Paragon wrote:@Solemn, what about flashbangs, or any other weapon that could disrupt hearing and line of sight?
I'm not sure what this question actually means or why it is being addressed to me.
I will assume you mean to imply that those things would diminish a telekinetic's ability to perform its duty.
So, I guess my answer is yeah, probably?
But my understanding is that flashbangs of the modern era have to be thrown or placed right next to the target, and a telekinetic could repel them with her mind, and setting them up in advance would be slightly more problematic than it would against human foes.
For instance, rooms booby-trapped with tripwires or pressure-triggered mines beneath the floor wouldn't offer an effective trap, as a telekinetic who had reason to suspect such would pat the walls and floor where she intended to walk down first. So people who use those sorts of traps (the oldest sort known to man, pits lined with sharp sticks and all that) would switch to things like optically triggered or timed or remote controlled explosives and other things that a telekinetic can't trigger prematurely by patting down.
Plus, things like infantry taking cover behind
anything (not just corners or hallways or other ambush points) would be a bit less useful against someone who can reach around or through cover to smash you with her brain; sure, we have grenades and explosives that can get around cover right now, but if videogames have taught me anything it's that a cheap sofa will stop bullets and completely protect you from an enormous explosion.
There may be some sarcasm in that sentence. I don't know how useful cover actually is in modern infantry combat, but since it seems to take place in cities instead of open fields I'd guess "a lot." It's still just a guess.
On the telekinetic's end, cover is slightly less necessary, she could probably project some field to deflect smaller and lighter projectiles that would have been grazing hits or whatnot, and enemies taking cover is less problematic, since she can, again, reach around it.
I'd think the Loroi would adapt to infantry combat in different ways than we have, and would have done so since the bronze age; Alex mentioned that the warriors he saw seem to have a strong touching taboo, whereas, say, a Norse shield-wall or a Greek Phalanx would have men holding their shields over the guy next to or in front of them, so the men would be pretty close to having some skin-to-skin contact with one another. The Loroi don't seem to have been trained to deal with that, and the Loroi seem (to me) to be a hidebound, conservative society who would have kept up the ancestral training practices (the whole warrior rites thing, right?) so they might never have developed shield- or spear-wall infantry tactics. If they didn't, it seems to me that's probably because of telekinetics being able to behave like highly accurate artillery, rather than just because touching is awkward; if infantry walls were as effective for them as they were for us, I have no doubt that the Loroi would have used them, and suspect that the training practices would carry over into the modern warriors, and reduce the touch taboo.
Imagine some sort of microwaves that work trough walls and stuff like that. We are developing crowd control systems like that. The next step is to make it portable and stronger.
