RE: Wire Obstacles

I think some people are forgetting that unless the governments involved
are fighting with a scorched earth policy then the ground has to be
"tidied up" afterwards. Think about the largest motivating factor behind
the drive to ban land-mines - the indiscrimante laying of non-ferrous
mines that are hard to detect and; being mad of plastic, have tended to
float away in the rain and monsoons of Cambodia, Burma etc, to lodge in
agricultural areas and cause horrific damage to civilians years after.

So by deploying mono-filament obstacles we are assuming that either you
are fighting a war with armies that are not in the least concerned about
what will happen to the ground afterwards I'd probably use tac-nukes in
that case) OR that the sides have developed a fairly easy means of
recovering the obstacle. Now if they have developed a recovery method it
is fairly reasonable to assume that a similar method or technique may be
used to breach or neutralise it.

I think the detail you get into with the technical apsects of the
obstacle is more in the realms of SG or probably more likely a skirmish
level.

Can't we just accept that there is a requirement for field defences and
obstacles and therefore detail a proprtion of your force to engineering
tasks. DSII has fairly generic concepts and engineering should be one of
them.

Let's clear the bottleneck and get the assault moving again.

Cheers, 

Owen G

-----Original Message-----
From: NVDoyle [mailto:NVDoyle@aol.com]
Subject: Re: Wire Obstacles

I'm beginning to get the feeling that monomolecular filament wire
(Niven's
variable sword, shadow square wire, various cyberpunk stories, etc.) is
so
dangerous and yucky (SIr, point's gone chunky again!  Next!) that it
would
fall under the category of something not often used by states who like
to say
that they are civilized.  Like mines/bombs shaped like kid's toys, laser
blinding weapons, biochem in it's more virulent forms, etc.  It would
probably
be as hazardous to the users as the enemy - there is very little room to
screw
up with an infinitely sharp cutting tool, and recovery might very much
be a
problem.  Also, DS/SG are meant to simulate good military SF, not
necessarily
the nasty, not-fun realities we seem to keep coming up with.  If future
war
will consist of laserblinders, monomol wire and flesheating nanites, no
thanks.

Noah V. Doyle