How realaistic will drop team be....

[Tarquelne]

I think Peter Cairns is fundamentally correct, in that warfare in the distant future - as distant as DropTeam's - will most likely be very different from current warfare. Much more different than DropTeam's, IMO.

But that's just "most likely".

First, looking at the history supplied: The Traders supplying arms to the Rim worlds wouldn't necessarily have supplied the best or most advanced weapons. Ease of maintenance, political considerations, legal restrictions - or just profit margins - could have greatly limited what the Rim warlords had to play with.

The Rim lost it's fight with the big E. despite it's much lauded experience - maybe because it didn't have enough of those things that'd make future warfare so different.

Now, with the Space Vikings (I have to admit it took a bit of effort to type "Space Vikings" with a straight face) relying primarily on old LiveShip production facilities (IIRC) the game DropTeam will be fought without those most-advanced systems. And the available units - lo and behold - are primarily "sci-fi" versions of units familiar to us from Real Life.

Secondly, there's the question of countermeasures. Why not use nano-based "grey goo", self-organizing fleets of UAVs, or all sorts of super-high tech sci-fi devices? Maybe it's because of counter-measures. Anti-goo goo, computer viruses, super-duper ECM, I dunno... but for some reason most "super weapons" don't work due to counter-measures kept on hand by everybody in the DropTeam universe. Everyone just deploys the stuff that can't be easily countered. In the case of DropTeam what's left looks a lot like upgraded versions of today's stuff...

Or maybe it's a question of scale: The armor, or ECM equipment, or power sources, or whatever required to function on the battlefield just don't scale down well. So we've got tanks, but none of those very tiny, very smart and excessively lethal weapons systems that seem likely to make the future battlefield so different from today's.

(Actually, I think it'd be interesting if the war of the E. against the Rim mentioned in the history featured the E. using plenty of super-sci-fi type weaponry... like say a dozen troopers that appear to be wearing light armor and carrying wands assaulting a city held by a battalion-sized Rim force of "advanced" AFVs.)

[Tarquelne]

Just a couple more comments:

in the movies they seem to think that in the future the effective range of an assalt rifle will be about six feet.

And note the Bad Guys often still can't hit anything at that range.

What gets me is the space-based weapons that don't seem to have a range much greater than 600 feet.

I'd have though that if anyone could come up with a "realistic" idea for what future combat might be like it would be the Battlefront team, as opposed to a copy ( all be it with a good game system) of your standard hollywood Buck Rogers GI in Space.

There's a lot to be said for Buck Rogers GI in Space. As a game. I expect more from a book. I wish for more - but expect less - from a movie. Think of it, perhaps, as pushing current trends to an illogical extreme. The familiar... but with a fun sci-fi twist.

I'm very much looking forward to a sci-fi game (even if it's space opera) that still takes realism seriously.

[TheTris]

A laser can move at the speed of light, about 300,000,000mps (three hundred million metres a second), so to cut a hole with a 1m circumferance it could do 300m rotations a second.

You need to play/watch/read more Science Fiction Pete! :-D

A laser can move with the speed of light, sure. That doesn't place a limit on the speed with which you can track a laser across a surface. If I draw a laser pointer across something far enough away, I can track it across at much more than c.

c is the limit for travel from the pointer to the end of the beam, not the limit for the end of the beam moving from one place to another.

So there is no limit on the number of rotations a laser could do per second to cut a 1m circumference hole. but I'm not sure why this is relevant?

I believe this then comes down to the cutting power of the laser, and the dispersion effect caused by material already displaced by the beam, which would have an attritional effect on the cutting power the longer the laser was focussed on the same surface.