Featueing: Culture Combat Drones (Culture Series)

[u/KarlMrax]

Combat Drone FC

Combat drones are sentient AI war machines used by the Culture filling a role somewhat like infantry in a real world army. They have a large variety of forms ranging from nanotech swarms to a rectangular box about the size of a suitcase to 10m³ cubes. This post focuses on the .1-1 meter sized drones. One thing about combat drones is that they love their jobs and don't get to do them very often. They will often prefer maximizing casualties/force rather than minimizing them unless they are constrained by mission perimeters. They aren't just perfectly happy to gun down routed opponents who have no hope of fighting back depending on the drone they enjoy it immensely. Most often they are seen in the series as part of a duo with a Special Circumstances Agent.

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Meta information

Drawings

A number of feats come from the Culture: Drawings. These are Drawings made by Banks made at unknown times. There are a few elements which I think are more early concepts rather than final ideas which made it into the series proper. But they represent a fair amount of hard statistics and numbers for carried munitions which we don't get in the series. I would go with what is written in the series over what is in the Drawings if there are any conflicts but it isn't like there is a specified canon hierarchy.

Feats from the Drawings will be cut so it is just the raw numbers only including the Drawings themselves if it is somehow necessary to illustrate a feat.

Dates

No individual drone has feats in every category so feats are pulled from several different drones.

The novels of the Culture series span a bit somewhat over 1000 years between the Consider Phlebas and Surface Detail. The Drawings has things from several thousand years before the earliest novel these dates will also be included if applicable. So feats will be labeled with the date the novel takes place in.

Mostly Full RT

The full RT is only mostly complete but this is the current version.

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Weapons/Firepower

Missiles

• Various Time Periods Combat Drones can carry a wide range of missiles, their capabilities are covered in this RT.

• 1362 CE The exact amount of missiles a drone can carry heavily depends on its size. The 330x200x90 millimeter (13x8x3.5 inchs) MDAWS Microdrone carries 1 knife missile, 4 scout missiles, 4 10mm attack missiles, 6 6mm attack missiles, 48 micromissiles and 240 drone missiles.

• 1362 CE As well as potentially 752,000 nanomissiles. That might seem like a lot of missiles but keep in mind a normal spoonful of nanomissiles would contain well over a million of them. Though this is A LOT more nanomissiles than the other somewhat smaller drone we have numbers for which is 240 nanomissiles.

Lasers/CREWs

CREW stands for Coherent Radiation Emission Weapon they are just the Culture's term for laser weapons.

• 1867 CE A drone's laser produces vague detonations behind a different drone. It is also powerful enough to turn things into plasma when struck.

• 1730 CE A Little Drone has 2 CREWs which can output 10 kg at 50 rounds per second for around 4 gigawatts.

Plasma

• 1362 CE The MDAWS Microdrone has 2 plasma weapons which will hit with 8tons at 1km and is fully controllable.

• Unknown Year By fully controllable they mean plasma rounds can be made to curve including allowing for over the horizon shots as with the case of the Light Plasma Projector 91.

• Unknown Year A plasma shot crosses 10km "instantly".

Effectors

Effectors are the Culture's electronic warfare system. They manipulate the electromagnetic force at a distance. This allows them to take control of computers and living being's nervous systems.

• 2167 CE An EDust Assassin (nanotech swarm drone made of components no larger than .1 mm except for its .1x1mm nanomissiles) takes control of every weapon within several kilometers in an isolated area except a mechanical one (which Effectors wouldn't work on anyway).

• 2167 CE An EDust Assassin subverts a drone (from a civ less advanced than the Culture) forcing it to attack a different group of drones before subverting the rest. Also subverts some laser turrets.

Fields

Fields are versatile force fields. They can be used for protection as well as offensively to cut things.

• 2375 CE Knife missiles (and presumably drones) can produce angstronm (.1nm) fine cutting fields.

• 2375 CE A knife missile can use its fields to give an extra kick to its kinetic weapons. So they can likely be moved around at supersonic speeds.

• 2092 CE A machine made by a less advanced civilization can produce molecular scale cutting fields and can cut through an interior wall of a space craft.

• 2770 BCE The All Purpose Sentient Drone can lift 8000 kg with its fields and can project them 4 meters.

Displacers

Displacers are the Cultures teleporters they bundle a volume into a singularity move it through hyperspace and drop it back in real space at its destination (or leave it in hyperspace). Due to how they move the displaced object through hyperspace any non-4 dimensional shielding will not block the displace.

• 1362 CE A MDAWS Microdrone can displace a 1mm² volume 84,750km and a 1m³ volume 25m. These can be linked to their plasma weapons (and presumably other weapons) to give extra range or bypass armor and shields.

  • To show the inverse exponential relationship between volume and distance this part of the Drawings also shows that 1 cm³ can be displaced 61km

Misc

• Range/1887 CE Some Culture drones fighting a Morthanveld drone were engaging each other at around 80 kilometers.

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Speed

• Speed/Acceleration/2083 CE Flere-Imsaho while wearing a bulky casing to make it look less advanced than it actually is, breaks the speed of sound moving 20 meters upwards.

• Reaction Times/2092 CE Skaffen-Amtiskaw gets 3 knife missiles into position before the a pan human's nerve impulse can travel down their leg after they are startled by something.

• Perception Times/2092 CE Skaffen-Amtiskaw has a lengthy conversation with a Ship within a second, which a pan human only registers as a brief pause.

• Teleportation/1362 CE A drone with powerful enough displacers can displace/teleport themselves. MDAWS Microdrone can displace itself up to 1050m in its normal configuration or 2750m in its compact configuration.

• FTL/1362 CE Some drones have FTL capabilities such as the MDAWS Microdrone which has 2 warp motors which can get it to 5.1*10¹⁰ meters per 2.1 seconds or 80 times the speed of light. Unlike Culture ships likely isn't something they can use in combat. It would be more for traveling between planets in a solar system or to nearby stars.

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Durability/Survivability

• Durability/1867 CE Sisela Ytheleus nearly killed by a direct hit from a plasma implosure which is described as being hit by a small nuclear blast.

  • 1887 CE In a later novel a blast that creates a kilometer diameter crater is described as possibly being a small nuke and a small blast.

• Durability/1867 CE Survives a gun overloading which blows a hole through the companionway on a ship.

  • Culture guns can have batteries typically ranging from tons (250 CE) to kilotons (3200 BCE)

• Stealth/2375 CE Gzilt Arbites (The Gzilt's drone/missile equivalents roughly equivtech/peer to the Culture) are invisible to the naked eye at 10 meters. Also keep in mind Gzilt pan humans would be somewhat better senses than baseline human.

• Trapdoor Coverage/1362 CE The MDAWS Microdrone has a trapdoor system Which can work on .1mm³ to .25m³ volumes within a 12.5 meter boundry.

  • What a trapdoor coverage does is moves things, such as nuclear explosions in the case of the ship version, into hyperspace so the drone is unaffected.

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Using Combat Drones on WhoWouldWin

Combat drones are invisible, supersonic flying, nuclear weapon surviving, gigawatt/ton firing, machines. If the character can't somewhat compete with that they might not be the best pick as an opponent.

Combat drones can be used on their own, with their compliment of missiles, or as parts of larger units of combat drones which can get up to over 2000 armies of 72000 combat drones in the later parts of the Culture Idiran War. On the science fiction side of things they can go up against just about anything you can think from ships to ground vehicles to high end infantry though make sure whatever it is can keep up with the drone's acceleration, range and has the ability to spot it if it is invisible.

Outside of science fiction there probably are some Shonen anime/manga characters in the same speed range as the drones whom can also take and dish out comparable punishment.

Having a round with effectors and/or displacers banned isn't necessarily a bad idea. There may be otherwise decent match ups that end up being stomps because they are difficult to defend against.

[u/SamLL]

Good writeup!

They will often prefer maximizing casualties/force rather than minimizing them unless they are constrained by mission perimeters.

I think you are generalizing too hastily and this is true mostly only of Skaffen-Amtiskaw, and in particular its killing of the bandits in front of Diziet Sma. Diziet's horrified reaction, I would suggest, implies that this behavior is actually uncommon and pushing the bounds of acceptability even for Special Circumstances combat drones.

[u/KarlMrax → u/SamLL]

Xuss was begging Anaplian to let it kill soldiers in the beginning of Matter.

The only other combat drone we get to know sort of well was almost too much for Special Circumstances. So they admittedly aren't a great example.

Edit: and Sisela Ytheleus was never had an opportunity to show either way.

[u/OneCatch]

Also worth noting that the knife missile in the lift shaft in Hydrogen Sonata is a significant durability feat - it deliberately launches AM-tipped micromissiles at a target about a metre away, seemingly very confident that its own fields can fend off the resulting detonation.

Also that the 'light plasma projector' from the State of the Art - the one which can do all of the 'over the horizon curve shot' ridiculousness and eventually kills a large starship from a couple of dozen km away with a single hit - is explicitly described as 'peace rated' and is not considered suitable for battlefield use.

[u/deltree711 → u/OneCatch]

TBF, their antimatter payloads can be arbitrarily small (maybe in the low picogram range?) so it's hard to say how big of an explosion it's actually causing.

[u/OneCatch → u/deltree711]

True, but they're stated to be 2mm rounds, and a other character remarks that it's a 'sub-gramme AM explosion' - not a 'sub-microgramme' or 'sub-nanogramme'. Given the specificity, it certainly seems like Banks was trying to imply a yield somewhere between perhaps 0.1g and 0.8g.

Also, the epilogue of Look to Windward portrays a micromissile around the same size leveling a building.

[u/deltree711 → u/OneCatch]

0.5g of antimatter is closer to city-busting than it is to building-busting, unless it's a really big building.

[u/KarlMrax → u/OneCatch]

In the Drawings at least Banks gives the 2mm rounds a yield of 212 grams.

[u/Skolloc753 → u/KarlMrax]

1000g equals a 50mgt nuke, so 1g would still be a 50kt explosion. When it comes to "destroys a building", something like 0.001g payload (50t explosion) would be better fitting. Seems a bit like a contradiction.

SYL

[u/KarlMrax → u/Skolloc753]

It most likely is in grams of TNT not grams of antimatter.

[u/Skolloc753 → u/KarlMrax]

Since a nano missile is described being able a building it would require something in the region of a few dozen or hundred kilogram of TNT, or the equivalent of 0.x gram of antimatter.

SYL

[u/KarlMrax → u/Skolloc753]

Sure, Nanomissiles in the drawings have a yield of 200kg in the drawings which would be plenty to level a building.

The 2mm rounds though are quite a bit weaker in the drawings for whatever reason.

I will not pretend to understand why some of the numbers in the Drawings are the way they are.

[u/OneCatch → u/KarlMrax]

212 grams of TNT equivalent would be a hand grenade, which feels way too low given the destructiveness observed. On the other hand, 212 grams of antimatter is megaton territory which seems way too high.

Might be a disparity. Or perhaps 'normal' micromissiles are grenade yield but there are enhanced yield ones with 10x or 100x the antimatter used for specific purposes.

[u/KarlMrax → u/OneCatch]

At least in the Drawings the MDAWS knife missile carries 1700 rounds of ammunition and in the feat it is firing all of them. That gets it to ~360 kilos in total.

[u/OneCatch]

One other feat: the equiv-tech Elench drone in Excession had sufficient repair capability to try to fashion an anti-matter engine from scratch, when heavily damaged, using crude materials and damaged components, over the course of a couple of seconds/minutes.

And it was further planning to bootstrap its own nanotech repair capability entirely from scratch, though it did note that it would take about a month to fashion the initial batch of nanobots, write software with which to programme them, get them self replicating, and fix itself.

[u/FaceDeer]

Another thing to bear in mind is that drones are often geniuses and they have a ton of technical knowledge. So if you put them in a scenario like "can a single Culture combat drone conquer Holy Terra?" It's not going to be a straight up slug-fest. The drone can readily determine "these guys have enough dakka to be a threat to me but they're morons and nobody gave me a time limit" and then go off to hide somewhere for a few years while it builds an army or doomsday weapon or whatever. Or it could hack the planet, or it could convince the Mechanicus that it's the Double Omnissiah and they should work for it, or so forth. They have big guns but that doesn't mean they are just big guns.

[u/deltree711 → u/FaceDeer]

To be clear, the smartest drones are on par with the smartest humans. They can think faster but they're still limited to 3-dimensional thinking, as opposed to Minds, which exist partly in 4 dimensions.

[u/OneCatch → u/deltree711]

Not so. Banks makes the point in a few places that drone intelligence varies significantly - they assess war casualties and certain types of democratic voting on an 'intellect sliding scale', for example.

But even a drone or augmented human with 5 or 10 or 20x the raw intellect of the average human is still nothing compared to a Mind, so all non-Mind intelligences within a broad range m kind of get bundled together.

Also, some drones are capable of warp travel, which implies that they are capable of '4-dimensional thinking', even if their processing faculties aren't actually hosted within hyperspace like that of a Mind.

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