NS Military Worldbuilding Thread No. 12

[Miku the Based]

Give me a proper run down on how to properly track down and eliminate a sub, ship, plane, and human. Equipment required, tactics used, and caution and countermeasures needed. To counter anti-forensics and tracking measures etc.

[Hrstrovokia]

Israel's Rafael industries have a micro/mini-UAV version of the SPIKE missile.

I don't think it has the same RHA penetration values as the other versions of the SPIKE but it would probably destroy anything without hardkill APS or pre-1980.

[The Dolphin Isles]

Are there any serious projects by major military powers for smaller UAVs that deliver small munitions similar to quadcopters for the platoon/company level? Are they mainly just focusing on guided munitions like the spike that keeps being mentioned or with China's and America's "drone swarm" projects? I guess I am mainly thinking of stuff like the makeshift drones in the war in Syrian and I guess that Belarussian drone (although I know nothing about that project). It seems like a makeshift way to get a similar effect to airburst AGLs/GLs.

[Hrstrovokia]

Are there any serious projects by major military powers for smaller UAVs that deliver small munitions similar to quadcopters for the platoon/company level? Are they mainly just focusing on guided munitions like the spike that keeps being mentioned or with China's and America's "drone swarm" projects? I guess I am mainly thinking of stuff like the makeshift drones in the war in Syrian and I guess that Belarussian drone (although I know nothing about that project). It seems like a makeshift way to get a similar effect to airburst AGLs/GLs.

ZALA of Russia do ZALA LANCET-1 with a 1 kg payload and also a ZALA LANCET-3 with a 3 kg payload.

There was some other system designed to carry grenades but I can't find it right now.

[Austrasien]

Are there any serious projects by major military powers for smaller UAVs that deliver small munitions similar to quadcopters for the platoon/company level? Are they mainly just focusing on guided munitions like the spike that keeps being mentioned or with China's and America's "drone swarm" projects? I guess I am mainly thinking of stuff like the makeshift drones in the war in Syrian and I guess that Belarussian drone (although I know nothing about that project). It seems like a makeshift way to get a similar effect to airburst AGLs/GLs.

https://www.avinc.com/tms
https://uvisionuav.com/portfolio_catego ... l-systems/

UVision and AeroViroment are more or less the leaders in small loitering munitions atm both are selling a couple of different small drones suitable for small vehicles or dismounts carrying warheads.

[Shanghai industrial complex]

US army's SUAS has planned the development of UAV from 2020 to 2035.UAVs of different levels, SBS、SRR、MRR and LRR,are provided for one soilder,platoons, companies and battalions from 2020-2028.After that, they will focus on using AI technology on these UAVs
https://www.army.mil/article/239374/soldier_unmanned_aircraft_system_suas

I discovered the locust project of the U.S. Navy in 2015,this is highly similar to the PLA's recently released equipment.It is reasonable to believe that similar equipment has been used in the US military
https://www.defenceprocurementinternational.com/features/air/drone-swarms

[Republic of Penguinian Astronautia]

UAS should comprise the vast majority of vehicles/munitions in a unit. No one would do this IRL because it requires shaking off 20th century thinking about armies but it would be pretty big brained.

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Something like this, which we can imaginatively call a "Regional Unit" or "RU":

Small Unit: 6-12 men with advanced sights, high performance cartridges and long range rifles, with a transport vehicle or two. Has a ROVER tablet (or two) for the FACs to receive sensor feeds from overhead Predator drones with GMTI radars and FLIRs. Can fly the drones if they want to give away their positions to enemy strategic ELINT I guess. Runs wires or has some sort of NLOS laser communications on one of their Humvees to talk to people. Gets parachuted out of planes. Drives around as the battle develops.

Artillery Unit: 150-200 men with cruise missiles, long range ballistic missiles, and a stealthy launch platform for long-range artillery. Maybe has its own internal UAS for targeting fired out of a VLS silo or out of a separate launch tube, and high gain SATCOM for receiving targeting data from the UAS (or piloting them).

Air Unit: 2,000-3,000 men that provides aviation support, including tactical fighters, OCA/DCA, and reconnaissance. Provides the MTI/FLIR drones that the Small Unit needs to see, and has a faster response time than the Artillery Unit. Maintains the smaller aircraft of a RU such as the liaison helicopters, CAS drones, and tac fighters. Probably has some means of providing "combat support" for a Small Unit by landing F-22s on roadside highways and arming/fueling them with MC-130s. Really 4-5 squadrons of good (F-22) fighters/drones with maybe a small transportation squadron for arming/refueling.

Support Unit: 3,000-5,000 men that supplies palletized ammunition, transportation by air or sea and materiel maintenance. Can also protect a theater or regional force from attacks using its innate defense capability. Also has medical evacuation capacity and a hospital. It's more a nerve center than an actual fighting unit, like a regional airbase or something, and so it would be pretty far away and talk to the frontline troops by satellite more or less.

A "RU" thus might comprise some 20-30 SmolUs, 2-3 AUs, 1-2 AirUs, and 1 SupU. Most of the SU firepower would be the 20-30 boxes of a dozen or two FOG-Ms that they get airdropped or whatever by the AirU and targeted by the constant robotic blanket of UAS that provides an all seeing electric eye for the SU. Deep artillery attacking airbases and railheads for enemy armored divisions comes from the AirU's strike-fighter components and AUs ballistic and cruise missiles.

I suppose ideally every SmolUs member is guiding 1-2 FOGMs at a target through his ROVER tablet, the AU is being given targeting coordinates by the SupU for hitting enemy artillery or w/e courtesy SBIRS-LO, and the AirU is keeping the skies clear and bombing things when it can, while also providing the SupU and SmolUs with GMTI it needs to attack stuff. Less "what unit has what drones" and more "who has compatible ground stations", because drones are functionally aircraft, so they should be as big like Grey Eagle and Reaper.

Cities are defeated with tactical nukes obviously. Or proxy forces used in the meat grinder.

This is FCS boiled down to its nuts and bolts more or less FWIW.

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Anyway.

Since it's 2021 Dumbla has added some sort of stupid jet powered drone replacing the Dark Stars (but equally stupid looking, so I'll probably copy something like Okhotnik or a Chinese UAS) and XQ-58 probably muscling in on the Firebees. The 1990s rocket drone is also replaced by a KZO-ified Aerosonde.

That's a pretty cool idea, but would this be the entire force or be complemented by some other more conventional units?

[The Dolphin Isles]

Thanks for the responses everyone. I'll have to read more.

[TPFII]

How bad would an early military pump action rifle be? It seems like bolt actions tended to be used instead of lever actions for more ergonomic use in the prone position, but why not pump action instead of bolt action? It seems like a pump action rifle would be particularly advantageous for my nation, tasked with protecting multiple islands of monsoonal rainforests, to be able to slam-fire the rifle and having a much faster rate of fire for close distance in brush, similar to trench warfare with the 1897.

[Manokan Republic]

How bad would an early military pump action rifle be? It seems like bolt actions tended to be used instead of lever actions for more ergonomic use in the prone position, but why not pump action instead of bolt action? It seems like a pump action rifle would be particularly advantageous for my nation, tasked with protecting multiple islands of monsoonal rainforests, to be able to slam-fire the rifle and having a much faster rate of fire for close distance in brush, similar to trench warfare with the 1897.

The main issue is reliability, accuracy and ease of use. A bolt action is easier to use while prone and moves the rifle around less when working the action; a pump action will cause a significant deviation in the weapon's position in general as your grip has to shift on the gun and thus your point of aim changes a lot. Basically, it wobbles up and down quite a bit as your work the action. It's not an insurmountable issue, but as the gun moves a lot, it's harder to be accurate and stay on target. As bolt actions were thought to be used to ranges of several hundred yards, good accuracy out ot this range was considered paramount, and so major deviations were somewhat of an issue. Soldiers also typically laid prone in the dirt to fire or as low to the ground as possible in trenches, and, the gun could be rest on the dirt while you operated the action where as with a pump action it would need to be raised up a bit, especially to be comfortable, and you'd have to extend your arm out fairly far. Another issue is reliability, with these types of weapons tending to jam a lot more frequently if the action is not worked properly than a bolt action.

There's nothing stopping it from happening, and it would have clear advantages in speed and ease of use, but it would suffer accuracy problems without substantial training to overcome the rapid shift in positioning on the target. It also would be harder to use in a trench or while laying prone, but it would be easier to use when on the move standing up. As more dynamic warfare developed later on, such as in WWII, this would have actually been a benefit, although submachine guns and repeating rifles just started to exist so, any new rifles not from WWI were usually made to be semiautomatic and so on. Basically it just missed the mark. Once there was a surplus of guns everyone just stuck to that. So my opinion is that it would be fine especially in the jungles where pump actions and submachine guns were more widely used, and would be better when on the move, although there are some drawbacks when firing from a largely fixed position and it's less accurate at long range. Mechanically the accuracy is also a bit less, although this only matters at long range as well.

[Manokan Republic]

Give me a proper run down on how to properly track down and eliminate a sub, ship, plane, and human. Equipment required, tactics used, and caution and countermeasures needed. To counter anti-forensics and tracking measures etc.

Basically you need a whole military to do these things. Some kind of good optics system, preferably infrared or light-boosted, UV can't hurt for aircraft and other things. Counter forensics is a bit more complex really, basically incinerate the target, hose it down a lot with something, various chemicals and water, more expensively you can use acid, or something else. Also anything to counteract infrared, radar and UV is a good way not to be tracked.

[Dayganistan]

How bad would an early military pump action rifle be? It seems like bolt actions tended to be used instead of lever actions for more ergonomic use in the prone position, but why not pump action instead of bolt action? It seems like a pump action rifle would be particularly advantageous for my nation, tasked with protecting multiple islands of monsoonal rainforests, to be able to slam-fire the rifle and having a much faster rate of fire for close distance in brush, similar to trench warfare with the 1897.

The solution to increasing the rate of fire back in the days of manual repeating rifles was a straight pull bolt or a cock on close action like in the Lee Enfield. For something that would be relatively situational having your guys run a mad minute drill on SMLEs would be fine. You could probably issue shotguns to a few guys per platoon as well.

[The Corparation]

Few know this but the USN has tested out incinerating submarines prior to deployment as a counter-forensics method. They even did it to a whole submarine back in 2012. It's a little known but theoretically very effective method of defeating enemy sonar. Supposedly the ship they trialed the process on remains invisible to enemy sonar to this day.

[Cossack Peoples]

Few know this but the USN has tested out incinerating submarines prior to deployment as a counter-forensics method. They even did it to a whole submarine back in 2012. It's a little known but theoretically very effective method of defeating enemy sonar. Supposedly the ship they trialed the process on remains invisible to enemy sonar to this day.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that the Kursk incident was a Russian attempt to perform the same technique.

[New Vihenia]

So yeah, back in WW II there were digital computers..like Zuse, Harvard, ENIAC etc. They're big but good for what they are doing.

Now what if one among them can be installed onboard a battleship. I'm curious if it would be of an improvement over mechanical analog computer there, will that help in say making the gun more accurate or something else.

[Night Kingdoms]

So yeah, back in WW II there were digital computers..like Zuse, Harvard, ENIAC etc. They're big but good for what they are doing.

Now what if one among them can be installed onboard a battleship. I'm curious if it would be of an improvement over mechanical analog computer there, will that help in say making the gun more accurate or something else.

Like on a MT battleship, or a battleship from the past?

[New Vihenia]

Like on a MT battleship, or a battleship from the past?

Past battleship of course something like Yamato or Iowa.

[Night Kingdoms]

Like on a MT battleship, or a battleship from the past?

Past battleship of course something like Yamato or Iowa.

I mean, you would have to connect all the guns which would take a long time, and make a new program for that. Maybe? I'm not really an expert on that.

[Kassaran]

Last I checked, Fire Control Directors were effectively a massive targeting computer and required inputs for tons of stuff to get a solution. Tied in with radar tech near the end of the war... Bismark had a similar set up early on, but without radar iirc.

[The Corparation]

So yeah, back in WW II there were digital computers..like Zuse, Harvard, ENIAC etc. They're big but good for what they are doing.

Now what if one among them can be installed onboard a battleship. I'm curious if it would be of an improvement over mechanical analog computer there, will that help in say making the gun more accurate or something else.

It's not going to be an improvement and would likely be worse. Early digital computers were reliant on vacuum tubes and so they were more delicate and less reliable than the widely used analog and electro-mechanical computers of the time. In terms of computation, for fire control accuracy the difference is minimal. (In theory an electromechanical computer could actually be *more* accurate than a digital as they deal in the "real" values rather than the limitations that digital computers have with regards to representing non-integer values. That said you'll probably be hitting the target either way well before you reach the limit of a digital computer's precision) The main benefit of going digital over electromechanical for fire control is that you no longer need to worry about moving parts. And until you have transistors properly maintainable moving parts are better than vacuum tubes which are consumable parts which need to be replaced at random with no warning. That said you do see some use of vacuum tubes for Radar and C2 systems in the 40s-60s but you're not getting anything reliable into the field until you've got transistors.



Also for what its worth the Iowas were using electromechanical systems for their main guns up until they retired. The Navy never saw upgrading to a digital fire control system as a worthwhile thing to invest in as the existing system was good enough for the job.

[Spirit of Hope]

Re working my Armored and Mechanized Brigade Reconnaissance Company. Now is two mech infantry platoons, two tank platoons and a UAV platoon that includes both UAV and Loiter Munitions.

[TPFII]

Thank you both. It certainly sounds feasible enough. The bayonet, when equipt, is designed to replicate a traditional/tribal polearm that is characteristically heavy. The indigenous tribe that recently gained control of the government, being of characteristically short stature, need a rifle as light as possible so a pencil-weight barrel is used, with the muzzle being recessed into the extended length upper receiver, and the bayonet sockets into said receiver. The intent is that the heavy bayonet doesn't damage the lightweight barrel through use, particularly when left on for extended periods of time or when the bayonet gets stuck in something, which is common for the polearm that it's replicating. The upper receiver, being of sufficient length, also provides a track for the pump arm/forend. Do you think that that would be reasonable for a nation trying to be hard-MT, or a bit retcon-y?

[Austrasien]

So yeah, back in WW II there were digital computers..like Zuse, Harvard, ENIAC etc. They're big but good for what they are doing.

Now what if one among them can be installed onboard a battleship. I'm curious if it would be of an improvement over mechanical analog computer there, will that help in say making the gun more accurate or something else.

The main practical benefit would be making the GFCS a lot more reliable and less maintenance-intensive to keep at full performance. Electrical noise in an analog system introduces errors into the values and the circuit between guns in a turret and the director was fairly long. Digital systems do not have this problem. Though in practice as has been said battleships like the Iowa's FCS worked extremely well there was inherently more room for errors.

It is also much easier to network digital systems so every gun turret could have a computer performing any or all the gun-laying calculations. Loss of the central GFCS would need not prevent the guns from operating in unison.

[The Corparation]

So yeah, back in WW II there were digital computers..like Zuse, Harvard, ENIAC etc. They're big but good for what they are doing.

Now what if one among them can be installed onboard a battleship. I'm curious if it would be of an improvement over mechanical analog computer there, will that help in say making the gun more accurate or something else.

The main practical benefit would be making the GFCS a lot more reliable and less maintenance-intensive to keep at full performance. Electrical noise in an analog system introduces errors into the values and the circuit between guns in a turret and the director was fairly long. Digital systems do not have this problem. Though in practice as has been said battleships like the Iowa's FCS worked extremely well there was inherently more room for errors.

It is also much easier to network digital systems so every gun turret could have a computer performing any or all the gun-laying calculations. Loss of the central GFCS would need not prevent the guns from operating in unison.

Networking like that with digital systems in a shipboard environment really isn't practical until you've got transistors which isn't until the early 60s which is also when you have stuff like NTDS roll out. (Although from what I know NTDS doesn't do much in the way of fire control)

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Could a mountain regiment contain paratroopers?