Robots and Automated Defenses

pisskop · 2016-03-17T17:18:16.000Z

South Korea's Auto-Turret Can Kill a Man in the Dead of Night From Three Clicks

The 2.5-mile wide demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea is the most heavily contested stretch of land on the planet. And if the massive contingent of troops, tanks, bunkers, and land mines weren't enough of a trespassing deterrent,...

http://www.paintballsentry.com/Prototypes.htm

bbc.com

Killer robots: The soldiers that never sleep

A South Korean company has designed a robot that could shoot and kill from four kilometres away. Who will teach these machine soldiers the rules of engagement?

ugh, the amount of video-game related fluffery I had to crawl through, and the SK turret was the main topic of discussion. could even find references to controled weapons platforms or anything.

Just a few examples of modern day turrets performing at police-grade levels in CDDA. While the one that snipes you from 2 miles away might be expensive and military grade, backyard mechanics can easily rig up a livefire version of a paintball turret.

Im asking about what to do with the largely inadequate robot faction of the game. I appreciate their impressive armada, but they tend to fall short in both appearance frequency, nighttime targeting, range, and even ammo capacity is fairly limited.

Coolthulhu · 2016-03-17T17:54:52.000Z

Limitations on turrets are mostly video game balance thing. If we wanted to make them all realistic, even the most basic turret would only get headshots and have perfect nightvision.

The problem with perfect NV is that it could result in random, frustrating instant deaths in the night. We’d need something to prevent that, for example making drones somehow remember if the player has attacked their faction and not attacking unarmed players who hasn’t done so.

Ranges could be extended, but that would require buffing their accuracy and making them burst less first. Turrets are already very vulnerable to exhausting their ammo supply.

kevin.granade · 2016-03-17T23:29:53.000Z

Assuming just a modicum of friendly-fire prevention, turrets could easily emit a light bright enough to spot them from outside their targeting range.
There is also a lot of room for broadening the types of turrets that exist, e.g. nonlethal munitions turrets intended to drive people away rather than kill them, camera turrets that only observe, but reveal player or monster location to nearby robots, possibly including some kind of artillery once we have that, minelaying robots that establish a perimiter of mines around friendly turrets. The options are pretty unlimited.

deoxy · 2016-03-22T20:56:04.000Z

Coolthulhu:

Limitations on turrets are mostly video game balance thing. If we wanted to make them all realistic, even the most basic turret would only get headshots and have perfect nightvision.

Perfect nightvision, sure, but headshots every time would require some serious AI. Frankly, the IFF is already crazy advanced, and perfect body-part recognition pushes the boundaries quite a bit beyond that.

Also, at the moment, night-vision is a noticeable power drain, something that turrets are currently assumed to have an infinite supply of. At some point, that should probably be addressed…

Litppunk · 2016-03-23T07:23:01.000Z

I am tempted to say make the places that have turrets have some kind of generator and large “mobile” fuel reserve that the turrets “run on” or run on, but that seems like a bad idea in many ways. Ideally lore should have some way to explain how they are being (or were being powered) in whatever random places they ended up defending and whether they are now on emergency backup power, or dimensional portal-ed energy or what.

John_Candlebury · 2016-03-24T03:31:23.000Z

Litppunk:

I am tempted to say make the places that have turrets have some kind of generator and large “mobile” fuel reserve that the turrets “run on” or run on, but that seems like a bad idea in many ways. Ideally lore should have some way to explain how they are being (or were being powered) in whatever random places they ended up defending and whether they are now on emergency backup power, or dimensional portal-ed energy or what.

Most robots run on plutonium, with battery backups, well at least judging from their item drops.

Litppunk · 2016-03-24T03:35:27.000Z

Ah. Not played deep enough to notice that, I would have thought that would make their drops too valuable for their low rarity… but that does explain why they are so prone to exploding without special precautions being made.