Hi all
Can I just jump in about this point of yours John.
"But modern artillery needs only moments to prepare to fire. The long setup
times to conduct indirect fire in WWII were required to accurately survey the
gun positions, something done by GPS positioning nowdays."
In a Sci-Fi planet assault scenario your unlikely to have GPS to rely
on. Does modern day artillery without GPS become no better than it's WWII
ancestor?
Cheers
> On Tue, July 8, 2008 12:41, germ@germy.co.uk wrote:
If you have a fleet of ships in orbit, you've possibly got yourself a GPS
system...
(how good it is will depend on the technology and how well positioned your
fleet is)
If you're in a position to land artillery pieces, you likely have ships in
orbit. If you have ships in orbit, you're probably laying a string of commo,
surveillance, and navigation sats for your ground forces.
If not, then not. As I said, getting into "what ifs" has been adequately
demonstrated to be excessively repetitive and pointless.
But normal artillery survey techniques require fairly good maps of the area
you're fighting over. The point is that you have to know where you are and
where the enemy is in order to do the math as to how to get a quantity of
explosive from where you are to where the enemy is. The speed of modern
techniques comes largely from computerizing this process rather than doing
manual math or going off paper charts. If you don't have a way to do this AT
ALL, then you cannot conduct effective artillery fire AT ALL.
If you presume that the invaders have neither navigation sats nor precise maps
of the invaded planet, then you actually have a LOT of problems, not merely
inaccurate artillery fire.
I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
are alternate techniques available to a force of Hypothetical PSB-Tech
which can pinpoint one's location without sats. If you know where the
artillery piece is and where the observer is to a high degree of precision,
then with a modern laser rangefinder you can find distance and direction from
the observer. Calculating the target's location is a matter of a heartbeat for
a computer, and then dropping precision fire on his head doesn't take long
once you have this information.
John
> On 7/8/08, germ@germy.co.uk <germ@germy.co.uk> wrote:
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n lacking GPS (if only initially), one's artillery probably still has
its integral radars. Today's field artillery is self-propelled for a
very good reason; today's counterbattery radar means that an artillery officer
can expect counterbattery fire in as little as 15 seconds after
firing. Shoot and scoot becomes shoot and scurry. ;-)
Best,
Ken
> John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@gmail.com> wrote:
If you're in a position to land artillery pieces, you likely have ships in
orbit. If you have ships in orbit, you're probably laying a string of commo,
surveillance, and navigation sats for your ground forces.
If not, then not. As I said, getting into "what ifs" has been adequately
demonstrated to be excessively repetitive and pointless.
But normal artillery survey techniques require fairly good maps of the area
you're fighting over. The point is that you have to know where you are and
where the enemy is in order to do the math as to how to get a quantity of
explosive from where you are to where the enemy is. The speed of modern
techniques comes largely from computerizing this process rather than doing
manual math or going off paper charts. If you don't have a way to do this AT
ALL, then you cannot conduct effective artillery fire AT ALL.
If you presume that the invaders have neither navigation sats nor precise maps
of the invaded planet, then you actually have a LOT of problems, not merely
inaccurate artillery fire.
I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
are alternate techniques available to a force of Hypothetical PSB-Tech
which can pinpoint one's location without sats. If you know where the
artillery piece is and where the observer is to a high degree of precision,
then with a modern laser rangefinder you can find distance and direction from
the observer. Calculating the target's location is a matter of a heartbeat for
a computer, and then dropping precision fire on his head doesn't take long
once you have this information.
John
> On 7/8/08, germ@germy.co.uk wrote:
> At 3:37 PM +0300 7/8/08, John Atkinson wrote:
Presumably, if you're the defender, you can get some good ground mapping radar
maps of your terrain performed forthwith.
You could even survey the old fashioned way and build from there, you might
have to adjust a few times however.
If you're the attacker, then you could likely do the exact same thing where it
regards ground mapping radar on your initial scouting prior to landing forces
in order to get your good maps updated as well as part of your recce of the
defensive positions. Current technology has 3 meter resolution off of what the
shuttle carries for such purposes. I'd expect the future would have far
greater resolution (up to what's useful for the purposes) and far quicker
transmittal time of the high resolution data to the end users. You are of
course going to be lacking street names.
> I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
The PSB in my own mind is the omnipresence of AI's or Near-AI's that
with even quick overflights by disposable drones, along with the old standbys
of Mark I Eyeball reporting, can quickly accrete information and predict
movement and behavior of enemy targets. The AI's can predict with a very fair
amount of accuracy what will be where and when based on existing and
historical data in combination with their understanding of the doctrine and
goals of the opponent. This actually ends up being the reason why humans
stay in control of the tactical command structure - because they are
inherently unpredictable enough compared to computers that it actually allows
surprise.
I also tend to suspect that arty is led by a few "stealth shells" that
actually give target telemetry before the actual ordinance arrives and does so
with enough timing that the shells actually in the air can correct their point
of impact if need be.
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 7:37 AM, John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
I don't recall if FT ever mentions anything about inertial dampers or the
sort, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did somewhere. At the very
least, we know the Tuffleyverse has anti-gravity. It wouldn't,
therefore, be a stretch to assume that ground forces have excellent
topographic scanning (from air/space elements) coupled to very
accurate inertial guidance systems.
In other words, you find a reference point on the planet, calculate the ground
force's location from that, and then use supercomputers to figure out exactly
how far you've moved in 3 dimensions along the topography. Very, very hard to
do accurately today (probably impossible on the ground without adding a whole
lot of error into your location), and not needed as GPS gives you an accurate
result in an easier fashion. Advance the time line into the future and this
stuff becomes possible, and probably necessary.
That's assuming you don't go with some form of neutrino beacon system that
lets you triangulate your exact location through neutrino emissions, or some
other highly advanced tech.
I think we can assume that if ships are capable of accurately navigating the
stars at FTL speeds that they can figure out how to determine a ground force's
location accurately on a hostile planet.
> If you're in a position to land artillery pieces, you likely have
That was my Dad's job, in the Western Desert in 1941-43; Royal
Artillery, Battery Survey Party for a 25pdr unit (and later on 5.5 inch guns).
A bunch of blokes with a couple of jeeps and a 15cwt, whose job it was to
scout and survey the gun positions for the next engagement. I still have some
of his tables, notebooks and a
double-cursor slide rule with gunlaying data on the back....
Jon (GZG)
> If you presume that the invaders have neither navigation sats nor
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> --
But normal artillery survey techniques require fairly good maps of the area
you're fighting over. The point is that you have to know where you are and
where the enemy is in order to do the math as to how to get a quantity of
explosive from where you are to where the enemy is. The speed of modern
techniques comes largely from computerizing this process rather than doing
manual math or going off paper charts. If you don't have a way to do this AT
ALL, then you cannot conduct effective artillery fire AT ALL.
One caveat, if you have ships in orbit, you have the ability to map the planet
quite well I should think.
I would say no. If you project forward you end up with smart shells that can
be targeted using atmospheric drones, onboard targeting and such. I remember
reading an article once that talked about artillery shells designed to be
fired beyond the horizon that switched to an active targeting mode to acquire
their own
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> Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Don M <dmaddox1@hot.rr.com> wrote:
> But normal artillery survey techniques require fairly good maps of the
Counter-caveat(s) :
Clouds
Weather systems can be substantial. Mars maybe not so much. Earth, quite a
bit, depending on location and season. Venus, total.
And/or other airborne particulant matter inherent to a given planet that
might interfere with other sensors/detectors.
Mk
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ellites might be so micronized by this point that you could launch swarms of
tiny cluster sats so that it would be nearly impossible or impractical to
destroy them all.
> I'm replying to several posts at once here. John Atkinson wrote:
> If you're in a position to land artillery pieces, you likely have
And if you happen to be the defender, you nav/com-sats are likely to be
destroyed by the invader. However, there are other navigation technologies
than GPS that work fairly well already... and they'll most likely get at
least a couple orders of magnitude better in a not too far future, so I'm not
too worried about a future defender's ability to know his exact
location either :-/
> But modern artillery needs only moments to prepare to fire.
With "moments" meaning "stop, determine own and target's location, fire 3
rounds with high degree of accuracy and get moving again in less than a
minute". (Or was it "in under 30 seconds"? Can't remember atm. Damn quickly,
anyway.)
> Flip side, nothing is perfect. There are techniques to mitigate the
At the moment that is rather expensive, with IIRC about a hundred 20mm
counter-rounds fired at each incoming shell. It shouldn't take that long
to improve on that ratio though.
> Radar also can now give
One thing to note here is that it takes a while for artillery rounds to
arrive; so even though the counterfire can be *launched* within 15 seconds of
the outgoing rounds being fired, it usually won't *arrive* until at least a
couple minutes later... by which time the target battery has
probably already moved a fair bit away from their firing position :-/
(Which is why MLRS is currently a favourite counterbattery weapon - if
you blow up a square kilometer or so centered on the enemy battery's latest
firing location, you've got at least a reasonable chance to hit it. But like
John said, it isn't politically correct to do that over a nominally
friendly city...)
> Even in 1944-5 'technologically equivalent' was only
I'd suggest that availability was at least as important a factor as how
advanced the techniques were, though... the US had both artillery and air
support available in huge amounts in 1944-5; the Germans had very little
air support and not very much artillery :-/
> ...I'm just tossing them out
Well... it is easy to argue for artillery becoming more *accurate*,
certainly. However, anti-artillery area-defence systems for ground
forces have only just entered service, and when they shrink in size and start
to proliferate I suspect that artillery will begin to *lose* lethality again
as more and more rounds fail to reach their target. That's definitely one
of the SF features Drake got right in the Slammers books :-/ (And no,
skewing the trajectory won't help the incoming rounds all that much -
they still have to clear the horizon *somewhere*, and when they do they're
vulnerable to the defence systems.)
BTW, area-defence systems capable of destroying incoming artillery
rounds within a few hundred or maybe even a couple thousand meters above the
ground are *not* necessarily capable of destroying aircraft that both fly much
higher and are much tougher targets than artillery rounds. The defences would
most likely be able to shred any bombs or missiles dropped
by said high-flying aircraft though :-/
As for game designing artillery to be weak, why just PSB it? Put the
anti-arty defence system in the game explicitly and see what happens
instead - that's a lot more fun <g>
Later,
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> Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Eli Arndt <emu2020@comcast.net> wrote:
> Satellites might be so micronized by this point that you could launch
Sand (or whatever material) cloud.
if it doesn't outright destroy them, it might cause enough interference to
reduce their effectiveness.
:-)
Mk
You can also launch swarms of micronized satellite hunters or satellite
jammers.
:)
> On Tue, 8 Jul 2008, Eli Arndt wrote:
> Satellites might be so micronized by this point that you could launch
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nter-caveat(s) :
Clouds
Weather systems can be substantial. Mars maybe not so much. Earth, quite a
bit, depending on location and season. Venus, total.
And/or other airborne particulant matter inherent to a given planet that
might interfere with other sensors/detectors.
Mk
Didn't we map Venus?
> On Jul 8, 2008, at 7:41 AM, germ@germy.co.uk wrote:
My take is that in a future like that a scan of the planet surface
would have already been done......allowing ortillery / strikes /
arty. to range in to within 50 meters.
I mean really now -- if technology has advanced so far that you're
talking about assaulting another planet why not go all the way?
D.
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> Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Don M <dmaddox1@hot.rr.com> wrote:
> Counter-caveat(s) :
Yeah. But not in a day, and not visually. If the atmo were to have something
that impedes non-visual detection? (see last paragraph/sentence of mine
above ;-) ).
Mk
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> Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Damo <damosan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 8, 2008, at 7:41 AM, germ@germy.co.uk wrote:
Would it? Might it? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. You may have a good map of
the planet, but of the location of the enemy forces?
Mk
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h. But not in a day, and not visually. If the atmo were to have
something that impedes non-visual detection? (see last
paragraph/sentence of mine above ;-) ).
Mk
Saw it, most invasions take a bit more than a day to pull off, add to that
technology may compensate for those factors. Think it's been mentioned before,
what's to stop the attacker from blanketing the place with drones for example.
All that aside, I think a gentlemen's agreement on how off table assets are to
be used is the best option here.
Don
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> Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 1:10 AM, Don M <dmaddox1@hot.rr.com> wrote:
> Yeah. But not in a day, and not visually. If the atmo were to have
If the defender has the resources, then said resources (someone mentioned a
cloud of micro sats at one point; counter to that would be micro HK sats or a
cloud of sand or something).
This also assumes the attacker has that blanket of drones available (not
necessarily a stretch to imagine they do, but I would not just automatically
assume it).
All that aside, I think a gentlemen's agreement on how off table assets are
> to be used is the best option here.
I'd rather think of it as everyone coming up with one all-powerful
example
for the attacker, w/out taking into account the defender's role in
countering or reducing the attacker's intel effectiveness. :-)
Mk