Medtech 2180, III

I'm not quite sure I was proposing tech as cheaply as Los seems to
think, though it might be that cheap. I suggest that the moral issue of
cloning a brainless body for parts is a different one than growing
another being and "overlaying" his brain with yours. And so is the level
of tech required. And even if it took you a year to rehab (takes you out
of a campaign), it might still be worth doing for career soldiers.
Professional army and all that.

Why not use bots or programmed human automata? Well, for grunties like I
was when I was in the reserves... sure. Section attacks they could do.
For SF? Nope. You need (and I'm not just being nice) a high level of
motivation and of creativity and invention. I don't think the
creativity, initiative and ability to adapt are easy to engineer into
either human or mechanical automata. In order to have these, we live
with some of the other flaws of the human. For normal infantry tasks,
such Automata might be okay. The problem is, once you dehumanize your
force, you might remove some of the barriers to the enemy treating them
humanely. Today, we don't nuke each others infantry because our local
area commanders don't want to get nuked. If the local fighters were all
some form of mech or bio automata, then who'd care if they got nuked?
Suddenly they become less effective than normal (albeit enhanced) humans
because the thing that keeps them viable in part is mutual restraint as
both sides don't excercise the most lethal systems they have because
they don't want it done to them. So we see such automata might give a
short lived advantage, but the point Los raised about
action-counteraction is visible here.... shortly the gloves would come
off and the automata would die in hordes. Back to the drawing board.
Plenty of reasons to enhance normal humans but not change them so much
that they are unrecognizable.

Note that only fools (sorry, my word for them) want to take man
completely out of the combat decision loop. I think most more sane folk
have it in their heads to take man out of the needlessly risky parts.
Decision loops should still have humans in them, maybe advised by expert
systems. And some types of ops will (if you are the ESU) be cheaper to
do with humans or (if you are the NAC) be delicate enough you can't just
use a bot.

What the battlefield in 2185 will be is a place where humans play a more
selective and specialized role. And the average soldier of the day will
probably (for a regular) be stronger, faster, bigger, tougher, etc. than
one of today. Better armed, protected, and less likely to get
pointlessly killed doing something technology could do cheaper. But he'd
be there... on the field....doing his job because it can't quite be done
by a computer as well. That will come one day I imagine, but way past
2185 (I hope).

Though bits of it reeked of cheese, the movie Soldier with Kurt Russell
addressed the idea of building combat biological automata and the effect
of newer generations of the technology.

As I said, I think one can posit a higher level of med-tech which only
impacts campaign wound recovery - the rest (weapon lethality vs soldier
toughness and reflexes) is mapped into the combat system and the
recovery roll system covers the stabilization aspects. I'm not talking
about overhauling the game, since the game is generic enough to already
operate on these assumptions. I'm just talking about campaign detail.

If we came up with an RPG for the GZGverse, then we'd have to look a lot
more closely at what tech in specific was in existence and operation. :)

Tom B.

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