Distance Learning for fun and profit...

[Frogs321]

As I have pointed out before on discussions on drones.

How Drones Beat Top Guns — 50 Years Ago

In 1971, U.S. Top Gun pilots took on the latest combat drone -- and lost. A forgotten episode from the early years of unmanned aviation bears lessons for today.

www.forbes.com

If not for military Luddites we could have had some truly amazing drones, RPVs and other smart weapons by now.

The F22 and F35 keep coming up as why we do not need drones. If you check the current news on the B1, B2, F22 and F35, they are all programed to be replaced by reworked, rebuilt, upgraded and in some cases new builds of the B52, A10, F15, F16 and F18. Also there are investigations into what is wrong with the US military acquisitions programs.

P.S. If you check on the US Navy, you'll find that they are talking about unmaned ships. The modern anti-ship systems are that dangerous.

 

[Graviator]

If the crux of the homing missile question is that non-AI homing is perfectly possible using human pre-ME technology, it answers itself.

Given the other species' extensive dependence on ME technology, humans might well be the only ones who could build a simple guidance package without resorting to forbidden options.

 

[cryptoam]

....
How the hell does that happen though?
The basics are there. All you need is a radar and PID controllers. Combining the two allows for primitive radar guidance. (Note that this is likely to be a shitty missile guidance system though)
If they don't have those components, what the hell are they using instead?

 

[DestinyPlayer]

....
How the hell does that happen though?
The basics are there. All you need is a radar and PID controllers. Combining the two allows for primitive radar guidance. (Note that this is likely to be a shitty missile guidance system though)
If they don't have those components, what the hell are they using instead?

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Eezo-based quantum bullshit communication or something, perhaps, having completely skipped Radar?

 

[Frogs321]

Let us be honest.

There are combat robots and drones in Mass Effect.

Robot

Robots are mobile synthetic units. They are deployed by the batarian army on the Ahn'Kedar Orbital Platform to support their assault. Robots have a relatively strong health and shields bar while they can also inflict a good amount of damage. You should deal carefully with those. Like others...

masseffect.fandom.com

LOKI Mech

The Hahne-Kedar-manufactured LOKI Mech is a bipedal humanoid security robot designed for security detail and guard duty in locations where manpower is an issue, or where the use of organics for "around the clock" shifts is unfeasible. Initially used exclusively by the Alliance for colony guard...

masseffect.fandom.com

Disruption Drone

The Disruption Drone is a CAT6 unit encountered in Mass Effect 3. It is deployed by CAT6 Specialists. See also: Drones Offensive Once deployed, the drone will move slowly and seek out targets, usually at their last known position. When Shepard or a squadmate enters its detection range the drone...

masseffect.fandom.com

 

[cryptoam]

Eezo-based quantum bullshit communication or something, perhaps, having completely skipped Radar?

Click to shrink...

Okay. Fine.
They should still have passive infrared imagers(useful for sensing and other civilian applications).
Use that instead.
Set up an exclusion for local stellar radiation(so that the missile doesn't track it).
When locking, you are programming position gates(there can be more adavanced versions of this. This is also where evasion becomes crucial).
Use the position gate to narrow down effective FOV.
Lock on the most valid signature there(this is where you have the ECM/ECCM fight)
Generate angular error.
Feed angular error into PID missile guidance.
Watch boom stick go BOOM.

The needed software should be out there. The vast majority of the needed software should be available commercially. Look for image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop.

And if they have nothing like PID controllers, how the hell are they using their spaceships? HOW?

 

[RecklessPrudence]

I'm very tempted to write a fairly short ME story based on what would happen if the canon ME scenario ran into humans who'd kept the Cold War mentality going until that point... Not sure how they'd have actually survived doing this, but we can put it down to plot armor

Because that would in a way be grimly hilarious; Turians decide to 'punish' the new species for breaking a law that doesn't apply to them, take out a civilian science vessel, and try to invade Shanxi... Only to run into massive amounts of anti-shipping missile fire that takes out most of their drop ships with pinpoint neutron warheads, ground based lasers that punch holes in the capital ships, thousands of satellite weapons that were at one point aimed at each other but now are all aimed at them, and if any of them manage to get to the ground, they find the crazy apes are firing nuclear mortars at them! With neutron bomb warheads small enough to fit several in a backpack. And chemical weapons, and Spirits know what else.

And once all the invaders are dead, the humans go looking for where they came from, with an eye towards making sure they never come back...

Hmm... A fleet of about ten thousand smart bombs with gigaton yields sent through the mass relay network aimed at Palaven? And as they pass through each Relay, a couple of dozen stay behind and nuke it.

It's the only way to be sure, after all

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A tabletop wargame I used to play, that the company that made it sadly went under due to mismanagement, was a space fleet battles game where one of the human factions - the one I played - had as their 'hat' that though they had the biggest fleet, it was largely outdated except for a few rare modern designs started after the cold war went hot - they compensated for this by using ALL THE NUKES.

A related game that I was getting in to just as the company went under was for the planetary invasions in the same universe, and my absolute favourite unit in it was one of the few fast units my faction had - a unit of power-armoured dropship-borne infantry whose main weapon was nuclear grenade launchers. Said nukes were somewhere between a traditional 'big boom' nuke (scaled down, obviously) and a 'dirty' nuke, in that the designers deliberately went for more radiation than they could have, ending up in a weapon that did a fair amount of damage, especially for an infantry-wielded weapon, but absolutely wrecked enemy morale and coordination as their Geiger counters went nuts and their comms and datalinks went to hash from the radiation burst - even gave any unit in the blast radius a to-hit malus for the next turn as their sensors went to shit, iirc. And as dropship-borne power-armoured infantry, you could either dump them in the enemy's backlines and fuck with all their arty and stuff, or drop them on an objective and laugh. The lore said that their power armour wasn't as effective at being power armour as some other designs, because they were ridiculously hardened against radiation and blast effects, so that the crazy bastards wearing them could fire their grenade launchers at danger close.

Luckily, this universe had really effective ways of cleaning up radiation, otherwise most planets fought over by my faction would've been unliveable for a long time afterwards.

 

[kaosisreality]

The Watsonian arguments are delightful, but the real explanations are Doylist. We all know this. I'm pointing it out. Continue doing what you're going to do though. I am entertained.

 

[eric1505]

At any rate, the ME races are in no way prepared for what Taylor and Tali are going to be doing. Then again, who is?

 

[cryptoam]

Hm.

Has there been any AAMs shown in ME though?
Because if there are not any in the militaries there (for some reason....), that would drastically reduce the need for high end manuverable guided missiles. That would seriously cause issues for anyone trying to create guided projectiles for space warfare. It's very easy when we all know about AAMs and can extrapolate, it's harder when you have no basis to do so.

Of course, that brings up how the hell aerial warfare works.

 

[Overfic23]

Let us be honest.

There are combat robots and drones in Mass Effect.

Click to shrink...

No is arguing that ME doesn't have drones, just that their usage of drones is horrible and their naval tactics specifically are archaic because we have, right now, systems that could easily be applied to ME and would just slaughter Council forces, because that's what happened in comparable earth wars. Basically ME naval tactics is WWI battle fleets IN SPAAAACE. We have had century of technological advancements and tactical innovations that are battle proven and make those totally obsolete. The discussion is more just over what the application of such systems would look like and what the consequences would be, mixed in with some griping over how stupid some of the tactics/tech used are and their in universe justification.

 

[Martin Bajar]

I'm very tempted to write a fairly short ME story based on what would happen if the canon ME scenario ran into humans who'd kept the Cold War mentality going until that point... Not sure how they'd have actually survived doing this, but we can put it down to plot armor

Because that would in a way be grimly hilarious; Turians decide to 'punish' the new species for breaking a law that doesn't apply to them, take out a civilian science vessel, and try to invade Shanxi... Only to run into massive amounts of anti-shipping missile fire that takes out most of their drop ships with pinpoint neutron warheads, ground based lasers that punch holes in the capital ships, thousands of satellite weapons that were at one point aimed at each other but now are all aimed at them, and if any of them manage to get to the ground, they find the crazy apes are firing nuclear mortars at them! With neutron bomb warheads small enough to fit several in a backpack. And chemical weapons, and Spirits know what else.

And once all the invaders are dead, the humans go looking for where they came from, with an eye towards making sure they never come back...

Hmm... A fleet of about ten thousand smart bombs with gigaton yields sent through the mass relay network aimed at Palaven? And as they pass through each Relay, a couple of dozen stay behind and nuke it.

It's the only way to be sure, after all

Click to shrink...

Now I really want to read that

 

[Aineko]

Yes, which with gravity affecting tech is still far better than being hit.

Click to shrink...

...talking about ME cruisers, not gravitech ones, which would probably not use similar doctrine and would be able to engage from much farther away than dumb mass-driver ships. They have no need for spinal weapons, may have actual facing-independent main propulsion, and have better shields.

And, well...that's a maybe depending on how much other effective defenses cost and how reliably you'll be able to achieve the dodge with the large evasion engines. And 'take the hit' or 'dodge it with secondary engines' are not fundamentally the only options. They're for the most part the only options compatible with engaging the enemy nose-to-nose. But if you don't do that, you could use your main thrust for evasion. Of course that means not being positioned to use fixed spinal weapons. And not being able to concentrate all your armor on the nose like an MBT (but unlike real armored naval vessels), though I don't know that ME canon specifies armor layouts.

 

[Faralis]

At the same rate of progress, by 2175 or whenever canon ME happens, there shouldn't have been any piloted fighters at all. That the Citadel species were using them shows that they are in that respect at least not really any more advanced than 21st century earth-type humans... And makes one wonder why.

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Because most of the writers write about their hobbies, like Star Wars, which has its combat based in a war that ended in 1945...

And because its more dramatic.

 

[Martin Bajar]

Not really about this story, but I just rushed through the Good Skynet story, an interesting read

 

[Frogs321]

snip
Basically ME naval tactics is WWI battle fleets IN SPAAAACE.
snip

Click to shrink...

I think that in a lot of ways for their technology level WW1 fleets used their technology better and that gave them better tactics then ME ships/fleets. As a example @Jacen1 pointed out over in Incompatible System just adding gun turrets would make a big difference in ME ship/fleet tactics. As all of you have pointed out the ME space warships could really use their tech better.

It seems to me that ME ship combat is more like cavalry combat then ship combat. You can not do crossing the T maneuvers as just one real ship combat maneuver that that you can not do in ME.

 

[Shiv Ers]

But used 3 1/4 floppy disks

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erased a 3 1/4 floppy

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Just a tiny nitpick,@FaerieKnight79. During the 80's and 90's you had 5 1/4" actually floppy disks (360kb or 1.2 mb storage) and 3 1/2" rigid plastic 'floppy' disks (720kb or 1.44 mb.) The 5 1/4" ones you could actually insert upside down into the drive to double your storage.
Edit:Spelling

Gee, thanks. I just had to wipe off my monitor. Read this as I was taking a drink of water.

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I was drinking from a Slurpee when I read this post.

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Sigh. I thought everyone knew after the first 10 chapters of TV to not drink while reading MPPi posts?

Damn, now we need to find a shipname for Taylor and Tali

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Done to death, but I didn't see TalTay in there.

That being said, QA should get an avatar eventually.

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Ninja'd. I was going to quote the Dragonflies as well.

Sovereign doesn't lie at any point in it's monologue.

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Slight nitpick again. Shepard asked who created the Reapers and Sovereign replies no one, they are eternal. Yet it was proven the Leviathan's created the Reapers hundreds of millions to billions of years ago. <Lie>

@mp3.1415player Loving your story. ME crossovers always get a double like. Looking forward to more and especially another round for that Irish fellow.

 

[Trufla]

You could literally build a functional cruise missile with a 500 mile range and a decent payload from parts from a good model shop, including a turbine engine, for a few thousand dollars. The only thing I'm surprised about is that no one has actually done it yet...

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I wouldn't be surprised to find out that one or more TLA's monitor certain combinations of hobby parts being done by a given individual or group. Nothing happens until a threshold is passed, then someone from the FAA turns up with a friendly suggestion to scale back the design.

 

[Darkphoenixlady]

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that one or more TLA's monitor certain combinations of hobby parts being done by a given individual or group. Nothing happens until a threshold is passed, then someone from the FAA turns up with a friendly suggestion to scale back the design.

Click to shrink...

Amature (s.p?) space enthusiasts run into this from time to time. They also need to schedule their launch tests.

 

[kaosisreality]

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that one or more TLA's monitor certain combinations of hobby parts being done by a given individual or group. Nothing happens until a threshold is passed, then someone from the FAA turns up with a friendly suggestion to scale back the design.

Click to shrink...

More realistically, the fuel is a lot easier to monitor since it's not just diesel and large purchases of kerosene or hydrogen/LOX are much easier to monitor than hobby shops.

 

[Pethrai Darkos]

As a example @Jacen1 pointed out over in Incompatible System just adding gun turrets would make a big difference in ME ship/fleet tactics.

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They do have turrets, IIRC the Thanix cannon from ME2 is turret mounted (if with an unknown traverse angle). Keep in mind that the Normandy os the only ship we spend a significant amount of time looking at and it is not only a Frigate, but a Stealth Frigate. Anything small enough to be put in a turret mount on that (before reverse engineered Reaper tech cones into play) would be limited to an AA or CAS role for which GUARDIAN lasers already fit.

It seems to me that ME ship combat is more like cavalry combat then ship combat. You can not do crossing the T maneuvers as just one real ship combat maneuver that that you can not do in ME.

Click to shrink...

Of course there's no crossing the T in ME. Even if you have broadside or turret armed ships (the only ones that benefit from crossing the T with, and even then it only applies to turret armed ones if you've got a superstructure which obstructs the LoF for rear-facing turrets) the absolute last place you want to be is in front of an enemy whose primary weapon is a spinal mount.

 

[Norgarth]

Actually, it is. Not directly, but in ME1 you can ask the VI tour guide in the Citadel about VI. Again and again throughout the games you are told about how paranoid the council is about AI via in-game dialog and codex entries. It's to the point that the only automated turrets you'll encounter are all being used by criminals or are ultra black projects that nobody is suppose to know about. The only missile/torpedo tech that is ever mentioned is unguided rockets that have to be launched from 'knife fight' range. They are really paranoid about AI, and the possibility any tech that can make decisions might become an AI.

Also, remember that drones can be controlled remotely. In fact, they are controlled remotely.

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... wait, so the Council is basically paranoid about AI, and refuses to build anything that even vaguely looks like it can make a decision without involving an Organic, but then ignored an an army of AI that already mangled the Quarians and just pretended the Geth didn't exist for decades?

Of course there's no crossing the T in ME. Even if you have broadside or turret armed ships (the only ones that benefit from crossing the T with, and even then it only applies to turret armed ones if you've got a superstructure which obstructs the LoF for rear-facing turrets) the absolute last place you want to be is in front of an enemy whose primary weapon is a spinal mount.

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technically, I believe passing behind an enemy ship to hit their stern with your broadside was also called 'crossing the T'

 

[Pethrai Darkos]

technically, I believe passing behind an enemy ship to hit their stern with your broadside was also called 'crossing the T'

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Well sure, but at that point (when it comes to spinal mounts) it's not about crossing the T, it's about being anywhere except in front of them. A broadside duel works just as well.

This is of course treating space as if it works on Aristotelian physics rather than Newtonian physics. A not entirely uncommon phenomenon when it comes to sci-fi but one where when it's averted requires you to redesign tactics instead of ripping off the WW II or Age of Sail playbook.

 

[Xerres]

Economies of scale should make such a thing a fairly minor problem. A lot of the cost of a fighter after all is going to be put towards keeping the pilot intact enough to get them back after the battle. Removing all of that would make the missile much cheaper than the equivalent fighter regardless of how much it ended up costing. After all, a modern fighter jet is easily capable of pulling turns that will kill the pilot instantly and handling it without trouble, but because pilots tend to complain about this, it's limited to only a few g. Take the guy in the seat out of the equation and you could make even an F-22 turn about four times as hard quite happily...

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also the costs of training, feeding, housing and paying the pilots plus the costs of R&R&R

 

[mp3.1415player]

More realistically, the fuel is a lot easier to monitor since it's not just diesel and large purchases of kerosene or hydrogen/LOX are much easier to monitor than hobby shops.

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Fuel for model turbines is pretty much anything that will burn and has the right viscosity. So yes, diesel does work perfectly fine, several friends of mine run their models on it You just mix in the right amount of oil and pour it in the tank.

Heating oil works nicely too, but the best smell is if you can get genuine Jet-A, which is a bit pricey but still available.