Post: #26

The "what's to stop x doing x" issue is largely self resolving.

If it takes even the slightest amount of nous and dedication then the person in question probably has better things to do with their life. If they're doing such a thing out of religious zealotry then "shoot and scoot" attacks are typically seen as the means of a coward.

If it isn't common now then then chances are it won't be common in the future (unless some sort of first world civil war kicks off).

Post: #27

Drones have a very very low entry point in that you can buy them off the shelf, but building a functional cruise missile is doable for someone with access to decent machine/metalworking tools.

Post: #28

There are still many men left in the west who are talented with technology. If there were an actual civil war here, you can bet that they will produce some interesting new weapons using all the high-tech toys lying around. There will be interesting countermeasures invented as well. Frankly I don't see a government as willing to completely give up all control by making drones totally autonomous. There will always be some sort of channel they will want to keep open in case the situation changes. However, I think terrorist groups might be fine with autonomous drones, as their goal isn't so much control as creating chaos.

Post: #29

Rednecks thought that they held off the cops with that Bundy Ranch shit. Yeah, they held off cops with p-shooters riding horses.

Try holding off a swarm of these things:


Followed by thousands of their friends:



Don't forget sound cannons:



There will never be an over throw of the government by the people. The only way it would happen would be by military coup. The people would get absolutely slaughtered against our militarized police force far before it would get to the actual military.

Remember, this was just Ferguson.


You think we can do anything but hide against shit like this?

Post: #30

(03-07-2016 09:36 PM)captain_shane Wrote:  

Rednecks thought that they held off the cops with that Bundy Ranch shit. Yeah, they held off cops with p-shooters riding horses.

Try holding off a swarm of these things:


Followed by thousands of their friends:

Yeah I'm not worried about fighting robots any time in the next 20 years. I'm not going to get into a long explanation of why, but let's just say powering them is a nontrivial problem and so is controlling them.

Quote:Don't forget sound cannons:

My pal the anti-materiel rifle has something to say about that. Even a 308 would be plenty to disable that thing.

Quote:There will never be an over throw of the government by the people. The only way it would happen would be by military coup. The people would get absolutely slaughtered against our militarized police force far before it would get to the actual military.

Remember, this was just Ferguson.


You think we can do anything but hide against shit like this?

Cops aren't soldiers, no matter how they dress. They rely a great deal on shows of force and intimidation, and that might work on rioters and criminals, but against people who are serious about fighting back it just makes them great targets. And armor is hardly invulnerable.

Do you have any military experience? Combat experience? Are you familiar with the nature of asymmetrical warfare? How much maintenance do armored vehicles require? How about helicopters? What are the logistical challenges in a civil war, where there's no clear front of battle?

Who's going to run and maintain all this equipment? I guess the cops and soldiers are all just mindless drones who will unquestioningly support the government? Even if they are--I think about 1/3 minimum would defect--there are only a few million total police and military in the entire country. Do you have any idea how many gun owners there are? If even 5% of gun owners fought back, the cops and military would be outnumbered 2 to 1.

This notion that an armed revolt against the government would be fought toe to toe is just absurd.

In Iraq I was always happy when the enemy was just shooting at me because they couldn't shoot for shit, and it meant they were in my line of sight somewhere. I can shoot, so they were fucked. In America, I would be terrified if civilians were shooting at me because it's about even odds they're skilled hunters or shooters who don't just spray and pray. I could walk out of my house right now with my deer rifle and hit a 12" target at 300m on the first shot from an improvised rest. There are millions of Americans who can do the same thing, and most of them are not cops.

Thanks for the fear mongering, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Post: #31

^ well said

Post: #32

^Agreed.

The cops maintain an aura of invincibility by flooding trouble spots with cops from neighbouring counties and states. If the "trouble spot" was everywhere then they'd be spread so thin as to be laughable.

Besides, how many of those fat men and chicks in uniform would turn up for work when the shooting started? Sick leave would skyrocket. Annual leave would be tapped out. Then the quiet resignations and workplace injury claims would begin. And during that entire period there would be little more than a skeleton crew left to paint targets on their backs.

Meanwhile as the economy tanks, their pension funds would be gutted and there's a good chance their state/county would become quickly bankrupt, meaning they wouldn't even be getting a paycheck.

That means many of those fancy guns and APCs would likely be sold off Soviet style to whoever could pony up enough currency to keep the operator's family fed.

The police state is a paper tiger. It relies on the perception of infallibility rather than actually being infallible.

Post: #33

(03-07-2016 10:58 PM)weambulance Wrote:  Yeah I'm not worried about fighting robots any time in the next 20 years. I'm not going to get into a long explanation of why, but let's just say powering them is a nontrivial problem and so is controlling them.

Cops aren't soldiers, no matter how they dress. They rely a great deal on shows of force and intimidation, and that might work on rioters and criminals, but against people who are serious about fighting back it just makes them great targets. And armor is hardly invulnerable.

Thanks for the fear mongering, but you don't know what you're talking about.

20 years? I think it'll be 10 max before we start seeing these used as combat units if not sooner. There won't be a revolt for a while anyway, QE till it explodes. The elite won't let there be a civil collapse before they get us to build them a way off this planet. I don't believe i'm fear mongering at all. Yes, people probably have as good a shot at doing it now than ever, but it will be impossible with the technology in the future.

Meet your future friendly neighborhood police officers:

Post: #34

Like I said, there are two major problems with combat robots: power and control.

I'm not going to do the math right now, but what it comes down to is there's no good way to power a human-size robot for days at a time. Robots take a lot of power to run, especially when you load them down with armor. They'd need to be swapping out batteries frequently, or plugging themselves in to recharge, and that leads to major logistical problems and weak points for attackers to exploit. Robots and computers are not anywhere near as power-efficient as human beings.

That's the same problem we have with powered exoskeletons, by the way.

If you make the robot big enough, you can just give it its own engine. Great, except that's not something you can send into a house and it has all the same weaknesses as any other armored vehicle. Very small robots can run for a long time on batteries, but that's not what we're talking about here.

So, suppose the above problems are solved. We build a terminator chassis and power it with some kind of nuclear battery that will run for years. How do we control it? Is it autonomous? We're a long way--decades for sure--from building the kind of virtual intelligence that any sane person would send out to act as a soldier or law enforcement tool without direct human control. We're barely getting self-driving cars on the road that work well in ideal conditions, and the rules of the road are incredibly simple compared with what a police officer or soldier would have to deal with on a daily basis.

If autonomous operation is off the table for awhile, I suppose the terminator would have to be radio controlled (and that would take a ton of manpower, too). Radio isn't that hard to disrupt and jam. If I had to worry about RF controlled robots, I'd build a faraday cage right into my walls and deal with having to go outside to make calls on my cell phone. There would be loads of places those robots couldn't go, because they'd lose signal. If you don't mind pissing off the FCC, it's not that hard to just blast the whole RF spectrum with noise either.

Then there's the fact that people would feel few compunctions about wrecking the robots in protest. I don't think Americans would stand for being policed by machines, and unlike the magic metals in the terminator movies there's not much available in the real world that can stand up to being shot at close range by high velocity bullets without a lot of extra weight due to thickness. It's a much greater leap for people to start shooting real human police than robots.

We can talk about the logistical problems of maintaining this fleet of robots, even if it was feasible to build them. Something as intricate as a combat robot would have a lot of down time. Electronics would fail, parts would need to be replaced. That requires a ton of manpower and money and a huge support structure. Software would be a major point of weakness. What happens when a fake firmware update is pushed out by some humanitarian hacker that bricks all the robots that download it?

I can think of more problems as well. Humans are amazing creatures and very, very difficult to replace. What it comes down to is it's a lot easier and cheaper to just pay humans to do the bulk of the dirty work.

Drones and moderately autonomous robots will be used more, I'm sure, in very specialized roles. I wouldn't be surprised to see a whole bunch of surveillance drones rolled out, for example. But general purpose combat and police robots? I doubt I'll see that in my lifetime, and I expect to live another 50 years. I think we're a lot more likely to see UN troops brought in to enforce some decree from on high than any kind of robot army.

Edit - typo

Post: #35

Suicide drones are here:





It's an Azerbaijani suicide drone diving into Armenian bus. Here's the forum thread on this new conflict: /thread-54904.html

Post: #36

I predict before 2020:

1) Someone shall stand on a hill and kill themselves on a live stream using an explosive suicide drone.

2) Someone will attack a school unfortunately.

Post: #37

I am actually more worried about this swarm of Fed credit "drones" (cards) failing en masse when the $60 Trillion credit bubble bursts...

The Biggest Scam In United States History | G. Edward Griffin and Stefan Molyneux

https://youtu.be/dsqGR31zoVA

What would you do if suddenly your Credit and Debit cards all failed and you have no cash, no silver, no gold to trade in order to eat or buy ammo to forcefully take what you need to survive?

Post: #38

Post: #39

(03-07-2016 09:36 PM)captain_shane Wrote:  You think we can do anything but hide against shit like this?

Do you really want to know?

Every hardened weapon system has a soft pink center.

Military leaders have families that enter public supermarkets and theaters.

A belief that civil war follows symmetric lines is incorrrect.

Regards,

Ivan

Post: #40

More problems drones start making, more severe will be punishment for their use or ownership

Post: #41

It's a race.

Armed Robots>Weapons to Kill Them>Hardened Armed Robots>Weapons To Kill Them

It's a never ending cycle, it's always been like this.

Right now a 5.56/7.62/308 could take a out your mobile robot.

A shotgun or hawk can take out a standard drone.


Obvious upgrades to robots and drones, then higher powered weapons to take them out.

Electronic warfare will increase tenfold.

Post: #42

Can something be a statist's and terrorist's wet dream both at the same time?

As already pointed out in this thread, this has obvious appeals to terrorists, anarchists or just otherwise mischievous bastards.

However, there's a whole statist angle to this stuff too. The bigger nuisance/danger little inexpensive drones are, the more the increasingly sheeple public will cry out to be "protected" from them. I foresee thousands of pages of regulations, millions of tax dollars and thousands of man-hours expended in a likely vain attempt to regulate these devices. Statists are creaming their jeans over this stuff.

Post: #43

(05-16-2016 04:34 PM)kaotic Wrote:  Electronic warfare will increase tenfold.

Drones can also be combined with this.

Attach a mini PC + wifi adapter to a drone, fly near heavily-guarded fortress, hack into the wifi, then start messing with the systems.

In the event of wifi being so protected it'd require physical access to circumvent, use 1000 drones with micro guns to break open windows.

We're doomed.