"Could OGREs/BOLOs ever be a reality?" Topic

SJ, of course, premises the existence of giant cybertanks on a huge jump in armor technology. His science fictional BPC armor is super-light and tough enough to handle a nuclear blast. Thus, a massive land-leviathan like the Ogre becomes a possibility.

Today, weapons technology has so far outstripped armor technology that one shot = one hit = one dead tank. Thus, creating a giant, multi-gunned monster only makes the enemy's job easier for him.

But need this always be so? Is it possible that armor could make a massive advance? What about stealth technology? ECM? Anti-missile weapons?

Waste of steel, IMNSHO. Do the math.

And how are you going to get the flat ground they would need? That would certainly limit where you could drive them.

"His science fictional BPC armor is super-light and tough enough to handle a nuclear blast."

BTW, yes, I read that part. I just don't believe it. Oh, yeah, Bucky-ball fibre technology. Right. Uh-huh.

Actually, just reading the GURPS OGRE book is enough to make you scratch your head about it.

1. Too big a target, and nowhere near fast or maneuverable enough, particularly in a situation where the enemy is likely to have tactical nukes.

2. Getting one to the scene of the action is a trick in and of itself.

3. No one is going to want to turn over a massive mega-fighting-machine to an AI when human command crews are cheaper.

Great gaming, but so long as any kind of real air power exists, a tank is going to have to be fast and maneuverable, and durned hard to hit from the air.

True, large objects attract fire on the battlefield. However, consider these points:
1) There are incredible advances in nanotechnology and the military is studying self healing armor, new lightweight composites, etc… . Probably not in our lifetime, but by the end of this century the armor on a M-1 size tank could weigh less than a hundred pounds.
2) Railguns are already being designed and probably tested. Some of the 155mm guns coming out in the next five years for the Navy's DDX program will be able to launch shells out to 100 miles and land within 10 ft. of the target. They will also be able to fire salvos so that multiple rounds all arrive at the same time. Certainly "Hellbore" type weaponry can't be far behind.
3) The Israelis already have a prototype and the U.S. Army is testing a system that will knock down mortar and artillery rounds, plus reactive armor and area denial blocks will be installed on armor to knock out enemy infantry and incoming missiles.
4) I firmly believe that by 2050 flying aircraft into "hostile"environments will be suicide, even for UCAVs. The advances in laser technology and orbital satellites will mean that anything that flies for over a few miles will be tracked and knocked down. The USAF is already deploying a new weapon this year that sends out a narrow EMP pulse that will knock out enemy aircraft. The days of manned combat aircraft are numbered.
Can all this be put into a Bolo/Ogre type vehicle? Certainly. But would a country want to put all of it's eggs into a few baskets or build a large, conventional force? An AI equipped machine, even armed with the above, late 21st century weaponry and defenses would be a tough opponent. Most people don't understand that the world's militaries(with a few exceptions such as the USA and China) are cutting back heavily on aircraft, ships, armor, and personnel. I can foresee a time when the combined militaries of Europe may only be 25% of their current size. Several Ogres could do some serious damage. Besides, it's fun to game!

As envisioned, as super-big tanks? No. Almost impossible to maneuver, ground friction and softness pretty much dooms them to anything besides huge one-use autobahns, which would be shredded by their passage.

As AI combatants? Yes, but probably not that autonomous, on land. Way, way too many variables and vision problems. Land combat will remain, for quite a while, the provenance of infantry backed up by armor/arty, some of which may be robots/semi-autonomous/RPVs.

Where OGRE/Bolo will be more possible/probable is in sea and air warfare. The environments are much simpler. With ships, you're already talking about large vehicles, some of which will be tossing nukes at each other, along with smaller craft (manned aircraft/UXVs). The Ticonderoga-Aegis CGs are already very heavily automated; they can pretty much (IIRC) search for, track, classify and fire on targets in their engagement envelope (200+ km?) autonomously, if we let them. The plan for USN aviation is to have fewer manned planes backed up by robot wingmen.

The most likely Ogre/Bolo will be a surface ship or a submarine, rather than a tank.

Can't see the OGRE being developed just yet, but GEV's (Ground Effect Vehicles) should certainly be do-able today. Not to mention the AI would have to be much more advanced than it is now. Also read somewhere that Great Britain is working on a tank with "non-metal based armor". A step towards the BPC armor of OGRE fame? Could be.

No, quite aside fron nukes you have to consider THOR. A big enough projectile, moving at orbital velocities, can make a nuke look like a firecracker.

Infantry will rule the battlefield of the future.

It is interesting that no-one has commented on the opposite end of the spectrum… a simple AI tank drone… Those WOULD be viable and fast enough to do their job, and if they do not need a whopping great amount of ammo for all of their weapons, they COULD carry several different weapons systems (At the very least a PD system, main and Secondary battery, and a missile or two).

But, I find even MORE interesting that Frank Chadiwck got our current technological track so close to what he envisioned for Striker and Traveller (with one or two major or minor exceptions).

OUr Ability to build such a moster as an OGRE will certainly be a reality probably within 20 years, but the question will then be:

WHY???!!!

I can see a much bigger roll for giant mecha than I can for a giant cyber-tank without gravitic propulsion. At least the mecha can walk over terrain that the tank couldn't, and the mecha could probably dodge fairly well (Judging from what I have seen in robotics in the last few months)…but, I don't want to get into an argument about Robotic Mecha either… They are not the best choice for a weapons delivery system either, and will not be unit they can move and think as fast as a regular sized human….with all of the same abilities…

I am fairly certain that, like Viking1066, that Infantry (And small drones) will rule the battlefield of the future.

If I manage to get the rest of the figures done for Fall In, or Cold Wars (Historicon at the latest), I will be running a near future Infantry battle(s) where Nano-tech, Self-healing systems, micro-drones, etc. will ALL be features of the battlefield (Probably man-sized mecha as well. Based upon the kung-fu rock-em-sock-em robots I saw at Lawrence Livermoor and Berkeley last spring – they were SO cool. About 18" to 24" tall and moved like greased lighting. Still had problems standing, but those are just engineering problems that will be solved in a year or two at most…)

OGRE, could build them but won't… Mecha, same thing… Nanite clouds, AI drones, etc… Yep and pretty soon… I am starting to study up on building them now…

I personally believe that AI assisted, but human crewed, tanks (read "Hammer's Slammers".. AFV's with advanced mobility and armor protection with the AI in control of target detection and active or semi-active defensive systems) a much more likely result of near future armored forces development than drone AFVs.

Clay

Hi

Violates the "Three Laws of Robotics" and, therefore, will not happen.

Grin.

R

Hi,

With existing technology, there would be no net gain for making a giant tank over a smaller one.

However, it wouldn't take too many technological advances to make one feasible…

Mostly defensive systems and armor would need to advance ahead of similar offensive systems.

Shalom,

Maksim-Smelchak.

"Nanite clouds".

Hmmm . . . Yes, they would make effective weapons – After all, a finely divided cloud of mostly carbon-based materials mixing with air would make _such_ a good FAE :)

( Seriously, this was pointed out in an article in ANALOG on non-carbon nanotech "The Not-Just-Diamond Age" )

This one was my fault for not paying attention to the date, so I'm sorry for the thread-necro. But it is a cool topic. So here goes:

There will be massive advances in armor. A simple look around the net will find all sorts of neat stuff already in development.

Carbon nanotubes are truly amazing things. How you assemble them changes their properties. I see a combination of electrically charged armor, macrofiber composites and auxetic materials (which get thicker as they're stretched, like from an explosion or something trying to pierce it) combined. Here's how:

Outer layer comprised of Polymerized Nested (Russian Doll) Multi-walled Armchair-configured Carbon Nanotube embedded in Macro-fiber Composite plates. This layer can hold a charge (due to armchair-configuration of CNTs).

Insulating layer spun from two different thickness/gauge of Nested Multi-walled Zigzag-configured Carbon Nanotube threads in Auxetic-configuration (thin one wrapped around thick one).

Inner layer comprised of Polymerized Nested Multi-walled Zigzag-configured Carbon Nanotube like the insulating layer, but now buile as plates instead of threads. This layer does not hold a charge (due to Zigzag-configuration).

The inner and outer layers are the actual armor layers. The insulator between them gives them the added bonus of effectively being spaced armor to help shear any penetrator. Each has hardness approximately equal to diamond, but aren't brittle because they're not a crystal lattices.

When a penetrator impacts, that force will generate a voltage in the MFC proportional to the impact. When the outer layer is pierced, the insulating layer expands (the property that makes an auxetic an auxetic). If that layer is also pierced, the penetrator completes the circuit between the inner grounded layer and the now-charged outer layer, vaporizing most of the penetrator and causing little or no additional damage to the vehicle.

All of these technologies are in development today and some of them already exist. It's just a matter of putting it all together and bringing the cost down.

Applying super-advanced armour to a large number of small vehicles is better than making a single huge vehicle.

Supertanks (AI or not) seem an unlikely direction for future tech to head in, but you could justify them with some effort. If we postulate the development of some kind of bulky, power-hungry "force field" that completely rewrites the offense-defense balance, then the only AFVs worth fielding will be the ones that can carry a field generator and its power supply. This is even more true if the only weapons capable of breaching these fields are also big and/or power-hungry. Even then, the size and ground pressure of the vehicle will be a concern, which will probably limit sizes somewhat, barring the development of antigrav or somesuch…at which point your tanks look more like slow spacecraft than anything else.

Laumer's Bolos use screens, but they don't seem to be very effective compared to their armor and compartmentalization. They also (in the later models) have limited antigrav, making their bulk marginally more plausible. They also serve as self-propelled planetary defense stations, with main guns capable of slapping starships out of orbit and slaughtering landing boats. That last role might require a fairly large platform regardless of tech, and for a star-faring race it might actually make sense. Building fixed PD sites on all your colonies could be prohibitively expensive, while making them mobile lets you shuffle them around from one hot spot to another. Mind you, a seagoing PD system would probably be an even better idea, but not all colonies will have seas, will they?

One other thing to consider, megatanks have real problems with ground pressure on Earth, but they might be more feasible in a low or microgravity environment.

Depends on the weapons being used. That was your thesis statement. Now back it up with some arguments.

I'll play devil's advocate, and I'll start. The M1A2 is armed with the M256, a 120mm smoothbore. It's ammunition of choice is the M829A3, which produces ~6.1MJ.

What if I can describe a kinetic energy penetrator capable of delivering over 15GJ? Yes, GJ, not MJ. But the requirements of said weapon realistically prohibit it from being deployed in an M1-sized MBT and pretty much require something Ogre sized, if not larger.

I'm skipping describing the weapon to keep the post shortish. Incidentally, 15GJ is about equal to a 3.65 megaton nuke. Current nukes are about 1.2MT.

And to answer the ground pressure question in advance, my "super-armor" is 0.28x the density of carbon steel. I assume that the majority of the vehicle will be constructed of some flavor of carbon nanotubes. Ground pressure won't be an issue, but silhouette/signature will be. But if you have a meter or more of super-armor…

Ground pressure isn't the only issue with supersized vehicles. There's also the problem of transporting them from one theater of operations to another, and day-to-day mobility within a theater. Something the size of a Bolo or Ogre won't fit on most highways or bridges, and while they might be able to drive *through* most buildings easily enough, it's not something you want to be doing in friendly territory.

A really big hull will also have problems with rolling ground and hills, although an articulated hull (ala the Ogres) might offset that some…but that same articulation is going to increase maintainance requirements and leave weak spots in your armor.

Back to my point… YES… You can build such a tank now with materials that are currently in the testing stages, even a weapon approaching the 15GJ output is within 10 years.

But… WHY?

A 15GJ weapon would be far more effective based in a highly guarded compound and aimed/deployed via multiple satellite reflectors… That is what is currently being done with weapons of that type… Or being put in platforms where their range is such that they do not need to enter a hostile environment to be used (Airborne Anti-Missile Laser)…

Making a gigantic poorly maneuverable weapons system like a land battleship is ridiculous. The battleship is no longer a viable weapon system at sea… What makes anyone think that it would suddenly become so on land?

ALL of the cybernetic weapons systems… and there ARE cybernetic weapons systems in development that are supposed to be capable of completely independent action… are being made smaller, rather than larger, and intended to be deployed in groups or swarms. Most of them ARE the weapon itself, operating as a drone, and then when a target is identified they are discharged, usually resulting in their destruction in the process.

Even nanite constructed crystalline titanium (Carbon-Sapphire armor) would make for an incredibly light and hard to defeat technology by today's standards.

But… Again… What makes anyone think that the offensive weapons will not be created using similar technologies:

A carbon-sapphire or diamondine penetrator with a nanite destructor/disassembler wouldn't care what your armor was made of… Even Neutronium would have problems against a nanite disassembler (assuming that it was accompanied by the appropriate sub-atomic particles to use the Neutrons as a substrate for the construction of something else…But, then we are getting into other problems of, if you are using Neutronium, then you will be needing something to offset the gravitic effects of the Neutronium, and then all you would need to do was find some way of destabilizing that field and you would turn the weapon using Neutronium against itself, and it would all collapse into the neutronium…

All of this intellectual "self-abuse" is pointless.

It is possible at this point to predict certain things about future trends in a general manner, by looking at what paradigms will be emerging, but it is impossible to really predict specific technologies past a certain point.

All of our current paradigms say that everything is devolving to pure information, which is where the battles will be fought… Not in huge cybernetic tanks that could be disabled by a simple logical paradox (It would need some hellatious "paradox absorbing crumple-zones" (to use Goodman's quote from Futurama) to make it safe)

You don't drop them your territory, only the enemies. If you were to actually making one of these beasties, you'd build other support equipment (sea-going vessels, heavy lift airplanes and helicopters, bridgelayers) to help you move it around.

Not sure where you live, but where I live (Las Vegas) even the small arterials in a city are at least four full lanes (plus center divider, plus bike lane). Major arterials are six to eight lanes. Highways are up to 20. Sorry, but that's the same tired argument that's been thrown out for the last 60 years, even though it really doesn't apply in very many places.

So what is an Ogre's ground pressure? I'm taking measurements off the Mk VI Ogre miniature (1/285 scale) and extrapolating how big it really is. It's 3 5/8" L x 1 7/8" W x 25/32" H (avg), which comes out to a real world volume of 2031.133m^3. Multiplied by an everage density of 4.5g/cm^3 = 9140 tonnes. While I assume most of its components are some flavor of carbon nanotube, not everything will be (like ammo). It has four tracks, each is 9.69m x 2.7075m, for 26.236m^2 apiece or 104.95m^2 total. Do all the conversions and it comes out to 124 psi. General Dynamics says that the M1A2 is 15.4 psi. Wikipedia says the average horse exerts 500 psi while galloping.

I'd say more but need to go.

The increased maintenance requirement for adjustable suspension is more than offset by the loss of maintenance assosicated with human-machine interface equipment.

"Could OGREs/BOLOs ever be a reality?"

Yes. It's called an "arms race". The [enemy] deploys one, so now you have to make a bigger/better one, then they have to top yours, and so on. Just look to the dreadnought era for an example.

Yes. It's called an "arms race". The [enemy] deploys one, so now you have to make a bigger/better one, then they have to top yours, and so on. Just look to the dreadnought era for an example.

That principle only holds true for technologies which are successful.

There is nothing to suggest that a gigantic target that is unable to defend itself would be.

If, when the Dreadnoughts had been first deployed, there had been surface-to-surface anti-shipping missiles (and Air-Surface anti-shipping missiles)… Then the first dreadnought would have been the last.

In the same vein that I have mentioned about ACV/GEV combat vehicles (LAND combat vehicles. The ACV/GEV is used in a form for naval combat vessels of all types, but they are NOT heavily armored supertanks)… If the concept was a practical form of combat vehicle… Then we would already have them.

If the giant tank was a successful combat concept, then we would already be seeing the increase in size of Armored Combat Vehicles, instead of ways to make them smaller and faster.

So… The "Arms Race" paradigm only applies to successful technologies.

You really should stop comparing a 75' vehicle to a 900' ship. And where do you get the "unable to defend itself" rhetoric? Of course it would, as we've been discussing. In addition to armor for conventional weapons defemse it could easily be an EW platform that stands good odds of spoofing whatever missiles come its way, plus it would be loaded with CIWS/equivalent mounts in case ECM fails.

And quite frankly the "we would already have it if it were feasible" is a load of bunk. By that logic we're never going to have fusion. It's pretty darn clear that we will, it just takes time. And that's just it, stuff takes time to develop.

BTW, no, no 15GJ will see the light of day in 10 years. 10 years is when the USN expects to deploy its 64MJ weapon. My 15GJ figure is based on a technology that obviously has weapon applications but for whatever reason isn't being exploited as such. Not everything DARPA has its hands in gets used to make guns.

The alleged move toward smaller ACVs has more to do with doctrinal changes in strategy than it does capabilities of the vehicles.

The problem with something as big as you can make it, as opposed to as FAST as you can make it, is that war isn't about armour or firepower. It's about action and reaction, observation and decision. In short, war does devolve to information. Tactically an OGRE/BOLO might be a war-god incarnate, but strategically it's a slug- little better than an emplacement. Remember the Maginot Line?

If, when the Dreadnoughts had been first deployed, there had been surface-to-surface anti-shipping missiles (and Air-Surface anti-shipping missiles)… Then the first dreadnought would have been the last.

Yes, but the point is that there weren't such anti-ship missiles back then. That's nearly a 70-year jump in technology. Technology that evolved gradually. As did anti-aircraft defenses for ships to knock down such threats. The closest contemporary threat (other than big guns) was the submarine torpedo, but even that did not stop the navies back then from building bigger and improved dreadnoughts/battleships. History bears that out. And history has a habit of repeating itself….

In the 1981 the United States brought the four Iowa class battleships back into service. The were updated with the latest fire control, radar, sonar,etc… The added eight quad Tomahawk launchers, four quad Harpoon launchers, four 20mm Phalanx Close-in-weapons guns,chaff launchers and "other" countermeasures. An antiship missle would NEVER have had a chance against one of these ships. That doesn't even include the defenses of the three escorting Aegis Cruisers and the twelve escorting destroyers. They were well protected and had more than enough self-defense capabilty of their own. I do agree though that in combat "speed is life" in most cases. The M1-A2 Abrams is a prime example; sixty to seventy MPH, reactive armor, and a main gun that shoots several 120mm rounds a minute (in daylight, smoke, fog, at night) while moving at sixty MPH. Fast and deadly.