Blinding enemy soldiers is also good, send those cripples back to the enemy and see how they try to fix them.
Unmanned Combat Ground Vehicle
- Thread starter rhino123
- Start date
1. If the thing is solar powered, then it would need to be out in the open daylight, easy target
2. You could give soldiers safety goggles
3. If you are in a position to unleash millions of laser dogs, you have enough money/control of the area to probably do whatever the hell you want anyway
4. The latency between the mechanical movement and AI processing to distinguish human eyes is not fast enough for this thing not to be smoked after shooting maybe one person
Energy density of sunlight isn't that high. Google says 1380 watts/m^2. You won't get much power if such a small panel is not exposed under direct sunlight in perfect angle for long.
1) There's this things called batteries, charge during the day in a safer location when nowhere is shooting at you. Also lasers are so precise and so high range that it will 100% out range most projectile weapons. And a robot dog like this is has a tiny profile compared to a human and can fit into hiding places no one can crawl into, like shrubbery and rubble that will make it hard to spot them, especially when they're shining a spotlight onto your face and it doesn't have the sound of a gunshot to loudly alert everyone within a kilometer.
2) Safety googles are just another expense that your opponent has to bear. Also not everyone can keep all their googles on all the time. Also, this kind of high powered lasers don't have to just blind humans. A 5 watt laser can easily blind a camera, maybe even fry a thermal camera if it's strong enough. Be it on a tank or on an airborne drone, or low flying aircraft. And you can combine lasers, just have a bunch of them pointed at the same target, but with mechanical precision that can focus it onto a square cenimeter , imagine a swarm of robot dogs combining their lasers to blind a fighter jet flying even at a few kilometers attitude. Or a swarm of robot dogs blinding a drone swarm.
3) This doesn't make any sense. China has millions of troops, that doesn't meant that they can waltz into any country that they feel like.
4) Yes and? It's a $3000 robot dog with a $200 laser pointer. Blinding a human for a cost of a robot is more than worth it. And that's assuming that there's not more than 1 robot dog, or that you can even shoot properly with a spotlight aimed at you, at this high power, you don't even have to look directly at the laser to be blinded. Hell, the laser hitting someone even slightly shiny basically turns it into a AOE flashbang. And again, this is assuming that it happens at close range instead of a precise shot from say 800 meters away, with the robot dog immediately running towards a pile of rubble or ditch to hide in after the millisecond long pulse. Or choosing a good target, like the robot lying in wait on the side of a road in the middle of the night and blinding a driver of a truck, causing a major crash.
And who is to say that's it's going to be 100% lasers? If you have a squad of say 10 robot dogs, you could take say 2 of them and put lasers on them, make their job to blind and disorient the enemy while the rest of the robot dogs or drones gun them down with regular guns. You don't even have to make the blindness permanent but people don't fight well with a strobing spotlight pointed at their eyes. Or hell, considering that said laser is the size of a handheld laser pointer, you can easily put both a laser and gun on even a tiny robot dog if you wanted to.
Good luck doing this with small arm fire.
The laser is a couple of watts. Not much of a power drag. Do note, this doesn't have to be deployed into a high intensity warzone. Something like the current Ukraine-Russia border situation. Or say a low intensity rural border conflict. The robot mainly acts as a sentry/guard, it zaps the odd enemy or drone, but most of the time it sits on a high ground doing nothing but surveillance and acting as a deterrence.
Destroy America by healthcare bills.
Fast food and sedentary lifestyles have that covered
I will put this bluntly, I think your idea is stupid/childish.
However, I will discuss this in the interests of seeing how stupid I might be to make this kind of assumption
1) Battery power will also affect range of this device because it requires the power to move. How safe of a location can it move to?
2) Safety goggles/eyewear are a cost already borne, they are standard issue with most developed militaries. Why? Because eye injuries are already super commonplace in the military (usually from debris). You can just make the glasses a little thicker with the appropriate filter.
3) What kind of ridiculous conflict do you imagine where you can just truck these things in and unleash (pun intended) them? Why not just drop cluster bombs or plastic AP mines, even cheaper. If you don't care about war crimes, you certainly won't care if children or civilians are killed/maimed.
4) Again your idea is way too complex. You know what else you can hide in a pile of rubble? A roadside bomb. You know who already did that and took out many trucks? The Taliban.
Also you failed to address the processing latency/servo-robotics movement speed (ie slow) issue.
5) Are you Donald Trump or something? You want to maim/injure possible intruders, but for whatever reason not kill them? If you want surveillance on high ground, why not just put up a sensor tower, why bother with something like a robot dog?
I'm skeptical of the blinding idea.
Firstly, millions of lasers have been pointed at pilots and police over the decades. How many have suffered permanent blindness? Very few, perhaps zero.
The Hong Kong rioters spent half a year furiously pointing lasers at police. Not a single police officer went blind.
Secondly, what about cost? Equipping the UCGV with a machine gun is pretty cheap. Say we equip the UCGV with a super-laser weapon (which currently doesn't exist). Would this hypothetical super-laser have a similar price as a machine gun?
Finally, I'm skeptical about battlefield utility. Soldiers move their heads a lot in combat. For a soldier to be blinded, his pupils have to position themselves at the correct angle and orientation towards the UCGV. This is not necessarily common.
Why not just send a bullet at his head and be done with it? Simpler, faster, cheaper, and has worked well for centuries.
Firstly, millions of lasers have been pointed at pilots and police over the decades. How many have suffered permanent blindness? Very few, perhaps zero.
The Hong Kong rioters spent half a year furiously pointing lasers at police. Not a single police officer went blind.
Secondly, what about cost? Equipping the UCGV with a machine gun is pretty cheap. Say we equip the UCGV with a super-laser weapon (which currently doesn't exist). Would this hypothetical super-laser have a similar price as a machine gun?
Finally, I'm skeptical about battlefield utility. Soldiers move their heads a lot in combat. For a soldier to be blinded, his pupils have to position themselves at the correct angle and orientation towards the UCGV. This is not necessarily common.
Why not just send a bullet at his head and be done with it? Simpler, faster, cheaper, and has worked well for centuries.
It's about temporary blindness, a blind grunt can't shoot and is a liability for thr whole squad.
This is because some of the more powerful lasers that can seriously blind someone generally are restricted for sale. Also, most people wisely don't like fucking around with high powered lasers due to very high chance that you can blind yourself. Same reason why people don't build IEDs or incendiary weapons in their kitchen despite the ingredients being quite common.
Why super lasers? A commercial >1 watt laser pointer that you can buy for a hundred dollars can easily do the job.
Lasers spread out due to diffraction. You can also spread the laser out with a len, with a strong enough laser you don't have to precisely hit the pupils, the spread out laser hitting their entire face could do the job.
For one, robot dogs can't pick up a gun and reload it own their own. The gun has to be mounted onto their back, it's heavy, once it's clip is finished, a human has to come by and manually reload the gun. The robot dog has limited battery, lugging a extra 2-5kg is gonna be a constant drain. The robot dog has to be sturdy enough to withstand the recoil of the gun and the software also has to be able to deal with the recoil. Compare that to a small tiny laser with no recoil and only consumes electrical power, which the robot dog needs anyway and having solar panels means that the dog will be a threat forever. Also, guns are loud, fire one and everyone within a kilometer know you're there.
Of course, you don't have to permanently blind someone to render them temporary useless in a gunfight and there's no reason why some of this robots can't have a gun and laser at the same time. There's a reason why flashbangs are still a thing, despite the fact that you can just throw in a frag grenade for much more lethal effect.
And again, drone swarms are one of the biggest threat in the battlefield, having a laser that can reliably blind them is a lot more useful than a gun that will have a horrible chance of hitting them. And that applies to anything with camera systems from humans to machines. A gun won't do much to a tank, helicopter or even a truck. Blinding a tank's camera, or the driver of a truck or the pilot of a helicopter is way more useful when you have a laser.
Also I suspect that robot dogs will have many roles in the future. A tiny handheld laser is a good way of disguising which models are armed or not, and a cheap and easy way for models to defend itself. For example, say you have an anti-tank mine robot dog whose's sole purpose is to get itself next to an important target and blow it's 10kg payload of HE. Part of the job means having a small and agile profile, you probably don't want to mount a machine gun on it, but a small laser can offer it some small amount of deterrence while being small, cheap and light.
Afterall, deference is a big thing in warfare. One guy with a gun could keep a dozen other at bay just because nobody wants to be shot. Same thing for this tiny lasers, you can never be sure if a robot is armed or not, something we can keep easily keep track of today when every armed robot has a big honking machine gun strapped to it.
In the future I can see the laser being used for additional purposes, like un-jammable direct laser communications in an environment where electronic warfare is getting insanely good.
Last edited: