Iraq had no air force to protect their airspace. That's why I said "all other things being equal". There hasn't been any war fought between two modern armies in decades, only one superpower against some technologically inferiour foes.

Also, speaking of the 6th world, once collateral damage is no concern, the need for precision force in urban terrain lessens greatly. Not to mention that this vaunted urban terrain still needs to get supplied through non-urban terrain. Drones are only as effective as their computer network is safe. A tank won't be as easily taken over, and won't be limited to programming when cut off from communication.

Iraqi tanks were total crap. They has a half-assed knockoff of an outdated Soviet design and craptastic outdated Chinese tanks. Most of Iraqi tank kills came from M1A1s and FV4030/4s. The FV4030/4 has the distinction of over 300 kills and no loses against Iraqi tanks during Desert Storm. The drastically interior Iraqi tanks couldn't even pierce the armor of modern battle tanks with their 125mm Depleted Uranium shells at close range. Their armor was crap and easily defeated by Coalition tanks M829A1 120mm APFSDS . The range of their guns was also crap, with Coalition tanks having more than twice the accurate range as Iraqi tanks.


Only the best of the best mage can hope to come close to destroying a tank with magic and even then the drain will be enormous. Ram Tank is a pretty suicidal prospect even with the drain reduction.


I'd argue that urban environments make non-precision weapons even more practical; the current military leaders are just too wimpy to use them. More people burned to death under Allied firebombs during WWII that have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in the history of the warfare. Imagine what it does to the morale of your enemy when they see their families slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands. They could end the insurgency in Iraq right quick if they wanted to. None of that precision-guided crap, just good old carpet bombing of civilian homes. Guerrillas can't hide amongst the population if there is no population to hide amongst.

Tanks provide a good medium between the cold aloof destruction of carpet bombing and nuclear devastation. And the visceral thrill of wanton hand-to-hand slaughter.


What is best in life?

I don't know. Even so, the U.S. is moving away from armor as we understand it, towards lighter, faster mech infantry units. I still don't think the Sixth would see armor in the same form we see it today. Everything it can do, something else can do better. If you guys want to make a case for automated armor, I'd probably agree with you. Less bodies in vehicles = less risk, and with drone technology apparently being cheaper, smarter, and more reliable then it is in 2008, I don't really see why, with a military budget, you would want to have to house, feed, and train a tank crew when a dog-brain can do it better with a higher uptime and a lower supply chain footprint. Yeah, sure.. networks are vulnerable to attack, but I think that weakness suits Shadowrun's theme perfectly.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying. What I was trying to get across was the fact that the main battles in modern times are headed to the sky - once you own the sky, everything else is basically trivial, as you can essentially dominate the battlespace as you see fit. Of course, even through all our technological progression, experience has shown that you simply have to have boots on the ground, so infantry would stay. Everything else I would likely bet automated to some degree or another. While maintenance would likely be a bigger concern, I can't possibly see it as being more of a burden then all the logistics that surround supporting humans, particularly when you consider advances like desktop forges and nano-construction, all of which would be within the scope of a military budget within Shadowrun's background.

FWIW, one significant factor in that shift may be the total absence of an equivalently-equipped foe that the US is likely to face in combat anytime soon. In SR, where if there is a superpower it's Japan and North America looks about like Europe did at the height of the Cold War (and UCAS and Sioux soldiers staring at each other with itchy trigger fingers), that factor is totally gone.

As for being unmanned, I'm not sure I agree—as probably the most heavily-armored thing on the field, it'll probably be where the Rigger is.

~J

What would a tank's Condition Monitor be? I mean, you'd really only have to beat a Threshold of 4 with a few multi-cast spells to pretty much take it out in one round if it's anything under 20.

Well, with satellite links, the rigger can be back in some armored bunker, vectoring drone tank platoons around and jumping into one when it needs personal attention - see the example of the pilots of Predator drones in the Middle East operating them from the United States. Matrix Security would be a concern, yes, but that fits with modern times as well. Cyberspace is viewed to be a new, critical part of the battlespace.

The jury's still out on the new "Light armor" trend. Compared to Tanks, APCs and IFVs are much more vulnerable to RPGs and similar attacks.

The Israeli tend to field more tank with APC capacities (Merkavas), and are going for heavier armor, not lighter armor.

Right, though. By sticking someone in the tank itself, you don't get to disable the whole works remotely, not without cracking the tank directly.

~J

Since there are boats with bodies of 30 I'd put a tank's around 60, meaning that you'd need to cast at Force 25 in order to have a reasonable chance to defeat one with a powerbolt.

I never mentioned using only one Powerbolt (or Ram, or whatever).

Multicasting lower Force spells on successive passes could chew into that Condition Monitor in a turn or two (assuming 4 successes per spell). Hell, you could just sit back and pick away with much lower Force spells over the course of several turns (given the aforementioned threshold issue), or am I missing something?

That the tank will not simply let you do that without popping thermal smoke as soon as something is registered, then starting to saturate likely hiding areas with weapon fire?

Current tanks have smoke grenade launchers bolted on already, in a world with mages, LOS breaking smoke will be used by tanks regularily.

I also don't really see mages being ordered to face tanks, not when there are other ways to deal with tanks which do not risk valuable, rare mages (who should be busy warding tanks, and summoning spirits, and astrally scouting, not trying to replace a tank or tank-hunter).

I didn't say it was always going to be easy, nor standard practice. I was just commenting on the possibility because it came up.

As for the Body, the 30 points assigned to those ships would be partly on account of size. I think it more reasonable to list a tank at around 40.

He said boats, not ships. If a ship has 30 points, there's no way a tank's going to have anywhere near that.

~J

Yeah, in the only true SR anyway, if your powerball can't beat a TN of their Object Resistance ( + Body (~20?) + Armor/2 (~20) it has no effect. So yes, a force 1 powerball COULD hypothetically hurt a tank, but you'd need to beat a TN of 48 and cast it with enough force that the tank doesn't just stage it down to nothing with its huge body.

(But it is hypothetically possible.)

Meh! As I posed the original tangent question about SR4 ...

I think I'm clearly in the "Tanks in the 6th world!" camp for the reasons mentioned: Hard to kill, less likely to get taken out by something stupid like wide spectrum jamming, and capable of providing all sorts of utility. I agree with a previous poster that a giant 120 mm cannon might have limited utility in the 6th world but I'm guessing that the basic idea of a 50-60 ton tank is still alive in and kicking. I envision an SR tank to be able to do everything from deploying/servicing drones, to laying down massive suppressing fire whilst spraying chemicals and napalm on things and people. I also suspect that it makes a decent platform for any sort of anti-air capabilities as it doesn't go "pop" every time someone throws a couple of rounds at it. I also expect that they have the ability to automatically eject burning ammo and what not thus removing a tanks primary threat, itself.

The fact that the US military is doing anything is not a good indicator that it is a good idea in the first place. I think the main reason we're moving away from main battle tanks is because the M1A1 is good enough, plenty good enough. As mentioned above American and British tankers fought massive armor battles in the first Gulf war and sustained practically zero casualties. In my reading I'm seeing that the only real "kills" anyone scored were because of friendly fire and in many cases the front armor of the M1A1 actually shrugged off the fancy APFSDS we field. Ah, I'm wrong there is one KIA in a tank that took RPG fire and 3 depleted uranium rounds that found a weak spot around the turret. I wonder what that weight of fire would do to a Striker? What I'm trying to get at is that modern tanks are all but impervious to only the most determined attacks by well equipped foes.

In other words our move away from tanks is not because they aren't good at what they do (staying alive and killing other hard targets) but because the thinking is we can move towards a "Smaller, faster" military force (read: cheaper). The people who are pushing these ideas also rode into and out of office on the idea that we could comfortably occupy Iraq with 30k troops and "shock and awe". Well they were wrong, and goddamnit Donny we want our armor back, and our heavy lift helos. You can however hang on to that crappy Crusader artillery piece that shoots nice but is too damn big to take anywhere. There is merit to the idea that we need something that's heavier than a HUMVV and lighter than an Abrams but I hardly think that means were going to push all our tanks into a hole and forget about them. In Shadowrun terms I doubt a team will ever square off against a tank unless they are very stupid or very unlucky or their GM has access to Arsenal and wants to start a new game anyway. Tanks in SR are probably something reserved for "Very Bad Days" ™ and are likely kept in reserve solely for the purpose of keeping riggers alive long enough to compose an orchestra of dronecentric destruction. Besides, what rigger worth his salt wants to sit in an office and play a trideo game when they could be screaming across the battlefield in 60 tons of death dealing doom? If you're going to die of dumpshock you might as well die doing something you love.

Combat riggers have to be in the field, probably in a tank. Satcom links have up to a seconds of delay (IRL) and are subject to all sorts of jamming and atmospheric interference. The delays are not something anyone has a good work around on because these signals are already traveling at the speed of light. Additionally I refuse to believe that Ares/Aztechnology/etc would have qualms about kinetic killing satellites during a conflict, something no one has to deal with today (well, unless China gets really jumpy). Who wants to lose control of millions of dollars of drones because of sun spots, multi tiered jamming, or because some asshole shot your satcom network to pieces?

I am aware that the Airforce flies digital sorties with Predators and other UCAV's but these are hardly high performance VTOL assault crafts and the "pilots" aren't coordinating multiple vehicles with 3 to 4 initiative passes. They pretty much fly around, look at things, and occasionally pull the trigger on a fire and forget hellfire anti tank missile that does all the hardwork.

I still think that's a cool job.

Fun fact that I learned when I did a paper on depleted uranium. The longest kill recorded for a DU APFSDS round was fired from a British Challenger tank that killed a tank slightly over the horizon.

A note to my players:
I have stats for tanks. I think they are still around in decent numbers in 2070, I'm simply tickled pink at playing "Geek the mage! Troll! Sniper!" with tank sized APDS rounds that do "HELL YES" damage. If things go bad and someone has time to get tanks to where you are, you should be running already.
I'm also fond of vectored thrust vehicles that use cut down tank weaponry.

The obvious fix is a large permanent ward, but wards just provide bonuses for inanimate objects on a roll inanimate object don't get to make. The person who wrote the warding rules for SR4 obviously doesn't read or write English as a first language. Or is an idiot. Or both.

My fix was to assume that wards just eat success equal to their power for people and objects, ignore the bonus crap. Yeah, this makes them tough. Mages are overpowered.

The "official" SR4 fix I would use would be long-term high force bound guardians using magical guard. This also makes your armor units move at 500 MPH and keeps people from swiping them when in depot.

Which is the same way you can blow up an aircraft carrier, a skyscraper, or the the earth ZOMG! Actually, the object resistance table says 4+, and I think that + is very significant. I remember talking about this in the fire darting an aircraft carrier thread a while back. Specifically Demerzel and I (not to steal credit from other people who contributed to the conversation or anything) talked about increasing OR by 1 per 5 full points of Body for vehicles, as a good rule-of-thumb. Keeps those pesky mages from powerbolting willy-nilly outside of the inter-personal conflict scale.

edited: misleading text

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that you jam the satellite and the tanks go brain dead. I'm saying drone tanks that a rigger can command / jump into from a remote command station, or can operate autonomously if they're isolated. Of course, you would be digitally vulnerable, but network security would unavoidably be a new battlefield in 2070, and I don't think that would be enough of a downside to shy away from using the matrix technology.

I didn't think you were, I'm just saying that in a world where people are making complex actions every second and a half that losing connection for a couple of seconds might leave you with half the force you started with. I insist (because I am all knowing) that riggers need to be in or very near the battlefield to have the best chance of coming out with as many drones as they put in.

Even so, a secured forward base is going to be worlds above a command tank in terms of safety. I also don't think that lag would be as much of a factor as you think; drones, both in Shadowrun and real life, are capable of decisionmaking and reaction far faster then your average human. From what I've read, Predators practically fly themselves, while the Officers in charge of the unit simply set it a destination. It figures out how to get there. Believe me, the rigger can just provide upper-level judgment in almost real-time, and the drone(s) will fill in the holes. I doubt they'd even need to jump in.

All this precision operation capability would likely be done at a lesser cost and higher uptime then with a human crew. Yeah, the military in question would need to protect its matrix assets, but considering that most theatre-to-theatre communications would be traveling by matrix anyway, that's a concern that would have to be addressed weither our hypothetical tank platoon is drone or man based.

This is true but in SR I though it was always cannon that one good rigger hoping in and out of drones, taking his 3-4 initiative passes can wipe the floors with an army of "mindless" pilot rating only drones.

Granted that's SR3. SR4 (which I'm not at all familiar with drone rules yet) seems to support your theory that riggers hardly if ever need to jump into drones.

I think we've reached a point in the conversation where were splitting hairs. I call it "I agree to disagree with you" and we'll just have to wait 60 odd years before I can log onto the Matrix version of dumpshock and say "Ha! I told you! lag still sucks!"

In game terms i think it's safe to say that different orgs have different philosophies and that both our positions have merit for certain mission profiles.

For runners, tanks are pretty useless since they have to exist without all that support structure. I'm sure the teams rigger has wet dreams about tooling around in a tank but... he's kinda off to begin with.

So does counterspelling, and that works on inanimate objects as well. But OR basically works as permanent successes on a resistance roll (for direct spells, anyway.)


So basically it'd get (counterspelling + ward) rolled + an OR of whatever, to compare to the spellcasting successes.

arsenal has rules for equipping a vehicle with a large sensor array and a missile defense system. it again links to one or more weapons mounted on said vehicle in a remote control equiped mount. each weapon gives a +2 on defense rolls, except lasers, those give a +4.

you need 1 slot for the array, one for the MDS, and whatever the weapon mounts need (and making those remote controlled only makes them cost 1 less then normal).

as for ADA (air defense artillery, right?), as it seems that SR4 do not care about flight time of the fired rounds, as long as target is within range, anything that can fit in a flexible mount (90 degree from center pivot) or a normal turret (90 degree vertical, 360 horizontal, so it can shoot straight up if needed it seems) can in theory make use of sensor assisted gunnery, be it active or passive.

so a vehicle scale laser, or even the gauss cannon, in a reinforced flexible mount could probably shoot down a aircraft, if needed. would be quite the sight

Does anyone else get the feeling that SR open warfare must not be a nice place to be standing outside without radiation shielding? With all these lasers and sensors pulsing all over the place your teeth will probably start falling out.

welcome to modern warfare...

or just a walk down the street, if the reports about mobile phones can be trusted...

Whats an ADA laser? if its Air defense artillery, which makes perfect sense actually, maybe atmospheric refraction screws up whatever they have? If you can just swat air units out of the sky things are going to be tricker.

Conventional warfare in SR4 is going to be extremely high intensity, and extremely one sided. One side will be catastrophically defeated in the opening hours, and thats that.

Its because something like eleventy billion UAVs armed with with hellfire missles and sniper rifles flying around will cause wholesale slaughter of the other teams ground forces - in a totally precision fashion. So the game is going to be sweeping the other guys UAVs out of the air, and that will be won by whoever has the best electronic warfare/EMP/EMP hardening technology, something that is decided long before anyone actually shows up. Once you've done that, you have a million billion flying things that can kill any infantry man or vehicle long before the target can A) see it B) react, and total victory is assured.

Unconventional warfare is going to much harder as the other team won't drive tanks around or wear convenient 'shoot me please' uniforms to make targeting easier. The UAVs are still going to be flapping around, so if you attract attention and don't have overhead cover things are going to go very badly for you, but that isn't an insurmountable problem.

So tanks are still going to be driving around for working in unconventional warfare and police actions, as these are the only wars anyone will ever actually fight due to the problems with total destruction in conventional warfare.

The US Air Force once thought that planes did not need cannons anymore. They were proven wrong and had to add a cannon to the Phantom. Also, costs are a factor - all the UAVs need a very big infrastructure. Then add jamming, smoke generators, and camouflage, and the army that only uses Drones in a centralised assault might very well end up beaten by the army that has people out there who can act on their own initiative even with communication and sensors mostly down.

Buck and Ball Brother, Buck and Ball

heh, not surprised that i got called on that one

If you use buckshot to hunt bucks, and birdshot to hunt birds, do you use grapeshot to hunt grapes?

~J

And we thought the ratio of logistics soldiers to combat soldiers was bad now...

Is it can it be SR military sim time?

Just wondering, is a 50' Cal Barrett considered small-arms? It's man-portable. Can't you fuck up an armored vehicle with that?

A fairly lightly armored vehicle, yeah.

~J

Like a bradley.

IIRC, brads are currently good against 14.5mm from all aspects and much heaver to the front.

Have they undergone a change since say 6 years ago? One of my friends used to drive one, and he said a 50 cal would pretty much swiss cheese one. Also he said that you might be able to get a 30 cal round in if you were able to shoot long enough with something like an lmg (he didn't think a normal 30 cal rifle would do the trick).

So what's a bradley? Is that a light tank? or is it a heavily armored car?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2/M3_Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle

its a "IFV"

The Bradly is an Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Sort of a combination of a tank a scout vehicle and a troop transport. It carries people, does scouring, has a huge gun and can fire wire-guided missiles. It comes in a variety of flavors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_fight...icle_.28BSFV.29

The HBO movie about it was really amusing.

There were armor upgrades (part of the A2 set) in 1988 or so that are supposed to stop 30mm AP cannon rounds. There were further upgrades in 2000 as part of the A3 set. My understanding is that it should be be good against 14.5 from all aspects, though I can't find any support for that in brief search. Global Security says it had 14.5mm protection on all sides initially, the A2 upgrade provided 30mm protection from all sides, with titanium roof armor added in the A3 upgrade. There is a reason that damn thing weight 33 tons without the 3 tons of add-on reactive armor tiles. It's also why the loss rate in Iraq has been fairly low. It's very tough, and quite lethal.

I'm just relaying what a guy that used to drive one in the late 90's early 2000 ish range told me about them. He told me, "...a 50 cal will pretty swiss cheese one, and if you catch AV rocket you might as well forget it..."

So whatever the stats say they are supposed to do, maybe the 2000 A3 upgrade you mentioned fixed it right. When he reupped 2001-2002 I don't remember which, he decided to switch and be a medical equipment repair guy. So the only thing I knew was what they were like before that time, and even that second hand.

The army doesn't magically upgrade all the vehicles in inventory when an upgrade comes out, particularly during the "peace dividend" that gave us the Les Aspin memorial shootout in Mogadishu because we didn't need armored vehicles. It takes years, if not a decade+, to get upgrades to all deployed systems, and some never will. Reserve units tend to be screwed that way. Knew soemone who still had M60 tanks when M60A4s and M60A5s were supposed to issued to all units.

But a UAV with a fairly large gun costs 8k, and a real soldier costs like 800k (based on current costs for a US army soldier. You can adjust depending on what you think the nuyen to dollar conversion rate is, but a car is 14k yens and a racing bike 6, implying that yens are worth more than dollars). And that drone needs a repair guy at an airbase (which in shadowrun is another drone) and a supply line to an airbase. Airbases are much easier to supply than infantry guys running around who need to do stuff like sleep and eat, and are in contact with the enemy. You can even have drone controlled artillery batteries that provide automated fire support as prioritized by a cyberlogistican - again great fire support for the guys on the ground, and doesn't require many people, and is easy to supply.

You can even get a drone to maintain other drones, so the logistics tail doesn't blow out hugely. You'd probably even need less guys, because a half squad could easily oversee a facility with 100+ dedicated maintanence drones running 24/7. Just put up a tent. They can even maintain each other.

It's not like you'd forgo your conventional soldiers either, I see them as a huge force multiplier, with each soldier/jet fighter/whatever backed up by an assortment of related purpose drones. So you don't have a single flight like today, you float dozens of drones.

I don't mean this directly towards your friend, but I talked to lots of combat arms guys when I was in the service. It was funny how many of them had crackhead ideas about at least one of the pieces of equipment they were supposed to be expert in.

A USMC NCO once told me that the secondary MOS of all enlisted personnel was to whine and complain. Making up reasons why your gear is a POS ranks at least in the top 5.

A guy in my unit was convinced our body armor was POS because it would not stop rifle ammo without plates!

You can't believe the manufacturer 100% even though they made the gizmo, and you can't believe the user 100% even though they use it every day.

WTF? I'd agree with him. If you aren't getting issued at least 25cm of RHA, you're getting ripped off.

But then some pansy'd probably start whining about "being able to move" or "standing up"…

~J

From my experiences with maintenance in the military (only on the "when can we get our APC back? Anytime this week?" end) I am not sure that this will work like you wrote. There are parts to ship for all maintenance, and any drone that maintains drones requires maintenance too. You'd end up, in my opinion, with a huge supply train. As far as I know, aircraft curently are operating, in püeace time, in a 2/3 active, 1/3 down for maintenance mode - and they have much more than one tech per craft.

I can't really see a huge army of drones operating as efficiently as a mixed force of soldiers, vehicles and drones, and then we have hacking to deal with.

I'm thinking a mixed force of drones, people and vehicles, probably in a 30-40?/50/10 expenditure too, I think we just have slightly different ideas of how much the costs are going to be

Remember, the drones can actually maintain each other too, humans are really not required at all for that process, except to make tactical/strategic decisions. The only reason you actually need humans is to make tactical and strategic decisions that are beyond a drone, SR has them more than capable of putting any human devised plan into action.

The supply train today is huge, and no reason to assume that would change in the future - and yeah, a combat readiness of vehicles in wartime of over 80% is pretty exceptional (US just tipped that in WWII in late 1944/1945, germany was running at about 60 percent from 1939 -> 1941, dropped to about 40% after that), though the US in GWI managed over 90 for both ground vehicles and aircraft.

However, there are huge logistical benifts to be made by the use of drones. Supply chains will be orchestrated by humans, but implemented by drones. A big bottleneck in GWI was the drivers for trucks to move the immense amount of crap around, drones have no driver fatigue so you can run the truck 24/7 except for servicing intervals.

Another major GWI bottleneck was the port facilities, but SR has a much more advanced supply chain management capability than we do. Part of the problem was the 'intresting' approach that US based logistics personnel had to things like shipping manifests, and putting what they'd said they put in the box. SR doesn't have this problem, everything and its dog is RFID tagged, so you can see whats in a container at an electronic glance. If the US guys cocked up the order and put 400 M-16's in instead of toliet paper, you'll know about it before you sent the M-16's to the guys with bowel problems. Another GWI problem was the (in)ability of the US forces to get the electronic supply chain management system working (civilian contractors actually deployed with US forces to get this going), but SR4 has a fantastic interworking matrix that enables all sorts of technology solutions - and ties into the capability to see electronic into shipping containers.

There is every reason to assume the entire port operation would be automated, with some humans to make overall supply routing decisions, and then a legion of drones (automated ships, handling equipment and trucks) to implement these directives. Drones don't get tired either, though they do break down, but they can easily run the place into the ground, and you're going to get much more accurate cargo manifests and supply requests enabling more efficient dispatch.

And yes, I'm thinking idealized solutions, and like always the supply chain is going to choke up in all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons. It's just that with the labour multipler you have in drones - one technican can oversee and entire team of maintainence drones and just step in for the tricky bits, and one foreman can manage an entire work crew of docker drones - you're going to ride them and ride them hard.

To look at it in 'fix my APC now' terms, you might be the only human on your 'team' (You'd still have a team, just stepped up the ladder one. You'd effectively be a work crew leader and your team of work crew leaders would be lead by a shop foreman), but you'd have a maybe a dozen or so drones with fully independant decision making and modest capability (probably the level of a junior technican, but they are fully qualified to operate all your equipment and conduct the majority of repairs), and a computer based parts ordering system that would automatically route parts from the closest location, give you an ETA, and then use a drone to ship them into the shop. Additionally, you could call up expert assistance at a moments notice from division or army level, or even from the US via matrix links.

Depending on the repairs, you might be able to work on half a dozen vehicles and drones at once, which is a neat capability. So a 'team' of 5 guys can work on 40-50 vehicles at once (assuming some are waiting for parts etc), which is probably a regimental level repairs facility. I'm not sure how many vehicles you'd expect in the shop at any one time.