In the age of drones would body-armor that's immune to small arms fire even matter?
Total immunity to small arms means excellent fragmentation protection. Drones are gonna need serious payloads.
>>65446935But drones are taking out tanks nowadays
>>65446939>furfag is also retardedwhat a twist!
>>65446933Every advantage matters, but realistically, technological progression is just going to make the 'standard soldier' less and less relevant to the battlefield as time goes on. There's all kinds of constraints one could impose to create scenarios where they could have their place but it's pretty easy to see how sci-fi has to warp reality unrealistically to give Space Marines a super-special role and important role on the battlefield. Ship boarding is a common go-to, since a boarding team is going to require the defending ship to have a whole 'immune-system' of counter measures, but you still have to argue why it wouldn't be more effective to send bombs at an enemy vessel rather than boarding pods. Maybe an alien empire intentionally uses outdated tactics fueled by a huge industrial base so their enemies can't learn or innovate from anything they're doing on the battlefield, and only save the good stuff to swat down conspicuous threats without letting on to much about how their wunderwaffen works.
>>65446935or an rpg head
>>65446933First we need to see whether a way will have been found to significantly reduce the lethality of drones over the next ten years.
>>65446939Stationary tanks, abandoned tanks, or obsolete tanks most of the time and even then you'd need a half dozen to get a confirmed kill. Most of the time the drone just breaks the tread and the crews bail out before artillery gets called in.
>>65450734Still say good marksmanship and shotguns can kill drones.
>>65446935Drones already use shaped charges like RPG7s on direct hits vs humans. Of course super-armor would help much vs the non-direct hits but the dynamic remains.>>65453583They can, but skilled shooters under battlefield conditions versus standard FPVs have about a 10% success rate. 10% * 10% * 10% = a 1 in 1000 chance of shooting down 3 drones in a row.
>>65446935They have serious payloads. Neither the Ukrainians nor Russians went in for the Western approach of high quality warheads with tungsten prefrag, top shelf HE, and lidar fuzes to minimize weight to improve flight time; because they're in target rich environments, poor, and it's simply not their culture style. Remember the complaints about the Switchblades in 2023 being too weak even though they killed the same or more number of targets as FPVs per hit?The FPVs in Ukraine generally have 2kg warheads, sometimes 1kg as the lower end. It makes BDA much easier when the target is guaranteed to visibly lose a limb at the minimum.
>>65453677"Skilled shooters" is stretching it. Most Russian Conscripts are tossed in with only a week of training at best. Since the actual trained marksmen don't carry visible identification they end up lumped in with the conscripts. I also don't recall any shotgunners taking hits from drones but I haven't seen all the drone-vids out there.
>>65453729Yes, when I type skilled shooters, I mean skilled shooters, like Ukrainian SF and upper-end Russian units with actual training and years of battlefield experience; not meatwaves or rear echelon support. They do about 10%. That's the peak end of anti-FPV shooting. The conscripts are worse.
>>65446933Good for near misses. A lot of times a drone will get shot down at less than 50 feet and still has enough inertia to land within 10 feet of infantry. Good body armor can resist shrapnel and dampen overpressure meaning a near-miss isn't just a soft-kill.
>>65453741So how do you know?
