I'm offline for a couple of days and immediately there are a load of vehicle posts on GURPSnet ... well, it saves time to give my inevitable two cents all at once :-)
Even more than the inventors/proponents of real-world weapon R&D projects, a technothriller writer can create exactly the right conditions for his clever idea and gloss over problems. * It might be possible to organize the complete sweep of the target area and the avoidance of double attacks with local communications protocols, but that is tricky. "If the nearest pigeon to your left is closer than the nearest pigeon to your right, shift right." "Before an attack, tell the pigeons to your right and left that you have taken the target. Have them tell their neighbours." If pigeons are programmed to flock towards concentrations of targets, that almost assures that isolated targets are missed. If they are programmed to spread out, the attack on concentrations suffers because the swarm tries not to be suckered. * The flock also has to determine the effectiveness of the attack. If the pigeons go after warm engines, a burning decoy will be a real killer. Not re-attacking a surviving target would be just as bad. * As described by DataPacRat, the flock communicates by a single radio per bird. That means a single frequency (or rather a single sequence of frequencies, with frequency- hopping) for the flock, right? To talk on two nets at the same time, you need two radios. If you switch the radio from net to net, you change from one intermingled flock to the other. Making sense of thousands of stations on one net will be a killer application, even with robotic radio discipline. And radios can be jammed. For some real-world thoughts on killer flocks, check the LCAAS mentioned in http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1398/ Of course that could change with more optimistic assumptions on computer power. Microbot flocks work in Transhuman Space, but not in Traveller, to name two extremes. * If the pigeon has no biomorphic camouflage, ornithopter drivetrains make no sense. A little prop or jet engine is much more reasonable. * Why bother with sound baffling? * It makes little sense to design a dedicated anti-pigeon defense. Pigeons are just one special case of a saturation attack by small targets. For the defender, lasers might be workable - the attacker would leave any anti-laser-aerosol cloud behind as he advances. * Last but not least, the deployment of cluster munitions has led to stronger overhead armor on AFVs. Don't assume that everything stays the same and only YOUR pet weapon adapts. When it comes to cracking armor, ten little bangs are not nearly as useful as one big one. And robots of this size really bring the Vehicles rules and even Robots to their limits, of course. Have you considered to use a brilliant missile seeker from VE instead of a robot brain/sensor? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
