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I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ... nagging. And I was utterly blown away. I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some

I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ... nagging. And I was utterly blown away. I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some way. I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more. I would have to put other projects up top like - when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get? - Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see if they shoot them down. - In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.

mr_overalls 5y ago
> The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was unmatched by similar advances in mobility. Most likely, ongoing advances in stealth, armor, area denial, anti-drone tech, etc. will preclude its reappearance on the battlefield.
- Qworg 5y ago
  Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades make trenches not a great option.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great option. Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned, and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions... Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're disgustingly effective in real life. --- "On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale—an unsigned diplomatic note—transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  There aren't really anymore advances in stealth and armor. If anything anti-stealth and anti-armor tech is advancing much more rapidly. What is advancing is area denial, anti-drone tech, and active protection systems.
  - nvelty 5y ago
    Stealth will always be important - it's just a numbers game to try and optimize RCS vs an opponent's radar systems. The big thing going forward will be creating resilient networks of shooters/sensors. This is where drones will make their money - spotting stuff via camera or radar for other manned planes, SAMs, or artillery.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      It's not, actually. Minimizing RCS hits a hard, unavoidable wall once the wavelength of the radar is close to that of the object. So it's a matter of getting large wavelength radars that are accurate enough.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Trenches weren't even all that great at protecting people in their days. What the multi-layer trench systems were good at was more or less "making it hard for the enemy to hold this territory for more than a few hours or days after taking it."
- nvelty 5y ago
  During the more conventional phase of the 1st Chechen War, the Chechens made good use of hastily dug zig-zag trenches to limit the effects of Russian artillery and air support. The real revolution now is the proliferation of precision weapons and the use of drones to enable targeting for supporting fires. The trench still matters, but now camouflage and deception is equally important to prevent accurate targeting of a position. The marines did some testing in a drone-saturated environment and had to reshuffle their tactical doctrine to put a much higher emphasis on immediately camouflaging their position.
na85 5y ago
>The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. This occurred during a time when trenches actually protected those soldiers. Modern artillery with GPS-guided rounds can not only target a specific building (so far away that you need to account for the rotation of the earth as it spins underneath the round) but you can pick the window of the building you want the round to go through. For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-grenade-duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter. Hiding in a trench isn't really going to save anyone.
- mc32 5y ago
  Can’t do much about missiles but against quadcopters with grenades just add a storm fence dome over your trench. And unless the quadcopters get equipped with high strength wire cutters they’re not going to do much.
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    first one blows up next to the fence, the rest go through the hole?
    - mc32 5y ago
      I don’t think grenades can successfully punch large holes into a storm fence. It’s flexible and very little surface to hit. They’re affective against people because we perforate easily.
  - adventured 5y ago
    The answer to the trench storm fence with a (larger) quadcopter is a fuel shower, promptly ignited. A sort of flying molotov cocktail. The target trench area/s would need something like a small Phalanx CIWS to play defense.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  Air-burst rounds have definitely rendered trenches obsolete. https://imgur.com/c17lPxF https://imgur.com/c17lPxF
nextaccountic 5y ago
> There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more. It depends on the level of investment. WW2 saw a tremendous technological progress in 5 years because that was it took to win the war. Nowadays, I don't see why AR would be so urgent.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I am a little dubious about the "war makes technological progress faster" meme. I think technology has a pace determined mostly by physics and what is possible. War perhaps only stops us getting in our own way( see torpedoes). Just to (cherry) pick a few examples - WW2 was not even going to start unless progress had already passed the point that doctrine could see a way past the stalemate of the previous war. Germany had proven this (to itself) in Spain in 1936 - that tanks with close air support was now a viable thing at the divisional level. Progress from the say Panzer II to IV was not "quantum leaps" but solid well tested progress as was similar Russian tanks who were going up against them. Adding bigger engines and more armour, or sloping armour. This was progress by "failing fast". That is an organisational decision less than a technical one. for example : - Torpedoes : In the battle of midway US torpedoes frankly did not work (it's a terrible thing to ask a pilot to fly low and slow into AA fire and not give them a torpedo that actually will shoot straight or explode on contact). That was fixed in the latter part of the Pacific war but not because of technological progress but organisational change. ie firing everyone who thought there was no need to test torpedoes by, you know, live firing even one. - Manhattan Project. Yes and no I mean in early 1939 science did not think it was actually possible to make a nuclear bomb. After Piles' memo that changed and so there was a race on. But the goal was so tempting / threatening that even without a war it would still have been a major strategic goal. just like Rockets - Rockets. Frankly these are like VR glasses. Basically the technology was just possible in the late 30s. And we would have worked on it anyway - war or not. But despite going from toy demo to actual bombs on London, they were ... well the V2 was the biplane compared to the Apollo 20 years later. It was not war that made rockets go up, it was funding. War perhaps gives a focus to develop at a pace that would not be seen otherwise, but the space race showed you can do it without an actual live war- Technology cannot be forced -the materials science or energy equations either make it possible or not. No amount of investment in 1917 would have made a Panzer tank by 1920. You also could not turn a V2 into Apollo by 1950. Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-serving excuses that organisations build up around why their progress is slow. It makes things faster because it gives clear unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and focuses funding, prioritisation and talent. It seems it would be nice if we could find ways to improve our organisations without the deaths of millions. Thank you had not thought about that before.
RangerScience 5y ago
Having worked in AR, the first place to use it in the military isn't in weapons; but rather training, logistics and construction.
duped 5y ago
I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades. A better use of technology for this kind of policy would be on offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, control and monitoring of social or media networks and telecommunications. The CCP seems to understand that those are better tools for conducting diplomacy with 21st century violence more than making it easier for a soldier to hit someone with a bullet, since that is mostly a solved problem (shoot more of them and care less about who they hit)
- goagw 5y ago
  Defensive cyber capabilities make sense but I dont know what offensive capabilities means when you are just completely cut off from Chinese networks. Maybe shoot a few Zuckerbergs into China or something...
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades. Tell it to Azerbaijan. The fact that the US didn't have a coincidence of plan and excution sufficient to achieve anything doesn't mean others can't, even with vastly fewer material resources.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  The US has successfully conducted a lot of policy through violence and the military. As you point out, the purpose of the US military is not nation building, and it has been those steps that failed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jvanderbot 5y ago
The US navy does test its weapons in live fire demonstrations for both offensive and defensive systems, and includes drones and other asymetric deliveries. You can find some cool videos on YouTube. Source: built one such system for US Navy.
- nradov 5y ago
  I think the real concern is that such live fire tests have been unrealistically small with only a few target drones at a time. There has never been a real all-up fleet defense exercise with hundreds of high speed antiship missiles coming in simultaneously from multiple axes. They run electronic simulations of those scenarios all the time but doing it for real would cost billions.
paul7986 5y ago
Would you want to virtually co-work with your co-workers Memojis using the oculus T instead of working in an office with them and or remotely from your couch no VR?

mr_overalls 5y ago

> The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was unmatched by similar advances in mobility. Most likely, ongoing advances in stealth, armor, area denial, anti-drone tech, etc. will preclude its reappearance on the battlefield.

Qworg 5y ago
Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades make trenches not a great option.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great option. Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned, and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions... Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're disgustingly effective in real life. --- "On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale—an unsigned diplomatic note—transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."
sudosysgen 5y ago
There aren't really anymore advances in stealth and armor. If anything anti-stealth and anti-armor tech is advancing much more rapidly. What is advancing is area denial, anti-drone tech, and active protection systems.
- nvelty 5y ago
  Stealth will always be important - it's just a numbers game to try and optimize RCS vs an opponent's radar systems. The big thing going forward will be creating resilient networks of shooters/sensors. This is where drones will make their money - spotting stuff via camera or radar for other manned planes, SAMs, or artillery.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's not, actually. Minimizing RCS hits a hard, unavoidable wall once the wavelength of the radar is close to that of the object. So it's a matter of getting large wavelength radars that are accurate enough.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
Trenches weren't even all that great at protecting people in their days. What the multi-layer trench systems were good at was more or less "making it hard for the enemy to hold this territory for more than a few hours or days after taking it."
nvelty 5y ago
During the more conventional phase of the 1st Chechen War, the Chechens made good use of hastily dug zig-zag trenches to limit the effects of Russian artillery and air support. The real revolution now is the proliferation of precision weapons and the use of drones to enable targeting for supporting fires. The trench still matters, but now camouflage and deception is equally important to prevent accurate targeting of a position. The marines did some testing in a drone-saturated environment and had to reshuffle their tactical doctrine to put a much higher emphasis on immediately camouflaging their position.

na85 5y ago

>The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. This occurred during a time when trenches actually protected those soldiers. Modern artillery with GPS-guided rounds can not only target a specific building (so far away that you need to account for the rotation of the earth as it spins underneath the round) but you can pick the window of the building you want the round to go through. For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-grenade-duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter. Hiding in a trench isn't really going to save anyone.

mc32 5y ago
Can’t do much about missiles but against quadcopters with grenades just add a storm fence dome over your trench. And unless the quadcopters get equipped with high strength wire cutters they’re not going to do much.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  first one blows up next to the fence, the rest go through the hole?
  - mc32 5y ago
    I don’t think grenades can successfully punch large holes into a storm fence. It’s flexible and very little surface to hit. They’re affective against people because we perforate easily.
- adventured 5y ago
  The answer to the trench storm fence with a (larger) quadcopter is a fuel shower, promptly ignited. A sort of flying molotov cocktail. The target trench area/s would need something like a small Phalanx CIWS to play defense.
ortusdux 5y ago
Air-burst rounds have definitely rendered trenches obsolete. https://imgur.com/c17lPxF https://imgur.com/c17lPxF

nextaccountic 5y ago

> There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more. It depends on the level of investment. WW2 saw a tremendous technological progress in 5 years because that was it took to win the war. Nowadays, I don't see why AR would be so urgent.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I am a little dubious about the "war makes technological progress faster" meme. I think technology has a pace determined mostly by physics and what is possible. War perhaps only stops us getting in our own way( see torpedoes). Just to (cherry) pick a few examples - WW2 was not even going to start unless progress had already passed the point that doctrine could see a way past the stalemate of the previous war. Germany had proven this (to itself) in Spain in 1936 - that tanks with close air support was now a viable thing at the divisional level. Progress from the say Panzer II to IV was not "quantum leaps" but solid well tested progress as was similar Russian tanks who were going up against them. Adding bigger engines and more armour, or sloping armour. This was progress by "failing fast". That is an organisational decision less than a technical one. for example : - Torpedoes : In the battle of midway US torpedoes frankly did not work (it's a terrible thing to ask a pilot to fly low and slow into AA fire and not give them a torpedo that actually will shoot straight or explode on contact). That was fixed in the latter part of the Pacific war but not because of technological progress but organisational change. ie firing everyone who thought there was no need to test torpedoes by, you know, live firing even one. - Manhattan Project. Yes and no I mean in early 1939 science did not think it was actually possible to make a nuclear bomb. After Piles' memo that changed and so there was a race on. But the goal was so tempting / threatening that even without a war it would still have been a major strategic goal. just like Rockets - Rockets. Frankly these are like VR glasses. Basically the technology was just possible in the late 30s. And we would have worked on it anyway - war or not. But despite going from toy demo to actual bombs on London, they were ... well the V2 was the biplane compared to the Apollo 20 years later. It was not war that made rockets go up, it was funding. War perhaps gives a focus to develop at a pace that would not be seen otherwise, but the space race showed you can do it without an actual live war- Technology cannot be forced -the materials science or energy equations either make it possible or not. No amount of investment in 1917 would have made a Panzer tank by 1920. You also could not turn a V2 into Apollo by 1950. Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-serving excuses that organisations build up around why their progress is slow. It makes things faster because it gives clear unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and focuses funding, prioritisation and talent. It seems it would be nice if we could find ways to improve our organisations without the deaths of millions. Thank you had not thought about that before.

RangerScience 5y ago

Having worked in AR, the first place to use it in the military isn't in weapons; but rather training, logistics and construction.

duped 5y ago

I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades. A better use of technology for this kind of policy would be on offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, control and monitoring of social or media networks and telecommunications. The CCP seems to understand that those are better tools for conducting diplomacy with 21st century violence more than making it easier for a soldier to hit someone with a bullet, since that is mostly a solved problem (shoot more of them and care less about who they hit)

goagw 5y ago
Defensive cyber capabilities make sense but I dont know what offensive capabilities means when you are just completely cut off from Chinese networks. Maybe shoot a few Zuckerbergs into China or something...
barry-cotter 5y ago
> I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades. Tell it to Azerbaijan. The fact that the US didn't have a coincidence of plan and excution sufficient to achieve anything doesn't mean others can't, even with vastly fewer material resources.
HWR_14 5y ago
The US has successfully conducted a lot of policy through violence and the military. As you point out, the purpose of the US military is not nation building, and it has been those steps that failed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jvanderbot 5y ago

The US navy does test its weapons in live fire demonstrations for both offensive and defensive systems, and includes drones and other asymetric deliveries. You can find some cool videos on YouTube. Source: built one such system for US Navy.

nradov 5y ago
I think the real concern is that such live fire tests have been unrealistically small with only a few target drones at a time. There has never been a real all-up fleet defense exercise with hundreds of high speed antiship missiles coming in simultaneously from multiple axes. They run electronic simulations of those scenarios all the time but doing it for real would cost billions.

paul7986 5y ago

Would you want to virtually co-work with your co-workers Memojis using the oculus T instead of working in an office with them and or remotely from your couch no VR?