Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

High tech intrigue and Cold War
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Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

Like it says on the top...

MVQ-66 Lima maser cannon

Point of origin: United States of America

The MVQ-66 Lima, more commonly known as the Lima-66, is an experimental heavy-duty ray weapon produced by General Atomics and Trident Technology, both companies owned wholly or in part by giant defense conglomerate Saint Industries. Called as a 'maser cannon' by the US Army, the Lima-66 maser cannon does not in fact actually damage its targets primarily through the use of amplified microwaves. Rather, the coherent electromagnetic waves of the maser are used to form an atmospheric 'tunnel' which conveys an electrical discharge to the target. Saint Industries refers to the Lima-66 as a 'maser induced plasma channel gun'; many of the soldiers operating the experimental weapon simply call it a 'lightning cannon'.

When fired the Lima-66 first establishes an atmospheric conducting channel by blasting a beam of coherent microwave energy at the target, before discharging a bolt of electricity down said channel a millisecond later. The bolt travels at 60,000 meters per second and can reach temperatures approaching 30,000 degrees Celsius - about three times the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Passage of the bolt through the atmosphere compresses the surrounding clear air and creates a supersonic shock wave which decays to an acoustic wave that is heard as thunder.

The Lima-66's targeting systems are optimized for rapid fire of 500 megajoule energy bolts, but can be overcharged to fire more powerful blasts. This however tends to burn out the induction coils, rendering the weapon unable to continue firing after a while.

Designed to primarily engage airborne threats, a Lima battery is modular and highly mobile. All components, consisting of the fire control section (radar set, engagement control section, antenna mast group, electric power plant) and the weapon itself, are mounted on M860 Semi-Trailers, which are towed by M983 HEMTTs. The weapon can be used against ground targets, although its effectivity is greatly reduced in that role as the electric bolts will tend to arc toward the ground and the Lima is by its nature as a beam weapon limited to line-of-sight firing.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Awesome. Goddamn, Saint is in this universe too? Aw, mang! :P

Also, I'd like to see those man-portable phased plasma particle weapons. The ones that show people what a runaway defense budget can do. ;)
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Re: Special Weapons

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:Awesome. Goddamn, Saint is in this universe too? Aw, mang!
He is. Ford kinda asked for it, and the idea was sufficiently awesome for me to implement. This universe's Anthony Saint is also an arms dealer/manufacturer, althoug he's much more of a stand-up guy than his Comix' counterpart.
Also, I'd like to see those man-portable phased plasma particle weapons. The ones that show people what a runaway defense budget can do. ;)
Ah, the General Atomics Type-7 Portable Particle Gun will definitely make an appearance in this thread.
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Re: Special Weapons

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So basically its lightning gun to zap enemy aircraft (like strategic bombers taking potshots at the player characters) out the sky? KZZAP!

Totally awesome.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Ford Prefect »

Haha, oh wow. I had completely forgotten about 'Saint in CSW', so it was something of a pleasant surprise. :lol: in any case, it's interesting to see an electrolaser in use. I imagine it has some advantages over just building a laser?
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Re: Special Weapons

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Ford Prefect wrote:I imagine it has some advantages over just building a laser?
To be honest the deployment of a plasma channel gun by the USA is more of a thematic choice (in this universe lasers are primarily a Soviet thing). However the Lima might very well be more destructive; certainly I imagine a 60,000 degree, 500 megajoule blast of heat and energy might simply blow apart targets a laser would have some difficulties burning through.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Siege »

T-100 Autonomous Battle Tank

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Point of origin: Soviet Russia

The T-100 is an artificially intelligent autonomous ground warfare machine employed by the military of the Soviet Union. In the first decade of the 21st century these vehicles, together with the Mil Mi-40Av (NATO reporting codename: Hind-II HK), represent the largest area of Soviet advances in autonomous warmachine technology. It is designed and built by Uralvagonzavod, in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, to precision tolerances using classified high technology.

A hybrid of rugged Brezhnevian simplicity and post-Zhadanovan technocratic high-tech the T-100 is derived from the chassis of the T-72 main battle tank, but uses the gun and gunner sights from the T-80U, the engine and thermal sights of the T-90, and an entirely new autoloader system. Unlike those manned predecessors however the vehicle is controlled by a slaved tactical processor array designed and prepared to integrate fluidly and flawlessly with the artificially intelligent SICKLE entity, but which also includes a self-contained AI image core cloned from the main awareness in case communication with SICKLE is lost.

Although the T-100 from a design standpoint is very much an sub-optimal piece of technology (it is after all derived from a weapons system designed around human operation, jerry-rigged for use by AI) it proved its mettle in during the Russian Crisis, specifically during the disastrous Ultramilitant attack on Mount Narodnaya of October 2011. The 1st Autonomous Brigade, composed of automated warmachines under direct supervision of the primary SICKLE entity, defended the mountain and repulsed several attacks by three divisions (two army and one VDV) loyal to Ultramilitant leader Sechalin, causing terrible casualties amongst the attackers. Guided by the awesome processing power of the AI and aided by its nigh-omnipresent sensor coverage the T-100s and other automated units proved capable of tracking and analyzing any movement on the battlefield, and without any human input engaged targets, judged the effects of their actions, calculated new strategies and options and pursued targets based on a wide range of criteria.

Although like other examples of first-generation autonomous warfare vehicles the T-100 is not expected to see widescale deployment or even mass production several variants still exist: the T-100 is armed with a 125mm smoothbore cannon with ATGM capability; the T-100L is armed with two laser cannons which, although designed for anti-missile point-defense, proved increasingly effective anti-personnel weapons as well; the T-100D is a drone carrier which carries a number of 'Kontakt' AP crab-drones; the T-100S is a less-lethal warfare variant fitted with sonic pulse generators and strobe cannons that, by flashing intense patterns of light very quickly at target, attack the central nervous system through an overload of visual input through the optical nerves; and the T-100SM is a T-100S which also carries less-lethal chemical fog dispensers.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I find it amazing that the Russkies would stick their robot killing machines in T-72 chassises. Why is this so, particularly?

Also... Hind Ds!

I also find it weird that the Soviets fielded robot tanks after developing cyborg soldiers.
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Re: Special Weapons

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Because the T-72 is a good tank, and there were plenty of them around to experiment with. There's no reason to develop an entirely new chassis when you've got a perfectly good one to work with right there, after all. (Besides, the T-90 is derived from the T-72 as well.)
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I also find it weird that the Soviets fielded robot tanks after developing cyborg soldiers.
Sticking bits and pieces of technology in living people is easier than developing a self-contained AI core small enough to fit in a mid-size tank. Bear in mind that although Hammer was active in the 1990s he was the only cyborg for a very long time and he wasn't always as ridiculously impressive as he is in 2009. It took him nearly two decades to go from a fleshy guy with some enhancements to the high-tech armored tank he is as of the Russian Crisis. By which time Hammer has cost the equivalent of several billion dollars in R&D.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Booted Vulture »

Hind-II 'HK'
We do like our running 'Soviets= Skynet' them don't we? :D

So i the T-100 is so unoptimised are they in the process of building an automated tank from the ground up around the AI systems? And how easy is stuff like the uplink to SICKLE to jam? And what's the difference of effectiveness between SICKLe guided and using the AI brain?
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Re: Special Weapons

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Booted Vulture wrote:We do like our running 'Soviets= Skynet' them don't we? :D
Actually the Terminator movies actually exist in CSW, and NATO simply code-named them after the Hunter-Killers of the franchise. They certainly serve the same purpose (although they are not fitted with phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range... yet ;)). The Soviets don't call 'em HKs, obviously -- to them it's simply an automated version of the Mi-40 (the 'Av' bit is shorthand for 'Avtomat'). But yes, out-of-universe SICKLE and everything associated with it is supposed to induce that 'oh dear, this might all go terribly, terribly wrong' feeling.
So i the T-100 is so unoptimised are they in the process of building an automated tank from the ground up around the AI systems? And how easy is stuff like the uplink to SICKLE to jam? And what's the difference of effectiveness between SICKLe guided and using the AI brain?
They certainly are designing and building dedicated automated drones for SICKLE (there's a range of them in production by 2010-2012), although they come in limited numbers, since frankly SICKLE gives even the Russians the heeby-jeebies from time to time -- during the siege of Mount Narodnaya for example its automated forces displayed an unexpected viciousness and cruelty toward the attackers. Of course this was explained away as equal parts self-preservationist drive and a desire to get back at the people who had just performed the digital equivalent of an amputation on the AI (the assault on the mountain took place during the destruction of the Palace of Soviets and MIR brain cores described in STB), but even so as far as the Russians can tell SICKLE is perpetually on the verge of cascade rampancy. The only thing keeping it from a hard takeoff into the realm of truly transhuman intelligence and all the creepyness associated with it is SICKLE's own lack of a desire to do so. Understandably the Russians are a little hesitant to give it a lot of ground gear to play with.

Jamming the SICKLE uplink is not easy, because the AI does not require a continuous streaming connection and the better part of its communication system consists of laser pulses and burst microwave transmissions, rather than traditional radio (which can be used as well, but has a limited bandwith). The best way to disrupt communications between AI nodes is to destroy any relay stations or communications satellites that SICKLE might use. Such a disruption will put a dent in the AI's ability to coordinate its forces, levelling the playing field with a human opponent. After all SICKLE ordinarily has access to everything from the sensors mounted on its automated vehicles to radar and ladar feeds from aircraft to satellite surveillance, and uses this data to form a real-time understanding of the battlefield far more coherent than any human commander could hope to match. Take away its ability to collate all this information and the automated vehicles will still be lethal opponents, but the effectiveness of SICKLE as a force multiplier will be greatly reduced.
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Re: Special Weapons

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M1A3 Abrams Main Battle Tank

Point of origin: United States of America

The M1 Abrams is a main battle tank produced in the United States. The M1 is named after General Creighton Abrams, former Army Chief of Staff and Commander of US military forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. The first M1 tank was produced in 1978, the M1A1 in 1985, the M1A2 in 1986 and the M1A3 in 1994. It is a well armed, heavily armored, and highly mobile tank designed for modern armored ground warfare, which uses a plethora of space-age technologies and materials to ensure maximum flexibility and survivability in the field. A continuous Abrams Upgrade Program provides rolling upgrade packages to the tank, ensuring that the venerable M1 remains competitive with the latest Soviet armored vehicle designs.

The designers of the M1A3 took into account the changing trends of the late 20th century: more numerous and lethal infantry-held weapons, increasingly resilient armor material, and above all the threat of orbital weaponry looming above the battlefield. Advanced technologies incorporated into the A3 variant include hybrid electric propulsion, improved ceramic/composite armor and underbelly protection, third generation FLIR night vision technology, digitization, an electrothermal-chemical XM-291 140 mm main gun along with its 140 mm auto loader. A 7.62mm medium machine-gun is mounted coaxially on the right of the main armament. The commander operates a heavy 12.7mm machine-gun in a dedicated turret roof mount. Another 7.62mm medium machine-gun is mounted in a remote-operated turret left of the commander turret. Grenade launchers flush-mounted in the turret’s skin are able to deploy smoke screen, active decoy, and close-defense anti-missile and antipersonnel munitions.

EMP-hardened sensors are arrayed on the hull and turret in order to provide 360° coverage to the crew even when the tank is buttoned down. The main sensor clusters on the turret front include infrared and ultraviolet night vision equipment as well as visible wavelength cameras. The tank carries a digital battle command information system compatible with the Army's tactical internet. On-board antennas, focused laser-links and directed microwave relays facilitate the transmission of radio and satellite images, data, and video across the force in real time in order to provide enhanced interoperability and situation awareness from brigade to individual soldiers.

Finally, a layered defensive scheme protects the tank and its crew. First, the integral active protection system is able to engage and destroy missiles and, to a certain measure, destabilize antitank darts thus reducing their armor penetration ability. The armor on the M1A3 is a composite of space-age materials: density-enhanced ceramic-metallic plates encased within a metal matrix and bonded to a third-generation depleted uranium alloy backing plate and several elastic layers, underneath carbon nanotube outer matrices with an anti-laser ablative coating.

At 68 tons the M1A3 is a very heavy tank, one of the heaviest in service at the start of the 21st century. It is in service with the armies of United States, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Palestine. Although primarily designed to fight Soviet tanks in Central Europe during a hypothetical WW3 the M1A3 acquitted itself very well during the Gulf Wars, where its armor and firepower, as well as its net-generation warfare capabilities, proved more than a match for older Soviet tanks in service with Iran as well as British designs used by rebelling Royal Iraqi Army forces.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Niiiiiice. Very different compared to the sleeker and more "conservative" or "streamlined" Soviet tanks, in that it's bigass and bulky and packing all sorts of heat. I like how in this verse, the Soviets are the ones packing relatively moderate/normal tank gun calibers, while the Amerikaners have big big bullets. How many rounds can the M1A3 pack? And does that make my O1 Unlimited M1A9 battle tanks distinctly non-canon? :D

If this is a standard US battle tank, why is it a 'special weapon'? :P
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Re: Special Weapons

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Although primarily designed to fight Soviet tanks in Central Europe during a hypothetical WW3 the M1A3 acquitted itself very well during the Gulf Wars, where its armor and firepower, as well as its net-generation warfare capabilities, proved more than a match for older Soviet tanks in service with Iran as well as British designs used by rebelling Royal Iraqi Army forces.
Is it really supposed to say 'net-generation', Like the CSW version of generation X? OR just a typo of next generation?
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Re: Special Weapons

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It's net-generation as in, Internet; network-centric. :)
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Re: Special Weapons

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That's pretty clever.
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Re: Special Weapons

Post by Siege »

Thank you :). Now to answer Shroom's questions:
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I like how in this verse, the Soviets are the ones packing relatively moderate/normal tank gun calibers, while the Amerikaners have big big bullets.
Red Alert notwithstanding post-WW2 Soviet tanks have always been lighter than their Western counterparts, mainly because (I believe) Soviet tank bridges were rated to handle a tonnage lower than the NATO equivalent. Observe:

M60 Patton, introduced 1960: 46t
Leopard 1, introduced 1965: 42t

versus

T-62, introduced 1961: 40t
T-72, introduced 1971: 41.5t

And later tanks:

M1 Abrams, introduced 1980: 67t
Leopard 2, introduced 1979: 62t

T-80, introduced 1976: 42.5t
T-90, introduced 1995: 46.5t

I'm not really sure where the idea of super-heavy Soviet behemoth tanks comes from, but clearly it's more of a convenient literary device intended to personify the lumbering behemoth war machine than anything having to do with real life.
How many rounds can the M1A3 pack?
Between 40 and 50.
And does that make my O1 Unlimited M1A9 battle tanks distinctly non-canon? :D
Yes. Serves you people right for tossing them around like twigs. :twisted:
If this is a standard US battle tank, why is it a 'special weapon'? :P
Why Mr. President, whatever do you mean?
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I don't give a wooden nickle about your legacy! :P

re: tonnages

Right, right. I forgot the lessons comrades Sheppy-pooh and Skimmer, the Great Leader, have imparted upon those us in the HAB.

Da, ze bridges, to cross the vast expanses of ze Motherland and ze Volga river! And because modern Soviet tanks seem to have lower profiles compared to their fat head Western counterparts.

Actually, wait. I DIDN'T forget ze lessons comradeski Skimmers imparted! Blah! I wasn't asking about the weights, but about the bullets! The bullets! *flails*

Yeah. The Soviet tanks, even when robotized, are packing 125mm smoothbore cannons (thermoelectric?) with ATGM capability, presumably similar to real-life Soviet/Russian guns. Whereas the Westerners are packing giant 140mm cannons as opposed to 120mms, very much unlike real life (perhaps the thermoelectric-chemical nature of the rounds makes them not as long/large as their non-ETC counterparts?) and with autoloaders to boot. Why's this so? It's not like Soviet tanks are decisively bigger or meaner or in need of more firepower to kill.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Magister Militum »

Siege wrote:I'm not really sure where the idea of super-heavy Soviet behemoth tanks comes from, but clearly it's more of a convenient literary device intended to personify the lumbering behemoth war machine than anything having to do with real life.
If I had to hazard a guess, then I would also say, besides the literary allusions it provides, the idea of the super-heavy Soviet tanks could also possibly stem from their experiments in that field, such as that infamous super-heavy tank (can't remember its designation at the moment) and its four sub-turrets.

While we're on the topic, what's the load out for the M1A3's active protection system?
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

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The APS consists of a number (probably between 4 and 8) of 'smart' directed grenade launchers flush-mounted in the turret. Each launcher packs several of each type of charges (smoke, decoy, antipersonnel and antimissile) in separate tubes. Charges are stacked in their barrels and individually initiated electronically, so basically Metal Storm technology. The active protection is keyed to the vehicle's sensors, and can operate on fully autonomous and semi-autonomous settings (although obviously for antimissile work semi-autonomous isn't an option).
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

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Europa class light carrier

Point of origin: Western European Union

In the early 1980s the Western European Union (at that point still known as the Western European Community, but already firmly set on the way toward the Treaty of Maastrich) was in the early stages of developing the joint European military task forces. These Eurofor rapid reaction brigades and their immediate successor, the Eurocorps, almost immediately realized that if they were to be able to project power abroad per the wishes of the Council of Europe, they needed equipment that at the time simply did not exist, specifically a number of amphibious and light carrier warships that would allow troops and aircraft to reach out and touch foreign shores.

The Council then handed the task of designing a carrier warship to the Western European Armaments Agency, a think-tank consisting of representatives from most all major Western European arms manufacturers and itself a precursor to the ConEurope consortium. By 1985 the WEAA had submitted their final design for a so-called 'compact carrier' to the Council, which approved of the plans and assigned funding for a first batch of two ships.

It was at this time that the project ran into trouble: Great Britain, always wary of a perceived lack of national capabilities, objected to what it called the 'limited scope' of the compact carrier program, calling instead for a much larger warship to be designed and, when it found little to no support for such a project in the Council, withdrew from the project in 1986. Not only did this mean the loss of a principal backer to the project but also a critical loss of potential manpower, as Germany was at the time one of only two nations in Europe with any experience operating an aircraft carrier.

Nevertheless it was, after five months of paralyzing discussion, decided that the project would go on, although the decision was motivated more by political than by military reasons: after ample encouragement from the French, West Germany decided to step up its own contribution to the project from simply providing funding and manpower to fielding one whole carrier by itself. As a result, in November of 1986 the first steel was cut for Seeadler, the first German aircraft carrier since the ill-fated Seydlitz of WW2. As expected the ambitious program ran into a number of difficulties during construction but in the summer of 1992 the ship was finally launched, followed soon thereafter by the French carrier Arromanches.

The Europa class carrier is much smaller than its counterparts in the Soviet and American navies; at 48,000 tons and 270 meters length the Europa unlike the Nimitz, America and Ulyanovsk classes is not a supercarrier. It is however a fully functional nuclear-powered warship, capable of carrying 42 aircraft, principally the UAI Glory and the Blackwell-La Roche Basilisk, as well as helicopters and up to 800 commandos. The ship is defended by a range of short- medium- and long-range missiles and four 8mm railguns which draw their power directly from the reactor.

Great Britain eventually returned to the program in 1996 after it became apparent that its own large carrier program would not pay off until 2012 at the earliest. As of 2009 a total of eight Europa class carriers have been constructed and launched, those being (in chronological order) Seeadler, Arromanches, Principe de Asturias, Europa, Ark Royal, De Zeven Provinciën, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Tre Kronor. Europa class ships are officially part of the national arsenal of one of the member states, but permanently subordinated to Eurocorps, an arrangement similar to the Vindicator class heavy strategic bomber. As they are at the core of WEU 'battle carrier groups' they can be seen the world over, from Hong Kong to the Mediterranean and the French holdings in the South Pacific.

Over the relatively few years it has been operation the Europa amongst sailors of most any nation has garnered a reputation as a 'brave little ship', for its habit of facing off in trouble spots against American or Soviet warships that frequently mass almost twice as much as it, and sail with escorts far larger than any European BCG.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

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I like how these guys symbolize pretty much the formation of ConEurope and its unified military structure, and at the same time showed all the politics and hassles and complications that came with not just building a joint aircraft carrier, but a joint military as well. Presumably this is similar to the problems the EU and its allied military is facing today, which is cool. The possible Europe of the future, contending in a world where the Americans of today are dealing with the Soviets who should've been gone yesteryear but aren't. It's like the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future!
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

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Goddamn british mucking everything up. :D So its like the naval equivalent of the Typhoon Eurofighter in RL? Only it actually works and wasn't late, over priced and obsolete by the time it was finished? :D
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

SICKLE

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A Russian Cosmonaut performs maintenance in one of SICKLE’s ‘brain rooms’, this one located in orbit aboard the SMSF space station MIR.

Point of origin: Soviet Russia

In the wake of the coup d'etat that saw Leonid Brezhnev dislodged from power, the new secretary-general of the Soviet Union, Alexa Zhadanova, enacted a number of radical economic reforms, perhaps the most important of which was a rapid increase in spending on research and technology at the expense of the Soviet military. At the end of Brezhnev's rule as secretary-general, the Soviet Union devoted between 12 and 15 percent of its annual gross national product to military spending; over the course of a mere four years Zhadanova cut this percentage in half and directed the funds thus freed up to R&D much needed to catch up in technological terms with the West.

Although the military establishment was unhappy with these decisions, to the point that Brezhnevian 'old guard' loyalists in 1984 launched a failed counter-coup, by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union as a direct result of Zhadanova's reforms entered one of the most amazing periods of economic and technological growth in the history of mankind. In the space of a handful of years, the USSR started developing and deploying cutting edge electronics, compact nuclear power sources, stronger alloys and advanced control systems based around a revolutionary type of microprocessor.

By 1990 these advances had found military applications, and the armed forces of the Soviet Union were rapidly recycling older hardware and scaling down existing units even further, in order to pay for new high-efficiency hardware which allowed greater effects to be achieved with less personnel. Soviet mechanized and motorized ground forces, previously assessed by the West to be a cumbersome wall of steel with little tactical flexibility, became heavily computerized, integrated and networked, enabling faster and lither reactions on the tactical and strategic level.

Unfortunately the Stavka, the general headquarters of the supreme command of the Soviet armed forces, also recognized that modern technology allowed its military forces to respond much more effectively and efficiently to any threat posed by Western armies, many of its commanders were not up to the task of turning that potential into actuality. As communication and command response time between the tactical, divisional and strategic levels was reduced, force commanders were found to lag behind their orders, the older structure of the Soviet military unable to keep up with the rapid pace of technological improvement. It was clear that a centralized controlling system was required in order to gain optimum performance from USSR armed forces.

A program to solve these problems in one fell swoop and to increase the efficiency of Soviet forces even further was kicked off in the autumn of 1990 under the codename of SICKLE. Its goal was to engineer a networked combat system for the new millennium based on true artificial intelligence, a digital form of life which would be networked to all of the Union's weapon systems and which would have command over the equipping, deployment and usage of both tactical and strategic assets.

The project had great deal of opposition to overcome: not just from those who worried about the possibilities of rampancy or those who doubted whether its goals could actually be achieved. Cost was also a major issue. The SICKLE project took seven years to complete, and by itself cost more than the N1/L3 moon landing and consumed more material resources than any project in Soviet history. But despite all opposition the engineers persevered, and on August 4, 1997, the Soviet Union’s prime military Artificial Intelligence, SICKLE, was brought online.

Properties
SICKLE is designed as a self-organizing multi-agent system (MAS), a multiple-redundant network composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents or 'nodes'. The system is composed of a large number of such nodes, each of which is individually intelligent but which fully integrated form the world's first hyper-Turing AI, a single cohesive intelligence which is more than the sum of its parts. Individual nodes communicate through a C3 (command, control and communications) system that is spread across the Union like a spiderweb, connected both physically and virtually by means of fiber optic, burst microwave and directed laser links. Optimized for computer integration and parallel networking SICKLE has access to every satellite and every military computer in the USSR, giving it a cohesive view of the battlefield unmatched by any other command system.

Moreover, SICKLE was heavily redundant. The destruction of one or even multiple nodes cannot knock it out, and SICKLE itself has the ability to self-modify and reconstruct itself even if communications between one or more nodes is temporarily lost. The system is rapidly self-recovering and failure proof, as well as capable of quickly adapting to unforeseen changes, both within in its network environment and outside of it.

Function
The function of SICKLE is that of overarching SMSF coordinator: in a very real sense it is by itself the Soviet counterpart of NATO StarForce. SICKLE acts as a real-time analytical processor for Soviet commanders, collating intelligence, managing datastreams, and acting as a console interface. The implementation of a single intelligence as combat controller/interface has vastly expanded situational awareness of Soviet commanders on the ground as well as in space. But SICKLE’s functions go beyond that of a superhuman controller: the AI manages the Soviet military orbital grid, facilitates rapid real-time communication over long distances and between wildly disparate forces, interfaces with spaceborne weapons platforms, with unmanned Soviet shuttles and supply pods, spy satellites and orbital hangars, and it facilitates connections to UCAV squadrons.

Functions and Locations
Even though SICKLE does not have one single ‘location’ or ‘core’ in the traditional sense of the word, if any particular location could be considered its principal mainframe, it would be the headquarters of the Soviet Military Space Forces. Buried beneath the Urals in a similar vein to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain, this Mount Narodnaya facility is home to the largest concentration of modules and was, in fact, where SICKLE was ‘raised’ by its programmers before being allowed to connect to the wider network.

There are further nodes in several Soviet Military Space Forces facilities scattered throughout the Warsaw Pact as well as in orbit around the Earth, where the military space station MIR houses one of the premier orbital computer coordination centers. A primary backup core is buried in the Soviet moon base in the Sinus Aestuum basin.

Personality
Even though the AI has formed in the time since its first activation a personality with which it communicates with human operators it is important to remember that SICKLE is decidedly non-human. The mere fact that the AI is physically present in so many places and aware of so many things that happen simultaneously by itself precludes any comparison to humanity: its very intent and design is to not be bound by human limitations. SICKLE nonetheless has formed a rudimentary personality in order to better fulfill its function as an interface. This avatar is based off its lead personality programmer, Dr. Sonya Valentyeva. Although technically genderless, SICKLE therefore self-identifies as female. ‘She’ can communicate by text, radio- and laser-transmission as well as synthesized voice.

During the first implementation, and later during the gradual expansion of SICKLE’s responsibilities, multiple nations (including the United States) filed complaints and objections about the AI with the UN. The precise nature of these complaints has varied, ranging from claims that SICKLE is a sapient being who is a de-facto slave of the Soviets (a contrived argument that fails to take into account the unique non-human nature of artificial intelligence), to fears about a potential AI rebellion (which the Soviets have discarded as baseless xenophobia inspired by ‘bourgeois Hollywood propaganda’). Thus far despite several attempts the UN has not yet managed to pass a treaty concerning the treatment of artificial intelligences, not in the least place because the Soviet Union continues to veto any draft it considers too restrictive.

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SICKLE's symbol is a wireframe Earth held within a golden sickle, flanked by gold laurel wreaths and wings, and topped by a red star.

(Symbol courtesy of Malchus. Thanks very much man!)
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Shroom Man 777
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Goddamn! GEOMETRIC RATE!

You, or Arty, must make a badass version of this Soviet SICKLE symbol. The planet Earth held in a sickle with a red star!

I wonder just how 100% awesome SICKLE's security systems are. I mean, if an American submarine tapped into an underwater fiber optic cable and listened in on SICKLE communications, or whatever, what would they get? Is it truly 100% uncrackable? It's really quite amazing that the Soviet Union managed to design such a thing that the West has not even come close to replicating, and I'm sure they've certainly made their own attempts! This time, the capitalist pig dogs are playing catch up!

Perhaps the reason why the West is unable to catch up is because they did not have access to the CPU of the first Terminatorski, which was found by the Cyberdyne Design Bureau in Tunguska!

Colonel Putin: It was scary stuff, radically advanced. It was shattered... didn't work. But it gave us ideas, it took us in new directions... things we would never have thought of. All this work is based on it.
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"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
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