Near Future Military Tech (Twilight 20XY)

[Raellus]

This thread is for folks who might like to use a more up-to-date timeline for their T2k campaign. v1 came out in 1984. That means the designers were projecting military tech 16 years into the future, more or less. So, for those interested in starting a campaign in 2036...

https://gizmodo.com/the-armys-new-ni...ogy-1846799718

Please share any other relevant near-future military tech info you might run across here.

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[Stackmouse]

Sensor fusion in its many forms will be the next big step on individual soldier and combat vehicle capabilities. The current thermal imaging/digital night vision fusion systems are just scary - in the future we may have goggles, that are so good in classifying what the sensors see that you can use them even in broad daylight.

[unipus]

Along with that I imagine a whole lot of other systems which will make being an infantryman absolutely no fun at all. Smart munitions for every conceivable platform. Micro-missiles. Ubiquitous thermal/millimeter wave radar imaging on platforms everywhere. Drone swarms. Widespread hacking with systemic effects on entire nations and global systems. All sorts of stuff that will may well make the normal human ability to act or react close to meaningless, or shift more and more "combat" away from anything like what we know today and closer to a ubiquitous strategic/deniable warfare that is global at all times... even more so than today because the possible scale of impact is much larger.

[Raellus]

I just wonder how a lot of these high-tech personal electronic devices will hold up under sustained combat conditions- desert dust and heat, tropical damp and heat, arctic cold, etc. What's the service life of some of these new systems? If a $50,000 per soldier system only lasts a year or two under field conditions, what nation can really afford that?

I imagine that many of these next gen devices will end up being prohibitively expensive for most militaries. I suspect that most first-world militaries might be able to outfit their SOF and maybe one or two brigades of conventional troops with all these cool electronic gizmos and that will be about it. The tech is going to have to mature for several years, and go commercial, to get closer to being affordable on a larger scale and, by then, there will be even more cutting edge tech just over the horizon. In a full-scale modern war, these "tech troops" would quickly be outnumbered by draftees lacking all the bells and whistles.

And data-linked systems- a military "internet of things", if you will- sounds great in theory, but I imagine that networked systems would be quite vulnerable to enemy electronic warfare/hacking. All those fancy doodads are going to be next to useless when they get bricked by some Chinese or Russian virus. And the Chinese and Russians seem like they've got a more developed hacking corps than the US and its allies. Also, stuff like Blue Force Tracker's been around for quite some time now, and it hasn't had the game-changing effect that its designers promised.

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[unipus]

Maybe, but on the other hand there's plenty of low-cost nightmare tech that will probably proliferate rapidly. See: Saudi drone attack

[unipus]

Of course there's also this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yOOBITha4

[Vespers War]

Originally Posted by Raellus

And the Chinese and Russians seem like they've got a more developed hacking corps than the US and its allies.
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The Chinese and Russian hacking corps are certainly more visible. The open question is whether that means they're more developed or less skillful.

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by Vespers War

The Chinese and Russian hacking corps are certainly more visible. The open question is whether that means they're more developed or less skillful.

I hadn't really thought about it like that. I suppose both propositions could be true at the same time. Operation Solar Winds was, by all accounts, very successful at harvesting a wealth of high level intel from numerous US gov't agencies, but it was ultimately detected (mostly by chance). A recent 60 Minutes report, however, claimed that even though the virus had been identified, it might not be possible to eliminate it completely. It will continue to lurk in US data systems, potentially providing our rivals with fresh intel and/or disrupt our IT capabilities.

On the other hand, one rarely sees reports of successful US hacks of rival nations*. Does that mean we're not doing it, or are we so good at it that no one's found out yet?

*The only one I can recall that the US might have had some hand in was the Stuxnet virus that disrupted the Iranian nuclear program several years back, but most reports credit the Israelis with developing and deploying it.