Infantry Scale Technology
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Infantry in the Human Sphere
Article Updated: August 4 2192
Author: Lt. Colonel William Sterling
A Historic Overview
Although most laymen believe that infantry have not changed significantly since their inception, the soldier of today is significantly changed from the soldier of the past. A familiarity with advances in weaponry, armor, electronics, and human modification are critical to ensure effective utilization and combat against infantry assets.
Armaments
When one thinks of the infantryman, one thinks of his rifle. The infantryman and his rifle is a romantic image easily found throughout the sphere in any type of media-but the rifle is still primarily a support weapon. Advances in body armor have reduced its overall lethality by a significant amount, and even stopgap measures such as electromagnetic launch and power armor allowing heavier weapons to be effectively used and fired have allowed it to almost keep pace with infantry protective technology-but nevertheless it is still less effective than the squad automatic weapon, the grenade launcher, or the support vehicle in causing casualties in an enemy force.
The two most common infantry small arms technologies are either electrothermal or electromagnetic acceleration. The former is somewhat cheaper and more reliable, while the latter has somewhat better performance due to lower recoil and therefore higher muzzle velocity. In both cases the difference is fairly minor and therefore the effects and characteristics are mostly interchangeable.
Modern rifles generally fire a moderate-caliber AP round of between 5 to 10mm in caliber, with capacities between 25 to 50 rounds in almost all cases. Electronic aiming sights are designed to compensate for gravity, environmental conditions, and travel time, giving a trained soldier reasonable accuracy with their weapons even in harsh environments. In general, modern rifles are also equipped with a grenade or gyrocket launcher, caliber ranging from 20-45mm and capacity ranging from 1 to 6 shots, which is the primary weapon used in eliminating body armored targets. Grenade propulsion may be chemical, but electromagnetic grenade launchers are more common, as they allow a reduction in the size and weight of the grenade cartridge. Shaped charge munitions are standard loadout to defeat heavier body armor but other munitions types, including thermobarics, sensors, and less-than-lethal munitions are often found in abundance.
ADDENDUM: With more recent advances in armor technology many powers are going for pure payload weapons due to the lessons of the last war and the relative ineffectiveness of most infantry rifles' KE components, choosing to expand the gyrocket or grenade launcher's magazine capacity instead.
Heavy infantry support weapons today are often mounted on a body harness to damp movement and recoil, with some even going as far to add automatic target acquisition to such weapons, turning them into true 'smartguns'. In general the recoil-damping harness is necessary to allow the use of a larger round or rounds fired at higher muzzle velocity than rifle rounds, giving the squad automatic weapon the ability to reliably penetrate modern body armor at typical engagement ranges. Most powers using electromagnetic rifles prefer higher muzzle velocity rounds, while powers using ETC have no choice but to accept larger-caliber projectiles. Other varieties of heavy support weapon include automatic gyrocket or electromag autocannon, firing 20-45mm projectiles at a moderate rate of sustained fire, as well as indirect fire solutions such as mortars and automatic grenade launchers.
Even heavier weapons may be mounted on squad support platforms, which are generally either treaded or multi-legged drones with limited ability to function autonomically but the capability to support either remote control from a member of a HW team or direct control of the weapon in the event jamming is particularly heavy.
Small-arms rounds are generally designed to penetrate armor, but also designed to stop unarmored targets and are generally stressed to splinter into shards after passing through armor. Exotic solutions such as nanotech "smart" shrapnel have been also used to enhance small arms lethality but are more costly and the gain in effectiveness is only critical for soldiers who need every edge possible, like elite and special operations units.
As electronics are fairly cheap to produce via assembler manufacture and the like, most large munitions today are guided. Modern rifle grenades and gyrockets are equipped with maneuver fins or vectored thrust systems, respectively to ensure high on-target accuracy. Guidance is harder as a reliable fire-and-forget system is difficult to minaturize so throughly without cutting unacceptably into payload, so guidance is generally done by semi-active laser homing with the infantryman's sensor and computer suite correcting the weapon's course to ensure hits. Although attempts have been made to miniaturize said, the incremental improvements in accuracy that guided bullets produce have not been enough to justify the cost except in the case of large-caliber sniper weapons.
Owing to the reduced cost of manufacturing electronic systems, great improvements in effectiveness have been in disposable rocket launchers, such as our Mk. 12 Anti-Vehicle Infantry Rocket Launcher (AVRIL). Using chemical warheads, these disposable rocket launchers are not limited by the constraints of the human body. With advancements in producing large amounts of cheap electronics, these missile launchers are generally guided, fire-and-forget, and most importantly disposable. Such disposable RLs are lightweight and cheap enough (a mere 2.5 kilograms) that they are often issued to every infantryman. With a moderately powerful HEDP warhead, a low-observability motor, and various attack modes, including direct-fire, top-attack, and airburst, such a weapon gives infantry a credible single-use threat against medium armor, low-flying gunships, bunkers, and dug-in infantry. Although we have used our weapon as an example, every major power and the vast majority of known expanse and rim nations possess a weapon similar to the Mk. 12.
Reloadable missile launchers have become somewhat less common with the cost reduction in electronics, but a few still exist, generally used by two to three man heavy weapons teams. These weapons are generally hypervelocity missiles which attempt to evade vehicle point defense via sheer speed. Often they do damage with sheer kinetic force, with a relatively small bursting charge to increase kill probability against heavily armored vehicles if they penetrate the armor.
Although energy weapons are a popular idea their expense, bulk, and cost ensures that they will be, for the near future, limited to deployment by specialist units. Manpack point defense lasers are a common platoon-level weapons system to reduce casualties from artillery fire, and certain ZOCU units deploy man-portable mega particle beams, judging that the increase in lethality more than makes up for their bulk and cost. A few PACT units, as well, make use of particle beam weaponry, but the heavy powerpacks and shielding needed to give man-portable energy weapons sufficient lethality, range, and robustness to be battlefield capable limit them to use by soldiers in powered armor or heavy weapons teams. Laser weapons have been fielded, but mostly by special forces units, which find that their low visual and auditory signatures make them the rough equivalent of a centuries-old "silenced" weapon, and their high accuracy almost makes up for their poor effective range-although extremely large and heavy lasers can and have been used as effective sniper systems by power-armored special operations units.
Suppressed weapons have become difficult to field and render useful owing to the need for ever-higher velocity to penetrate even concealable body armor. As with any immature field, the current field of "black ops-friendly" weapons is a smorgasboard of various solutions to the problem of maintaining armor penetration while being limited by the need to ensure low signature, ranging from exotically shaped munitions to to active noise cancellation to large-caliber, low-velocity rounds with explosive filler. Most of the solutions are roughly interchangeable in cost and effectiveness.
Defenses
The most critical advance in armor technology nowadays is that it is smart, lightweight, and versatile. All but the most primitive infantry today wear at least a mobility suit-a powered suit of artificial muscle with soft armor to resist fragmentation and non-AP rifle fire, as well as a clip-on exoskeleton to take the strain. Heavily physically enhanced soldiers like Adharans often do away with the restricting exoskeleton, their skeletal tolerances sufficient to take the stress of the suit's artificial muscle by itself. Some extreme transhumans may even implant the mobility suit and supporting struts directly into their bodies-these "exojocks" are capable of impressive physical feats, especially if the original framework was heavily transhuman to begin with. Mobility suits are generally capable of vacuum and NBC operation and are often good for weeks of continuous high-power operation, as well as possessing piezoelectric rechargers that allow them to recharge (to some extent) off of body heat and motion. The mobility suit's strength augmentation (and incidentally thickness) is greatest on the limbs and dwindles to near-nothing for the hands, to reduce the need to retrain a soldier on how to manipulate objects, as well as to minimize the need for complex glove designs. Designed for ergonomics and prolonged use, with waste recycling features and integrated medical systems, infantry wear their mobility suits today like second skins.
The mobility suit is not primarily armor, however. Its primary purpose is twofold-the mobility suit houses powerful (but mundane) nanocomputers and also reduces the encumberance of heavier infantry weapons and armor, allowing an infantryman to comfortably carry a warload of 60+ kilograms for sustained periods of time. Infantry armor has gotten heavier, more covering, and significantly more protective, with most infantry having full torso "clamshell" armor with a fully enclosed helmet, as well as solid armor for thighs, shins, and arms. As the armor is spaced from the torso and backed with both additional soft layers and the mobility suit's own protection, most infantry armor is somewhat resistant even to shaped-charge munitions on the torso as well as proof against all but short-range or repeat-hit fire from infantry rifles.
Armor is heavily equipped with sensors and communications equipment, generally fitted with adaptive camouflage to ensure that a matching camouflage pattern is always available for the environment, and equipped with electronic countermeasures. Given the prevalance of guided weapons, smartgun systems, and sensors systems in the Sphere today, ECM and passive stealth have become more and more useful. All modern armor is designed for reduced radar reflectivity and reduced IR signature, but as many modern weapons run hot only the most exotic and dedicated stealth fields or heatsinks can prevent detection while firing weapons. ECM is a better countermeasure against smart weaponry as it does not require the user to cease engagement to evade enemy target locks, but makes one more visible to sensors systems. However, reducing the extreme accuracy of modern guided munitions is a necessity in warfare if one wishes to survive-even the most advanced sets of light infantry armor are insufficient to deflect more than one or two medium-caliber gyrockets.
To do so one must transition to larger armor, commonly known as "battlesuits" or "trolls". These suits generally stand several centimeters taller than a man, and mass anywhere between 150 to 300 kilograms without their operator, who pilots the suits via some sort of neural interface that reads from the skin. Although more primitive nations like Cook's World do not possess the technology to fully integrate neural interface into their infantry mobility suits, all the worlds of the ZOCU and Core, as well as a significant percentage of expanse polities, have their mob suits designed with neural interface to allow an infantryman to wear it while piloting a battlesuit. Fully sealed from the environment, they carry superior sensors, armor, and defensive systems, as well as the capability of easily carrying heavy support weapons such as 30mm gyrocket repeaters, automatic mortars, multishot anti-vehicle missiles, and heavy infantry energy weapons. Their heavier armor protects from much more fire but on the other hand makes them larger and more obvious, as well as somewhat restricting where they can move, and increases their target priority, ensuring that they generally get targeted by heavier weapons, ones which can defeat their armor.
Due to this, battlesuits carry some limited hard-kill countermeasures, generally simple claymores taped to the chest, back, and thighs, triggered by radar. Other enhanced defensive measures besides hard-kill systems and superior ECM that have been attempted have included personal shield generators, but due to expense, power drain, and miniaturization difficulties few powers employ them as anything besides a defensive system found in the hands of elite units.
Even heavier armors exist, termed as "shock infantry", but are generally more akin to vehicles than infantrymen and beyond the scope of this article.
Sensors and Computers
Sensors have significantly advanced since the days where infantry could solely rely on perhaps a pair of night vision goggles and their own natural (unenhanced) eyes. The infantryman today has a sensor suite comparable to a miniature armored vehicle, although shorter-ranged and lower-power.
Most modern helmets, in fact, have an armored, opaque visor that is normally flipped down in a combat situation, as to prevent blinding from dazzling lasers as well as to improve protection against shrapnel and direct-fire threats. With the visor down, the infantryman sees using an array of cameras and electronic sensors, having an artifical view of the world that is partially interpreted by a tactical AI, run off of the mobility suit's nanocomputers. The tactical AI helps emphasize potential threats, filter out extraneous noise, switch through sensor feeds. In addition, it also manages the ECM, medical, damage control, and camouflage systems that the infantryman possesses, to minimize the amount of workload the infantryman has.
Given the amount of differing sensors that an infantryman possesses-visual light, IR, radar, lidar, sonar, auditory, and olfactory, there is a heavy amount of data to sift through to use all the data in an optimal situation. A soldier with his AI nonfunctional can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information, of which most is essentially irrelevant. Therefore, the computer is vital to combat function. The computer in some cases is given more autonomy than that-some powers have tactical AIs which will take control of the armor if the soldier is incapacitated, attempting to move him to cover as best as it can.
Given the necessity of AI support to the infantryman of today, it is no wonder that the computer it runs on is both extremely durable and extremely powerful. The nanocomputers supported by the mobility suit are built in a rough neural network, due to the ability of a neural network to fail extremely gracefully from heavy damage instead of failing poorly and suddenly. An incidental quirk of said neural-network AI is that it learns from its occupant, adapting to his or her own quirks and foibles to better perform its task. Therefore, most tactical AIs are backed up regularly to ensure that an infantryman who survives the loss of his AI partner will not be forced to "break in" another AI.
Most armors use either several redundant discrete visual and IR cameras, with light amplification for low-light situations, but there are some which use compound ocular clusters, covering the entire front of the suit with fairly low-resolution sensors to provide heavier overall resistance to damage and a more graceful failure method. The latter scheme reduces resolution somewhat over the non-compound system, and is more expensive and complex, but makes it easier to detect motion and is harder to disable.
Radar/Lidar/Sonar is, although low-powered and therefore short-ranged, still a useful sensory method. In general the most common use of the trifecta is a "motion tracker"-using doppler effects to detect movement in objects within close proximity. Although useful, the disadvantage of such a system is that it can only give a rough guide to size, and cannot tell between friend, foe, and civilian. Furthermore stealthed infantry or vehicles will have minimal signature and are often filtered out as noise.
Olfactory senses for armor sensors are significantly focused-they almost exclusively focus on detecting biological and chemical weapons, although some are designed to also detect buried explosives such as mines. Given how many odors are found on a battlefield attempting to do more than that is somewhat cost-inefficient.
External sensors are a method of further increasing the information available to an infantryman. Soldiers in the sphere carry several micro-UAVs and micro-UGVs, deployed by muscle power or modified grenade, that allow an infantryman to easily look anywhere he or she wishes. These unmanned mini-vehicles are generally fairly stealthy, moderately quick, and have a variety of sensors, most common being visual and auditory, to spot and eavesdrop on enemy movements. As these robot spies are extremely compact and lightweight, an infantryman can often carry a half-dozen or more of these drones, and a battlesuit may carry several dozen, all of which are expected to be expended in the course of a prolonged battle.
Augmentation
The most recent evolutionary advance in infantry technology has been the increasingly common use of augmentation technologies by various soldiers from many powers in the human sphere. Advances in genetic engineering, implantable mechanical technology, and nanomachinery, as well as the less high-profile but still critically important advances in pharmaceutical technology, have significantly increased the viability of infantry today.
Pharmaceutical
A near-universal augmentation method, pharmaceutical augmentation is used by powers which eschew other forms of human augmentation technology. Even powers which do not often modify their soldiers with drugs and chemicals make use of such, as the high cost-effectiveness, low absolute cost, and lack of ethical dilemmas makes them an easy and palatable solution to keep up with the most powerful forms of transhuman engineering. However, the results of pharmaceutical enhancement are generally relatively minor, or short-term.
Pharmaceutical augmentation takes many forms, from short-duration combat drugs to long-term medical care such as steroids and nootropics. Perhaps somewhat ironically, in this field the leaders of technical advancement are the Core powers, especially the European Union, as they have the highest incentive to make better "soldier drugs" for their personnel.
The most common form of pharmaceutical technology is the engineered steroid. Modern ones are highly selective, bonding solely to the desired tissue, and produce moderate amounts of improvement in physical attributes. A common EU steroid cocktail includes a modified anabolic steroid, as well as a DHEA-analogue. The combination boosts bone density and muscle mass by approximately 25-35%, with no side effects (when properly administered) save the gain in weight and bulk. Analogues of such technology are used by many powers throughout the human sphere, including New Mercian infantry, as the cocktail is extremely cheap, highly effective for its cost, and easily administered. Likewise, many military forces issue their recruits nootropics to cut down on training costs as well as increase productivity.
Finally, the most interesting and controversial form of pharmaceutical enhancement is the combat drug. Typically a combat drug cocktail consists of a powerful stimulant, an analgesic, psychoactive drugs to modify the fight or flight response, and antipsychotics to control the mental side effects. The net result is a fearless soldier who feels no pain, is capable of nearly inhuman feats of strength and endurance, and reacts quickly and precisely to battlefield stimuli. After the drug wears off, the user is left lethargic, easily distractable, and often has taken some degree of strain damage from overstressing his body.
These drugs today have no known long-term side effects, although the post-injection "crash" is extremely distressing, and it is possible to become psychologically addicted. Therefore, combat drugs have become more of a curiosity as of recent, although illegal possession and use of combat drugs is not uncommon in elite units such as the British Parachute Regiments, the USMC, and the US Army Rangers. Interestingly special forces units proper have a significantly reduced incidence, percentage-wise, of being caught for abuse. Whether this is from a lack of enforcement, superior skills in hiding said combat drugs, or lack of use is impossible to determine without further research.
Genetic
The most well-known method of augmenting human (and by extension, infantry) performance is genetic. From the relatively moderate changes made to the majority of ZOCU troops to the living testaments to modern genetic science that are Harawayians and Adharans, genetic augmentation lacks the limits of pharmaceutical enhancement and is still relatively affordable.
Although most transgenics were primarily designed for enhanced health, appearance, and mental capability than any particular intention to engineer towards war, due to the high value put on physical fitness by the consumer, many transgenic templates have at least moderate improvements on average over baseline humanity. The percentage improvement of enhancement decreases somewhat at the extremes, but as most soldiers are not subjected to the intense and grueling selection and training of commando units, the reduction is academic for the most part, as the bulk of every nation's armed forces are not made of special operations units.
The best way to represent this is a bell curve, with a mean and a standard deviation-much like intensive selection and training does. Transgenic enhancement increases the mean, but reduces the standard deviation on either end. For example, on the standardized Atherholt-Morgan Trauma Function Test, baseline humans score a 40 with a standard deviation of +/- 10 points. Most nations' special forces personnel score a mean of 65, with a standard deviation of +/- 2.5 points. The Red caste Harawayian scores a mean of 72 with a standard deviation of +/- 1.5 points as well, making the difference at commando training and selection levels relatively minor although still noticeable.
The most extreme examples of combat engineering are Harawayian Reds, as well as Adharan genetech, both of whom share several very similar characteristics. In both cases, muscle and bone densities are significantly increased, reactions are boosted by one of several methods, muscle tissue is generally modified to be capable of functioning with both speed and endurance, and the cardiovascular system is heavily boosted. The Harawayian Reds possess an optimized endocrine system for their role, while the Adharans possess significant amounts of redundant organs as well as an abrasion and penetration-resistant dermal layer. In both cases the results are reasonably comparable-highly improved endurance and strength, superior reaction speeds, a higher body density, and increased capability to accept injury.
What genetic augmentation can do is well-known, so we shall focus more on its shortcomings than its strengths in this article. Although we have pointed out the Adharan adaptation of an abrasion and penetration-resistant dermal layer, we should also point out that such internal armoring is rare. Although a few extreme transgenes have similar protection, this matters little to modern weaponry unless used to back body armor-the Adharan skin is rated only to stop light, chemical propelled pistol rounds at moderate ranges and exists mostly due to the prevalence of extremely high velocity superstorms in areas of Adhara, which can easily flense someone without such an abrasion-resistant layer to the bone. Noticeably, Harawayan Reds, who are debatably a superior (although more limited) soldier-caste, lack such an adaptation, as the additional protection gained is very low compared to the difficulty.
However, that does not mean it is impossible to make a transgenic more durable. Much like how with the obsolescence of armor on aircraft and naval vessels (discounting the fairly recent resurgence of both) vessels could still be made more durable by clever design, significant toughness improvement could be gained by intelligent design of redundant organs and critical system placement. Most transgenics designed for good trauma management have multiple blood vessels that self-seal, duplicates of important cardiovascular systems, and an improved immune and blood clotting system to reduce the need for medical treatment and reduce time in the hospital. There are limits to what clever body system placement can do, however.
Similarly there are hard biological limits to reaction speed based on how quickly muscles can contract and nerve signals can transmit. The maximum level of boost in reaction speed available via transgenic methods without exotic reconstruction of the nervous system and neurotransmitter function is approximately 30-40% above baseline, with the effects rapidly decreasing as one gets towards peak human reaction times compared to peak transgenic reaction times. Therefore heavy reaction modification requires extensive reconstruction of the genetic code for neurons-a large project, even for a power with extensive amounts invested in human augmentation.
Strength is the easiest to modify but also sometimes inconvenient. Boosting muscle mass also reduces caloric efficiency and heat dissipation, limiting an infantryman's field endurance even in his climate controlled mobility suit. Therefore, the standard method of genetic strength augmentation is a boost of muscle efficiency combined with very limited overproduction of muscle growth factors, which has smaller gains but also has far fewer disadvantages. After a certain point one hits bone and durability factors. Incidentally this is why transgenics with significant strength enhancement are also tougher than the human norm-bone and other connective tissues must be heavily reinforced to take the strain of the more-powerful muscles, requiring heavy engineering.
Endurance can be significantly increased to a point, but again improvement rapidly drops off at the extreme ends of the scale. It is not difficult to enhance a population so that every man can run a marathon without difficulty. It is far more difficult to enhance it such that the most elite members can sprint a marathon. Minor improvements to the peak (and much heavier improvement to the mean) are fairly easy but again after a point the modification requires complete restructuring of oxygen carrying molecules, the cardiovascular system, and other incidentals, like anaerobic respiration's efficiency and heat dissipation.
Cybernetic
Cybernetic augmentation, whether via hardware or is by far the most powerful but also the most expensive. Even in heavily transhuman polities such as Adhara, military-grade cyberware is rare and expensive, although the Adharans have been making attempts to reduce the cost of such an augmentation regimen. It is, however, the best choice for a "supersoldier" program
The most critical problems with cybernetic augmentation are mass, reliability, and rejection potential. Human or transhuman bodies are not designed to accept inserts of cold metal objects-in fact, most transgenes will forcibly reject significant augmentation without the modifications being treated to ensure that they are not "foreign" and ejected via natural healing. Nanomachinery may be less obvious, but is also more expensive and, as a somewhat less mature field, has had problems with allergic reactions-the "Gray Death", a disease found in a moderate percentage of ZOCU veterans who possessed early-generation nano-enhancement, was caused by their enhanced immune systems rejecting the nanomachinery in their bloodstream.
The other issue with cyberware is the need to implant framework augmentation to keep it powered-an external communications system can have an external, replaceable battery that can be recharged from an outlet-but how does one recharge an internal variant? There are many solutions but all of them must also be implanted, meaning that to have any augmentation at all requires a significant expense in implanting various framework systems, like a method to diagnose and troubleshoot malfunctioning augmentations, a suit of piezoelectric and thermoelectric generators to power them, and if the augmentations are enhancing physical ability, often the bones and tendons must be reinforced.
Furthermore, an internal augmentation must be far more reliable than an external one. A malfunctioning mobility suit or linear frame (implanted powered exoskeleton) can be easily replaced by taking it off and putting on another one, but if an implanted version malfunctions serious injury could result, and at minimum surgical attention will be required to repair it. Furthermore, in situations where the implant is damaged or breached, it must still be nontoxic to the host. Thus much heavier emphasis is put on implant reliability, and most implants require more expensive material to build for the safety factor. Finally, there is the cost of implantation versus the negligible cost of wearing the enhancement or carrying it around in a pocket or backpack-all cyberware must be surgically implanted and although surgical AI has become both effective and common having a full autonomous surgical unit is still expensive. Therefore, cybernetics for the forseeable future will be a nearly entirely military field, although there are some transhumans in the Sphere who have had minor to moderate ubiquitious cybernetic enhancement.
The irony of cybernetic augmentation is that combining it with genetic augmentation is often difficult. The enhanced healing and regenerative capacity of most transgenes exacerbates the rejection issues, making baseline humanity better choices for cybernetic modification. There are a handful of transgenics who are intentionally designed to be friendly to cybernetic upgrades, such as Adharans, but as the side effect of this engineering greatly cripples the immune system and requires an artificial one to be installed, for the forseeable future homo sapiens sapiens is still a better 'blank slate' to modify with cybernetics.
By far the most common military cybernetic is the "wired reflex" system, or a reaction enhancer. As reaction time enhancement via chemical or pharmaceutical means rapidly hit biological limits, cybernetic surgeries to go beyond said limits are the most common military-grade cyber. Other common augmentations generally are enhancements that are much more effective than any genetic or chemical surrogate, like artificial muscle tissue, dermal armor, and skeletal reinforcement. However, modifying someone with an amorphous diamond skeleton, myomer muscles, a set of cybernetic lungs, and dermal plating is extremely expensive, and a good suit of powered armor can essentially do the same at a somewhat cheaper price point. Therefore cybernetic augmentation is generally restricted to elite or special operations units, as they are generally already extremely costly and the augmentation can further improve them in their role as shock troopers, covert operatives, or light infantry.