Someone's laced this alcohol with sugar and lime juice! Gah!

Also, what the heck is up with "synthahol"? I figure it's just a futuristic way of saying "grain neutral spirits" because making ethanol via fermentation of waste plant material is pretty much cheaper than any kind of "synthesis" I can think of. Aside from photosynthesis, I guess.

Also, what's the big deal with soy? Factory farms are way more cyberpunk, and plus there's Animal 57.

I can't see Skillwires in regular infantry - When you factor in that grunt training is reasonably cheap, and the fact that skillwires could, conceivably break at some point and Joe baggadoughnuts forgets how to shoot his rifle, I don't think it'd happen. On top of that, EMP munitions are likely more frequent at the milspec budget level then you'd think, and we haven't seen how EMP interacts with cyberware. Technical specialists, on the other hand, may have a better shot at getting a skillwire package - it's pretty rare that the military would get a curveball peice of equipment to repair.. it's basically all templated. Skillwires and standardized skillsofts for, say, F-50 maintenance basically ensures more reliable maintnance at a low cost, and with a lower training turnaround time. No three month tech!

Synthahol is basically alcohol, but more produced and probably not through fermentation. Considering we are currently looking for ways to do exactly this (because of the huge push for ethanol fuel) it's quite reasonable. I always imagined it's actually an alcohol-substitute, probably oil based, that can be mass produced at some factory somewhere. If it helps you any, imagine it's just Victory gin.



I don't think factories grow especially well on farms, and they scare away the other animals.

Truthfully though, it's just driving home the point of 'you are so far separated from your natural state, you don't even eat meat any more'. Again, I don't think soy is necessarily real soybeans ground up, but any number of other soy food product substitutes. Unfortunately, with the fall of the UCAS, the Department of Agriculture disappeared and no longer required such informative labels on their foods. But the ultimate point is, whatever the food product is, you cannot identify through touch, smell, sight or taste what it was originally made of (which isn't the case with meat).

Dupuy has some pretty good criticisms of the square law...

SR4 makes the military much more cost viable. On one hand, you can train first term troops with external augmentation (e.g. contacts, glasses, earbuds, trodenets, etc). the gear in basic will be twitchy and no longer combat worthy but will suffice for good training. Of course, that's because "good training" is apparently a euphemism for "crappy conditions where the only officer doing his job is Major Murphy."

If Private Dave can figure out how to engage the enemy as part of a unit while using a smartlink that occassionally turns off, a NOD full of static, and a data link on par with a drive through intercom, he'll be functional in the field on the rare occasions the gear is working correctly. Conversely, Corpsec Steve, who only trained with perfect gear, will start to fall apart when the opponents jam his data link and EMP/gremlin/magic his tech.

Combat drugs will likely be used but sparingly. The Airforce of today hands out provigil (modern equivalent of Long Haul) to many of their pilots. I figure every grunt will go through one field execise on the combat drugs to find out which ones can't handle it. Heck, they may be able to use simsense/VR/BTL for some weeding out or for coping exercises. The cost of dealing with addiction is too high to make it a commonly used thing but you can't tell me that there's not a 50 gallon drum of "distillate of Shiva" sitting in a warehouse just in case the drek ever does hit the fan.

Sleep regulators will probably be the most common implant behind eyes/ears/datajack. Wires will be sought after but I imagine the brass will be more careful about giving out what is really a combat-only implant. I wouldn't be surprised if access to anything past wires1 requires entry into one of the special forces.

Really good point here. Sr4 is definately alot more freindly to skills heavy characters vs OMGWTFBBQSTREETSAM types. Theres pleanty of 'alternative' methods of interaction with tech to get an edge, but they were careful to make sure the player who invests theri nuyen and essence still edges others out in this department. It just feels a little more balanced.

Or ware that your superiors can switch off when you're off duty.

I'd think that VR would do more to augment training than anything else. Sure, it does nothing at all for muscle memory but for learning tactics or even general equipment familiarity VR would go a long way. Screw MILES, imagine a live (blanks) fire exercise with a simsense overlay to provide the sensory data of artillery, grenades, or even getting shot.

Then there's the low-grade enhanced training where you slot an "exhaustion" or "full body bruise" BTL before your 10 mile fun run.

VR Hot Sim hookups, can get their 3 week boot camp training done in a matter of a day. A good simsense can go a long ways to saving time. Just have to boot the ones who come out Scorched or with Sensitive Neural Structure.. But thats what the waivers are signed for.

There's still a lot of muscle memory and endurance training in basic that, while not directly combat worthy, are still worth having. Let's face it, a 3 week crash phys-ed program has value all by itself in a world of couch potatoes. Just developing the foot callouses is worth the time.

Keep in mind that VR training won't be perfect. It won't know about the nerve damage in my right leg or the muscle in my back that got cut. It will tell a little guy he can absorb more recoil than he should and teach a strong guy to over exert himself. VR can replace that initial familiarization session and can train people to deal with various aspects of a skill but it will never replace actual real-world repetition.

I'd imagine that AR training devices will be developed that help provide feedback, I.e. sniper rifle mock-ups that record micrometer movements, M16s that provide simulated recoil for burst-fire practice, etc, that can be used in the barracks or, at least, not require the rifle range and the ammo expenditure.

Also there's no reason that the military of 2070 won't have access to the Olympic training equipment of 2000. Biomonitors to train breathing or monitor dehydration in concert with a VirtualPerson/Agent trainers (ack, R. Lee Ermey as your own personal DI: "Maggot, don't think you're tired, I can see your blood sugar and you ain't tired!")

oh ok, i can agree to that. last time a military discussion came up, i proposed the drone army and everyone kept telling me that it would never happen because drones could be subverted too easily (i tend to disagree with this, personally, but apparently that's just me and you).

i do still think that the SINless could be cheaper, when you factor in that everything can be salvaged... just make sure the cyber isn't enough to kill them, remove it from corpse A, and install it in corpse B.

in any case, as far as the army being composed almost entirely of drones with each group of drones having a team of human handlers (imo there would be a communications specialist/hacker, a mechanic, a medic, and a rigger to transport the team around, but YMMV).

i mean, really... it is *hard* to compete with a drone that costs less than 10k and is throwing 10 dice on it's attack rolls. anyone who is in 2070's military should realistically not be a regular grunt (or at least not like today's regular grunts... you'd have the specialists more or less being considered grunts though, imo) unless they are majorly undertrained, underequipped, and highly expendable. (which is why i assume SINless people with minimal cyber and training if you're talking about someone who's only ability is combat)

Nah, sorry, doesn't work. The mechanic for teaching people skills via augemented training is defined - it is a tutorsoft - and it takes longer than that.

The problem in SR4 is that AFAIK, only medium drones can be equipped with weapons. This means it's going to suck down fuel like a small ATV and a lot of its carry capacity will be taken up with fuel tanks or spare batteries. MREs and ammo can fall down a cliff and be recovered while few fuel tanks or batteries will survive the experience. IMO, anything less than a walker drone able to leopard crawl will fail at infantry-type tasks.

I don't believe in the 20:1 drone infantry army but I believe a drone rigger will replace the RTO and/or the scouts. I wouldn't be surprised if many troops, or at least officers, replace one of their grenades with an offensive iBall drone; chuck it in a room and get eyes/ears and a mobile flashpack. Mini- and micro-drones could be scattered throughout the unit as spares or backpack sensors. Equip the bug drone clipped to your pack with motion sensors and you've got a spare pair of eyes to watch your back.

Defensive positions where power and fuel can be stockpiled will probably have a heavy drone presence. I can see the em-con factor being mitigated by using optical links to stationary drones. Matter of fact, my rigger uses an optical cable as a mooring for his Stormcloud drone so it can be at altitude and totally RF silent. It also gives the stormcloud a nearly unlimited operating window since it doesn't have to exert power to resist the wind.

Drones will probably play a big part in mechanized units or forward airbases providing close air support. Five pilots can only keep five birds in the air while five riggers can have thirty birds airborne. They can either hit 30 different target zones or each of them hit one zone with six full loads of ordinance.

I really don't think that serious nation vs. nation air combat will seriously involve remote-operated drones as the defenders have too much ability to use jammers or RF-homing missiles. Autonomous drones are a different matter, but I see those as advanced fire-and-forget missiles rather than troop replacements.

Yeah, my thinking on the power issue is that power transmission exists in SR, so you'd just use that. But if it doesn't, you'd have all infantry as mech infantry, and when your drone patrol is fighting from a vehicle that has an electrical system that can be pressed into service as a generator, you can avoid many of the issues with power. So a large vehicle will disgorge its pack of steel lynxes for example, than can drive back in and plug in when getting low on power.

nah, SR4 uses magical wifi tech.

(or, to put it another way, a signal 5 emitter with a rating 6 ECCM program running cannot be shut down by any jammer in the core rules... never mind the satellite link with it's signal of 8! )

So basically cheap, nasty, cogener-filled ethanol (or as I call it, tequila). Anyway, the "synthetic" way to get ethanol is to make it from petroleum (hydrating ethylene), which I can't picture being cheaper especially in 2070. Fermentation is really cheap and if you want something futuristic, it can be carried out by genegineered yeasts that can break down cellulose into sugars and then ferment the sugars. Also there's apparently a bacterium that can make ethanol out of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

You could also go the other way for "synthahol" -- something that gets you "drunk" but doesn't have all that hangover/liver damage/depression stuff going for it. This would basically require little or no more knowledge of neuropharmacology than we have today, just an environment more rewarding for recreational pharma research (probably GABA-A agonists) than we have today. (Slightly more rewarding, says Bob Dole. Down boy). This would be the stuff that people who now drink Red Bull and vodka would be drinking. The cheap stuff would be drunk by the people who now drink the cheap stuff, and would probably, in different concentrations and mixtures, be the basis of the sort of drinks currently sold as "malt beverages" (only made from malted grain because of the weird history of beverage laws, really). Actual beer, wine, whiskey, whisky, rum and so on would range from somewhat upmarket to super-crazy expensive.



I agree with the idea, but not so much the execution. See, factory-farmed meat drives home the point of "you are so far separated from your natural state, even your supposed 'hearty beef cooked with fire' meat is coming from a clone of a clone of a clone, stuffed full of recombinant engineered hormones and growth factors, fed an utterly unnatural diet and incapable of surviving, much less breeding, without assistance".



Like the fake meat stuff you can buy now? I dig on a lot of that stuff, actually. It's also pretty impressive how much better it is now than it was ten years ago -- we've still got a ways to go if we're going to catch up with Taiwan though. I had a fake burger for lunch yesterday, and a real one today, and I've got to say they were pretty close to equally enjoyable (although the guy overcooked my hamburger, which I had requested rare). On the low end, cost-wise, the veg-based burgers are actually a lot better than the meat-based ones.



It's certainly the case with mechanically separated meat, or the kind of stuff you get at fast food places. Most of the flavor is fat, salt and MSG anyway, plus some hint of a spice maybe (like mace for hot dogs). Most mock meats like you'd find at, say, a Chinese vegetarian restaurant, are made out of soy, wheat, and/or mushroom gluten, which yeah, are pretty removed from soybeans (or whatever the starting plant) but not, when you think about it, more removed than bread, which most people consider to be pretty natural.

Anyway, I think that the scale, unnaturalness, environmental impact, consumerism and misery (for the workers as well as the animals) of factory farms make them very cyberpunk. And sure, it could apply to any sort of large-scale agriculture -- there's plenty of squick factor in the whole "soy sauce made out of human hair" story (waste hair hydrolyzed into its constituent amino acids used as a base for brewing shoyu, but it was dirty hair, eww). And as you point out, with no Dept of Agriculture, extraterritoriality, and a dangerous environment for investigative journalism, it's hard to know what you're eating.

"In UCAS, you are eaten by ghoul. In Russia, ghoul is eaten by you!" -- Ad for Evo Agricultural Products

Oh yeah, and that "Animal 57" I was talking about:
http://www.geo-pie.cornell.edu/media/kfc.html

Well, no, the core rules just don't have higher-rating jammers available for shadowrunners to buy (and they probably wouldn't be man-portable anyway). You also can't buy ocean liners, office buildings, nukes, lamp-posts, or lumber, for various reasons.

Plus really, something with signal 6 and ECCM 6 can be shut down, it's just that the ECCCM consists of hacking it (ECCCCM is firewall and Agents).

i said it can't be shut down by any *jammer* (and i also specified jammers in the core rules, for that matter, meaning i already accounted for the first half of your post anyways).

but really, if the jamming tech available on the streets is outmatched by the anti-jamming tech available on the streets, i would expect that the military jamming tech is outmatched by the military anti-jamming tech. but i suppose you never know =P

Okay, really, there are two possibilities -- the best jammer wins or the best jammer is defeated -- and they chose one of them: the ability to act unpredictably beats out the ability to predict actions.

A third possibility I guess is to say something like "higher rated jammers and ECCM exist, double the cost for each level increase," but that pretty much is saying "screw you, PCs". I mean, it's Shadowrun, not Army Electronic Warfare 2070 or something. The non-availability of higher rated jammers in the core rules doesn't mean that radio in SR4 works through "magic wifi tech", merely that stronger jammers aren't available in the core rules. The military probably has access to some crazy stuff that hasn't hit the streets yet -- also a jammer that loses a point of effectiveness every 10 meters or whatever maybe isn't all that useful in a shooting war anyway.

ECM/ECCM ratings are really an abstraction; technically a missile in home-on-jam mode is ECCM, but so is doing something like changing the frequency you're communicating on very rapidly (this is probably part of ECCM software), Spoofing signals, and other stuff.

I think the problem I have with a SINless (National) army is...

They're SINless. They inherently don't belong to anyone and there is probably a pretty good economic reason for that. They legally don't exists and such people, while making great Shadowrunners, make for terrible soldiers because there just aren't very good ways to compel performance out of them. If they suddenly decide to stop fighting what are you going to do? Lock them up? They're still getting 3 meals a day and a roof over their head. "We'll send you back to the Barrens!" starts to sound like a wonderful offer when the alternative is fighting a platoon of Azzie cyberzombies. Using your military as a prison alternative is an absolutely horrible idea (unless you're willing to use p-fixes, which if I recall, is not exactly legal ware to install wholesale).

This is of course assuming the military is still volunteer only. If there is conscription or other forced service, than I suppose that's a different argument.

As to the drone argument, I think the answer for why there isn't a 20:1 ratio of drones lies in the game itself. Why aren't Shadowrun teams composed solely of drone riggers, costs aside? Granted 5 riggers with a virtually unlimited budget would be a terrifying prospect. An all drone force, while possessing some very favorable attributes is an inherently flawed system because it lacks diversity and adaptability. By the time you design a drone that does everything a well trained infantryman can do, the cost per unit is going to looking suspiciously like what you'd pay for... a well trained infantryman.

Also, consider what happens in an all drone army. Let's say that a milspec rigger can handle 15 drones comfortably (this is assuming they all have very good Pilot programs and are grouped together by subscription to keep things workable). Get 6 of these guys in a room and you've got a truly disturbing amount of fire power, even before you give them specialized support like artillery. The problem I see is that, by the rules, they need to be fairly close to the action to gain all the benefits that make riggers kick ass. So there's a chance that a single shell is going to weave it's way through counter measure fire and kill one of these guys, or a hacker will crack their firewall and black IC them till they're rigging with brain pudding, or the enemy will fill the air with so much EW radiation that it renders people sterile. What I'm trying to get at is that if any single rigger drops dead or is otherwise unable to effectively interface with his drones he takes 3 fireteams worth of kill out of the conflict. Additionally, since he's really the only serious threat on the battlefield, he's going to be the focus of the brunt of the attacks (Geek the rigger!) which means significant resources need to be allocated to protect him, and resources to protect those resources and so on.

The weakness of a 20:1 rigger military is the same as an all infantry army, or all armor, or what have you. It's vulnerable because it's specialized. The enemy only really needs to figure out how to kill one thing and if they do, you're boned. Also, while having less personnel is attractive from a budget standpoint it means that each casualty confers a substantially higher decrease in combat effectiveness. And while drones are cheaper per unit they’re also expendable and the cost of maintenance and replacement probably reaches are fair percentage of the upkeep for fleshbag soldiers. Also the cost of training, equipping, and retaining (in the face of juicy corps deals) these shit hot riggers has to tremendously high as well.

Drones are awesome but I see them as simply another tool combatant commanders can use to screw up their enemies. Drones strike me as the perfect light armor, they provide a whole lot of kill in a very small package. A coordinated fire team backed up by a couple of drones would be incredibly effective.

One more thing on “SINless, poorly trained, poorly armed, etc troops� I think that it should be fairly obvious that mooks are actually worth less than the money you put into them. There is a minimum amount of training you have to give someone to make it worth training them in the first place. Operation “Flesh Wall� really isn’t all that cost effectively, especially when you consider that a 11k piece of cyber doubles their combat effectiveness. The only people who are going to deploy Mook Marines are people who are too poor to deploy anything else. This also gets back to recruiting, unless there is some sort of obligatory service, you have to convince people that being part of “The World’s Least Effective Infantry� is better than selling Jazz to burn out mages. People may be desperate for work but unless you’re offering them enough money to make it economical to die, there are probably better ways of spending their time. If you are offering that money you’ve made an investment and the easiest way to recoup that investment is to get the most utility out of each person you hire. This typically means keeping them alive for as long as possible. I don’t consider trained military to be some sort of enlightened methodology but rather just good business.

Picture a drone artillery battalion. Call it 16 MLRS launchers, a repair section, some logistics guys, some support vehicles, some 'infantry' to secure its immediate permiter, an counter battery radar section and probably a radar section.

In a fully intergrated military people are going to be sending in firesupport requests directly, and a person has to actually order the battery around. Thats a couple of people. But everything else... can be done by drones

the launch tubes - has to fire at targets. We do this by computers *now*

Repair section - there are drones in aresenal that specifically do this already

Reloading - Presumably they have drones for this, totally manual labour

Logistics - can EASILY be automated - the repair drones mentioned before can already do this.

Perimeter security - Dobermans and Steel Lynx's are explicity described as for this purpose.

What exactly are basic infantry men supposed to be doing in that unit? picking their nose?

As for IT security... rating 6 agents with rating 6 attack and rating 6 analyze have a unit cost of zero dollars. Every single military device will be loaded with one and possibly two. IC-tastic. And as no-one is using VR, the worst you can actually do is jam their radios (which is pretty bad, but yeah)

So what the place is going to be full of is agents. Lots of agents. Zillions of agents. Seeing as all these dudes probably have sat coms with global reach, it is not clearly how warfare in the 6th world doesn't instantly collapse to people using runners to deliver messages because they have to turn off their wi-fi to avoid the agent spam.

Assuming they do, they'll use laser comms to connect.

I apologize for not being clear but I’m talking about the fighting force that actually goes in and seizes control of targets, the front lines if you will. My beef with the 20:1 idea is that drones have replaced infantry. Looking at the broader picture of supply, maintenance, etc drones almost certainly outnumber their human masters. The Air Force in 2070 probably has about three human being in it, and all they do is fix the drones the fix the drones.

Are there a lot of basic infantry with artillery battalion right now?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...und/To1113r.htm
(For clarity this is the Table of Organization (TO) for one of three or four “firing� batteries along with one “Headquarters Battery�. These make up a battalion which in turn falls under the broad heading of a Marine Division.)

Not so much. In fact if I’m reading their TO correctly they don’t actually have any “basic infantry�. The primary reason for this is because it’s simply not their job to do anything besides fire and counter fire. I’m sure everyone is cross trained to provide security and there might even be a dedicated security detail but that’d be up to the unit to decide because the TO doesn’t make any special note of “30 grunts with guns who stand around and look pretty�.

I also don’t think that artillery in 2070 will be fixed like it is today. Plunking down in country when you could be driving around stopping only to fire seems like a very unhealthy policy.

I personally belong to a Medical Battalion which is a fancy way of saying “A bajillion Navy mook’s and 3 very sad Marines�. The only basic infantry we have are people who learned how to kill like a proper Marine and than screwed up and ended up in the school that teaches you how to drive 7 tons and humvees. In some training we did last year, 30 armed corpsmen in 7 vehicles got lit up and driven off by exactly 2 AK wielding gunmen and one guy with an RPG. Combat is not our strong point, perhaps the inclusion of “medical� and “logistic� should have tipped me off. Our primary mission is to field and coordinate a number of shock trauma platoons. STP’s are essentially mobile (insofar as our tents can be packed up and our gear put back in their cans) surgical suites/wards that can follow behind advancing units. Part of the reason we don’t have grunts with guns has to do with maintaining medical neutrality but mostly because it doesn’t make sense to take people off the line to babysit a glorified field hospital. Those guns would be much better served killing the enemy and making sure they never make it far enough to the rear to harass our medical units in the first place.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is that yes, there are many places where drones and riggers are going to rule the roost. I disagree with anyone who charges that drones in SR have rendered well trained infantry so obsolete that they only get in the way. As Cthulhudreams points out,
“…it is not clearly how warfare in the 6th world doesn't instantly collapse to people using runners to deliver messages because they have to turn off their wi-fi to avoid the agent spam.�
I contend that on the “battlefield� it probably does breakdown like this. If drones and their riggers kick so much ass it only make sense to spam the airwaves with every flavor of radiation you can think of along with using more subtle techniques to screw up their comms. I also maintain that a sea of steel lynxs becomes even more deadly with the inclusion of some versatile infantry. Having infantry, and riggers down amongst that infantry (possibly rigging using hardwires or LOS lasers) strikes me as more effective than having a couple of guys in a bunker somewhere.

Don't overlook the persuasivness of cranial bombs. We are talkin' SINless, after all. You stick a little boom boom in a guy's noggin, show him what it can do, and hten say "Now, if you serve valiantly for the next 5 years, we'll take it out, you get a SIN, any previous record you had expunged, X amount of cash and valuable training. You can re-up for special services/higher rank, or go your own way. If you try to go AWOL or attack a senior officer or your fellow soldiers...pop. Your choice, soldier.

There are no rights being violated. (They are SINless!) The governments could make vast use of those breed-like-crazy, fast maturing orks. Natural born soldiers! Assuming hte government actually pays off hte survivors well, they might not even be all that likely to come back after the military once they are out. I would suspect that a lot of survivors would actually want to re-up, lose their cranial bomb and make something out of themselves. They've been brain-washed over 5 years anyway.

Imagine it, modern day press gangs roaming hte barrens, gassing or tasering likely candidates.

Sure, you are gonna have hte occasional guy that slips through, escapes his unit and has his bomb removed/neutralized. Big deal. You aren't paying him, you are simply equipping him and feeding him. No need to invest a bunch of cyber in him, nor expensive cyber at all. Use combat drugs. So he runs off with a few automatic weapons, some grenades and some low-end milspec gear. Where do you think your runners get this stuff on the black market in the first place? From all the gear the guy traded in to get the nuyen to remove his noggin bomb.

Vlad

@Doc

Yeah, I'd agree that the ratio in frontline rifle units is probably going to be the lowest. For example, in your unit you need like 2 guys, lots of medical drones, lots of transport drones and you'll have some doberman for when the dude with the AK turns up, so your unit would have a very high drone:people ratio.

Basically, people are deployed when you need strategic or tactical decision making. Aside from tasking and routing decisions, the majority of the medical needs, particularly behind the line, are about expert skillsets which drones can have.

A rifle unit is probably going to have more people because it requires lots more tactical decision making, and high command is not going to have many drones because it needs lots of strategic decision making.

But all the glue that gets and supports rifleman and high command needs decision making like it a bad case of herpes. I would question the need for, say, the crew of a crew served weapon. That is a huge waste of time. You have a guy that tells the drone what bits to shoot at, and then a couple of steel lynxes that make the firepower happen. And 10 steel lynxes costs less than a years salary for a sargent.

You're rifleman on the ground probably won't be part of a rifle section like him normally would. Instead, he'll be a mech infantry decision maker, working closely with an AFV which probably houses his commander, probably one fellow rifleman, some steel lynxes, a squad UAV (probably a military spec version of the Ford LEBD with the grenade laucher packing frags or replaced with something more menacing), some iballs, and some hunterkiller dronesto make his tactical calls into a reality. He won;t tell these drones what to do in the convetional 'jump in' sense. Instead he'll order the steel lynxes to flank, or lay down cover fire, or he'll lay down fire with a lynx while two other lynxes advance.

So our squad is - Armoured fighting vehicle, 2 riflemen each with 3 iball flashpaks, 8 steel lynxes that ride inside the AFV, an external dronerack with a lockheed optic X, an external dronerack with 20 hunterkiller drones and some other random crap. Compared to today these three guys have a truely amazing amount of firepower (8 squad automatic weapons plus an AFV plus the riflemen), as well as gaining unique access to eyes in the sky (a UAV and 20 hunterkillers at the squad level! That is 21 flying things!), a unique capability to root bad guys out of armoured positions (sending in the explosive hunterkillers, essentially guided grenades) and the cost is probably on par or less with equipping and training 5 light infantry men.

He'll also be using drones in lots of other ways too. Our rifleman will be wired back into the entirely drone-ized artillery batteries so he can call in precision guided artillery fire on strong points via his laser targeting gear built into his helmet in a matter of seconds if his battalion has been allocated artillery support, or dial in an airstrike from the big predator style UAVs in taxi ranks over his battalion. He'll also be wired into the supply system so as soon as he fires off a clip, an order is placed for more ammo, and it will be brought up the next day by an entirely drone automated supply chain.

If I was in charge I'd make a platoon 3 of those squads, a command squad (really a dude in a rigger coccon in the back of an AFV with a seperate rigger to drive the AFV. You'd then bolt drone racks to the AFV and fill up the compartment with the endless supplies required to make this work. The drone racks would have rotodrones with rocketlaunchers mounted to lend eye in the sky firepower at the squad level), and a support vehicle, another AFV ideally with an artillery peice attached, probably a mortar with precision munitions and jam a repair bot in there. Season with drone racks to taste.

This gives a platoon huge firepower, amazing recon (5 UAVs!), hunter killer drones, strong organic fire support capability for almost any mission, and organic repair capability for the 101 things that would be going wrong with all that gear.

Combined with the power of the network giving powerful access to drone based support units, that would be a pretty compelling little fighting force. And to be frank, it is pretty cheap.

I think the appeal of the military will be for those people who are involuntarily sinless. Sinless parents, families "disowned" by corps, or people who were just lost by the system a generation or two back and don't have the skills to function in a SINner world. For anyone who wants to be part of the world in general, the military is probably the only one that completely teaches you how to act. Yeah, the washout rate may go up but depending on which histories and psychology you believe, many SINless would become seriously attached to the military as the only "family/culture" that has accepted them.





Same thing if your SINner troops decide that Leavenworth is better than fighting cyberzombies. Not sure what that is but lets face it, zombies suck regardless your background.

The biggest problem with the Drone heavy army is the industrial infrastructure and links with military tech corps that would be needed.

Sure, UCAS would have drone heavy armies, probably Aztlan, CAS and Peublo too. Places with less money would have more metahuman forces, and some places with heavy magic influences would likely field more awakened troops (often in the shape of Paranimals). These kinds of places would probably have different training techniques as well.

I imagine as many places have mostly irregular troops, as have mechanised infantry or automated troops.

Drones can't be the be all and end all, or why would anyone develop stuff like jarheads?

Oh yeah. My solution is extremely technocentric. If you live in the happy land of magical rainbows, apply elsewhere. Also, light infantry forces (ie those where AFVs to provide generation for all the drones are not an option) have to look completely different because you cannot charge all the drones you'd love to have. Rear escehelon stuff will still be dronetastic, but the guy on the ground will look more like today and less like the future.

Finally, insurgencies are completely screwed. The forces of oppression can seriously have hundreds of flying sniper rifles costing invisibly around in the air above you. This is likely to make carrying a gun around, or even waiting in ambush quite fatal for you. this is going to be a serious deterent to doing either of these things, which means your down to IEDing.. but all the guys have been replaced by robots, which are cheap. Really cheap. A months wages cheap. So your IEDing is more risky (one of the assorted sniperrifles buzzing about might notice what you are up to, resulting in the addition of extra ventalation holes) and the payoff is reduced, you will almost never get an APC, you might get some of the screening drones - if you think IED's are about, send the drones out front to keep an eye out. Whoopie.

As for jarheads, my only possibility is that you are a moron. Buying a jarhead seriously costs more than an APC with a fairly nasty gun, 8 steel lynx, 1 UAV with a grenade launcher, and 20 hunterkiller drones. And once you factor in the therapy from professionals that the jarhead needs, you could spend the money on hiring the three rifleman to round out that little squad there.

And that little squad there is going to beat the tar out of the jarhead. A CZ would trouble them though, need a lucky hit from the APC main gun, or lots of hunterkillers doing the HE grenade thing.

Thankyou so much for your very insightful comment re: my moronhood.

I was thinking Jarheads would be the future of the military, the step beyond drones, as it were. A jarhead is effectively a drone with a smarter pilot. When the tech for cyborgs has been perfected to the extent that drones have been in 2070, they'll stick jarhead CCUs into your APC, 8 Steel lynxs, your UAV and 20 hunterkillers, or whatever advanced drones they've developed by that point.

If jarheads were such a tremendous waste of time and effort, and drones were so infallible, why would anyone bother working on them?

Cannon also suggests that insurgencies are not screwed. Aztlan have been beaten out of the Yucatan peninsula have they not?

With magic and draconic help I thought?

Perhaps so, but it still underscores the point that massive drone heavy armies are not the be all and end all.

Unless you're suggesting that UCAS, CAS etc. are unnecessarily concerned about their southern neighbour?

Drone armies are inherently specialized, which makes them optimal for a particular set of tasks but less flexible for unexpected situations and tasks. One of the lessons today's army has learned is that having a combined arms force is more effective in the long run than having all 'just one thing'. I think this would apply just as much to 2070 warfare as it does today, if not more so. Being able to integrate metahuman infantry, drones, mages, spirits, [para]critters, armor, artillery, air support, etc into a single cohesive unit would be preferable in my opinion.

Drones themselves have the same limitations in my mind - they're specialized and optimized for one function, but by their very nature less flexible/adapable than people. A rigger can only be jumped into one drone at a time, so the rest have the limited judgement of their dog-brains. While their sensor suite may be just as sensitive as human eyes and ears, their intelligence will be unable to respond appropriately to stimuli they're not expecting. Is that bump in the ground natural, or an indication of a mine? Is that an innocent civilian, or a hostile insurgent hiding explosived under his clothes? The higher the drone-to-person ratio is, the 'dumber' the average drone will function, as each drone will benifit less from human interpretation of it's sensors. They'll also have all the same weaknesses - EMP, magical effects like accident, broken terrain, jamming, etc.

This is not, of course, even including whatever a soldier might do to screw up his own software.

There's an issue of the Ghost in the Shell manga where the Major hacks into and takes over the cyborg body of a cop during a mission. She gets into a shootout, only to find that she can't hit anything worth jack, because the cop who owns the body she's steering installed seven different fire control software programs, all of which are conflicting with each other. She ends up having to wipe the operating system and download & install a new set of combat software. During a firefight.

On a positive note for that cop, she woke up after the hijacking to find her body perfectly tuned and adjusted and outfitted with the latest in milspec black ops combat software.

The one thing that IT fears more than a user that does not know anything? The user that thinks he DOES know something.

=)


-karma

Drone Army Discussion: I still think it's a bad idea to be able to kill 3 people in a track with one good artillery shell and completely disable 8 or more rifles. I also like drone armies because everyone will just buy crates of HERF guns and drench everything in device disabling goodness. Futhermore drones are inherently hackable... at some point. Throw all the IC and what not you want in them, some smart cookie should have it cracked in a weekend. People in SR are... less hackable and that alone makes them worth a whole bag full of steel lynxs. Now if you think drones are impervious to jamming, hacking, and other EW, than obviously they're going to kick ass.
I also reiterate my point about runner teams. There are reasons why there aren't a lot of all rigger teams.
"Okay! Now we need to put the boxes onto the truck so we can get out of here."
"Uhm... the drone I had with arms... doesn't have arms anymore. One of us is going to have to run out there and hand load those boxes."
"You first asshole."
Flexibility. I maintain that being a one trick pony, no matter how good that trick is, is a massive weakness.

KarmaInferno:
I hadn't even thought of that. While I'm certain the military would go to great lengths to blackbox their cyber it just stands to reason that bored Marines/Sailors/Soldiers will continue to be the most dangerous force on the planet.
"Dude! Dude! The cybertech totally showed me how to redline my cyberarm today! Look!"
*Earth shaking cracking sound*
"Wow, that's pretty impressive... is it supposed to turn that way though?"

Funny that you should mention that episode (Ive been re-watching SAC lately) because Im working on a goody for my website that is similar to this in many ways. I don't want to reveal anything until its been playtested this weekend though.



Tell me about it, Ive spent the last 3 days rebuilding VM's that a user fragged while trying to "fix" citrix.

I choose to use this space to whine about the lack of a third season of GitS. I will also take this time to rejoice that my first and second season boxed sets will arrive any day now....

The translated Novels are pretty good, though Japanese leisure reading is.....different. Im not sure how to put it, but the style and cultural outlook just seem a little more alien as they are embedded into the writing more than what you get with the Anime and Manga.
GITS: Solid State Society was a fun little romp, but not as satisfying as a third season would've been.


And while were on the subject of Drones integrating with ground forces, I think what you'd be likely to see at the infantry squad level is something more along the lines of an intelligent walking rack for holding all of the troops packs and excess gear. The unit would likely also house a combination repeater/booster for the Intrasquad radios, and a SATCOM uplink to patch the troops into the local data net.

Actual no-shit combat drones would likely be handled at the company level, used much like a weapons platoon is today. This keeps the $$$ drones out of Pvt Schmuckatelli's greasy little paws, while still having them close enough in terms of command topography to be readily availible.

Roles I see becoming Drone-centric are things like artillery, Anti-aircraft, and even Mortar crews. These are specialized jobs requiring a lot of training that places their practitioners awfully close to the front lines. It makes sense to automate them.

Gragh... Drone Battalion. That's freaking hot Hullbreach.

Carry packs isn't a particular good idea imho. Either you have an AFV of some sort around, in which case that carries all the crap, or you don't, in which case you cannot recharge the batteries on the walking weapons rack because you don't have a generator.

So there is no possible situation in which you can use it that you'd want to use it.

Ps, also in a world where a steel lynx costs 5 grand, why would you ever hire private schmuckatelli? He's dead weight.

@doc

I'm not sure you are thinking about this in terms of cost? For my mechanised infantry squaddies with AFV (this costs like a years salary! I can use a manual controls version and turn that matrix off) + 8 steel lynxes (another years salary, a bit less) + 3 tooled out dudes + other stuff that adds more to my side (the rest of the years salary spent on the lynxes_, you can alternatively get 6, conventional light infantry with mild cyber.

My salary figures are built on a private having a low lifestyle + 3 family members + 20-30% on top of that to allow for things not built into your lifestyle (saving for retirement, subsidised medical care for him, whatever) and the cost of training, HR, etc doubles that baseline cost. This gives a figure of employing a soldier of about 6000 a month or 72k a year. It depends on how paygrades are structured and the total overhead of employing a soldier

Also remember if they are in LOS of the comms hub - the AFV - they can use LOS comms tools like the lasers to communicate over wi-fi, and in sr-verse world they probably will do.

I'm not sure what you are seeing that I don't. The cost of all that drone gear that adds massive capability to the team could buy you 3 infantry guys. I'm sure you could run some simulated combats with SR mechanics if you wanted and see the difference, it would probably be most pronounced at a platoon combat, ie 4 afvs, 32 steel lynxes, 80 hunterkiller drones, 4 law enforcement drones with rocket launchers (and anti radiation missles), and 12 riflemen vs 24 riflemen. To be honest I feel that the blue force hunterkiller drones would just take out the entire red force before they could do anything, the rest of the force aside (40 homing HE grenades is probably going to sink the red force straight up)

Edit: I also feel that drones have some additional capability that is worth mentioning

A) You can buy anti radiation missles. These fill the same role they do today. Shooting jammers and high signal attack nodes is an option.

B) When subject to hostile EW attacks, drones can shut down their wi-fi capability and revert to manual mode. In manual mode they can be manually directed in the same way you order private Schmuckatelli to do stuff ie shouting. They by cannon has some sort of IFF capability which they bring to the table for this sort of stuff.

Well you've fairly hammered the point that drones pack a lot of power in an economical package, a point I might add I haven't really disagreed with.

Things you haven't approached:

-How come drones don't dominate every aspect of security/military/shadowrunning? If they're cheaper and capable of carrying out everything a career soldier can do, there really isn't any reason to hire guards, shadowrunners, etc. The only people who would spend money on meat bag security would be people who don't have the money to afford drones. But of course by your logic everyone should be able to hire drones since they're so much cheaper. I see you've finally provided 3 fire teams for your drone platoon. And you've put them up against a platoon that has no drones, no air support, no uhm... anything. I never said drones were useless I just said that they have a role and that it's to support well equipped and well trained infantry that can wield them like an extension of their will. Not the other way around.

-What do drones do when they're not equipped to carry out some unusual occurrence like picking up a box or defusing a bomb. A 5k Steel lynx doesn't have arms and can't be trained and or chipped with a knowsoft for a multitude of possible eventualities. The obvious answer is that you give them more capabilities but also makes them less of a steal when it comes to the almighty bottom line.

-Go get 10 of your friends, give them all laser pointers, take them into a city or any moderately interesting terrain (ie not the beach). Designate someone as the leader and run around willy nilly trying to maintain LOS contact with "Red One" while avoiding traffic. You are allowed to "bounce" your signal off someone else to get back to the leader. I think you'll find that it's not an easy task, it's not impossible and certainly drones should be smart enough to figure out how to keep on the move and in LOS. Now imagine that situation with thermographic smoke, chaff, and expendable jammer munitions spread everywhere. Again, you can operate but you lose one of the greatest advantages a drones has, mobility and quick response. Drone A move up loses LOS and drone B has to move up behind it to act as a relay, drone B may no longer be able to engage the enemy which denies you that asset as a weapon system. On top of all this your enemy is trying to figure out where the "leader" is so he can keep hitting it over and over again with a missiles, shells, and drop bears. Which brings me to my next point.

-What happens when your AFV gets blown up for one reason or another? Or just plain breaks down? You have three more, but now they have to shoulder the load of their disabled brethren the units overall combat effectiveness is going to drop. Multiple drones will have to subscribe to slot in the riggers network and that means they lose their flexibility. You kill an officer and some senior sgt can take over, you kill him and some corporeal can take over etc and so on. You kill 3 riggers without touching any of their drones and you have one guy trying to coordinate 116 drones all by himself, oh and stay alive too. You kill the three senior most members of a platoon and that platoon can still carry on pretty damn well.

-A drone without wi-fi is a drone that some rigger needs to jump out of his tank and scream at to convince to go do something pertinent to the battle (as opposed to just flying around and killing whatever it finds, which I imagine is the default mode.) The problem with that should be fairly obvious. You could push the drone off on one of your fire teams and I bet it'd be pretty damn effective, but I think that was my point in the first place.

-We spoke of costs and I don't really have any interest in making charts to try to and win a point. But I have to ask, how much are you paying these riggers?

-By reducing the number of people you reduce the costs but you also create a highly centralized command system. If everyone is highly trained and motivated that's fine but one bad rigger could spell disaster for an entire unit. The key selling point of well trained independent fire teams is that they are inherently decentralized and therefore can mitigate the amount of damage a single person can do.

Honestly I really don't think we're going to come to a consensus about this. You're sold on the value of drones and I'm convinced that the day of the dog face is far from over. I believe that a heterogeneous, balanced, and coordinated mixture of soldiers with drone support will carry the day over a couple of hot shot riggers in AFV's. And you believe that a drone centric fighting force provides such an overwhelming amount of firepower that the mobility and adaptability of trained soldiers is moot.

And that's actually perfectly fine because I'm sure that this is the same argument that is being carried at the highest levels of military and corporate warfare. I'm sure that in 2070 this argument has been raging for decades and by cannon I don't think it's over because people are still sinking big money into cyborgs and cybermancy. Two fields of study that ostensibly try to merge the utility of a human mind with the resilience and destructive power of a drone. I might have stated otherwise but I highly doubt every army in 2070 operates with the same doctrine or one single combination of drones, soldiers, magic users, paracritters, drop bears, and what have you.

There's one munition missing from SR that would skew things away from drones: anti-radiation missiles (ARMs). Every drone broadcasts meaning every drone is a giant light in the sky. Subsonic missiles should cost much less than aerial drones, given they are much simpler devices. Heck, you could turn cheap drones into ARMs by loading them with a decent Scan utility and stuffing them full of explosives.

Grunts could crossload manportable SAM launchers with pop-up ARMs to decimate drone forces with indirect fire. Alternately, small sneaky teams could get behind the main fighting front and then take out the riggers' broadcast systems, seriously degrading the drone armada's tactical abilities.

Warfare is the world of measure and countermeasure and I don't see drones as the measure to end all countermeasures.

Well, a drone that's using frequency-hopping spread spectrum (which mechanically should fall under hidden mode, plus ECCM and/or Stealth) would really just show up as a tiny bit of noise, not even above background, on a wide variety of equencies. So you need more sophisticated ARM.

Aside from the fact that Drones will have a much deeper 'long tail'... that is logistical support need (which could not be completely automated... the sort of miraculous drones doing drones world that has been suggested is only a short step away from V-ger, which we can assume is safely beyond Shadowrun for the moment.


But the 'cost ratio analysis' of cutting out real soldiers that are replaced by drones and small dedicated command teams is corp think, not mil-think.

Corps go 'can we remove bodies by adding drones, and if so, is it more cost effective'.

Militaries go 'Can we give every soldier drones and double the firepower'. EOD teams haven't shrunk with the addition of modern bomb disposal robots. If anything they've grown because they've added a 'robot controller' to their normal compliment of bomb disposal experts.

As a point from earlier: Artillery is not static. The biggest single threat to artillery units is counter-battery fire. Ask any modern artillery man what they spent most of their field time doing. Heres a few hints; It doesn't involve shooting, and it does involve setting up and breaking down under time constraints. Particularly the latter.

Will drones be a factor in the firepower of a military organization? Certainly. ANd a big one. Will every soldier be reduced to a rigger? Not hardly. Might I point out that there are two or three different guns for every drone in the books? There are reasons for that, just as there are reasons for newer, shinier armors as well.

I will suggest that the RULES present a world where Drones logically should replace everything but the most dedicated experts, though there is the suggestion of rarity of higher rating programs and hardware, along with assosiated costs to feild them (you are talking hard and software that outstrips the original cost of the drone in many cases...).

Flying drones will be incredibly vulnerable to incoming fire: There is nothing to hide behind and most visibility modifiers will be against them, not for them. Ground drones are limited in the terrain they can reliably cover (wheeled steel lynxes would balk in some of the uneven terrain that a soldier takes for granted... and be positively unable to even consider some terrain (or do you have them climb stairs at their normal speed?)

iballs? Forget it, if an infantryman needs to know whats beyond a doorway, he tosses a grenade through and checks the wreckage after. While that may not be true in the current 'police action' world, in war, and in 2070 if the military is involved it's war, that is the standard, and it works beautifully. Every iball carried is one less grenade (maybe more...). Sure, the squad will have one or two, and access to whatever aerial assets their military tasks them with... but thats more because you can chuck the little bastards through the woodline for some quick recon rather than sending your buddy who might get shot up and still not be able to tell you who did the shooting, though no grunt worth his salt is gonna expect it to run right over tree roots and through swamps with any reliability.

Anyone who expects steel lynxs to be adequet replacements for infantrymen has not spent enough time with a pack on his back up to his knees in muck and grime. They are designed to patrol reasonably clear 'grounds' and very clear 'hallways'... or pre-urban artillery and bombing run urban streets.

They do make decent area denial assets, however. Amazingly enough, that is what they were designed for.

I think I now understand what the big gap between our perception is. I don't see my 3 man fireteam being all riggers. I do see one of them as being 'a rigger' who sits in the APC and never leave. The other two though at general infantry. Just that they are functioning at the 'Sargent' level rather than private and are responsible for ordering their 'squad' of drones around. So its like a mechanized infantry squad. You'll have a small team of guys, one in the AFV - who is an NCO and is probably responsible for the hunterkillers, the UAV, and the AFV, and two riflemen who manage the steel lynxes.

Sorry for my lack of clarity previously, I was advocating multiple fireteams for my drone platoon. When I was talking before, I was discussing what you'd be using at the section or squad level, thus you'd have multiple of those at the platoon level.



Definitely, drones cannot do all this extra stuff. But I'm not proposing disposing of all the humans, I'm saying you replace half the humans, and most of the money you lay down is about delivering those humans capability they cannot otherwise have, or just giving them big force multipliers



Yup, on offensive operations it would be totally difficult, defensively it would be much easier. But drones have serious advantages I don't have in this case - including the ability to very precisely calculate trajectories. Plus you'd fall back onto radio comms at this point. If you couldn't, flesh and blood soldiers would have the same co-ordination nightmare. Urban combat without radios, GPS or any non runner communications would be effectively going back to WWI/II



Much the same as what happens to mech infantry today I imagine. You see if you can fit into another APC in the platoon/company, and if you cannot you get to sit on your ass until the rescue vehicles turn up. You'd probably prioritise taking the rifleman from the broken down section over the drones as they are more capable, and all drones in the platoon would refresh their drone racks if they'd spent any hunterkillers. Incidentally, that would be the way you'd manage if an APC gets hit. You can have riggers relaying via satallite to pick up the rogue drones if you sustain serious casualties without losing any drones, but I feel that is probably a highly unlikely scenario.



I see the guy in the APC rigging that functioning much as the commander of the APC does today. I see those two guys in the fireteam as being the key component of managing the steel lynxes.



Well, I'm planning on paying my 3 guys as NCOs for the purposes of current discussion, so something like a 2xSargent and 1 x corporal, The roles for those guys are AFV driver, General Infantryman, General Infantryman.




Yup, a bad apple can sink the boat because unlike a mech rifle platoon of say, 41 or more guys, I'm only looking at 12 for a platoon, though I'd probably hope to deploy 1.5 platoons for the same cost as 1 conventional platoon, and have an extra guy or two in the command sections. So I'd be looking at 20 guys across 6 APCs, rather than 40 across 4 as an 'equivalent force'. So bad apples have a much greater proportional effect, and a key requirement would be boosting pay via cripping from the money saved automating rear echelons to pay more across the board to attract better talent.



I actually fee; that my proposed blended 50/50 mixture of drones and people formed into a mechanized force *was* a "heterogeneous, balanced, and coordinated mixture of soldiers" I mean sure I've got a lot of actual robots, but that is just because they are pretty cheap.

@spike: Yeah, the advantage with the iballs is that they are 4 shot flaskpak grenades that the grunts can recharge. Historically the army has had problems with supplying enough grenades. They could be swapped out for grenades if you like. I'd spend the cost savings on tooling out the LEBP drones for better ariel support.

Sorry this is in no particular order, I just kinda hit the points as they came to me.

118 drones per 16 soldiers isn't 50/50

But I might be reading that wrong. What's your erm... fireteam I guess. The smallest division of rigger/drones/infantry? From the previous post I assumed we were talking about at least 4 riggers (I thought 4 per track) running all those drones plus only 12 infantrymen to split between the 4 tracks. Is that how you were breaking them up? Oh and I think I was reading these as "Number of Drones Up at One Time" not "Total Drones Stores". You mentioned that hunter killers would be refreshed (and I think they work in swarms anyways right?) that certainly makes it sound a bit more reasonable (do they burn out over time?). I also must apologies because I wasn't clear on what hunter-killers were. You're talking about the swarming anti-drone microdrones right? Zip around and eat things? For some reason I was thinking they were a lot more substantial.

Giving more pay doesn't necessarily attract better people. Rigging that many drones sounds like a high intensity sort of job with a pretty high burnout/turnover rate. Whereas as a rifleman is pretty easy to equip, train and deploy, an effective rigger who can utilize all that firepower would have to bust his ass from dawn till dusk. Especially if there's only one rigger per vehicle.

If anything you've made my objection to the small number of riggers even worse. Having 4 dedicated riggers gives you a lot of redundancy, they can stand a fairly easy watch rotation and someone coming down with the "Azzie's Revenge" still has 3 other guys to lean on and cover him.

The LOS thing is troop with meat bag soldiers. I just think that a lot of what makes drones so awesome in combat is lost if you have to keep arranging them to maintain LOS. The more i think about it the more I'd probably agree that riggers have gotten pretty imaginative about keeping their networks running. They probably use things like ultrasound, "vocal' comms, and a few other things to keep drones in basic comms (ie you can still get orders passed down the line).

But if you're willing to agree that a 50/50 mix (maybe even weighted towards drones in terms of total numbers) than I think we've been arguing over nothing I of course would weight things in favor of infantry but I'm more than willing to admit that is a decision that may not be grounded in hard numbers and rounds per minute. I agree that you save a lot of money with drones in the rear and like I said, I honestly couldn't imagine most of the logistic work being almost totally automated.

@Spike

Actually if you mod the drones to have the "crawler" ability than it has a sufficient number of independent treads, wheels, toes to move full speed over any terrain a human can. It's certainly not going to be able to climb in through a window but it can get up a set of stairs in a hurry. Give the 'Big Dog" a couple of decades and I think you'll have some drones that do an excellent job of not falling down like retarded children. The fact that it can skate across ice with 350 of gear on it's "back" today, seems like a pretty impressive feat.


I also have to agree with cthulhudreams that an iBall would be an excellent piece of gear for an infantryman. Rolling a grenade into a room is a bad idea if your other squad is in there or a family of non combatants or nothing at all. iBall's being reusable and being stuffed with flashpaks (and presumably other tricks if you so desired) would certainly have an appeal.

don't they have a gas grenade variant of the iball?

Doc, maybe its because you are aligned up with the navy, but you obviously haven't seen the sort of terrain I've seen. Stairs are only the begging of the problem (and I'm assuming by 'going up stairs' you don't mean 'at top speed'. I agree that the drones apparently are fairly mobile little beasties. I've also crawled through the woods more than my share of times (and swamps)... and I'm pretty certain that once you make a steel lynx fully waterproofed and capable of crawling through heavily wooded (god forbid obstaclized) terrain/swampland its gonna cost, and your long tail is going to get deeper and deeper.

Honestly, my biggest issue is that while people look at the cost of the drone and say 'see how cheap it is'! They look at the soldiers and add up all the stuff like feeding and housing, paying salaries, equipment and so forth.

Drones have expenses tied to them too, and plenty of them. Combat drones more than most. Maintenance, parts (lots and lots of parts) being just the very tip of the iceberg... never mind powering them. Looking at rules you don't see a cost assosiated with power requirements. That's because it's a game, not Sim-Shadowrun-ultra-real-edition.

If this weren't speculative future gaming, I'd start to wonder if some posters were trying to sell me drones from their company... highlighting only the positives of drones and highlighting the negatives of the soldiers they'll be replacing....

A smoke grenade (plus flash-pak) version's in the BBB, and really I don't think there's any difference between a smoke grenade and a gas grenade other than what is shooting out of it. A decent armorer should be able to make them, which means that if they're at all useful, they should be available somwhere.

Also, a grenade with a loudspeaker in it that counts down from ten in a pleasant-sounding woman's voice would be great, even if it does nothing once it reaches zero.

Gas grenades currently exist NOW. Why haven't they replaced HE grenades in the infantryman's kit NOW?

Same reasons why flashbangs don't occupy current infantry kit. Items that disable or stun are less useful in war than devices that kill by a huge measure. Military and police work are not the same, which brings up the potential can of worms discussing current military operations.

The iball doesn't alter that equation by virtue of being a drone with recon ability. IF it is useful for recon, it will be carried. As a 'vehicle' for delivering weaponry it will probably not (its too expensive to explode, and carrying it as a source of disabling weaponry is a waste of space better taken up by killy shit).

ooo! A Navy jab! Even though I wear Marine Corps green to work everyday (okay that's a lie, I wear coveralls to EMT duty). But your point is well taken and I'd be the first to admit that I haven't humped a ~120 lbs pack over 18 miles of North Carolina swampland. I humped 80lbs over hill in dale in Pendleton. But that's besides the point. You make it sound like I didn't just spend several posts vehemently opposing at super drone army.

Of course if the enemy is crawling through a swamp there really isn’t any reason /not/ to simply sit back and light his ass up with artillery and air support. Or send in swarms of hunter killers to feel them out, call in fire, and rip out their eyes while they sleep. This is probably a big reason why very few people seem to want to fight powerful armies anywhere than major urban areas.

I just don't think that drone mobility is going to continue to be completely retarded in 60 years. Have you watched the Big Dog video's? That thing’s carrying 350 pounds of gear at a slow to moderate walking pace. It skates across ice, it can go down a snow covered wooded embankment without a whole hell of a lot of fall on your ass. They've demonstrated that it can gallop and it's only a matter of time before they shrink a power plant down small enough so that it can "sprint" without being tethered.

I’m not a supply drone I won’t argue with logistics because there are ways to calculate some approximate costs and I’m getting bored just thinking of them. I will however bring this up with my buddy who works in supply and find out what he thinks. My gut instinct though is that the logistic train required to feed, house, entertain, keep healthy, and in any other way maintain a human being is significantly larger and more involved than a 7 ton full of batteries, spare parts, bullets, and replacements. When a drone buys it on the field you don’t have to hire a descendant’s affairs rep to go tell their family they fought bravely and died valiantly. You also don’t have to cut a check for 500k, disburse their saved up pay/retirement, and turn over 40k worth of GI Benefits to their qualifying next of kin. Nor do you have to pay for a portion of funerary expenses or wait ~4 years before you can throw another meat bag into the grinder.

I think you’re blithely ignoring the primary reason gas grenades aren’t used today:
It’s a freaking chemical attack.
That tends to stir up a fair international outcry. Something I’m not sure is a problem in 60 years. Sady.