See also Brigador: apart from the various lasers, exotic ballistics, and nightmarish chemical weapons it includes, there’s also the prosaic “Mãe Dois.” The tech entry leaves no doubt about what it is:

My understanding is that this weapon not only predates the colonies, but space travel entirely. If that is the case then it’s a truly venerable design, and one I’m told will continue to serve for the foreseeable future.

He’s decided you’re not on his level, but he thinks you’re cool all the same.

Biblically-accurate Ace Combat aircraft.

A turret toss does seem like it would be effective as reactive armor. Is this how tanks evolve to survive drone predation? Main turret autotomy to give the smaller turret buds a chance to flee?

Some ships do have emergency antimatter generators per the TNG Technical Manual, but they’re hideously energy-intensive to run–something like a 10:1 ratio of deuterium used for each unit of antimatter. They only make sense to run in the rare situation you absolutely need to warp to safety when you somehow have deuterium and a warp core but no antimatter.

But holodecks apparently have their own infinite power supply incompatible with any other Starfleet technology, so perhaps Voyager used the holodeck replicators to generate deuterium to run their antimatter generator whenever the Doctor isn’t practicing his sermons.

Efficiency would be abysmal even by the normal standards of this process, but it beats walking back to the Alpha Quadrant.

The microwave thing? I couldn’t even guess, though I personally wouldn’t want to stand next to it even if it works. A big microwave emitter on the battlefield is just asking to catch a HARM.

It really doesn’t seem like anyone knows for sure what to do about drones right now.

Large, non-nuclear EMPs mostly use explosives. Covering a large battlefield means you’re essentially bringing a massive, single-use explosive charge to the battlefield, staying uncomfortably close enough to benefit from it, and trying to set it off at exactly the right time, because they’re not reloadable. And your enemy is probably thrilled you’re doing this, because it saves them from hauling their own explosives there. (On that note, why are you sitting on this thing instead of dropping it on the enemy?)

This is in addition to whatever shielding you brought, which is likely bulky and conspicuous. And you’re probably not doing combined arms, because shielding infantry and light vehicles from massive explosions is, it is fair to say, something of an unsolved problem.

But wait, you might be thinking. I know there are non-explosive ways to generate EMPs. Yes, there are, but you need a power source for those, and if you have a really good, portable one of those and a consistent supply of fuel to run it, you probably have better uses for it, like powering a modest laser. Oh, also, you’re 100% sure your shielding works perfectly, right? You’ll find out quick if you don’t.

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody:

The ghost of Sam Hughes: Okay but have you considered

Is it actually good against tanks now? I always liked it, but it still hurt to finally get a shot off just for the tank to shrug off the hit.

I’m just going to pretend that’s one of the researchers from Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.

I felt the exact same way about the conversation you mentioned. I really liked the idea of the quest, but way they handled it just utterly drained all the stakes. And as you noted, it’s weird to see a misstep like this after they nailed it once in Sumeru.

You get medals and requisition points from playing that you can use to unlock new stratagems, which includes everything from weapons to orbital bombardment. Medals get you new weapons, cosmetics, etc. You also find samples you can collect on missions, and these unlock permanent upgrades for stratagems. There are player levels, but these just unlock new titles once you get past the basics.

The battle pass equivalent is Warbonds, which include new weapons, armor, cosmetics, etc. Unlike most games, warbonds don’t expire and you can find enough premium currency while playing to get them without too much trouble.

On the whole, new warbond weapons tend to be different rather than obvious upgrades. The default assault rifle you get stays perfectly viable throughout the game.

All I really know is shoot bug and if you aren’t getting friendly fired to hell and back you’re playing wrong

You’ve pretty much got it down, though you also shoot terminators.

If they’re really lucky, they’ll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.

Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

FWIW, the shield backpack and either AMR or Quasar/EAT have served me well against bots, but I typically run light armor. I bring the grenade pistol to handle factories.

If you aren’t already using it, there’s never been a better time to get into the AMR now that they buffed the damage and finally zeroed in the scope.

Orbital stratagem timings make no sense, and are strictly a gameplay balance issue that *cannot* be realistic: the loading screen shows the first helldiver drops well outside the atmosphere and take several minutes to reach the ground, but turrets take 3 seconds to deploy?

I assumed this was because equipment can endure acceleration that would make a person pass out, or at least be combat-ineffective on landing. A trip from the Karman line to the ground in a few seconds would involve some deeply unpleasant G-forces…in opposite directions, back-to-back.

Come to think of it, this might explain why different gear has different call down times, as more fragile stuff might require a slower and (relatively) gentler drop.

Rockets seem more useful to me, since I can’t count on tanks going where I want.

On the other hand, if the IRL combat footage videos are any indication, there might be black comedy potential with the AT mines I’m overlooking.

I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.

It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.