How capable would this android be against a modern military?

Question

So I was thinking about a concept where this scientist/engineer in a post-apocalyptic America/an America-esque country(the rest of the world is pretty much normal) makes this android(a female if you must know) to defend his village of survivors from from a group known as the Capital(name may be diffrent) trying to reclaim the land. That group pretty much has modern day weapons, although they do have advanced weapons as well.

I was wondering how well this android would do if she fought an onslaught of modern-day soldiers. Here are her stats:

Agility: Can jump around 28 feet in a standing jump unencumbered, and up to 50 feet if she crouches and stores a bit of energy. She can climb walls like a gecko.

Durability: She can fall off the world's tallest building pretty much undamaged. Is more fireproof then asbestos and and can remain in liquid nitrogen for at least 28 hours without being affected. She is also pretty much acid-proof and shock-proof.

Intelligence: Einstein+ as she has pretty much the knowledge of all of Wikipedia and similar sites in her memory.

Speed: Unencumbered she can run around 50 MH on 2 legs and 100 on all four.

Stamina: Can run/lift/drag at full capacity for around 28 hours with out starting to overclock herself.

Strength: Can lift 12 1/2 to 14 times her bodyweight of 160 pounds.

Answer 1

She is too smart to just do battle.

She is strategic and intelligent. She will determine what the Capital is looking for and use her skills to gain audience with its leader/leaders. She will propose an approach which meets their needs much better and also advances the cause of the people in her village.

She does not return to the village because persons in the Capital have other problems that she can help with as regards strategy and tactics and they ask her to stay. These are not military problems but larger problems involving governance.

She winds up the leader of the Capital as well as her village and adjoining areas, which are peacefully incorporated so as to better advance their common interests.

120 years later she rules the entire world. Humanity thrives under her canny governance, and she is getting smarter. She has not had to put her liquid nitrogen resistance powers to the test.

Answer 2

She weighs 160 pounds. Unless she can defy the laws of physics, a rocket launched grenade will knock her off her feet. Given her strength, roughly 2240 lbs, she can be restrained with a few strands of 1/4" nylon double braid rope. Including lassoed.

The reality is, the bad guys are not going to come one at a time. She may be invincible one-on-one, but can she defeat 24 men at once trying to wrap her up? Trying to net her? Constantly shooting at her? Bullets carry massive momentum; enough of them and she can't maintain her balance.

Any military commander will recognize the problem quickly, withdraw, and create a pincer movement on her.

Or multiple lines of attack on their target (not her). How is she going to defend from 3 directions simultaneously, if the instructions of the commander are for the closest battalion to her to constantly fire on her, so the other battalions can make progress?

Every time she turns to stop one, the other two advance. I don't see her as an effective defense against an "onslaught" of soldiers directed by an actual battle strategist. And you DID say "modern day soldiers," so they probably won't be under the command of a complete moron.

Her best bet is guerilla warfare; not confrontation. Use her near invincibility in small battles, try to take out the officers, strike and withdraw to strike somewhere else. If she is capable of it, use her apparent weakness and vulnerability as a female to lure soldiers into a false sense of security; pretend to be a woman escaping somebody else's custody. Let them think they have captured her, then kill them all.

If you are going to sustain remotely plausible physics, then no android is so strong it cannot be overwhelmed.

Otherwise, you are just writing a supergirl story. Which is fine, but if you are just writing supergirl, then she'll win easily over an onslaught of soldiers. Super speed, invincible, heat vision, freeze breathe, etc.

Answer 3

The military

• has the advantage of many individual soldiers acting intelligently toward a single goal where the android, powerful as it is, can only defend or attack one location at a time.
• has the advantage of vehicles carrying more and much heavier armaments than the android can carry.
• has the advantage of ammunition stockpiles and dedicated personnel to resupply units, where the android has only whatever ammunition it carries with it.

Most likely, the first unit that encounters it takes heavy casualties but reports back on the nature of its capabilities and then the android gets engaged at a range at which it cannot respond (e.g. anti-tank guided missile, airstrike, autocannon, etc.) most likely by multiple units in a coordinated operation and is destroyed.

Answer 4

In outright fighting, she's toast. If the group is small enough, she can outrun and kill them one by one by sheer speed and strength. However, lay some traps (say a couple claymores or a snare) and the soldiers have more options.

Say they snare her, an APFSDS round will eat through a foot or so of solid steel. Not to mention the effect that cavitation would have if she were a soft body instead of solid steel.

Say they can't snare her but can laser paint her. A Javelin surface to air missile could track her and come from unexpected angles with speed she can't match or dodge. And a Javelin is able to down tanks and helicopters.

Aside from that. A couple of .50 Cal machine guns on the back of trucks could pepper her full of holes with normal rounds, and possibly shred her with thermite rounds. Even being fireproof does not prevent high temperature rounds from ablating the surface away over time.

The adage that if you absolutely, positively need something destroyed overnight is not just a joke. The military has no shortage of weapons to do so.

Answer 5

This android is slim, fast, and smart so she's not going to wait for them to come to her, she's going to go to them. Infiltration is the tactic to use.

Slip in at night and kill people as they sleep. Hit the high ranking officers first. If the encampment is too big or parts are too heavily fortified or guarded, leave evidence and a trail to a neighboring Capital camp and let them fight amongst themselves. They'll use up plenty of ammunition and lives before they realize it was a setup.

She will also boobytrap Capital equipment. Putting in barrel plugs on unguarded large weapons, disabling vehicles so they don't start, draining oil/fuel/coolant so equipment only runs for a short time, cutting brakes, adding remote detonated explosives, and more will cause confusion, spread out enemy forces as they have to deal with disabled vehicles, have equipment fail or explode during an engagement, and make the android seem to be "everywhere at the same time".

Ambushes are going to be a staple of her defense. Setting up punji stick traps, large ruts to hamper small vehicles and troops, claymore mines, regular mines, boobytrapped bait, decoys, tripwire hand grenades, automated firing systems, and more are what she's going to use as a frontline while she comes in around the side or from behind to take advantage of her surprises. She's also going to use low tech options, too, like in the first Predator movie.

Underground tunnels are also going to be an advantage to her and hamper the enemy, as she'll be able to pop up "wherever", then disappear again quickly. Even if the soldiers get into the tunnels, they are going to be designed for her small body on all 4's, not "burly men" with all kinds of body armor and equipment/ammo/weapons. These tunnels can also be boobytrapped so only she can navigate them without damage.

Her mind is her greatest weapon, not her body. Even though she can take a lot of punishment, that's really just there as a last line of defense for when someone accidentally manages to shoot her or an explosive fragment is impossible to dodge. With her skills as a tactician, along with her speed, stealth, and other skills, she'll get a reputation as a "boogeyman".

Soldiers won't want to fight the villages she protects. This fear will be propagated by the few enemy she leave alive specifically so they can spread the tales of her dominance. And those tales will grow and become legend to the point where literally no one wants to try anything, except for some poor fools that end up dead, which only add reinforcement to the legends.

After a while, her reputation is what protects the village(s) she is said to protect, and that can be a more powerful thing than anything else.

Answer 6

There's a couple of things worth considering here.

The first is that traditional/trope-laden Post-Apoc (PA for short) android fiction tends to rely heavily on a lot of hand-waving.

Nothing is created in a void, and the number of technologies, and specialisations which need to be drawn together to build a "super human" android are huge. And in a PA-world, a village would simply not have the ability to create their own technologies - everything from refining metals, creating alloys, machining parts, producing high-spec CPUs, etc require huge amounts of raw resources and vast amounts of knowledge, experience and specialisation. And that requires large numbers of people, which in turn require vast amounts of food, etc.

As such, if someone in a Post-Apoc (PA for short) world is able to build a high-spec humanoid android, then the only way they realistically can do that is by bolting together widely available and standardised existing technology.

Which means that our scientist is either bolting stuff together which was created pre-collapse, or has somehow traded with external entities to get the technologies he needs.

Which in turn means that if the rest of the world hasn't suffered a PA collapse, then any culture able to fund and sustain a "modern army" will be aware of this technology and will have been able to develop their own technologies and techniques to counter it. More importantly, they'll almost certainly have their own androids, which are likely to be more advanced than some junker thrown together in a PA village...

Equally, I'd question some of the features being given to this android. E.g. what materials is this android made of which can be immersed in liquid nitrogen (at least -340F/-196C) without becoming brittle[*]? Assuming the android looks human (given that you've given it a gender), then her skin and hair in particular will just snap and break off when it moves, so you'd end up with some sort of Terminator endo-skeleton wandering around. And even then, that's only if there's nothing within the android's body which would be equally prone to breaking if flexed at that temperature.

(Conversely, I guess the android could maintain an internal heat source, but a hell of a lot of power would be needed, it'd need to be able to deliver said heat to all of it's limb virtually instantaneously and all of that liquid nitrogen would immediately vapourise. Which would be a bit of a clue to watchers that there's something odd going on... Either way, how many vats of liquid nitrogen will be left just lying around in a PA landscape?)

I could add more about the physics of some of the other things mentioned, especially when it comes to the "super intelligent" AI for this machine, but for now, I'll just flag the idea that this android can run faster on 4 limbs than 2? Humanoid forms just aren't designed to work this way, so unless it's somehow able to transform into something resembling a horse? Even then, some impressively wierd engineering would be needed; 4-legged animals tend to have "reverse jointed" rear legs which are the same length as their forelegs, so unless this is some sort of T-1000 "liquid metal", it'd have to both rotate its rear kneecaps and stretch it's arms...

Unless of course, it doesn't look human. But then, it's not a "she".

Which takes us to the next fun bit: how would a modern military deal with a super-tough, super-smart android? Assuming of course, that it actually decides to get involved with physical combat.

And for this, I'll lean once again on the Terminator movies a bit. And I'm going to assume that the android is going to want to physically fight, despite the fact that it's meant to be super-intelligent.

Against small groups of human soldiers, then the android is probably going to able to run riot. And if the android has any sense, it'd go for divide-and-conquer style tactics to whittle the enemy down, or target their senior command. Maybe even raid their capital city to kill or threaten the political leaders (though see previous comments about how they're likely to have their own android guards...).

But even then, once the military realises it exists, it wouldn't be that hard to set up a killzone which negates it's advantages.

After all, it can't be everywhere at once; any sufficiently "evil" military would simply send in a hard massed assault on the village. Because then, you either draw the android out and destroy it in direct combat, or you force it into a situation (e.g. by taking hostages) which funnel it into a tight space which negate it's capabilities.

You could even just send in a tank or some bombers or even a cruise missile to eliminate the village, unless they have significant radar and missile defence technology and the infrastructure to maintain them. And at that point, are they really a village?

And what happens if/when the village is captured? Either the scientist is forced to order it to surrender, or the army can simply destroy the village; what happens to the android's "super-intelligent" motivations at that point?

Beyond that, a humanoid robot with an endoskeleton isn't going too be too hard to take down with modern military weaponry: you can watch something like the TAOFLEDERMAUS channel on Youtube to see how even "home-made" 12-gauge bullets can chew chunks out of plate steel, never mind military armor-piercing shells and the like. And at 160lb, this android sounds too light to have any significant amount of armoring.

There's also the question as to how much damage an android could actually take. Obviously, it could handle the loss of one or more limbs far better than a living creature could, and any designer worth their salt would put the CPU and power source in the chest, and shield them as much as possible. But this also means that any body shots are highly likely to take the android down, especially one as lightly armored as this one. And that's before you consider what happens if any support systems are damaged, such as cooling for the power supply. Or what happens if someone gets a head-shot in? One weakness of the humanoid form is that most of our sensors are in the head; how many useful sensors can you install elsewhere in a "human" android which wouldn't make it look inhuman?

Conversely, you've got the T-1000 liquid metal/nanotech approach, and a machine which could literally dissolve into the ground, seep through any cracks and effectively ignore bullets (to a point). But at that point, we're getting even deeper into science-fantasy.

Fundamentally, and no matter how powerful, any individual trying to defend a static position against a large and equally capable army is going to lose. Because they can't be everywhere at once, and they're constrained in what they can do.

Unless you do a lot of handwaving, as per most fiction involving military robots ;)

[*] I know Roy dips his hand into liquid nitrogen in Bladerunner, but this is a fairly big bit of handwaving, given that the entire premise of Bladerunner is that androids are physically indistinguisable from humans and can only be detected by psychological tests. A simple DNA test or chemical scan should have been able to detect physical capabilities such as these...