What happens in 2025? / new tactics- new technologies

[Mustang]

Originally Posted by MarkSheppard

Simple jamming isn't stopping the drones on both sides from hitting their targets in appreciable numbers.

Yes, the future is going to be directed energy weapons (DEW) applied to every armored vehicle -- presumably as part of the active protection (APS) system -- if the APS detects a signature similar to the very fast spinning rotors of a quadcopter; send back a short high frequency radar burst to that target to fry the drone.

Or lasers (they're just getting deployed now) will appear in large numbers to counter drones.

Either way, a LOT of coding would be necessary to accurately depict weapons effects for both lasers and DEWs in Steel Panthers since they're a totally new "rock-papers-scissors" paradigm versus the current projectile weapon system used in all Steel Panthers since 1994.

Issues to solve would be:

1.) Size issues -- laser size is rated in kilowatts with targets being:

10 kw = Mortar shells and small drones
50 kw = artillery shells and heavier drones
300 kw = combat aircraft, etc.

2.) Lasers can be affected by dust/smoke/weather conditions; to an extent that projectile weapons aren't.

3.) Microwave (aka Radar based) DEWs are largely unaffected by weather; but are a current unknown-unknown -- in that we don't have public open source data on just how much radar energy is needed to disable/damage current threat profiles -- commercial drones like DJI Mavics should be relatively easy; but a combat aircraft like the F-16 -- IDK how well that would work, given that F-16s have been tested for operations in a nuclear environment with nuclear-generated EMP.

Drones are just a range 10 grenade. They are already part of the game.

If you do want to know the math behind how jamming works I can show you. The jammers themselves are custom made and there aren't any mass produced models you can put in an oob, but I can give you numbers.

The size value in the game already abstracts all of this. There is no reason to handle different sensors differently. If you can detect something visually you can detect it by radar as well. The size and other values in the game are just for all detection types, for example aircraft have an EW value that is used for stealth and things that aren't EW.

Again, in real life it would be shot down by rifles immediately but if we want to simulate jamming we can. Regardless of drones it would be good to have some understanding of how ground penetrating radars and such work. This also allows tunnel warfare which is the only real thing you need in tbe game as tunnel warfare happens a lot in real life.

But I can give you information on how jamming works and the signal/noise ratio functions, and you can incorporate that as a size value in units, there is no code change needed as the unit visibility is already abstracted as size, suppression, the orders system etc.