If you were going to design the, oh, 23rd centuries, Tank of Doom, what would it be like?

Invsible, as small as possible (think inch or two square), and would carry a tiny little robotic arm which would enable it to destroy circuitry.

Couple hundred of them and the enemy's tech is kaput.

Too big.  Try a huge swarm of nanobots, capable of coordinating or acting independently, and of replicating themselves by using the enemy's resources as raw material...  :)

Tank of Doom describes it perfectly, as that is what it would be like... The name says it all, as you so described.

Eh, we're thinking too small here.

Okay.

It's a hover tank, first of all.  Secondly, instead of traditional armament, it will be armed with speakers.  Massive, massive, incredibly focused speakers.  By shooting out powerful sound waves, it will be able to literally destroy tanks and turn peoples' innards to mush.  The tank itself will be the size of a 2-car garage.  On the front is just a wall of spikes on the sides is about a foot more armour than you'd think would be needed.

Of course, all of this is very unnecessary, as any sort of incoming fire would be destroyed by the wall of sound.

I'm thinking along the lines of Hammer's Slammers, Ogre, and the Bolos in SF and in gaming (Ogre is form Steve Jackson Games).

Or, let me clarify my question to what I was MEANING to ask instead of what I asked.

Given that the huge, plus two hundred ton tank is the most dominant form of destruction on the battlefield, and that spaceships and infantry are largely inconsequential, and no one uses mechs, what would be the form of this supertank?

Also, anything about the culture or world setting would be of interest as well.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The thing is, certain types of SF assume certain types of attacks are most effective.  Star Trek assumes light cruisers, Star Wars assumes fleets and individual saber duels (very 18th century), David Weber in his Honor Harrington has duels with lines of battle (Napoleonic era).  Drake in Hammer's Slammers assumes Tanks.  Drake and Stirling in The General series has mounted cavalry on giant dogs, and 'form square!' infantry.

Now some of those might have a more complicated view of warfare, but most military SF focuses on one type of fighting, and exalts it over the others.

So you could say....

World Types for Multiverser>Science-Fiction>Next Thousand Years>Military SF>Supertank

And then once thats done, I can come bug you with...

World Types for Multiverser>Science-Fiction>Next Thousand Years>Military SF>Ship-to-ship combat

Anyways, what I am not asking is "What is the most realistic form of effective combat?" because its given the tanks are the Kings of Battle for this universe.

PT

How about stealing a page from "The Incredibles"?  :D

I'd say something similar to the tiger 3 AUSF B from John Ringo's legacy of the aldenata books. 6 pebble bed nuclear reactors driving turbines to sent power to wheel motors one on each drive wheel, either a 12 inch naval cannon with an extended barrel and 10kt antimatter charge or a railgun with depleted uranium slivers with a like charge of antimatter contained within, 5 25mm cannons, and defensive claymore mine bands around sides, and condensed metal armor.

The Incredibles machine was a mech, but maybe I could take something from it.
Yeah, we can add Ringo's tanks to the Bolos and whatnot.

Hmmmm---
1. Hovertank
2. Big as a two car garage
3. Sonic disruptor field that shield from missile attacks, although if the explosive is large enough it might hit the tank anyways.
4. Massive, truly massive yard-thick armor made of SF super substance....
5. Multiple cannons per Sawyer's point.

Okay, for this machine, lets imagine the most insanely powerful cannons (and we need a main gun, and lesser guns and lesser still guns):

A. Say a bomb-pumped laser.  There's the idea of a nuke in orbit with rods attached to it on one side.  Bomb goes off, energy is turned into insanely powerful laser (hotter than the sun), and laser fires off milliseconds before the whole thing vaporizes.

Problem with this is you might have a hard time surviving firing this.

Now you could have this as a laser on a missile--Weber does this in space navy stories.

But, I really would like to have this as maybe the main gun.  Any suggestions?

B. Sawyer gave me an idea--say a sliver of antimatter depleted uranium is surrounded by a shell of normal matter, and a magnetic field to separate the normal from the anti ....

Hmmm, maybe it would be better to have a plasma of antimatter which plasma is magnetic.  The outer shell hits the enemy armor, and ....

Okay, what I'm trying do here is create a self-forging shell that will spike through the enemy armor and then release the antimatter inside, and then massive explosion inside....

PT

Lets stipulate that we have the sound disruptors, but that they won't be enough to take out shells.  They are an anti-missile defense since missiles are more fragile, but a direct fire shell from a main or secondary tank cannon can punch through with some accuracy loss.  Third level tank shells might or might not survive the field, but then the third level are primarily for taking on the powered infantry.

PT

A couple more random ideas:

(*) How about a main gun like the main weapon of the Death Star?

(*) Or how about a weapon like the one the Iron Giant used?

Rail gun.

We have the tech already, it just needs to be two miles long and can only speed up parts of an atom...

But, in the future, it can be several feet long and speed up objects the size of a tennis ball.

Do you know how much damage a tennis ball would do if it struck an object at the speed of light?

A hell of a lot, that's what.

As for defences, you're going to want automated point-defence weaponry.  Several dozen scatterguns, each with their own targeting matrix.  If an object moves towards them at a high enough speed, they throw forwards enough shrapnel to destroy most incoming projectiles that the sonic barrier wouldn't (and anything coming in at a slower speed would probably be stopped/thrown away by the pure sonic force).

The tank would need virtually no anti-infantry weaponry of any sort, as the sonic field would decimate any infantry that approach it.  So, we can think of the tank as a device which will mutilate thousands of infantry but be vulnerable against tanks.  The solution?  Slap on a huge-ass gun which destroys tanks in one shot from ranges unheard of and then dozens of smaller guns which destroy incoming shots.
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:38, Sun 04 Mar 2007.

Not familar with Iron Giant's weapon.

Planet destroyers....on a small scale, I'd have to go for ...lets say an add-on to the Main Gun which is discussed two paragraphs down.  Take thirty minutes to really rev up the main gun,a nd add on the Extra Barrel Length...and now we're shooting a tennis ball at .75c, and this time its made of something like neutronium.

And oh yeah, you've got clearing shots.  Say two previous shots, at very quick, which push the air aside--this might have to be a pair of lasers to push th eair aside, and then the planet destroyer has a clear column of vacuum to the surface of the planet.

Okay, with a rail gun, we can shoot down spaceships in orbit.  We can make that the Main Gun.

But I still want secondary nastiness like the anti-matter plasma shells.

Also, what happens if...

1. Someone pops a nuke nearby, but out of range of the sonic emmitters.

2. Even worse...mines.  Or do we say the sonic emmitters have enough juice to pretty much pulp the ground as well as powered armor infanty?

PT

For the nuke...

Assuming it was launched from a half-decent distance, a layer of lead roughly one foot thick will stop all potential radiation (gamma rays? pfft).  Any force of sound by the nuke will be counteracted by the tank's force.

So, the nuke would have to land relatively close to the tank.  At which point... well... heck, I dunno.

Sound moves better in the ground anyways, so we would say the sonic emmitters would pretty much toast mines way before the tank got even close to em.

However, then we go back to the fact that the nuke itself is freaking deadly.  Ignoring the radiation and the sound, we still have the pure destructive force of a nuke.  To deal with this... hmm...

I'll have to think of that.  Cause, right now, a nuke is definetely the easiest way to destroy the tank.  I suppose we could give the tank missile platforms ala Patriot (except much smaller ^_^).  Give em a few miles range, destroy the nuke before it gets within a mile.  Sound waves and radiation would be the worries then and we're covered as far as that goes.

By the way, if I remember correctly from physics class, our current particle accelerators can accelerate up to 99 percent-ish the speed of light.

But 75 percent's still a lot.  As a comparison...

The nuke that landed on Hiroshima conatined 12 to 15 kilotons worth of TNT (it was plutonium, yeah, but in conversion... wikipedia sucks for exact numbers).  This meant it exerted roughly 50 to 63 terajoules of force.

A tennis ball weighs approximately 58 grams which is 0.058 kilograms.  Using the formula Ke=(0.5)mv^2 (kinetic energy = one half times the mass of the object multipled by its velocity squared), that means it would exert...

(0.5)(0.058)(299892458*.75)^2 = 1467072621333659 joules of energy.

Divide that by one trillion and you get 1467 terajoules of force.

That means a tennis ball at that speed would be equivalent to 23 nukes (that dropped on Hiroshima).

That's one impressive main cannon, if you ask me.
This message was last edited by the GM at 07:21, Sun 04 Mar 2007.

Hey guys...

Here's my thought for dealing with super-destruction on a nuclear scale.

Super-dense tritanium alloyed armor plating:
This is the stuff that can only be made by nanofactories. This stuff is super condensed metals with several layers(yes, like an ogre), nanomachines would be needed to construct it because it's completely unnatural and to make it more dense than other metals. With this idea in mind you can form a Faraday cage within the layers to defeat the electromagnetic pulse from the nuke grounded in the legs/tracs/ect. You can also put in layers of lead as Malachai suggested to defeat other radiation. Of course you're still going to need a roll cage unless there is also an anchor-line which could be blasted into the ground for recoil and to keep from getting tumbled about. ^_^

We've already seen the Tank of Doom verse out Avahur :P

If you want the perfect weapon for short range defense for your MegaTank, I'd have to go with a Metal Storm system.  Never heard of Metal Storm?  Look up the Discovery Channel show Future Weapons and play the Metal Storm clip from season 1, part 1.  Or...

http://www.popularmechanics.co...ary_law/1281426.html

http://www.metalstorm.com/inde...deo+%26+Live+Firings

Jhixus I did not enjoy that world at all... stupid tank... and stupid dice roller....