Re: Legions of Soldiers with Railguns (Future of Warfare)

Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Sat, 16 Nov 1996 13:13:18 -0800

>Imagine future warfare where each human soldier control a flock of robots,
>possibly by telepresence, and he with the best and most robots wins the
>battle. I think this is the most likely way for future warfare to go. Off
>course there will always be weapons that uses the battleaxe style instead
>of the scalpel style that robotic warfare represents.
>just look at it from a PR and political viewpoint. A Robowar will be
>relatively inexpensive(none of our boys got lost) and hi tech war material
>is always cool on the tube.

Mach 17 autonomous fighter aircraft instructed via telepresence. Cool!
Looks like war may be turning into more of a technological competition than
tragedy.
When the US have those little peacekeeping wars, even the Gulf War with
Iraq it was merely a way for the country to go over there and play with
their cool new toys.

>The problem with rail guns is not the size of the rail. You can build
>one the size of a pistol to give equivalent muzzle velocity. The problem
>is in the power supply. TO give sufficient gauss, with current capacitor
>technology, you would need a backpack full to get enough power for a few
>blasts, plus a power supply to "reload".

So I guess that explains why in "Snow Crash" they had a mini fission
reactor cell attached to the gun. hehe

>THe US DOD now owns the designs...... ;-)

Damn that sucks.