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Does dodge can beat both jammer and other attacks from a coordinated order?

Discussion in '[Archived]: N3 Rules' started by Sungwon, Jul 4, 2019.

  1. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    By definition an "E/M pulse" is a signal. You're using post hoc circular reasoning to defend a shitty game element.
     
  2. ijw

    ijw Ian Wood aka the Wargaming Trader. Rules & Wiki
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    Emitting an unmodulated burst is categorically not equivalent to two-way communication with a network. That's not post hoc circular reasoning, it's basic electronics.
     
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  3. Savnock

    Savnock Nerfherder

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    Somehow that burst is targeted at just one guy though, not broadcast all around it/in a cone. So there has to be some sort of receiver on it too. In which case it makes sense to call it a comms attack. Otherwise you might as well just have an E/Marat or the like, an area-effect weapon.

    I mean, Jammers are supposed to even be able to interfere with active camo measures (which is a function of the weapon that pushes it into the overpowered zon given its other powerful effects).

    So there's some sensor stuff there, plenty of justification to call it a comms attack. And mechanically, introducing at least some weakness to Jammers makes a lot of sense.
     
  4. TheRedZealot

    TheRedZealot Well-Known Member
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    Oh snap finally I can put all my wireless communications education to use.

    The direction of an E/M wave will certainly be changed by the transmission source. The Antenna the Jammers in Infinity use appear to a variant of a parabolic antenna meaning modulation of the signal source likely isn't needed to reach specific areas.We know that the Ghazi themselves don't use Cubes in part to protect themselves and this would line up with the expected spillover we would see from a parabolic antenna.

    It is possible the antenna is a hybrid using some Parabolic elements and a phased-array with 4 sources. But that would add a lot of complexity for little benefit.

    Either way the jammer itself would be operating on completely different principles to what would make them vulnerable to hacking. With no need for a modem the jammer wouldn't be able to receive a signal at all.

    This is a common misconception and stems from the way terminology changes when we're talking about the Electromagnetic spectrum. When we talk about E/M spectrum communications a signal needs to be modulated to transmit information. Other E/M pulses like you would find in an E/M weapon are usually considered noise or interference. You do occasionally hear of pulses or waves like those we see in deep space telescopes as signals, but this is used in a different context and is not referring to a traditional carrier wave. If you're interested in learning more about wireless communications technology I'd recommend "Guide to Wireless Communications" by Jorge Olenewa. The book is dry but makes good use of examples to explain complex concepts.
     
  5. psychoticstorm

    psychoticstorm Aleph's rogue child
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    @TheRedZealot that was a fascinating read, not sure I would tackle that book though, sounds interesting though.

    At the rest, can these debates be more civil for once?
     
  6. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    That's actually the E/Marat, it's mislabeled.

    I'd be interested in seeing what definition you're pulling from to make this statement.


    How do we know a Jammer is unmodulated? And it's not really a "burst", it's very targeted.

    Regardless, if something is making comms attacks and is a piece of equipment, it's a failure of game terminology if it somehow avoids being called "comms equipment."
     
  7. toadchild

    toadchild Premeasure

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    You say that repeatedly, but last time we (collectively) delved into that via concept art analysis I don’t feel like it held up. Yes, the E/Marat is described in a certain manner, but there's nothing that says the jammer can’t have that appearance as well.
     
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  8. TheRedZealot

    TheRedZealot Well-Known Member
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    Fair enough. I just double checked the Jammer held by other units and they do seem a bit different. The Jammer is still using a parabolic antenna though and doesn't seem to be a phased-array.

    I'm mostly going off my Advanced Diploma as a wireless communications technologist.

    A more formal definition would be to split it as "What are we looking for" vs. "everything else".

    But in wireless communications this isn't very helpful. We want to think about all the signals anyone is sending, and ensure that none are being lost as a result of what we're doing. This is why we do things like restrict parts of the spectrum to specific uses.

    Since we know that certain things will never be something someone is looking for (ex: E/M from the sun, Light bulbs, Background Radiation, every other piece of electronics in the world) and some things will be (what we modulate to encode information). We can refer to signals this way to make the concepts simpler to understand.

    Now part of what makes this tricky is that researchers are actively looking into topics we would consider noise will rightly talk about them as being signals. But they aren't signals from a wireless communications standpoint because they aren't there to communicate information.

    Modulation is all about encoding information. When we modulate a signal we take a Carrier wave, a continuous baseline that our devices can understand, and overlay other signals. The receiver then take the resulting signal and interpret what the changes were from the baseline. We can then use the demodulated information recreates the data.

    There are a few ways to do this and as we get better at it we start to use more and more of techniques over lapped to make our information more dense.
    • We can change the Amplitude of the wave. This is how AM Radio works.
    • We can change the Frequency. This is how FM Radio works.
    • We can change the Phase. This is how GPS works.
    • We can use Directional modulation. This is commonly used in Fibre Optic cables.
    • We can also combined these techniques in different ways.
    In the case of a Jammer its not looking to make the signal readable in any way. What its looking to achieve is to either block the use of a specific frequency by filling it with noise so that the signal is no longer readable. If you've ever turned a microwave on and lost your Wi-Fi connection on your phone you've seen a signal being drowned out by noise.

    The more likely scenario, based on how jammer's work in game, is that they are using the E/M Spectrum to short the electronics in a piece of equipment by making the circuitry act as an impromptu antenna. The simplest way to do this would be to send a directed signal out over a wide part of the spectrum for a short time and at a high power. If you've ever put a piece of metal in the microwave you've seen this in action.

    As for Burst vs. Directed. We're running into another terminology issue. Any signal that is short in duration is a burst. in wireless Comms. When we're talking about a signals direction we talk about Directed vs. Omnidirectional. So in this case we could define a jammer as a Directed Burst of E/M Noise.

    Even directional signals will have parts of the signal that are released omnidirectionally. You can see a very neat graph charting a parabolic antenna's backscatter to give you an idea. In the real world you may have seen this with old Yagi TV Antennas where the direction of the antenna would change the station you were on. Sometimes if two stations were too close together you'd end up with both blurred together on screen at once.

    [​IMG]

    This is definitely a separate question and not something I'm particularly knowledgeable about.

    Thanks! I was mulling the Parabolic antenna Jammers are using after I posted and I realized we can also assume the wavelength of the Jammers is likely quite small. Since it would be need to be proportional to the size of their antenna. Which means its getting up nearer to the visible spectrum/the radioactive and likely has a completely different band than traditional wireless communications as well. It likely also causes some noticeable physical side effects given that the weapon would have to be quite high energy.
     
    #28 TheRedZealot, Jul 4, 2019
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2019
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  9. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Go look up "EMP Bomb", there was a Popular Mechanics article a while ago covering them.

    No transmission antennas of any sort involved, just a stack of (paraphrasing) capacitors that are explosively squished to cause the EMP.
     
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  10. Musterkrux

    Musterkrux Well-Known Member

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    TheRedZealot gets my vote for 'Mayor of Jammer Town' with that excellent explanation.
     
  11. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    You also probably need to replace that microwave, because it's leaking RF signal into places that aren't supposed to be getting it!



    I've been kicking around ideas for dealing with problem drones in the real world, and have settled on using a 1000W microwave oven as the signal generator. Then you need a chunk of 2.4GHz waveguide (commercially available, and relatively cheap, 3.4"x1.7" inside dimensions), and a simple antenna horn to allow some signal spread.

    Mount the entire assembly in some PVC pipe to weatherproof the assembly. It's going to look like an old Blowpipe SAM missile launch tube, so you're going to need to color it really brightly to make it look non-military. I'm thinking straight-up fluorescent orange.

    You see, modern quadcopter drones are all controlled on 2.4GHz frequencies, the same used for WiFi connections. Their controllers all run on very low power, averaging about 0.05watts. Hitting antennas designed for listening to 1/20 watt instructions with 1000W transmissions will not just drown out whatever control signal they were listening for, but will actively fry any circuits connected to the antenna.
     
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  12. toadchild

    toadchild Premeasure

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    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Looks pretty similar to me. The backpack differs, perhaps, but the hand-held unit is the same in all cases.

    For the sake of thoroughness, @Hecaton is referring to this description of the E/Marat I believe:
    The E/Marat, whose name signifies "power" in Arabic, is a directional short range electromagnetic pulse transmitter device. The first versions of this weapon, known as Generation-1, consisted of an omni-directional E/M pulse emitter with a radial effect. However, those versions had defects such as a reduced range and the indiscriminate effect of the pulse on everything that surrounded it, including the E/Marat carrier, seeing it achieve scarce success in combat. This new version has a parabolic deflector, which allows focusing of the pulse to select more specific targets. Being a directional weapon, the current E/Marat possesses a more limited range of action, especially when compared to other area saturation E/M weapons. However, it has more range than the previous Generation-1, and also allows more accurate target discrimination, reducing collateral damage. The new version keeps and improves the basic philosophy of the E/Marat as close quarters battle weapon, quite useful to equal the imbalance in confrontations between light forces with a low technological profile and highly modernized units.

    This is the old Ghazi, with a handheld trigger for the E/Marat backpack, which was indeed a circular template centered on the user:
    [​IMG]

    The dossier has a marked Jammer, but no official E/Marat illustration:
    [​IMG]

    Even as far back as the release of the resculpted Ghazi people were asking if the Jammer was mislabeled, if the same weapon has two firing modes, or if there's some other explanation. Given that they are very consistent in how they present Jammers on newer units, however, I think we can officially say now that this is what it looks like.
     
  13. A Mão Esquerda

    A Mão Esquerda Deputy Hexahedron Officer

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    The last wrinkle is that one of the books, Human Sphere I believe, has a picture of the dish and the backpack the Ghazis wear in an illustration, labeled as an E/Marat. Regardless, now the dish = Jammer.
     
  14. Sabin76

    Sabin76 Well-Known Member

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    The reflector looks to be over a half-meter, but even taking one of the 4 "pieces" of it, you are probably looking at microwaves (which go to about 1 mm in wavelength). Visible starts at ~700 nm.
     
  15. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    It's very possible to shut down a Jammer with another Jammer. And a combi rifle. And a 50's Cheva. And just about anything with electricity, the cruder the device the more power is necessary, unless someone set up a Faraday Cage around it. Probably not with a computer virus, though, unless you can force the Jammer's microprocessor (and it will have some sort of microprocessor, probably with a fancy adjective in front of it) to receive a signal. But if you have a device capable of doing that, it's probably broadcasting with enough power to shut down the Jammer permanently (i.e. you're effectively jamming it)

    The interesting question here is that E/M was determined to be a bit too strong to shoot through walls, then why did they keep the primitive E/M device doing the same?

    In either case, I can't find anything in the rules that says you can't dodge a comms attack if the attack completes the requirements for Dodge, and particularly since the Jammer is not even an area equipment, it seems pretty clear to me that you can choose to either Dodge, Change Face or Reset against it. Either you get the Jammer to miss, or you protect your gear by shutting it off and on again.
     
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  16. ijw

    ijw Ian Wood aka the Wargaming Trader. Rules & Wiki
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  17. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Oh goody, well that settles it. Would be good if that was written in the Comms Attack label, though.
     
  18. TheRedZealot

    TheRedZealot Well-Known Member
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    Definitely doesn't hurt to swap it out but the average person shouldn't see any major issue from a little bit of stray microwaves.

    With a cheap router and antenna you should be able to block 2.4 ghz without issue. It would be a simpler change and ground the drones anyhow. It would also be less dangerous. Though your federal regulatory agencies will drop the hammer on you pretty hard.

    Im going to level with you. I completely lied about looking up the models because I didnt give a shit if I said I was wrong about it. Evidently I should be less lazy next time. :grinning:

    Wait am I doing my math wrong? Its been a while since I calculated one instead of just looking at a spec sheet. I pegged it in ~500um range.

    (Antenna Area) = ((Gain)(Wavelength)^2) / 4(Pi)


    Edit: It occurs to me I'm leading this topic very far off course now. If you'd like to discuss wireless communications technology feel free to PM me instead of replying here and leading us further astray.
     
    #38 TheRedZealot, Jul 5, 2019
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2019
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  19. Ogid

    Ogid Well-Known Member

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    Mind this however:
    Those 2 might be readed as "only in the case of a coordinated order, you can use these AROs versus every attack". I know it's not the intended reading, but it might be misleading; it'd be a good candidate to add to the list of "things to reword"
     
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  20. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    True, you really need to make sure the magnetron (the part of the microwave oven that makes the microwaves) is sealed up tight to the waveguide.

    This whole project was really more on a military scale for knocking drones out of the sky. Or for VVIP protection folks like the Secret Service.
     
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