a few molecules.
The flight profile of an aerodynamic vehicle and the flight profile of a giant potato are not one and the same. The second this thing activated its shields in part or in whole, the jet it doomed. The air in front of the jet would pile up and the moment the shield de-activated the jet would slam into it like a red hot brick wall. The air friction of the air would cause a fireball of plasma to melt the front of the jet (cause remember, force fields don’t block light!) even before the field is dropped. If it activated in part, like over one section of the wing, the drag would torque the airframe, probably ripping the wing off and killing the pilot. And being frictionless doesn’t help either because while the air might be frictionless with field, it’s NOT frictionless with all the other air it’s ramming into to get out of the way.
The assumption that the shape of the field when the jet is sitting on the tarmac is identical to the shape of the field when the jet is flying at Mach 1 is unsupported by anything.
The assumption that the ***visible*** shape of the field ***during interception of a projectile*** is related to anything else at all is unsupported.
The more natural assumption is that the field has an appropriate flight profile that handles all your objections and that the activated field has the shape necessary to handle the danger, then reshapes itself to handle whatever other forces need to be handled.
Arm-wavium to the rescue!
Interesting… A new shell type could be made too. So instead of armor piercing and high explosive you now have fusion cutter blade
Daniel here…
Huh, so that kind of shielding HAS been “used” before? Requires X amount of velocity/energy to activate? I know I came up with a version of that type, decided to call them “Reactive Barriers” or “Newtonian Shields” My version is always active, with the field extending a relative distance from the surface being protected. When something of lower energy or velocity passes through the field, it isn’t enough to activate the shields, but after a certain threshold the shields actually absorb the energy, blocking the incoming “attack”, absorbing more of the energy involved, blocking more energy and absorbing even more of the hostile energy until it’s all neutralised, essentially using hostile energy to harden itself like a “non-Newtonian fluid”. With this method, lower energy attacks can also be blocked by “spiking” the shields with some energy, causing them to react and catching the attack while the shields are “hardened”. Just gotta watch out for the systems overheating and frying…
So, are the Mass Effect shields the same thing or is my design still somewhat unique?
There’s a bit of a problem with reactive barriers on jet aircraft. If the LAW missile is going fast enough to activate the field, this establishes the maximum top flight speed MUST be slower than that rocket. Modern military combat aircraft move considerably faster than that.
NOTE: the rocket from a LAW flies at a relatively slow 443.18 mph. A bit over half of Mach 1 and very, very slow of modern aircraft – way to slow for combat aircraft.
From the several glowing parts I would guess that it’s not one single shield generator, but several. Which means parts of the shield, like the aft section can be deactivated. Depending on the technology available there might be dedicated shield generators just for the engine exhausts, which only get activated for a short time just before a missile impact. The plane might loose a little speed and altitude, but that can be compensated for.
A similar system would allow a jet to fire it’s weapons.
Go with mass effect kentic shield technology. Shield active once area at X has an object move at speed X.
Hopefully the shot will last short enough to avoid too many problems for the (probably modified) engines to deal with. If there is a ton of weapons being shot then having the plan crash would still probably be better odds than surviving without shields.
The rest is just tinkering with trying to figure out how to best adjust it as the early period will be more for shock and awe before enemies figure out how to get around it. Sort of like submarines being horrifying unstoppable weapons at sea until people figured out how to deal with them.
A mass effect kinetic shield would immediately lose to high yield lasers we already have, such as ones designed to take down ICBMs. Chemical lasers could even be designed light enough to be carried by infantry.
Sure… But how long would it take for your opponent to figure it out in the middle of a war?
Besides we have no idea how these shields work or their limitations. The Mass Effect barriers were just the easiest example to pull up.
“The jet only remains airborne due to the physics of air passing over and under the wings at different velocities.”
The shield can be shaped to continue to allow the principles of ‘lift’ to still exist, even if no antigrav tech exists on it.
In fact, given sufficient control of the forcefield shape and being able to sustain it for long periods, you could do away with the physical wings entirely and just have force-wings.
This is true. :)
You could, but it’s likely a bad idea. Power failure on a plane with physical wings = maybe you can glide to safety, or at least crash less fatally. Power failure on a plane with force wings = you die.
Seems to work fine for Cora’s arms and legs.
Also, the less need a plane has for durable wings, the lighter they can make it and the faster the plane can conceivably fly. You can still have light wings with a powerful force field over it. That way, even if the force field goes, you can still have the ability to fly and glide until you can reconstitute the shield.
This is actually a lot like how the Galaxy class starship operated in Star Trek TNG, since it did not have the same type of ablative armor that the Defiant class had, and it also did not have armor as good as earlier ships like even the Constitution class. But its shields and deflectors were so much more powerful that it tended to only need minimal ‘normal’ armor. That is also why the Dominion ships were able to take a Galaxy class starship apart rather easily at first, back when the Dominion was able to almost completly bypass shields, but was not able to destroy a Defiant, Oberth, Centaur, Intrepid, Exceslsior, or even Constitution class as easily, since even when bypassing shields, those classes had heavier normal armor (especially Defiant, which had ablative armor which was then put on Galaxy Class during the latter part of the Dominion war).
Btw main reason I know this is a youtube channel called Lore Reloaded which went into detail on it. I”m not normally a huge Star Trek afficianado.
Current batch of planes from last 30 years procured by the USofA Air Force only fly because of massive engines. They are otherwise flying bricks. Force wings, regular wings: same difference in a power outage. Eject immediately because if you don’t you’re dead.
Does the forcefield complete the sphere under the ground? Or is it more like Mr Bubble, conforming itself to the surface under Syddles’ feet?
In fact, I’m wondering if the shielding is ever intended for airborne usage at all?
Like people have said below, the Mass Effect style shields could work. Another possibility are the shields from Dune, which are programmable to allow the passage of air but not fast moving projectiles. Admittedly that kinda goes out the window given the speeds a fighter jet would be going… but given Deus is all about the classics…
Just having the shield up in parking mode would already be pretty great. Aircraft that can’t easily be bombed to pieces inside the hangar have a distinct advantage…
“I cannot say with certainty that we destroyed an aircraft in that video. However, unless they were storing wings under that bridge…” — Norman Schwarzkopf Jr
Airplanes are at their most vulnerable when they are just sitting around on the tarmac.
Dune shields were given the additional weakness that being hit with a laser would create a feedback causing both the field and laser to detonate. This was to make them as dangerous to the attacker as the user. I for one would just send a drone with a laser over to the enemy’s shielded base and live with the loss.
C’mon, where’s Vale hiding? Haven’t seen her in one and a half years aside from what’s presumably her leg on page 1014.
I have a certain… weakspot for “forcefield shielding”.
Thinking about how this tipe would work and the engineering properties of it.
For expample, this looks like a simple “counterforce” one.
Knetic force is detected in certain radious. Then the engine proyects force in that general area with a equivalent but oposite strength.
But my favourite by far is the inerthia dampener. Make a structure that would work mostly like Anvil’s power. Necesary for FTL aceleration and deceleration.
Perhaps Deus bought some Element Zero at that alien shopping place.
You are pretty on point on the usefulness of force fields, and you really want to have them (especially if they are new). Israel got a bit of a black eye a couple years ago because they thought the trophy system was too expensive to put on tanks…..until they got into a conflict and realize it would have cost them less in the long run (tanks are something like 10-15x as expensive or so).
Funny story with ironclads, I think the first was done by a British trading company I remember being used in the Boxer Rebellion? and it was functionally invulnerable. The Empire tried copying the design for use around Europe and it was a disaster. The difference in water temperature changed the brittleness/flexible such that a wood would have been better armor.
The first ironclads were LONG before the Boxer Rebellion. The first battle between two ironclads was in the American Civil War in 1862 in the Battle of Hampton Roads.
Yet, even then, the two ships involved could’ve done serious damage to the other if they had been better prepared. The CSS Virginia didn’t bring armor-piercing shot that was available, and the USS Monitor could’ve used twice as much powder in their guns.
Yes, the battle of Hampton roads. The first significant meeting of 2 ironclad warships in battle. At the end of a full day bouncing shells off each other, both ships got bored and went home with no significant damage. After that, naval warfare changed forever. England and France immediately halted all production of wood hulled ships, and all future ships were built based on the design of the Monitor, with a rotating turret that could fire in all directions.
Well, you really have to admire Lorlara’s foot skills. Lorlara’s superhuman foot skills? Stilettos can be a right bitch even on good days, so I am informed by those who use them, so doing a skateboard to flick the RPG into your arms is pretty impressive.
You have to recite the mantra:
These heels will make me look fabulous. But if I show a moment of fear they will try to murder me.
(but mostly you have to develop strong muscles in your ankles)
Orlando probably learned it from Kung Fu ninja babes, and the shirikin heels of death.
Indeed, she likely learned that trick watching a not to shabby romcom from the states. Had Jamie Lee Curtiss in it. Oh and some guy with lots of muscles. Did a similar move with a AKM.
“True Lies”. Great movie.
A supervillainess must have skills in fighting in high heels. It’s part of the job.
The conversation where Deus explains why a trained warrior would wear stiletto heals would have been pretty entertaining. Given Lorlara’s apparent zeal for following Deus’ directions the first iteration of her work wear might also have had entertainment value.
I’m sure she’d be all for it once she discovered the etymology of the name
It didn’t even occur to me that she was kicking it up to her hands.
Most stiletto heel shoes are flimsy. These pair have to have been steel-reinforced or have their own tiny forcefields.
Man now I kinda want to see Lorlara’s contract.
Wonder if she gets dental and a decent amount of vacation time?
Good question. But, this IS Deus, so I’d imagine yes, but more likely she’s REQUIRED to take vacation time, and REQUIRED to have dental plus health (combat) cover. Having said that, there’s vacation and there’s vacation. I’m not sure Deus would cover for 4 weeks paid annual plus several (I lost count of them in Oz) celebratory public holidays… Not to mention 10 years’ paid long service, EVERY 10 years…
I guess that more depends on what holidays Lorlora celebrates. Hell if Deus is lucky maybe the Alari don’t havr as many holidays as earthlings do and he won’t have to pay her for them. He is very informed on various races history, weaknesses, culture and what not. He could easily work some magic there
Plus maybe he worked holidays off the contract for more rights involving the 2nd ammendment.
To be fair I would give up a day off for the right to operate and (hopefully) own an abraham’s tank at work
I suspect the default Alari contract would include the same number of days off as the default Galytni one, for the PR angle if nothing else. If those groups celebrate differing numbers of fixed holidays, then the difference would be available as discretionary. Probably both groups get a day or two for both sets of ‘major holidays’ (e.g. Christmas/New Year, Easter), to encourage cultural exchange, but both have to use up discretionary days if they want to celebrate the minor holidays (e.g. May Day, St. Patrick’s) as well.
Part of her job is to show off a magnificent evil grin so I assume Deus insists on the best dental services.
Bond villains tend to skimp on vision plans. On multiple occasions we have seen Bond walk into a room surrounded by a dozen machine gun wielding guards, and none of them have managed to land a single hit.
Question is, how does your force field work. You’ve well covered the point if it’s just a new way of adding a protective layer but if we are talking about something like let’s say “repulsive shield”, I think it would indeed completely change warfare (like in the Dune universe, for example).
I think the big question is how big are those rivers you’re sending supercontainers up
One significant difference force fields might present compared to simply better armor would presumably be the chance to create pieces of shielding equipment that are highly maneuverable and implementing that as part of procedures in any battle where almost no single hit can completely take out a shielding unit.
This would allow a formation of vehicles with shields to stop almost all non-1-hit-KO damage until the shields of almost every single unit in the formation was depleted.
In the novels for Halo, Covenant cruisers would use their maneuverability and energy shielding to take hits aimed at other ships whose shields were down, thereby allowing both ships more time to return fire and for shields to come back online.
With enough software coordination, you could automate this process such that you either need to score a 1-hit-kill through concentrated firepower, or you need to not only take out the shields of one plane or battleship, but also all the planes or battleships in close enough vicinity to block a shot at whichever unit you were aiming at.
With armor, any damage inflicted is either completely nullified because it’s not nearly enough to scratch it, or it’s permanently debilitating until the armor can be repaired.
A lot of this of course depends on what the bottlenecks of shielding are. Heat dissipation, power generation, the weight of the shield generators. If it’s heat-dissipation a land vehicle might have stupid powerful shields by having systems that can channel the heat directly into the ground, while spaceships and aeroplanes are limited to however fast and how much they can transfer to onboard heat sinks, and the shields on structures can be absolutely staggeringly powerful as they would only be limited to how fast they can shunt the heat away.
Oups, double post. Sorry, thought this one failed to post.
For power generation without a meaningful dam, see Niagara Falls – the power generators are underground and the intakes are away from the tourist areas. A lot of African rivers have major waterfalls and rapids – once you have some sort of Zap gun tech its not too hard to bore the intake and outlet tunnels, even the turbine rooms only need a bit of forethought to get the hardware in and out.
The Deschutes river in Oregon has a lot of those on a small scale. Divert part of the river, run it through a generator for half a dozen buildings, send the runoff back in. There’s ways to coexist river traffic and power generation, as long as you know the limits you’re working with.
I’d argue shields have a significant difference – through maneuverability they can enable a fleet or brigade or platoon to shield each other from anything less than a 1-shot kill by automatically interposing themselves between enemies and de-shielded units.
If you can’t kill both the shield and the vehicle in 1 hit (or several hits in the same split second), you may end up in a situation where you need to drop every single shield in the entire enemy formation before you can start causing permanent damage. This is even more true in battle involving units/ships/dreadnaughts so large and with such powerful shields that a single attack finishing both the shield and mission-killing a ship is almost unheard of.
Then there’s the question of what is the primary bottleneck for these shields, power, weight of the shield generator, or heat sink/heat transfer capacity.
When the first canels were being build in England during the industrial revolution in the 1700’s a way of getting canel boats up steep hills was invented, called an Inclined Plane. Essentially a steel tank of water with waterproof doors big enough to hold a canel boat, which sat on rails. They were usually built in pairs so the weight of the tank coming down hauled, with the help of a steam engine (or animals or wind before steam was invented) the tank going up. One has been restored at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum.
The force field appears to be transparent, referring back to the very start of the series.
Man, I really screwed up my employment contract. Should have negotiated recreational anti-air weapon time.
I’m gonna need Jeff Goldblum, an Apple Macbook, and a transmitter!
This is when the comic comes full circle about lasers passing clear force fields.
Now I want Sydney to just casually mention on-screen how her D&D group was arguing about lasers just the week before, so I can watch all the “it was all a flashback” diehards sputter about continuity and her current rank.
Based on what we’ve seen of the Alari mentioned in previous strips from everyone’s favorite blood mage, Dabbler’s reference to their culture, Alari house structure and Cora’s use of technology, one thing is certain: Alari employment contracts would be full of all sorts of things that just would NOT fly on Earth.
Not to mention some decidedly old school attitudes about the working relationship with your boss as evidenced by the recent vote incentive would probably be pretty damn prevalent. Even if the employee wasn’t remotely interested.
Depending on the forcefield, just keeping a laser (or other continuous-fire weapon) trained on the target is almost as good against some shielding as penetration and kill – keeping the enemy from being able to fire (because the field isn’t directional – in either sense) means they’re out of the fight.
And, yeah, the history of war is full of examples of either offense or defense getting the advantage – impenetrable castles or plate armour giving defense the advantage; warbows, cannon, and modern firearms giving offense the advantage. World War 1 was dominated by the defensive power of trench warfare; World War 2 by offensive tanks and planes bypassing fixed emplacements.
To me force fields are just different armor. On a tank it means a marginal improvement in survivability at what cost? Tanks are already designed to take hits after all. Aircraft must be light. That means not armored. A force field on one of these increases survival chance far more than it would on a tank. Air to air missiles as I understand them are basically frag grenades. Get close and toss out lots of debris. Lorara hit that shield with a light anti-armor weapon. So this thing will shrug anti-air devices. Suddenly needing real armor piercing.
Final note is a question for those that better understand this. But I heard/read a while ago that an armor piercing round is less useful on an aircraft in flight as it tends to make either too small a hole. To will go right through the plane before detonating. Hence why modern air to air missile use proximity detonation. So wouldn’t anti-shield missiles fail against unshielded aircraft?
“… an armor piercing round is less useful on an aircraft in flight as it tends to make either too small a hole.”
Yes. But not just for aircraft. Many a naval battle has hinged on the judicious use of AP vs HE shells… And the injudicious usage. As well as those times when — for whatever reason — you have run out of one type.
Yes you need poke holes with AP, but you also need to get some destructive force inside the hull, which means you need HE. Some shells have a mixture of both, but then you’re praying that the AP bit will go through before the HE goes off :(
This is also the reason the large caliber cannons were adopted for air warfare rather than the smaller caliber (~.30) machine guns. Many aircraft came home riddled with .30 caliber holes and dents on the engine and pilot armour, but not many came home with .50 caliber holes in them.
What exactly is that thing dangling on the foregrip of that rocket launcher? I figure it’s a non-functional fob but what is it a representation of?
https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/epicrapbattlesofhistory/images/9/98/Team_Rocket_Based_On.png/revision/latest?cb=20161010115531
I thought you were joking, but zooming way in, yep.
It may possibly be a “Checked by …” tag. When only the best will do…
Sorry, but I am bored, this feels like this whole arc with Deus in Africa is where the comic has jumped the shark.
I think the one thing we need to know is: does this force field stop lasers?
Diffuses them most likely Just like a dirty lens or mirror.
That is… not a bad idea. It could probably scale up to any energy frequency with a bit of work.
Dam Spellcheck.
Actually it took decades to start dealing with Ironclads and Tanks.
The got bigger guns for Ironclads, so they put all the armour around the essential systems and the rest of the ship relied on the fact any shot would pass through it before exploding. Those ships are known as Dreadnoughts.
As for Tanks, AT Mines were developed in the run up to WWII, and the AT rocket was still being developed.
Then in the 70s came Chobham armour, and the “Oh! We only scratched the paint.” moments with RPGs/AT missiles.
Proper 2nd Gen Chobham (Devonshire, 1990s) is yet to be beat.
It really didn’t take all that long to deal with tanks though. The Germans quickly learned that their artillery guns would kill the early tanks used against them, pretty much the very first day they were used. In short order their field artillery units were trained to shoot the tanks directly, basically becoming the first anti-tank guns. Direct fire guns remained the go-to anti-tank weapon for decades until the advent of rockets and missiles. The Germans also quickly began issuing armor piercing bullets for their machineguns and even just rifles. When those stopped being effective they made the Tankgewehr rifle, a (barely) man portable 13mm anti-tank rifle in 1918. They also employed bundles of grenades as close quarters anti-tank weapons, something they they even used into WWII.
It wasn’t long before weapons were designed to kill ironclads either. From simply bigger guns to ones with higher velocities to punch through the armor to things such as spar torpedoes to bypass the armor entirely were developed months after the first ironclads were introduced.
The dance between Defence and offense is rapid and never ending.
I’m sorry, I seem to be getting my point across very poorly if at all.
The specific technologies to counter tanks and Pre-Dreadnought Battleships, known as Ironclads, did not appear within a couple of months.
The Tankgewehr rifle appeared around 21 months after the tanks debut (September 1916 to May 1918).
Before that they were using pre-existing technologies, like artillery pieces or AP rounds, to deal with tanks.
As for the Ironclad Pre-Dreadnought Battleships (not Ironclad sail warships) Spar Torpedoes don’t work on them, and Torpedo Boats were developed instead about 10 years after the first of these Ironlcads was developed.
> You would think that force fields would change warfare considerably, but honestly I think at most they would cause a fairly temporary disruption. The first ironclads and tanks probably had a few months of feeling pretty invincible, but really all they did was force someone to invent a better canon or landmine or armor piercing whatsit.
But both of these _did_ change warfare considerably, you don’t need to be invincible for that. Tanks, twenty years after their development, were instrumental in the paradigm shift from the trench warfare of WWI to the movement warfare of WWII, and having tanks is still extremely important in modern war. Ironclads fired off an arms race where everyone kept building heavier armored ships, because they realized how important this was – and this kept going until entirely new technologies (aircraft (carriers) and anti-ship missiles, to a lesser degree torpedoes) changed the naval warfare paradigm again.
> They just raise the bar higher for anyone on offense, so instead of the lone insurgent being able to take down a blackhawk or whatever with a lucky RPG, now it takes three hits in rapid succession, or five, or two RPG’s followed by a TOW or whatever, depending entirely on the properties of the shield.
That’s still extremely important – if you need three times the number to achieve a kill, your enemy has much more firepower. You’d need three times the firepower to score a kill, on top of more complicated coordination – if the three guys with RPGs don’t fire at the same time(and all hit), the target can retreat and wait for the shield to recover, or shoot back and kill the last guy before he can deliver the finishing blow. Yes, there will be ways to take down the shield – but they will have all sorts of costs and disadvantages, making fighting your opponent much harder. If only one side has shields, they will have a huge advantage, just like the side that has tanks has an advantage over the side that does not.
And drone technology will change it yet again. It removes one thing from the danger zone that’s very hard to replace – experience.
To only feel the equipment that you need make devices smaller and more light weight and extendable. The AI (human factor) can be read deployed again and again as long as you have equipment to use with it. That is why currently they’re also deploying methods of disrupting communications to drone technologies.
Why do you think they want quantum entangled communication systems? Remote control that can’t be tampered with our interfered with
‘ but at a certain point, it’s probably more efficient to offload the ship, move the shipping containers up an elevator, and reload them on another ship that just travels between locks’
Or, and hear me out, an elevator for the whole ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_lift
Sure, for such a massive dam it’ll be an equally massive lift, doubly so if it’s for the really big cargo ships, but thanks to the way physics work, these things need surprisingly little power. No matter how many ships are put in either tank, both sides will always weight the same.
I really like the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland. It looks so futuristic.
The development and usage of canals in England is quite fascinating really. What they used to be used for was for heavy transportation using simple horse-drawn means. That infect her in the simplicity of being manually operated and water driven. It may be out of date currently for mass transit but it doesn’t mean it always will be.
What about landing strips that are liquid instead of solid, and cargo planes that are more like trains instead of single vessels.
There’s a lot of technologies we invent and then find we can reinvent them as well. EG the fail ability of pressurized Wheels, not only in planes but also in heavy cargo vehicles
I’m subscribed to CruisingTheCut on YouTube. The channel is owned by a retired BBC journalist who is now living on a narrowboat.
It’s very informative and highly recommendable if you’re interested in that topic.
Frankly my dear, I don’t a give a dam(n)!
“…all they did was force someone to invent a better canon”
So, an agreed-upon backstory was important in the development of armor defeating weapons?
Guisarme? that is first from Chainmail, same people though back in the 70’s.
Dues is probably really not worried about how long a shielded fighter will be a game changer.
He worried about how many he can sell , and in a year or so also sell the pew pew to defeat it.
Deus: If America doesn’t want to work ‘with’ me, its global opponents will be getting these toys while it doesn’t. And you don’t want to know what I will charge for the technology to counter it should that occur.
America: “Attention space UN. A nation state has extra terrestrial technology. Please either come remove or allow us interstellar technology trade.”
Why would the Xevoarchy care? I don’t think you understand the nature or reasoning behind their restrictions. The author explained somewhat in the notes for page 689, but they’re basically like customs restrictions between countries.
The Space UN didn’t show up when an Alari refugee ship made its presence known to Earth, with its attendant ET technology.
Or all the incidental tech all the alien tourists are bringing with them.
Besides, as Deus said. Its technology, its on Earth, therefore it is Earth technology.
You’re right in saying that locks often aren’t adequate for overcoming the large height differences of dams, although those do exist.
However, another way to bypass those structures while minimizing water loss is to use ship elevators. Those can actually be quite amazing – for example, look up the “Falkirk Wheel” in Scotland. It’s a truly marvelous design.
I was just about to say that. Also of course, river/canal cargo ships are NOT the ocean going behemoths being referenced, you do indeed shelp the containers off of one whip and onto another. One of the virtues of shipping containers is that they make this a standardized and mechanized process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel
Yep, no need to unload the contrainers, elevator them up and down, and then reload the ship. Just elevator the ship up and down.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ship+elevator
I’d guess a laser would do the trick. Obviously photons penetrate.
… What is Dabbles looking at? Something above and slightly behind them (or at least to the side of them, in a direction opposite to where SmugD is leading them)
Everyone jumps to the conclusion that he had developed/bought, an effective force field.
For all they know there is an underground conduit carrying mega-watts of power with a hook up on the opposite side of the airframe. All smoke and mirrors.
yes, the advanced tech exists for the forcefield. but you also need a power source that they do not have in a small enough form to fit in a jet.
If they did, why waste time with a jet in the first place. I’m sure by adjusting the force field itself you could propel a craft. And it wouldn’t even need to be aerodyamic.
Flying tanks anyone?
Dam! Dat dark elf booty!!!
Dam! Dat dark elf booty!!
I think you’re underestimating how much functional shield tech would change things, even if it were capable of absorbing blasts from all current conventional weaponry. As others have pointed out in the comments above, historically the invention of such things did fundamentally alter the nature of modern war.
Additionally, I believe that you’re discounting the sunk cost of weapons development. Developing a force field wouldn’t just force an opponent to develop a better gun / missile / what have you, it’d force them to replace their inventory of inferior weaponry, and the facilities which produced those. That price tag could easily run into the trillions of dollars. A lot of that depends on quickly the shield tech could be produced and deployed, etc. but Deus has already shown us he has mass fabricators…