Friendly Fire from aircraft

[PlasmaKrab]

Pyros said :
Giving the fact that the commander/player has total knowledge of the positioning of all his troops and everything that these troops see, THEN we may assume that in the game the commander takes profit of a limited military GIS (satellite positioning)!!!

Well, that kind of technology is way easier to work out in video games than on the field. It is even harder indeed not to have total control and vision on the battlefield.

And in SPMBT as in most of these games, the battlefield network is far above the wildest wet dreams of any commo general! But even better than running liaison units allover to have short glimpses of the situation...
Call that gameplay compromises.
Although that would be fine to pour in some identification issues, but I dopubt this would be feasible...

p.s Using satellite positioning:
all participants in the battlefield can know where everybody else is at all times

Nope, that is when you have GPS + instant tactical network + everyone with a computerized interface. There is no advantage in knowing where everyone is, but having to tell them on the radio each time!
You need something more like the navigational aids you get in cars these days (or in SP howitzers), only networked.
Most of all, you need data transfer. Ask the US guys in Western Asia who have to buy off satellite band from private comm satellites!

[Pyros]

PlasmaKrab said:

Nope, that is when you have GPS + instant tactical network + everyone with a computerized interface. There is no advantage in knowing where everyone is, but having to tell them on the radio each time!
You need something more like the navigational aids you get in cars these days (or in SP howitzers), only networked.
Most of all, you need data transfer. Ask the US guys in Western Asia who have to buy off satellite band from private comm satellites!

I know but I just want to generalize the basics...
First time I read articles concerning the command & control battlefield of the future was back in 1996 (reading JANES) while going on a mission to the Aegean sea

[narwan]

Ahhhh, Heinlein, I have a whole row of them in my bookcase.... Startship troopers is one of my favourites.

But the starship troopers view of soldiering doesn't really change the problem. If the trooper only carries the smart weapons, there's still the question where he carries them, what targets he picks, and to what degree he can trust his sensors. It is sometimes surprisingly easy to fool these.
During the Kosovo campaign for example NATO used technology that could identify the shapes of tanks and other AFV's (as opposed to humans having to poor over the pictures). To verify that these were actual vehicles and not decoys they verified it with heat sensing data to see if the vehicle had an actual engine (different signature from the rest of the vehicle). Then they had a smart missile (worth hundreds of thousands) fired at the target. Which often was nothing more than the silhouette of a tank painted on the road with a big container of water placed on the area where the engine would be.

narwan