Given the following assumption, what can we extrapolate about armored vehicle design and countermeasures?

Given: an automated factory that produces rectangular plating. The plates are 1.5m by .75m by 10cm, and when powered with 1kW of electricity, radiate strongly in visible light wavelengths, and have the equivalent penetrative resistance of several feet of chobham armor (or whatever the hell they're putting on MBTs these days). The plates have a density of iron. For the plates to function, they must be unaltered - that is, not punctured, reshaped, drilled, pressed, etc.

Given that, I'd look into weapons with the ability to interrupt the power supply to the plates and then deliver a payload capable of penetrating them and eliminating the target.

In terms of what it would mean for AV design? Long lasting/redundant power plants capable of delivering power to the plates and engines. We'd probably be see light (weight-wise) fast AVs over slower/heavily armored designs. If R&D is able to come up with solid power plants we might see some energy weapon development.

The scanning equipment would be tuned to detect the plates power consumption.

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Dave

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Here's what I imagined the panels to look like, much like a picture frame. The glowy part in the middle produces the protective fielding effect that bubbles out and can't be painted over or easily covered. This will make anything carrying it easily visible in most circumstances.

Plates would probably be too heavy for aircraft with any sort of extended range.
Early 21st century engines would not be sufficient to power more than a few.
They couldn't be mounted onto tracks, so vehicles would still be vulnerable to mines.

It'd certainly produce very blocky vehicles, especially if the plates couldn't be manufactured in triangular sections.

Would the Visible radiation be 'tunable' or would it have a characteristic frequency and or intensity? If it were not tunable (and especially if it were dependant on exact make up, i.e. enemy plates would be a different color than freindly) it would make automated defenses very simple to construct. It would be easy to identify active fields by characteristic emissions, and engage them with simple optical equipment.

As for countermeasures, can we assume anything that size with that power draw and emission signature would be electrically conductive across the surface? If so a harpoon-like projectile that would either short or ground the system would be most effective, essentially robbing it of the neccessary power. You could then have a second traditional round hit the now unshielded section(s).

With sufficient power reserves you could mount a dual railgun, with the first slug carrying the incapacitating round and the second providing the knockout in quick succession.

I'd need to know more about it to make too many judgements.

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SG

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I'm intrigued but utterly confused by this conversation. Could someone explain, in laymans terms, why it's taking place please?

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Given the above we would need to start making all minis in clear/clear tinted resin with an embedded LEDs. It'd be that or paint lighting effects on everything and use chromaticnanoparticle varnishes, and i'm lazy. Or, paint normally, then attack the minis witha glue gun for the bubbles!

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I'd attack the ground below them - maybe the old Mole Mortars make sense after all!
Think you'd need more than 1kW, and that means problems with how to generate enough energy on a vehicle. And 10mm plates in steel would be quite heavy for land vehicles too, as I tend to agree with Dave.

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I kinda assumed O-man had some epiphany about new minis, and was looking for ideas about how his rough background would inform the design of the models. If not, I don't know... but I like hypotheticals anyway.

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

you could have plates projecting past each other.

this would let you get some slopes into the thing. Also, since the fields project, you can have gaps using regualr armour that the fields project past. lemme think about this.

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I just like pondering these sorts of things.

They might also provide a coherent background for weird minis. For example, let us further assume that the owners of this automated factory find a sufficiently good power source to use lots of these, making very visible but very hardy armored vehicles.

Their enemies would develop countermeasures, such as even bigger guns, mole mortar variants, a way of shooting huge amounts of mole robots. Perhaps the field effect is temporarily weakened while stopping kinetic vehicles, which means that double-barreled tank guns make sense: the first shot weakens the field, the second penetrates.

Miniature wise the design isn't very sexy, but their opponents might be...

Some interesting concepts ...

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EMP. No one anywhere has developed a decent countermeasure to the flow of electricity, yet
There's a fantastic section in Warday on the difficulties of shielding electrical systems. Perhaps some of that is in order?

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With the greatest respect, I think your thought experiment may be lagging behind the times.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/n ... tists.html

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