Krancor said:
If anything, your defenses sound dangerous and prone to failing in a way that kills you spectacularly. Your best defense is secrecy, and I am pretty sure that surrounding a hill with tank traps and barbed wire eliminates any chance you had of that.
Are you kidding? Over here, barbed wire and tank traps are the norm. If he were living out here, he'd fit in just fine with the rest of us. Most people are more concerned with keeping rampaging cattle and runaway tractors at bay, but eh, what stops runaway tractors works just as well against any other vehicle. A point can be made that excessively visible exterior defenses attract unnecessary attention, though. I would recommend that he design with the intent of specifically allowing an attacker to get indoors before laying on the heat. There's all sorts of fun you can have inside.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
... and all of my planning hinges on any attacker being no brighter than this dude. This is approximately what I expect. I reckon people like this would not get beyond perimeter one. Since there are six rings of defense possible around the shelter, this is the kind of guy I would just expect to find dead on the perimeter while I am out trimming the hedges. My strategy assumes a native intelligence equivalent to this rocket scientist.
That's not a very sound defensive strategy. You might want to plan ahead for what you intend to do about someone a bit smarter than that.
Krancor said:
All someone needs is a sniper rifle to train on your entrance, and you're toast, no matter what you do, if you ever plan on coming out. 200 yards of defenses is not much. At 200 yards virtually anyone with a scoped rifle can take you out, and you won't even know they are out there til you walk out for some fresh air and get some right in your brain. For someone who's a good shot, they would not even need a scope for that. If someone had a genuine sniper rifle they could take you out at 1000 yards easily.
Oh, come on. Have you been playing too much Counterstrike? What's somebody gonna do, sit there all day waiting for the off chance Cleve might come out? This issue is nothing a distactionary smoke screen cannot resolve.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
Maybe you're too clever for that and instead will choose a slow creep up the ravine. This is great because it is lined with CCD cameras and at the mouth of the ravine is a small concrete cylinder poking out of the ravine wall.
Suggestion: While the surveilance equipment never hurts, you cannot seriously be suggesting that you're going to sit there all day and watch. Plus, cameras have only a limited area of visibility and it is quite likely that a determined attacker will sabotage these cameras, preventing you from seeing anything at all. You have to assume that you're going to be operating blind against any kind of serious attack.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
You'll be relieved to know that we don't intend to shoot anybody from this observation point, though. It's just a remote perch where we can watch the homemade napalm cannon flood the ravine with sticky flaming fuel out to about 100 meters without any hope of cover.
Suggestion: This tactic works better indoors. It requires considerably more fuel to set fire to an area outdoors, and you won't get the fun of depleting the oxygen supply for the attacking force. Also, there's the fact that storing such equipment outside is unreliable and makes resupply a logistical nightmare under fire.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
One of the greatest features of my mountain is that is it always chockablock with dead wood, so should we come under attack by a force of more than 100 people (unlikely this millennium, but still) we simply light up the entire mountain and seal the blast valve. Within a half an hour, temperatures outside climbing to 600 degrees in the resulting uncontrolled firestorm will pretty much clear the entire plain out to 4 kilometers, with the only hope of survival to immediately evacuate the area ahead of the fire.
That could make things a bit uncomfortable inside. I would also point out that A: The area is probably not as flammable as you are hoping, or else this would have already happened by accident due to lightning or your testing of the aforementioned napalm launcher (You *ARE* testing this stuff, right? How can you be sure any of it works if you never test? I hope that's not the philsophy you're applying to that game of yours!). In any event, one shot deal. It will burn out and your attackers will only have been delayed slightly.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
I never said I had rotating sentry guns.
You should definitely work on correcting this deficiency. Sentry guns are a cheap and effective method of defense both indoors and out, although measures must be taken to protect against weathering in outdoor deployments. You can automate these with a simple targeting mechanism you can create from commonly available electronics. I suggest adhering to the KISS principle here: Don't go with fancy logic. Just a crude motion tracker should do the job. If it moves, shoot it until it stops. Rotation is not, strictly speaking, a necessary feature in many deployments and will add unnecessary complexity to the system. Unnecessary complexity should be avoided as it represents an additional point of failure and will increase your maintenance requirements. This is very important to keep in mind if you expect your compound to be maintainable by just you and your family: I've seen many an extravagant design simply fail in practice because the maintenance requirements are simply too onerous and the entire thing falls into utter disrepair in a year. And above all, test, test, test. Even then, expect a failure rate of at least 50% as a baseline average for any given system when it hits the fan.
Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:
See that smiley? My observer can put a bullet through those two eyes at the fenceline day or night. Is that too far out for you? Too many big words?
That'd be convenient if the post was manned 24/7. I would consider this to be an unfeasible approach. Who is this observer, anyway? You? If it's not you, who DO you have manning this post at this moment? I would imagine whoever it is is frightfully bored and not at all paying attention to what's going on out there.