The Last Battleship
I am not sure in what sense Iowa is the 'last battleship.' It does not seem to have been the very last in commission, but more likely was the last to be 'striken' from the navy list. This came after it rusticated for some years in the Suisun Bay mothball fleet, out of commission but at least nominally available for refurbishment and return to service. (In fact, it seems that even as a museum ship it is in some theoretical sense still available. But its next berth will almost certainly be its last.)
By exquisite coincidence Iowa passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on the day before the bridge's 75th anniversary celibration, and also happened to coincide with the commemoration of Memorial Day, the 'Murrican counterpart to Remembrance Day.
It all lends itself to any number of reflections. Swords and plowshares: After a lifetime of honorable service (70 years since launch, less a few months), Iowa is headed for a twilight afterlife as a waterfront exhibit, while the bridge remains a major regional traffic artery.
The transience of grandeur: The battleship era still conveys a powerful image, but it was remarkably brief, and Iowa's career belongs almost entirely to its epilogue. None of its class was ever seriously tested as a battleship, i.e. in action against enemy battleships.
In World War II the Iowas were used primarily as carrier escorts. During the Cold War era they were periodically recommissioned for offshore fire support. Functionally they were no longer capital ships, though size and impressiveness certainly qualified them for maintaining a presence, one of the most fundamental naval missions.
The first battleship is considerably harder to identify. The last generation of sailing 2-deckers and 3-deckers were called 'line of battle ships' in place of the older 'ships of the line.' But this usage disappeared when ironclads came along.
The first generation of ironclads had an amazing variety of armament layouts and general configurations. No one knew what the capital ship of the future would be like, which gives the era a wonderfully steampunkish flavor. Russia's Admiral Popov was a radical design even for the era, but shows how unsettled the design possibilities were.
By the 1880s the more bizarrely creative designs were set aside. A relatively standard type of capital ship emerged, exemplified by HMS Royal Sovereign, laid down 1889, and the term 'battle ship' came into use to describe them.
Today we mainly know them as pre-dreadnoughts. Let us pause to admire the meta-ness of that term. Pre-dreadnoughts ruled the waves for a generation, but for nearly all of that time absolutely no one thought of them as 'pre-dreadnoughts.' Our ideas about these ships are inevitably filtered through their successors, and for half the battleship era retrospective time flows backward.
The last engagement between battleships - there were never very many - was Surigao Strait in 1944, so that the battleship era lasted just 55 years. If we take Pearl Harbor as the end of battleship supremacy, 52 years. Thus the battleship epilogue, exemplified by Iowa's career, lasted considerably longer than the battleship era itself did.
In fact the battleship era was transitory, not really an 'era' at all. This may be kept in mind when thinking - and most of you are inevitably thinking - of battleships' possible future spacegoing counterparts. Relatively short periods can stand out in our minds and become nearly timeless 'eras,' when in fact they only lasted a few decades.
That said, in an an age of post-industrial technological maturity the overall configuration of capital vehicles might be as stable as it was in the age of sail.
Capital vehicles - how is that for a colorless expression? I have argued before in this blog, more than once, that the familiar and time-honored naval analogy may be misleading when it comes to space forces. Laser stars, as I have speculated about them, have only a fairly tenuous similarity to 'battleships.' If kinetics are dominant, the platforms from which they are deployed might be even more remote from the battleship image.
On the other hand, the similarities might turn out to be greater, if only because impressive weapon systems have power-political significance that extends well beyond their purely military characteristics.
Discuss.
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My phone camera image of Iowa passing under the Golden Gate Bridge was too low-res to be worth posting. The Tumblr image above comes from this naval history page.
1,169 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 1001 – 1169 of 1169Congrats on reaching a thousand. And I see automiscorrect screwed up part of my last post lol
1000+ comments! Woot!
Rockets are indeed more efficient in a vacuum, but the performance improvement is relatively modest. Certainly no chemfuel can approach 100 km/s. Typically figure about 3-5 km/s per rocket stage.
There's the great man theory of history va the theory of historical forces and interchangeable figures. If ten gangsters fight for a city, one will win but if not him then any of the others will serve. His success was a mix of luck and talent and in no way inevitable.
My personal belief is somewhat in the middle. A great man cannot arise out of nothing. He is dependent on time and place and the vast movements of history. Alexander born in middle America could just as easily been a ashore salesman or a television infomercial huckster. Hitler could have lived our his life as a portrait artist in the park whose musings on race and politics are considered quaint bohemian kitsch.
I think this also holds true for war. Some military leaders have a spark of genius but their gifts are also subject to the realities of their war. There's no way a nazi or imperial Japanese genius could have won their respective wars. Other times, starting conditions are so close that individual genius makes all the difference.
As humans I think that we put too much importance on individuals because they are easier to identify with. We strive for clear narratives when the truth is that things are messy, random, and inelegant. But the reflexive discounting of individual contribution to the shaping of history is equally flawed. Therefore I think the truth is a sloppy mix and march of individual genius and historical inevitability mixed with a heaping scoop of historical revisionism and spin-doctoring which can also be called myth-building.
I would use the river analogy to describe it. Rivers flow through geography. They seek the lowest gravitational point. This is physics. Where that point is will be fact. But there are so many quirks that make for a ricer's course. Why here and not there? What is the tripping point?
The river analogy is useful because so much human history turns on quirks of geography like this. And rivers can meander. In fact, human efforts to control and shape these courses may work for a number of years and convince us that we have tamed nature but then events demonstrate to us the inadequacy of our imagination and what we believed we could control.
I think the truth is that there are tipping points where individuals can shape the flow of the river and the two mistakes would be imagining that the individual was responsible for the river in the first place or that their contribution to changing the flow was a non-event and any other person in a similar situation could have adhesives the same result.
Locki:
"A couple of quick points. I got a mate who just finished up staff college but I still have trouble wrapping my head around the concepts. Here's a couple of definitions as promised earlier:
1. Definition of Manoeuvre pre-1980 = 'forces are manoueuvted to gain an advantage over the enemy, to close with him and destroy him>'
2. Definition Manouevere post 3GW = 'is the dynamic elemnt of combat, the means of concentrating forces in critical areas to gain and to use the advantages of surprise, psychological shock, position and momentum which enable smaller forces to defeat larger ones.'"
The second definition is pure sales talk. See above why it's patent nonsense.
(BTW, Locki, my argument is not with you, it's with the whole "Maneuver Warfare" scam.)
Gee, go away for the weekend and the post count goes past 1000...
Getting back to manoeuvre warfare for a second, it can take place in all levels of warfare; OPERATION MICHAEL in 1918 (the German spring offensive) used what we would recognize as manoeuvre warfare principles such as surprise, bypassing enemy strongpoints, tactical decision making at the lowest level and so on in a very high density force to space environment. They made large penetrations of the British line, but failed to follow up successfully (there are many different opinions as to why, so I won't get into that here). Much of German military thought during the inter war period was devoted to studying the lessons of WWI and updating these lessons to take into account modern technology such as radios and vastly improved tans and aircraft..
PMF space warfare can be "manoeuvre" if there is some way to pull your enemy forces out of position (i.e. they have expended most of their delta V) before you arrive, but once battle is joined then it is a pretty straight up shooting match. Semi magitech items like magsails might work if you can use them to move your forces around the solar system without expending a lot of your on board fuel and remass; but this presupposes your opponents somehow don't have access to this technology, or can't figure out what you are doing. Given the long travel times and ability to observe all your actions, it won't take too long to discover what is happening. Only really high level operatic drives (like CoDominium/Empire of Man fusion drives) would really provide much of an edge in the tactical or strategic realm.
Locki said:"The USN has completely replaced Phalanx with the much longer ranged Sea Ram."
Where are you getting your information? I know that the missile has supplimented the gun, but to my knowledge, the Phalanx is still used: the Navy simply added another layer of protection.
Oh, and any rocket's theoretical maximum velocity is twice the exhast velocity; I doubt that an SM-3 (even in a vacuum) could reach 100 kps fast enough to reach burn-out before a target ship blew it up and/or lesurely moved out of it's path.
Ferrell
Thucydides:
"Getting back to manoeuvre warfare for a second, it can take place in all levels of warfare; OPERATION MICHAEL in 1918 (the German spring offensive) used what we would recognize as manoeuvre warfare principles such as surprise, bypassing enemy strongpoints, tactical decision making at the lowest level and so on in a very high density force to space environment. They made large penetrations of the British line, but failed to follow up successfully (there are many different opinions as to why, so I won't get into that here). Much of German military thought during the inter war period was devoted to studying the lessons of WWI and updating these lessons to take into account modern technology such as radios and vastly improved tans and aircraft."
In 1918 movement was restored at the tactical level. But the Germans just couldn't follow up tactical breakthroughs with operational ones. The mobility of the horsedrawn offensive just couldn't match the mobility of the railroad carried defensive. At the strategic level, the attrition -- a half million casualties druing the spring and summer -- was insupportable. Ludendorff's armies gained a considerable amount of ground, but they burned themselves out doing it.
What the Germans learned from that is that the tactical breakthrough had to be carried forward into an operational breakthrough by fully motorized forces. That was the genesis of the panzer division and motorized infantry divisions. What a lot of people don't really comprehend is that the panzer division was not really about tanks. It was about motorized infantry, artillery, engineers, reconnaissance, and communications to support those tanks as they maneuvered.
Ferrell:
"Oh, and any rocket's theoretical maximum velocity is twice the exhast velocity; I doubt that an SM-3 (even in a vacuum) could reach 100 kps fast enough to reach burn-out before a target ship blew it up and/or lesurely moved out of it's path."
That's why you use something more like an IRBM-sized booster, carrying a bus with dozens or hundreds of KKVs.
Sorry guys. Just ignore that post about the delta-V of chemical rockets and SM-3s. I got a bit carried away thinking a SM-3 had enough fuel to constantly thrust and sustain 2-3kps for its entire flight profile whilst subject to continuous drag from the atmosphere. I then extrapolated and arrived at a stupid figure when thrusting in a vacuum. Its delta-V in a vacuum is of course only related to its mass ratio and its exhaust velocity. Doh!
But working through that mind problem did bring up an interesting thought. Unlike atmospheric bound weapons, bigger missiles will not necessarily have more range (delta-V) in a vacuum. So given your fixed payload of say 1kg depleted uranium lnog rod penetrator and 1-2 kg of sensors and popcorn thrusters there will be an ideal size for a missile given these parameters.
Could something like a 15kg stinger MANPADS (or maybe a 150kg AMRAAM) have just as much delta-V as a huge single stage 2 tonne anti-ship missile? Regardless any current day missile capable of sustained mach 1+ flight (Stinger/Sidewinder/AMRAAM etc etc) is going to reach a hellaciously high speed and will hit you with more KE than an M1-A2 Abrams 120mm discarding sabot round. Surely armor is irrelevent in a space setting. Ditto lasers!
Tony re: manoeuver warfare
I have to admit from a laypersons perspective the "new" definition of manoeuver sounds a bit convoluted. If tennis were an analogy for warfare I can't help but think it'd be a bit like a new touchy-feely, tree-huggy hippie tennis coach telling Federer: "Now Roger, the purpose of your footwork is to dazzle and befuddle your enemy into surrendering the match due to the shock and awe of your sheer err awesomeness."
Meanwhile the Russian coaches are telling their proteges: "Ivan, I want you to run to the ball as quickly as possible so you can hit it back with interest to any one of 5 different points on the court."
Speaking of which has anyone read much about the Russian theories of warfare especially the operational level? My reading is pre-WWII the Russians were very advanced in their theorems of armored warfare before Stalin purged them. Twice. Guderian was greatly influenced by some of their ideas.
My same mate spoke to me that the russians always had some different ideas to western generals. The big example I remember is they'd prefer not to rush their reserves to the weakpoint in their own line. They'd prefer to double down and throw their reserves at the enemies line and hope to bust the enemy up faster than they are busted up. Its an interesting, presumably equally valid theory on the use of reserves. But its just so, well russian!
Re: WWII Panzer divisions
I thought the Panzer divisions were still slightly old fashioned and not trully "fully motorised" since their logistics train was antiquated and still relied on horse drawn supplies? I know they motorized almost everything but it was an incongruous fact they their supply train was WWI level antiquated.
Where are you getting your information? I know that the missile has supplimented the gun, but to my knowledge, the Phalanx is still used: the Navy simply added another layer of protection.
Ferrell
===============
Nah. Sadly that big bad 20mm gatling cannon has not been included in the recent Gerald Ford CVNs, nor the latest Burke destroyers now even the dinky little LCS. They are all pretty much using the phalanx sensor mout but replacing the cannon with Sea RAM. http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/littoral/.
From what I can gather if a ship already has the gatling gun they'll keep it (a recent software modification means they make excellent anti-insurgent weapons!) but new build warships don't bother. This has always been part of my bias against lasers. Even today dumb fire weapons are on the way out.
Locki:
"Tony re: manoeuver warfare
I have to admit from a laypersons perspective the 'new' definition of manoeuver sounds a bit convoluted. If tennis were an analogy for warfare I can't help but think it'd be a bit like a new touchy-feely, tree-huggy hippie tennis coach telling Federer: 'Now Roger, the purpose of your footwork is to dazzle and befuddle your enemy into surrendering the match due to the shock and awe of your sheer err awesomeness.'
Meanwhile the Russian coaches are telling their proteges: 'Ivan, I want you to run to the ball as quickly as possible so you can hit it back with interest to any one of 5 different points on the court.'"
That's an analogy I wouldn't have thought of, but it catches a great deal of the spirit of the "Maneuver Warfare" theorist. But the central theme is that Maneuver is good and attrition is bad. To which the astute student of military history would respond, no -- maneuver is what you do to position your forces to achieve favorable attrition.
Oh, well. These fads in military affairs never last.
"Speaking of which has anyone read much about the Russian theories of warfare especially the operational level? My reading is pre-WWII the Russians were very advanced in their theorems of armored warfare before Stalin purged them. Twice. Guderian was greatly influenced by some of their ideas."
I don't know if Guderian was ever really influenced by the Soviets. It's true that the Soviets gave the Germans a place to practice and develop doctrine out of sight of the WW1 Western Allies. But the Germans were, in the end, just applying modern technology to their own doctrinal theory of envelopment and anihiliation.
As for the Soviets themselves, they had a pretty well-formed idea about operational battle in mobile warfare. But the actual application, given their capabilities in WW2, was pretty heavy-handed. They'd use mass artillery fire and infantry attacks on a very narrow frontage to gain a tactical breakthrough, then shovel in the tank and maechanized corps (and cavalry divisions) to gain as much ground as possible. They'd usually pick up a couple hundred kilometers of ground, on a fairly broad front. (The Germans, not being stupid enough to sit still and be surrounded, if they could avoid it, would pull back to defensible lines. Later on, as they got weaker and the Soviets got stronger, the Germans couldn't in fact avoid seeing large numbers of their troops enveloped and captured.)
"My same mate spoke to me that the russians always had some different ideas to western generals. The big example I remember is they'd prefer not to rush their reserves to the weakpoint in their own line. They'd prefer to double down and throw their reserves at the enemies line and hope to bust the enemy up faster than they are busted up. Its an interesting, presumably equally valid theory on the use of reserves. But its just so, well russian!"
Well, on the offensive, any competent commander knows to reinforce success. The Soviets were just really pronounced in their application, in that they'd pick a spot where they wanted to achieve a breakthrough level of success and just pile up the artillery, assault troops, and tank/mechanized/cavalry exploitation forces in that sector. Then they'd attack until they either broke through or ran out of force to achieve a breakthrough.
Locki:
"Re: WWII Panzer divisions
I thought the Panzer divisions were still slightly old fashioned and not trully 'fully motorised' since their logistics train was antiquated and still relied on horse drawn supplies? I know they motorized almost everything but it was an incongruous fact they their supply train was WWI level antiquated."
The panzer and motorized infantry divisions were fully motorized.
The infantry divisions had motorized reconnaissance and anti-tank battalions. They also had motor vehicles for administrative and liaison tasks, and some motorized transport columns. But the division as a whole could only maneuver as fast as their horsedrawn units, which included their infantry and artillery regiments.
So, in army level offensive operations, the panzer divisions would rush out ahead, the motorized infantry would try to hold the road open behind the panzers, and the infantry would march hard to keep up and secure the flanks of the penetration. In Poland and France, the war was on a scale that that could be managed over the course of a few weeks to win a campaign.
In Russia and Africa, the space was just too big. The panzers could make large advances, but the marching infantry just couldn't keep up after the first hundred miles or so. Also, the German strategic logistics relied on railroads, which had to be rebuilt, thanks to the Russian non-standard gauge. In Africa there just wasn't any rail support, so the army was stuck trying to supply itself over a thousand miles away from its base with trucks.
By the way, i think we managed to collect something, that would be worth mentioning on atomic rockets.
Its a great site, but to say fighters are inefficient because they need return fuel but not investigating all other torpedo boat missions, reusablity and other issues... i have to call it oversimplification...
Some general observations:
1. Missiles max speed by itself is irrelevant in space operations; the orbital velocity is several to many times greater than whatever the missile itself can achieve. Interplanetary speeds are greater still.
2. Relative velocities can also be manipulated by selecting the orbital paths and approaches. A "slow" missile could be impossible to stop if it is on a retrograde orbit (2X the closing velocity)
3. I think that much of the discussion on 2GW and 3GW theory is a misunderstanding about application. The answer (as I understand it) is while there is both attrittion and manoeuvre happening, the primacy is given to the destruction of enemy forces in 2GW (manoeuvre to bring forces to bear) while the primacy is given to displacement of the enemy in 3GW (as Tony points out, make a breach then move to put the enemy in an untenable position). In either case, you are still fighting and moving.
2GW was mostly predicted on the fact you really could not move fast enough to effectively displace the enemy or avoid contact, while 3GW is predicted on increasingly effective levels of mobility both in the fighting echelons and the logistics trains as well. The side with the highest levels of mechanization could move far more effectively than their opponents.
PMF will actually be in more of a 2GW situation WRT logistics and mobility, especially when selecting transit orbits between planets (or even the within Cis Lunar Space), mobility is limited, timelines are long and it will be essentially impossible to use manoeuvre to surprise or displace the enemy.
Thucydides:
"2. Relative velocities can also be manipulated by selecting the orbital paths and approaches. A 'slow' missile could be impossible to stop if it is on a retrograde orbit (2X the closing velocity)"
The energy required to get that missile into a retrograde orbit would in effect make it a "fast" missile, in terms of delta-v.
"3. I think that much of the discussion on 2GW and 3GW theory is a misunderstanding about application. The answer (as I understand it) is while there is both attrittion and manoeuvre happening, the primacy is given to the destruction of enemy forces in 2GW (manoeuvre to bring forces to bear) while the primacy is given to displacement of the enemy in 3GW (as Tony points out, make a breach then move to put the enemy in an untenable position). In either case, you are still fighting and moving."
The maneuverists want you to believe that. In reality, any maneuver that isn't absolutely decisive just changes the location of where the attrition battle is fought. See Vicksburg Campaign (1863), Overland Campaign (1864), Atlanta Campaign (1864), Africa (1940-43), Eastern Europe (1941-45), NW Europe (1944-45).
"2GW was mostly predicted on the fact you really could not move fast enough to effectively displace the enemy or avoid contact, while 3GW is predicted on increasingly effective levels of mobility both in the fighting echelons and the logistics trains as well. The side with the highest levels of mechanization could move far more effectively than their opponents."
Not really. Grant in 1863 outmaneuverd the Confederates. (In fact, cutting loose from his supply base was an enabler, not a handicap, because armies of that era could still live off the land and didn't shoot off hundreds of tons of artillery ammunition every day.) The Germans in 1870 quite handily outmaneuvered the French even though, once past their railheads, each army had essentially the same maneuver resources. The Western Allies in 1944 eventually did maneuver around the Germans in Normandy, but they had to fight their way past an army that had inferior mechanization -- and then bogged down again at the German frontier. As Gen. William DePuy put it in 1990:
"People talk a lot about attrition versus maneuver. This is not an intellectual choice. The same generals who so brilliantly dashed across France were suddenly forced back into conducting attrition warfare. Nobody doubts that General George Patton preferred maneuver, but maneuver warfare is not a doctrinal choice; it is an earned benefit.
The efforts to break through and obtain operational maneuver in the Fall of 1944 at Arnhem, with the great air-ground operation called Market Garden, failed; the attacks through Huertgen and Aachen were bloody and indecisive, and the attack by the Third Army across the Saar bogged down.
In a last operational effort in the middle of December -- three months later -- the German Army once more sought freedom of maneuver through the Ardennes." (emphasis added)
"PMF will actually be in more of a 2GW situation WRT logistics and mobility, especially when selecting transit orbits between planets (or even the within Cis Lunar Space), mobility is limited, timelines are long and it will be essentially impossible to use manoeuvre to surprise or displace the enemy."
Any application of maneuver would have to be wholly tactical. Even then, surprise would bel imited.
By the way : i had the idea, to scatter low orbit with bigger chunks of debris if i want to defend, so my ships can hide from incoming KKV.
Ok, the KKV will blast the chunk to million pieces, but it will also shatter, more chance for survival.
Tony said:
That's why you use something more like an IRBM-sized booster, carrying a bus
with dozens or hundreds of KKVs.
==================
I wonder if a missile bus is really necessary. It won't necessarily allow you to get away with a higher mass fraction. You also lose a lot of flexibility in your ability to target eg close off all the escape vectors or even just use your missiles as counter-battery anti-missile missiles.
Will 1 IRBM carrying say 10 MIRV'ed KKVs be really that more efficient than just 10 missiles (with 3 stages each)?
I did a bit of reading about the SM-3 and its specs are damn impressive for current day tech. Its a 3 stage missile that can hit mach 9.5 about 2.5kps. And thats accellerating straight up against gravity and against atmospheric drag most of the way. It weighs 1.5 tonnes.
In comparison the now decommissioned peacekeeper ICBM weighs 87 tonnes (it does carry 10 heavy W87 thermonuclear warheads).
If you had to haul one of our present day weapons into space I think I'd rather have 60 SM-3s that can be used for both anti-ship and anti-missile than just one MX Peacekeeper.
This whole point about missile Buses totally fails if the missile bus is using some ultra-expensive NTR or nuclear electric drive of course.
But even if an expensive nuclear drive is possible from an engineering and economic POV you may just be better hauling a 3 or 4 stage chemical rocket as your main weapon. It'll still have pretty spectacular delta-V (enough for engagement ranges out to tens of thousands of kilometers) and unmatchable accelleration.
Re: Locki
The KKV bus is not going to be carrying ten MIRVs. It's going to be carrying dozens or hundreds of SCOD (Soda Can Of Death, for those late to the party) type KKVs. Dozens if we're looking at independently targetable and maneuverable KKVs. Hundreds if we're looking at dumb KKVs that literally are the size of a soda can and weigh in at 7 kg or less. (A 12 fl oz soda can has a volume of 355 cm^3; a DU cylinder of the same dimensions would mass 6.8 kg; iron would mass 2.8 kg.)
Nota bene: A KKV bus and it's booster is a long range, anti-ship missile. For anti-missile defense, one really want's something much smaller and specialized for the task.
Also, a KKV bus probably won't be carried by the ship, but accompany it instead. The bus would carry a bunch of chemfuel missiles, each with a bunch of KKV's (thousands of ball bearings, hundreds of SCoD, dozens of dumb impactors, single heavy impactor or nuclear-powered weapons); the unmanned bus (or more likely, busses) would be something like the propulsion module of the manned command ship.
Ferrell
For perhaps the ultimate expression of the rocketeer's art, it is hard to beat the 1970's era Sprint http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/sprint.htm
Capable of 100G acceleration (useful if you want to clear the launch platform in a hurry or move out of the intercept cone of incoming SCoDs), the deployed Sprint used a nuclear warhead. For demi operatic spacecraft this might be what is used against incoming SCoD clouds, or if the bus is big enough, these would separate and rapidly deploy to establish the intercept cone of the KKV's (which might be a mixed bag of devices to further confuse the defender).
It would be interesting to see what sort of performance could be delivered using today's technology to make a Sprint like missile.
"the unmanned bus (or more likely, busses) would be something like the propulsion module of the manned command ship."
I would rather call such thing a kamikaze ship...
Ok a simple chem fueled missile isnt that expensive, but to make it a propulsion module, lock on and atack multiple targets, evasive manuevers etc... if there is one way, i want to bring back such things.
Okay, time for some nomenclature clarification. From the tail end to nose:
Booster -- a high-thrust, low-efficiency engine that provides the initial thrust for the vehicle. It gets the vehicle off of the ground and does most of the work to defeat gravity.
Sustainer -- the second (and sometimes third) stage(s) of the vehicle. It provides the thrust to get the vehicle to it's target velocity.
Bus -- it's main function is an interface between a single launch vehicle and multiple submunitions (reentry vehicles, kill vehicles, penetration aids, whatever). It is a non-propulsive element that can however reorient itself around the axes of rotation in order to provide selective targeting of each submunition.
Putting this all together in the context of a missile in a space environment, you would have a booster, (possibly, though not necessarily) a sustainer, a bus, and then a collection of submunitions on the bus.
Wow, some serious purple vs. green warfare going on up in here.
Green and purple must unite to become a mucky brown!
jollyreaper:
"Green and purple must unite to become a mucky brown!"
Nope. Just dark gray.
Purple = Red + Blue
Green = Green
Red + Blue + Green = Gray
Crap, now we have the mucky brown vs. dark gray debate.
jollyreaper:
"Crap, now we have the mucky brown vs. dark gray debate."
oh noes!!!!
kittehs in trubl nao!
Seriously, just mix purple and green in any web or graphics package RGB color mixer.
The very nature of this kind of debate is that there are no answers. Or if there are, you ignore them. The pleasure is to play.
jollyreaper:
"The very nature of this kind of debate is that there are no answers. Or if there are, you ignore them. The pleasure is to play."
Hmmm...
Thing is, in the real world, it usually is Purple AND Green, complementing each other. But of course, to recognize that would undermine the whole point of having an argument...
Actually, I'm pretty sure it depends on whether or not you're using an additive of subtractive color wheel...
(Dun Dun Duuuuuuun)
The problem with purple and green in space combat is there are too many unknowns that need to be defined for the setting.
While the arguments can be just as strenuous in the real world, at least many of the technical factors are known and we could at least argue with real-world figures. That gets ironed out sooner or later on the battlefield.
Tom said:"Ok a simple chem fueled missile isnt that expensive, but to make it a propulsion module, lock on and atack multiple targets, evasive manuevers etc... if there is one way, i want to bring back such things."
Tom, the missiles that carry the submunitions are chem fueled for rapid course changes on their way to the target before they release their submunitions, they would also carry penitration aids (jammers, dazzler-lasers, whatever)and would pose a threat to any enemy ship, because if that hits you it will be a hard-kill; when I said that the bus was like the propulsion module of the manned command ship, I meant that it would have the same engines and power plant that the command ship would have, a high ISP/low thrust engine with huge Delta-V. After it launches it's load of submunition-laided missiles, it would continue on to whatever base, to be reloaded and reused in another campaign.
Ferrell
jollyreaper said...
The problem with purple and green in space combat is there are too many unknowns that need to be defined for the setting.
While the arguments can be just as strenuous in the real world, at least many of the technical factors are known and we could at least argue with real-world figures. That gets ironed out sooner or later on the battlefield.
=========================
And the 1032 posts the whole discussion neatly comes full circle. Maybe the true capital ship won't be known until battle is joined
Even when the technical specifications and capabilies are known there are often competing schools of thought before a few battles soughts out the mice from the men.
There's a reason why battle tested is metaphor for proven and reliable!
See pre world war II with the battleships vs carrier debates.
Everyone knew what the various ships could do but it wasn't until Pearl Harbour/Coral Sea where the Americans and Japanese realised the obsolesence of the battleship. The British were a touch slow on working that out though.
When steam powered Iron Clads began replacing the 200+ year old ship of the line sailing ships the Iron Clads were armed with a huge assortment of gun calibres, armour schemes and weapons. Hell the Royal Navy even fitted a ram to several of their warships! Once again battle quickly sorted out the winning combinations from the losers (Battlecruisers stunk).
Its certainly possible space navies will equip themselves with a huge assortment of both laserstars and kineticstars or even primarily unmanned kinetic buses into space before a fight sorts out the problems. It may even make a nice story setting echoing the problems of yesteryear!
You could base a whole story based around an escalating purple-green laser vs kinetics arguments in the military academies of the space nations. The whole argument could become more and more frantic as the good space nations (read Allies pre-WW2) desperated try to rearm in time to fight off the fascist space nations (read Axis pre WW2) with well meaning people desperately arguing for their case. Until a surprise apocalypic sneak attack means you just have to make do with the warships you have left (read the 4 carriers the Japanese missed).
I can't be completely gracious though on this purple green debate. I've firmly attached my colours to Newton's flag. I will point out given near present day technology the kinetics have a huge advantage.
Locki:
"There's a reason why battle tested is metaphor for proven and reliable!
...
Hell the Royal Navy even fitted a ram to several of their warships!"
Many nations fitted rams or built reinforced, ram-capable bows into their capital ships precisely because they were battle tested. The Austrians sank two Italian ships at the Battle of Lissa in 1866. One as a result of fires consequent to a ramming attack and the other as a direct result of flooding following a ramming attack.
Four decades later, even after the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese war had proved beyond a doubt that modern guns had relegated the ram, Jackie Fisher insisted that battleships and battlecruisers retain the appearance of a ram bow (though of course they weren't actually reinforced for ramming).
Loki; if the enemy missed the four Laserstars mounting RBoDs that were not in "Battleship orbital" then your story will be very.....interesting.
Thucydides:
"Loki; if the enemy missed the four Laserstars mounting RBoDs that were not in 'Battleship orbital' then your story will be very.....interesting."
If they did, it would only be because space isn't the stealth-free environment that we've been taking as given all along.
Thucydides said...
Loki; if the enemy missed the four Laserstars mounting RBoDs that were not in "Battleship orbital" then your story will be very.....interesting
=================
Aha. But that's because my heroic, square jawed protagonist, Stealthy Sam, is in fact neither on the green laser side nor the purple kinetic side of the space-naval warfare argument. No Sam is in fact part of a small, obscure cult of naval theorists with BLACK as their chosen colour. Yessiree. Stealthy Sam is a stealth advocate :)
And besides for story sake maybe the underrated, unloved kineticstars weren't destroyed because the enemy in their disdain chose not to destroy them. Its not without historic precedent. The japanese fully knew where the non-stealthy fuel supplies and infrastructure of Pearl Harbour was yet they concentrated their attack on some obsolete ex-WWI battleships no one but the flag waving 'Merikan public wanted anyway. Its arguable Pearl Harbour would have been far more effective if the Japanese had taken the time to just totally destroy the naval base.
Tony said...
Many nations fitted rams or built reinforced, ram-capable bows into their capital ships precisely because they were battle tested. The Austrians sank two Italian ships at the Battle of Lissa in 1866. One as a result of fires consequent to a ramming attack and the other as a direct result of flooding following a ramming attack.
==========================
My understanding of it was after Lissa is the Royal Navy learnt the wrong lesson and desperately fitted rams to their ships for the next 40 years. They'd probably read far too much Horatio Hornblower. Over the next 4 decades there were indeed 3 successful rammings resulting in a sunken ships.
1. Iron Duke vs Vanguard
2. Koenig Wilhelm vs Grosser Kurfurst
3. Camperdown vs Victoria.
Read the list of warships carefully. Yelp they're all friendly collissions. The ram was probably the worst idea in history until Stealthy Sam in 2186 decided to boost himself into orbit and close his eyes in the hope the enemy couldn't see him.
The Japanese totally pooched Pearl Harbour because they failed to deny the logistics of the base to the enemy (if they were going to follow up with a landing right away, then maybe the miss could be justified) and because they failed to hunt down the aircraft carriers at the same time.
If an enemy attacked the orbital "base" and hammered all the warships tethered but failed to go after the four Laserstars not in that orbit at the time, then you might get close to a "Pearl Harbour in Spaaaace" story.
Failing to follow up on a surprise attack right away is usually a very bad idea. Being unable to disrupt the enemy logistics train is the other recipe for long term disaster (it could be argued that the British Empire might have been able to prosecute WWII on its own because it had a vast and dispersed logistics base that the Germans or Japanese could never have completely closed down. In that alternative history the war would have ended in 1948 or 49).
Indeed, having the capability to produce battleships in the first place would provide a good indicator of the long term viability of the various sides of the war; even if they chose to produce something else, the capacity to produce battleships (or capital ships in general) provides a first order idea of how much capacity is available to each side. More capital shps=more available muscle to make "things", mobilize resources and so on.
Welcome to another new commenter!
Thing is, in the real world, it usually is Purple AND Green, complementing each other. But of course, to recognize that would undermine the whole point of having an argument...
I see Purple/Green as, on a semi-meta level, a question of technology developments and balance. Think of it as a sliding scale:
At one end of the sliding scale, weapon-strength lasers just aren't practical, so combat is purely with kinetic (or explosive) weapons. At the other end, lasers can zap targets at such long range that kinetics or other payloads are hopelessly vulnerable, so that combat is purely with lasers.
Move inward a bit from each end of the scale, and the still-disfavored tech has a few limited uses. Think of gunpowder weapons around 1200-1400, or edged weapons in modern times.
Note that 'limited uses' doesn't preclude wide deployment, especially if the weapon is cheap. Edged weapons are very marginal on the modern battlefield, but the standard infantry rifle still has a bayonet, and the grunt gets some training in its use.
Closer to the midpoint of the sliding scale you get classic complementary weapons, such as naval guns and torpedoes 100 years ago.
This sliding scale represents technological capabilities, both known and currently unknown. The latter are where all the debate is.
Chemfuel rockets are a mature tech, so we pretty much know what they can do. For nuke thermal we can make pretty firm estimates, and we know that electric drive is too sluggish for short-term 'tactical' maneuvers.
So lasers are the big unknown here. Laser weapons are certainly not a mature technology, and may never be a viable one.
My personal SWAG is that in a PMF setting, laser weapons will probably achieve about 10 percent of their ideal performance. Since we are basically talking about a Very Bright spotlight following the inverse square law, this corresponds to producing a given destructive effect at about a third of the ideal range.
YMMV, of course.
Thucydides:
"The Japanese totally pooched Pearl Harbour because they failed to deny the logistics of the base to the enemy (if they were going to follow up with a landing right away, then maybe the miss could be justified) and because they failed to hunt down the aircraft carriers at the same time."
The Japanese were thinking in terms of a short war. The whole point of Pearl Harbor was to present the US with a fait accompli: ZAP! -- your battle fleet is gone. So are all your possessions in the Western Pacific. Now let's discuss terms by which we can end this unfortunate unpleasantness.
Did the Japanese miscalculate American resolve? Yes. But given their (absolutely correct) analysis of what their best chance was, concentrating on the battleships was the optimum choice.
Also, huning down the carriers makes no sense. The Japanese don't know where the carriers are, and they don't have the kind of scouting resources aboard their fleed to even begin to find out.
The Japanese were also concerned about losing their entire attacking force, being so deep in enemy territory.
The only possible scenario I can imagine for the Japanese credibly keeping their Empire would pretty much entail a lobotomizing and rewiring of the entire imperial mindset.
The Japanese pretext for invading China was preventing the spread of communism while the the real objective was a resource grab. A smarter Japan would have tried to create a "Japanese lobby" in Washington, possibly cooperating with the Nationals.
Keep the raping and killing down, play up the whole red scare angle and how the Japanese are the eastern bulwark against the spread of evil communism. Flood the presses with propaganda about how the dirty reds are murderating all the poor little villagers and big, strong, virtuous Japan is selflessly working for the greater good here.
I don't think they ever could have stomached doing it, though. That kind of subterfuge flies in the face of the national myth of Japanese superiority and bushi machismo.
jollyreaper:
"I don't think they ever could have stomached doing it, though. That kind of subterfuge flies in the face of the national myth of Japanese superiority and bushi machismo."
Funny thing is, it was a recently concocted myth, based on a very narrow and chauvinistic reading of Edo Period romanticism of the Warring States Period. In that world view, the samurai were a bunch of poet warriors who possessed all the best of the Yamato spirit. In reality, they were a bunch of opportunistic thugs. Compare the action of the 47 Ronin with what contemporary crtics thought they should have done, based on the critics' ideals.
47 ronin criticism: Yeah, pretty amusing. A true samurai is not concerned with victory or defeat, only honor. The operation was a success! Whether or not the patient survived is unimportant!
I prefer Patton's version: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
It is funny though how certain cultures can become so insular and doctrinaire that they will conduct purges and loyalty tests because being right and correct is more important than actually accomplishing the stated goal.
Admiral Yamamoto had most certainly understood the American reaction to a surprise attack, but most of the Imperial japanese decision makers apparently did not.
A bit of a side note here. Imperial Japanese strategy was based around getting access to resources. Invading China was a relatively easy step, since China's institutions had essentially collapsed with the end of the Quing dynasty in 1912. There were two schools of Imperial Japanese thought; the Imperial Army wanted to move into Siberia and exploit the resources there, while the Imperial Navy favoured displacing the current Empires in SE Asia and annexing their resources. The argument was reasonably good since the resource base was already developed (unlike Siberia) and there was a strong possibility of the local population assisting to get rid of the European overlords.
The Imperial Navy eventually won the argument, although there are many incidents in Japanese history during the '20's and 30's that suggest it wasn't a peaceful process. Having the Red Army win some major victories in Mongolia didn't help the Army's cause either.
One thing the Japanese did not seem to factor in was the American regard for China. Americans had mythologized China as a vast market for their goods and services, so having Japan essentially annex it was not taken very well. Increasing friction between Japan and the United States over China was the proximate cause of Pearl Harbour, it is conceivable that if the Japanese would have restrained themselves they could have taken over the Asian possessions of the European Empires without American interference.
WRT the carriers, although the ability to search for them was quite limited, there probably should have been more effort put into that. The IJN well knew the power of aircraft carriers, and allowing the US carriers to escape came back to bite them very hard.
Thucydides:
"Admiral Yamamoto had most certainly understood the American reaction to a surprise attack, but most of the Imperial japanese decision makers apparently did not."
The japanese leadership engaged in some pretty wishful thinking WRT American reactions. But given the decision to start the war, there really was no choice but to try to face the US with a lost cause and no means to fight. Going after logistics resources that would only have mattered in a long war was counter to that methodology.
"WRT the carriers, although the ability to search for them was quite limited, there probably should have been more effort put into that. The IJN well knew the power of aircraft carriers, and allowing the US carriers to escape came back to bite them very hard."
Once again, the carriers were a desirable target, but missing them was not as important in a short war strategy as it was to take the victory at Pearl Harbor and go home. Let the Americans figure out if the carriers and moxie alone would be enough. Don't give them a chance to whittle away at already successful Japanese capital assets that would be, after all, a big part of the argument that the Americans would be foolish to try dragging things out. Also, even in the context of a short war, the carriers were needed elsewhere to help secure gains in the Western Pacific.
Yamato knew that a protracted war with America was a bad idea, but he was unable to convence the rest of the Imperial War Staff. To illuistrate the depth of their mispreceptions about America, they launched a few dozen fire bombs in balloons to drift over the Pacific so they could set fire to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The Japanese just had no concept of the scope of the enemy they were engaging.
100 years from now, some Earth nation might think that the colony on Titan would be a good addition to their empire...without realizing that their popular image of the place is a couple of generations out-of-date.
Ferrell
On another note: Rick, as an idea for an upcoming post, why not invite your readers to discuss their would-be designs for PMF spacecraft...and not just the ones that shoot up stuff, but all kinds.
Ferrell
jollyreapersaid...
I don't think they ever could have stomached doing it, though. That kind of subterfuge flies in the face of the national myth of Japanese superiority and bushi machismo.
=====
This reminds me of my other favourite pet hate. The myth of the crushing superiority of the Katana's workmanship/metallurgy over the equivilent european weapons. The steel used to make the Katana was SHI* and the folding process was just an attempt to control the stupid high carbon in the steel.
The point may be tangential but it does in my opinion relate back to what I think the true definition of a "capital ship" is.
In the end its what the public percieves is the most powership ship or spaceship in the navy. This perception is based on 3 equally weighted factors. Its somewhat rooted in 1. actual historical performance (did it sink lots of ships) and 2. the ability of the naval theorists to convince people its badass and in thirdly in my opinion quite a bit of romanticism on the part of the public, poilitical leadership and by extension the military leadership.
The battleship itself looked like a kick ass ship. Big heavy armour, huge guns, loud noises beautifully purposeful silhoeutte. Its a no wonder the public couldn't accept a flat top, unarmed, fragile floating airport as its replacement for so long. Even in the 1980's the USN wasted millions reactivating the Iowa's and tying up 2700 valuable crewmen (thats enough to crew 27 destroyers or submarines!) because I suspect they looked totally kick ass and gave Ol' Reagan and his warhawks something very visible to cheer.
I suspect nowadays we have trouble accepting our 100,000 tonne carriers may have been replaced by a rather ugly, mostly unseen nuclear submarine as the ultimate sea-control ship.
Tony said...
Did the Japanese miscalculate American resolve? Yes. But given their (absolutely correct) analysis of what their best chance was, concentrating on the battleships was the optimum choice.
=================
I've always wondered how the japanese can have so badly misjudged the American psyche. Afterall this is the same nation willing to throw millions of its citizens into the attritional meatgrinder of WWI just because the Germans (a nation with whom a huge percentage of americans share common ancestry) accidentally sank the Lusitania. Given this singular historiral precedent it should be obvious the Americans are going to move heaven and hell if you deliberately sink half of their fleet.
On another note: Rick, as an idea for an upcoming post, why not invite your readers to discuss their would-be designs for PMF spacecraft...and not just the ones that shoot up stuff, but all kinds.
Ferrell
==============
I agree. I propose we all submit our proposals and then score our own space warships out of 10 in 3 categories for a total of 30 points. We can then invite other commentators to score our PMF proposals. I think for rocketpunk the key categories are:
1. Lethatility
2. Plausiability (how many years till we can build it or do we need several major breakthrough in physics to do it) eg
3. Story Potential
So for example. I would score the following vessels as:
1. Remote drone Laser star with light seconds range:
Lethatility = 10, Plausibility = 6 (needs 1-2 breakthroughs to target things), Story Potential = 1 (boringggggg!) Total = 17
2. Space Shuttle with a few AMRAAMs and SM-3s onboard:
Lethatility = 2, Plausibility = 10 (we can do it now!), Story Potential = 9. Totals = 20
3. Solid core NTR with KKVs, no lasers, minimal radiators, Manned:
Lethatility = 6, Plausibility = 9(we could do it in 20 years), Story Potential = 8. Total = 23
Locki:
I suspect nowadays we have trouble accepting our 100,000 tonne carriers may have been replaced by a rather ugly, mostly unseen nuclear submarine as the ultimate sea-control ship.
That is a good modern example of why it is difficult to predict future warship design.
Carriers are very vulnerable to modern weapon systems. However, the major powers have been playing nice with each other for decades. Even during the cold war the USA and USSR did not engage in naval warfare. There hasn't been a major naval engagement since WWII. What the major powers have been doing is fighting nations that do not have the latest and greatest. In that case, having a big mobile airbase is a plus. Your enemy can't hit it and you bring your aircraft within strike range.
In a future scenario, the space warship requirement will depend on the mission. Do you have two major powers fighting it out laserstar to laserstar or do you have a major power that needs to slap a rebellious colony around?
Ron
The thing about racism is it's ignorant which means obvious counterpoints ate ignored.
Americans knew the Japanese were silly, absurd, bucktoothed monkeys with bad eyesight and a child-like, obsequious demeanor. Likewise, the Japanese knew Americans were wealthy but spoiled, soft, and completely lacking in martial virtue. We were well-equipped with weapons we were incapable of using effectively because we are soft and not warriors and blah blah. And Japanese warriors have a mystic fighting spirit worth a million divisions. And Americans know Jesus is on our side. USA! USA!
Contemporary accounts on both sides can be amazingly ignorant and it's especially surprising when these views are held by people who should be educated enough to know better. This isn't just propaganda for the proles, this is genuine belief.
Also, don't forget that moderate Japanese politicians were often killed by radical junior officers who then suicided to atone for the impertinence of murdering superiors. You will see this sort of feedback loop in groups.
Not to get political but I will point out the increasingly radical views of the republicans and how center-right politicians are getting primaried from the right.
I think you will discover we are in an increasingly ideological age in just about everything, Jolly. I am waiting for reports that Keynesian economists armed with slide rules have stormed a conference held by followers of the Austrian school judging from some things I have seen on blog sites devoted to economics.
Progressivism, Green ecologists, and others on the left side of the political divide are just as rabid and illogical sounding these days, and are willing to employ everything from harassment (getting blogsites and twitter accounts closed as spam to SLAPP lawsuits) to outright violence (look up SWATing).
The proximate cause is the sheer size and power of government apparatus; whoever controls the apparatus of the State can enrich themselves and their cronies beyond their wildest dreams and at the same time inflict death by a million cuts on their enemies through taxation, regulation and so on. The Res Pubilca Roma essentially collapsed through a series of increasingly vicious civil wars based on the idea of who was to control the levers of power, and Thucydides describes a similar process in the Athenian ekklesia is taken over by demagogues during the History of the Peloponnesian War.
Sadly, neither the ancient authors nor modern political theory seems able to show the way out, and historical examples demonstrate the usual end is the arrival of "The Man on the White Horse" who offers to end the chaos and social disruption if the people support them. Sadly, the Men on the White Horses turn out to be Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, or the Taliban, to pull a few examples from the hat.
Between the progressive and cyclic view of history, I prefer progressive. Cyclic pretty much seems synonymous with nihilistic. Not sure if it's also sunonymous with realistic.
Thucydides said...
Sadly, neither the ancient authors nor modern political theory seems able to show the way out, and historical examples demonstrate the usual end is the arrival of "The Man on the White Horse" who offers to end the chaos and social disruption if the people support them. Sadly, the Men on the White Horses turn out to be Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, or the Taliban, to pull a few examples from the hat.
=================
Sheesh. That's a depressing way to finish up a discussion about my favourite heroic war machinary - Battleships in Spaaaace!
I'm not american so I can get involved without hopefully turning this into a PoliticalPunk blog. In my darker moments I tend to agree with the above assessment.
As America's place in the world inevitably slips from its unprecedented precipice of power and influence I suspect they'll increasingly turn to the radical elements of their society. After all the country was first settled by a bunch of religious crackpots and refugees. As the "great" orator Sarah Palin once said its the only way to maintain "our exceptional country." I thought the end was coming when the republicans flirted with putting her or Bachman forward.
However when I've had my caffeine hit in the morning and cheered up a bit I tend to agree with Jollyreaper. I think there are signs of hope we aren't doomed to a historical cycle of doom.
Despite all of America's inherent racism in WWII their soldiers in the main conducted themselves with remarkable restraint considering they were facing a foe so sunken into mad despair they willing to break every rule of law in order to take a just a few more GIs or marines with them (stories of Okinawan women and children charging soldiers with bamboo spears). I used to think nuking the japanese twice was amongst Mankind's greatest crimes but as you read more and more about the Pacific campaigns I'm amazed the Americans could forgive them so quickly and turn Japans into a loyal ally and bulwark against communism. America's soldiers conduct atrocities like everyone else but when you read about the foes they are facing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Rwanda etc etc etc I'm amazed we've finally managed to create a society and army with enough self restraint that it doesn'tjust doesn't try to stomp them into oblivian like the Romans/Colonial Europeans/Soviets/Chinese did before them. There are many cases where the American's could have just flattened one more building or village but restrain themselves because the foe is breaking all of the rules and mingling themselves with the civilians and putting their own civilians lives at risk to save their own ass. We have soldiers willing to put their own lives at additional risk so that they don't needlessly kill civilians ... that belong to the enemy. In times past the Romans or Soviets (or as is rumoured the British allowing the bombing of Coventry in WW2) would've happily flattened their own civilians to achieve their objectives and save a few of their own soldiers lives.
And at the risk of turning political again I think its quite encouraging that faced with having to choose a real representitive in the end the republicans silenced the nuttier religious fringe of their party and nominated Romney. A man who is politically basically a centrist moderate and particularly galling to the extemists - a Mormon. I don't know if the UK or Australia could've braved nominating a Mormon as a potential political leader.
Anyone else getting crap-flooded with spams from this blog? Russian drug peddlers.
After the XXe century, when we discovered the horrors the great ideologies could lead us to, we tended to reject them, not always with much distinction. Unfortunately, we need something more than just 'bread and circus', so we are turning back to ideologies - without much distinction or restraint, unfortunately. Thus the rise of varied extremists.
I'd agree with Jollyreaper, History does show evolution, sometimes positive (there are also cycles, though). But evolution isn't always a good thing, the aforementioned excesses of the great ideologies are an example. So will tomorrow be brighter than today? Impossible to tell...
As a side note, I'll point out that putting Napoleon in the same bag than the Bolsheviks or the Taliban is quite unfortunate. Whatever you can say about him, he was both one of the most efficient and one of the most rational leaders of History, as completely opposed to those. (He also never tried to be elected, but hijacked someone else's coup d'état...)
And forgetting everything else, just as an example, if you are living in a developed country, chances are that most of your legal system is also inherited, copied from or inspired by the Napoleon code.
On the other hand, he was the first modern nationalistic leader, so you can probably thank him for the excesses this drove later...
(Morale of the story : don't loose wars.
In fact, he had more in common with a wargame player character than an early XIXe century man, strangely)
But I digress (again).
So, if the laserstars/kineticstars are our submarine equivalent, as space superiority ships, what would be the equivalent of carriers be like, as advanced support base?
A big mothership carrying drones? A constellation of tender ships taking care of automated drones, manned gunboats and espatier dropships?
There's been a big spike in comment spam the last week or two. Blogger filters it out pretty well, so it doesn't show up in the online threads, but for some reason they don't filter the email feed.
I don't want to go to comment moderation, given the number of *real* comments this blog generates!
On PMF ship designs, I am a bit skeptical of design comparisons in a vacuum (so to speak). Any given design will embody both tech assumptions and mission assumptions. Which makes comparing them a bit akin to comparing Trek and Star Wars. (Nothing like as bad, but similar problems on a lesser scale.)
I am - quite belatedly - working on a post that offers a scenario and discusses how it might play out. Which has its own problems, but starts to integrate some of the long-running discussion here.
Eth:
So, if the laserstars/kineticstars are our submarine equivalent, as space superiority ships, what would be the equivalent of carriers be like, as advanced support base?
A big mothership carrying drones? A constellation of tender ships taking care of automated drones, manned gunboats and espatier dropships?
You would have to have some sort of support base or tender ships. Logistics for space warfare would be very difficult. In an operatic setting, FTL might make logistics more like modern airlift. In the PMF, with the long flight times and no stealth, the attack fleet would probably have to take everything with it, just like a space mission today.
I think that leads to massive fleets that stare at each other across the vastness of space, while espatier commandoes actually do the dirty work. Anyway, it may not be how the future turns out, but it makes for good military sci-fi stories.
Ron
Napoleon is the first modern "Man on the White Horse" (and I think the term actually refers to him), so the inclusion is quite valid, I think.
Rick has decided the best policy for the blog is to simply let us write it (;)), I'm sure we can carry on to 2000 without much effort (heh).
I'll trust you about the Man on the White Horse (I'll confess, I hadn't read about this expression before). But my point was about your sentence :
Sadly, the Men on the White Horses turn out to be Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, or the Taliban, to pull a few examples from the hat.
Which implies that Napoleon was no better than the Bolsheviks or the Taliban.
Particularly as if Napoleon was, as you say, the first Man on the White Horse, those were subversions who ended up making things even worse than before (if I understand correctly the meaning of the expression).
Rick has decided the best policy for the blog is to simply let us write it (;))
Which is quite a valid policy, when you think about it. After all, many people will read the articles, but not the thousands of comments, and thus would miss what valuable things that may lay here. So,
I'm sure we can carry on to 2000 without much effort (heh).
let's try this.
Hmm, giant, slow, very long endurance spacecraft that carry dozens of small combat spacecraft and several troop landers; they would probably have some short range weapons for defense, lots and lots of EW, and enough supplies for a protracted combat operation, including repair facilities. High endurance, 'fast' logistic ships would resupply them. They might have an escort of medium large warships for really intense situations; other than that, the base ship model seems as viable as having several sizes of multi-purpose/modular combat spacecraft.
Ferrell
In terms of disrupting societies, imposing his own views on everyone, causing chaos and millions of casualties, Napoleon was right up there.
Now Napoleonic law and bureaucracy did manage to outlive him, but there were quite a few people who were equally happy with the system the Communists or the Taliban established. The major difference is mostly longevity and how history gets written. Had the Taliban made better choices in house guests, no one would have bothered with them and their horrific regime could have lasted for decades or centuries. It seemed back in the 70's that the USSR was going to last forever as well (hence the CoDominium stories of Jerry Pournelle), and if there was no President Reagan, they just might have limped along even to this day.
In terms of disrupting societies, imposing his own views on everyone, causing chaos and millions of casualties, Napoleon was right up there.
There was little left to disrupt in society after the Reign of Terror. When Robespierre fell, it's the only time I heard about in History where people spontaneously crosdressed out of sheer joy.
Imposing his views, well, it's what every single leader had done until them, and you can hardly blame him to not trust a republican system after said Reign of Terror.
The millions of causalities are in part his fault, yes, but let's not forget that it's actually the rest of Europe who attacked first. His responsibility there is that he saw invading any enemy country as the most efficient way of ending the threat, and the fact that he cared about his people, probably because he was 'from the rank' and didn't grow up in isolation like most rulers or generals of this time. (A little known fact is that he was emperor of the French, not France.) But not much about the other countrymen, unfortunately. Thus, he brought the war outside of France (warring armies tended to be very bad for local populations), and didn't pay much attention to foreign causalities.
Though it may be one of the reasons why he invented modern military logistics. Having supply chains and armies bringing their own stuff was less disruptive (i.e. less pillaging) than armies who until then just lived on the 'local resources', in addition to be more efficient.
But the main difference with the Bolsheviks or the Taliban may be that he let a legacy (we are still living on) after his fall.
Take the USSR, for example. Eighty years of totalitarian, prison-like regime who was, among other things, extremely anti-theist. A mere few years after its fall, you can see many Russian going to religious pilgrims all around the world. For all their years, efforts and brutality, they didn't even change such a 'simple' thing as that.
Some even say that in the USSR, History simply stopped, to start again as soon as they fell. Somehow fitting for those who were claiming about the 'end of History'...
Compare the 1830 Revolution. During the Restauration, people put down a king, not because they wanted democracy or anything like that, but because he wanted to change things from what Napoleon had left to what things were in the Old Regime. Then, they just put another king in his place, who was fine with the system.
So, no. Putting him in the same bag than totalitarian or fundamentalist regimes is a big, big historical mistake.
But a common one, mind you. He lost the war, after all.
Hmmm...
1. Submarines wouldn't make very good sea control ships, because they can't do anything on the surface, where the commercial traffic to be protected or interdicted is.
2. Carriers have their vulnerabilities, but that has always been so. That's why they have anti-aircraft and anti-submarine escorts and carry fighters for self-defense.
3. The reactivation of the Iowa class battleships was primarily for the purpose of having large missile-armed strike platforms (32 x Tomohawk and 16 x Harpoon). The guns were seen as being useful mostly for shore bombardment. Their complements during the Cold War was 1,800, not 2,700. Also, Cold War destroyers had complements of over 300 apiece, not 100.
4. While there may have been prejudice on both sides in WW2, plenty of people had realistic assessments of their enemies' capabilities. The misgivings of Yamamoto have already been mentioned. At a much lower level, in the battle of Midway, the squadron commander of Torpedo Squadron 8 told his men to do their best, and even if only one plane was left to make the final run-in, that plane's pilot should go in and try to get a hit. In the event, none of his planes survived the mission, and only one pilot. He knew what he was up against in old, slow torpedo planes, against Japanese Zero fighters.
5. Napoleon didn't invent modern military logistics. His operational method was pretty much built on living off the land where he had to, and relying on established magazines only in the beginning of a campaign. His real contribution was in solidifying the modern army organization for land combat into divisions and corps.
WRT cyclic or progressive history, I'll always fall back on the Melian Dialogue, in which Thucydides has the Athenians tell the Melians: "The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must." Over 2,000 years later, that's still our mode of operation, at every level of society. About the only progress we've made is in our ability to organize violence more efficiently and use that organization to shove low level violence into out of the way corners. But when the big war comes along? We are ever so more efficient at killing than we used to be.
Of course, we can't manage the daily slaughter rates of tens of thousands that we used to, but only because we don't butcher enemy armies out of hand once we have them surrounded. But even that has an element of pragmatism built into it. It's easier to accept a surrender than to manage a mass execution.
To try to place this in historical context and not devolve into a flame war, Napoleon did leave behind some pretty admirable things like codefied law, efficient bureaucracy and military organization.
He also laid waste to large areas, imposed his own relatives on many of the thrones of Europe, disrupted international trade rather than accept the UK being independent, invaded Russia for a remarkably weak set of reasons and consumed the flower of French society to man his armies.
He is the "Man on the White Horse" because he rode in and promised to end the chaos of the Revolution, but many Frenchmen came to realize (like people in many other lands in other times and places who make that bargin) that the exchange for security was a one sided deal.
Thucydides:
"To try to place this in historical context and not devolve into a flame war, Napoleon did leave behind some pretty admirable things like codefied law, efficient bureaucracy and military organization."
Napoleon left behind him a bureaucracy that was less corrupt and a civil service system that had a certain ethical standard. But the system has accrued prerogatives and political status over the years that we might find a bit odd in the English speaking world.
Napoleon's code of law has been very influential in civil law societies. In common law societies, AIUI, it is seen as something of a quaint joke by people interested in legal matters.
Napoleon's contribution to semi-regularizing the organization of an army have already been touched on. It was a valuable contribution, but one easily assimilated by his competitors when they figured out what he was doing. It would have gone the way of many military innovations had it not been so persistent in use over the subsequent two centuries. A soldier in Napoleon's army would have been a member of a certain battalion of a certain regiment, assigned to a certain brigade of a certain division, assigned to a corps. A soldier today works within the same organizational hierarchy.
“Everyone knew what the various ships could do but it wasn't until Pearl Harbour/Coral Sea where the Americans and Japanese realised the obsolesence of the battleship. The British were a touch slow on working that out though.
When steam powered Iron Clads began replacing the 200+ year old ship of the line sailing ships the Iron Clads were armed with a huge assortment of gun calibres, armour schemes and weapons. Hell the Royal Navy even fitted a ram to several of their warships! Once again battle quickly sorted out the winning combinations from the losers (Battlecruisers stunk).”
There has only been one successful instance of the 'Battle-cruiser doctrine' (able to kill anything it can catch, able to outrun anything that can kill it): The American 44-gun frigates, which were successful from 1800 until about 1860. However, when those ships so embarrassed the Brits that the Admiralty issued orders that no single ship was to close and engage an American ship, well, they left an impression.
“I suspect nowadays we have trouble accepting our 100,000 tonne carriers may have been replaced by a rather ugly, mostly unseen nuclear submarine as the ultimate sea-control ship.”
No, the submarine is only half of a sea-control equation. The submarine can deny the sea to the enemy once the shooting starts, but it cannot effectively send a message that the actor is about to get smacked around.
“So, if the laserstars/kineticstars are our submarine equivalent, as space superiority ships, what would be the equivalent of carriers be like, as advanced support base?
A big mothership carrying drones? A constellation of tender ships taking care of automated drones, manned gunboats and espatier dropships?”
I lean towards the carrier/tender of sorts, since all of the other systems need maintenance at some level to stay at optimum efficiency.
It may even result that the carrier is hauling the laserstar/kineticstars, in addition to the smaller patrol gunboats and dropships. Depends on what the most efficient size of 'tactical' drive is compared to the most efficient 'operational' drive.
If the tactical drive means a superiority ship is 1000 tons max, and the operational drive needs a ship massing 50,000 tons, well, dragging a couple superiority ships around is barely going to register on the tender.
Or we could see the opposite: the most efficient superiority ship is 50,000 tons, while the tender needs to be a 5,000 craft.
Unless we get something like the VASMIR or some other throttleable design, in which case you could have dual-purpose ships.
Thucydides said...
It seemed back in the 70's that the USSR was going to last forever as well (hence the CoDominium stories of Jerry Pournelle), and if there was no President Reagan, they just might have limped along even to this day.
I'm going to do my bit here to try to extend this blog to the 2000 post record and deliberately court some controversy.
Reagan did win the cold war, He spent the Soviets into bankruptcy but really he was an idealist in a time when the stakes were so high (nuclear oblivian) we would have been better off with a pragmatist. He may have won but he was playing a high stakes poker game and gambling all of civilisation on a pair of 9's. There's been a stack of stuff declassified by the KGB and it makes fascinating reading on the cold war. It sends a cold shiver up the spine to realise how close to the brink we came
A bit of quick, very simplified, background. Able Archer 1983. Soviet leadership were getting old, senile and were by experience paranoid (understandable since they survived Hitler, the SS and Stalin). Reagan bursts onto the scene, doubles the military budget and then uses rhetoric like the USSR is the evil empire. He then moves to deploy Pershing III missiles to western europe which are brilliantly accurate weapons ideal for a decapitation first strike. Then NATO runs a huge exercise (Able Archer) which simulates an escalating nuclear readiness all the way to Defcon 1. The soviet leadership panicked and thought they were about to be attacked. A trully scary thought since we now know the Soviets knew their ICBM arsenal was too vulnerable and slow and must be launched preemptively to have any chance of survival. Contrary to western ideas the Soviets never planned to escalate their hostilities if they thought their nation was under threat. They planned just to go all out from the outset.
Now Reagan won but given the stakes I don't think it was worth the risk. And it scared a certain communist leader named Gorbachev so much he began 2 little things called perestroika and glasnost
3 clumsy gambling analogy scenarios.
1. If I played poker and siphoned off $10,000 from the family account and bluffed my way to victory with a pair of 9's and brought home $1 million my wife would be furious, I'd be sleeping on the couch for a month and after been shouted at till my ears bled I'd be forgiven and we'd go on a nice holiday,
2. If I went to the same Casino but this time mortaged the family home and somehow conspired to win $10 million with my awesome bluffing skills on my pair of 9's. Despite our newfound riches my wife would probably just divorce me for irresponsible behaviour.
3. If I went to a dodgy black casino and brought home $100 million but my wife later found out I was using the lives of our extended family as collateral whilst betting on a pair of 9's she would drive me straight to jail. After killing me herself.
Reagan was essentially doing scenario 3. He won but the risks he took were unreasonably high. Thankfully for all of us he won on that pair of 9's. With the stakes been so high he should have been betting on nothing less than a Royal Flush. Fortunately, for all of us he won. But deep down I think if we really ever want to see Laser Thermal or electric drive starships zipping through our solar system we had better stop betting our entire existence on an elaborate game of bluff and brinkmanship.
...... I'll get back to all the carrier/submarine/napolean talk later (since thats my pet hobby)
Reagan didn't win the Cold War.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2993
Incredibly, conservatives ask us to believe that Ronald Reagan, with only harsh rhetoric and some extra dollars for defense, tore apart the Soviet Empire. More than likely, it was the non-viability of the grossly inefficient Soviet economic system, exacerbated by the plummeting price in the 1980s of the Soviets’ major export (oil), that led to the collapse. Ronald Reagan’s defense spending increases might have had a marginal effect, but mainly he was lucky to have been president just before the Soviet house of cards fell in.
jollyreaper:
"Reagan didn't win the Cold War.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2993
Incredibly, conservatives ask us to believe that Ronald Reagan, with only harsh rhetoric and some extra dollars for defense, tore apart the Soviet Empire. More than likely, it was the non-viability of the grossly inefficient Soviet economic system, exacerbated by the plummeting price in the 1980s of the Soviets’ major export (oil), that led to the collapse. Ronald Reagan’s defense spending increases might have had a marginal effect, but mainly he was lucky to have been president just before the Soviet house of cards fell in."
Except that no house of cards necessarily needs to fall in. But a house of cards is in fact easier to tumble than one build of bricks and mortar. Reagan found a situation where a little leverage would go a long way.
No, he certainly doesn't deserve all of the credit. But he deserves a lot more than none of it.
Small question that may have relevance to space warfare at some point: could it be said that the battleship concept is obscelete and the the carrier has replaced any and all of its roles, sans shore bombardment?
Sigh
President Reagan set up the winning conditions for the Cold War by essentially destabilizing a static playing board. Presidents from Harry Truman on down had bought into the policy of containment, and had this continued, both sides would have essentially fossilized in place. While this is possible and there are historical examples, the end result is similar to a poorly maintained boiler with a rapidly rising head of steam, the system will undergo a violent breakdown, and probably over some unforseen event (see the situation at the start of WWI for example, or the "Arab Spring" in today's world).
While most civilians were buying the Soviet line of non agression, most military personel were quite aware of what to expect from the USSR should they attempt to "Liberate" Western Europe. This includes expected first strikes by nuclear and chemical weapons. The Red Army helpfully gave everyone a good look with EX DNIEPER 67, a sort of full dress army level rehersal. You can see the propaganda film they made "I Serve the Soviet Union", which was widely distributed as part of a long term PSYOPS campaign to demoralize the West (you can order it on Amazon today). The addition of hundreds of Soviet nuclear armed SS-20 IRBM's to the arsenal aimed at Western Europe in the late 1970's certainly demanded some sort of response. Being trained to survive and fight in a nuclear environment in that time period, I can certainly say we in the NATO armies were a bit less than impressed by the so called "peace" movement of the day.
So perhaps the real risk is extended periods of stability, especially if they are artificially enforced by Imperial Great Powers. As the Great Powers tend their gardens, small irritations fester and grow along the seams, ready to burst when the pressure is released or it grows too great. Extended periods of instability are just as bad, so what is really needed is a means of allowing internal pressures to be valved off. Cheap transportation to the New World probably had a great deal to do with the long peace at the end of the Napoleonic wars, along with rising levels of prosperity, but eventually limits were reached (sometimes political limits as the elites attempted to reign in developments that would be detrimental to their own interests), political fault lines locked up and the pressure started to grow....
Geoffrey S H:
"Small question that may have relevance to space warfare at some point: could it be said that the battleship concept is obscelete and the the carrier has replaced any and all of its roles, sans shore bombardment?"
Even for shore bombardment cruisers and destroyers are adequate, under most circumstances.
But yes, the battleship was obsolete by the end of WW2, in the sense that no more were constructed. How that translates to space? Who knows? Space should be a much simpler environment, much like the maritime environment during the sailing era or early steam era. So one could imagine the return of a rating system, if ships vary by size of battery (and size of largest guns). Or maybe ships might be optimized for different roles, so that one might have 1st and 2nd class battlehips, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class cruisers, and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class sloops (or whatever term fits in space for the sloop function.)
Tony wrote:
Or maybe ships might be optimized for different roles, so that one might have 1st and 2nd class battlehips, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class cruisers, and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class sloops (or whatever term fits in space for the sloop function.)
This is more-or-less what I use for my (A.D. 2300, no FTL) setting. ‘Battleships’ are the real warships which don’t really leave base in peacetime except on exercises. ‘Frigates’ are the workhorse spacecraft which do most of the deployments in peacetime and try to stay out out of the way of the battlefleets in wartime. They are meant for long, independent deployments and carry a lot more consumables and delta-V than battleships. ‘Corvettes’ (called ‘sloops’ in some space forces) are the small utility spacecraft which have no business mixing it up with real combat spacecraft but are armed and capable of independent operations. If you need to have a mobile military spacecraft out at a minor outpost, it’s going to be a corvette/sloop. They’re sort of budget frigates.
Other than these terms, though, I tend to avoid naval analogies—in most space forces, the commanding officer of a battleship is a colonel, for example, not a (naval) captain.
Of course, not all space forces are going to use terminology consistently.
Hmm...I think that spacecraft commanders would be called "Commander", with "Watch Officers" or "Pilots" being in charge of the shifts that the ship's CO wasn't on the flight deck. NASA already has a (kind of) rank system of Commander, Pilot, Mission Specialist, and Payload Specialist. We can probably see military space forces basing their rank system on something like that.
I think that military spacecraft might be classed by Delta-V, crew endurance, volume/mass, and loadout; how far, how fast, with how much a 'craft can get some place would be the most important
identifyers.
Ferrell
Thucydides said...
Sigh
President Reagan set up the winning conditions for the Cold War by essentially destabilizing a static playing board. Presidents from Harry Truman on down had bought into the policy of containment, and had this continued, both sides would have essentially fossilized in place. While this is possible and there are historical examples, the end result is similar to a poorly maintained boiler with a rapidly rising head of steam, the system will undergo a violent breakdown, and probably over some unforseen event (see the situation at the start of WWI for example, or the "Arab Spring" in today's world).
=================
Last post from me on the topic. I promise.
I personally sit on the fence about whether Reagen was great or not. Its very hard to argue against dramatic success!
But the counter-arguments run something like this.
1. Reagan acted so aggressively (rhetoric, military build up) out of ignorance rather than making an informed decision. The Presidents before him (especially Nixon whom I think is underrated) acted out of pragmatism not because they were cowards but because they knew what the stakes were. He may have destabilised a dangerous static situation but he did so because he was ignorant of the stakes.
- The scary thing about Able Archer, unlike say the Cuban Missile Crisis, was the Americans never knew the Soviets had gone to a heightened state of alert. Intelligence was been passed on directly to the politburu without interpretation so the Soviet leaders could decide whether to launch or not. We were oblivious to how close the USSR was coming to the brink. Their paranoia is considered silly nowadays but it is understandable when you look at it from their point of view and their history. We should have taken it into account.
2. More damningly for Reagan. (some of this is anecdotal so I'm happy to be corrected)
a. He never bothered to participate in the nuclear drills before Able Archer. From my reading of it he didn't really know the full extent of the US full nuclear exchange war plans or the likely Soviet plans before this event
b. He probably watched a movie called "The Day After" which further frightened him just after '83
c. His first instinct was to talk to the Soviets about banning all nuclear weapons *Roll Eyes* Presumably so he could fight a nice clean conventional war against the dastardly commie villians. Something he had to be talked out of quickly.
d. His next instinct was to create the SDI (Star Wars) *DOUBLE EYE ROLL*. Cnce again so he could fight a nice clean war without destroying the people he had sworn to protect
Luckily the Soviet leaders were mostly sane, reigned in their paranoia and blinked first. I hope he don't have to do it ever again.
Interestingly, have people read the declassified 1990's stuff on the Cuban Missile Crisis? The Soviets actually gave nuclear launch permission to a submarine and the local commander in Cuba. There were about 100 soviet tactical nukes in the area as well as the medium ranged ballistic weapons. The local commanders had the authority to launch without further permission from Moscow. Luckily Kennedy, for all his faults, stared down his Joint Chiefs and refused to invade Cuba.
We've gotten scary close quite a number of times and I personally don't think ratcheting up the stakes, doubling down, bluffing and hoping the "evil one" blinks first is the right thing to do.
Now to drag myself slightly back onto topic but related to the previous cold war posts.
I once read somewhere SF Authors tend to fight their wars with the military tropes of the generation before. When Carriers are all the rage in real life SF authors write about Battleship duels. When Missile carrying destryoyers and submarines are all the rage we tend to write about Carriers.
I wonder if SF authors will finally start to catch up and write their fictional wars using a true cold war setting. 40,000+ NTR interplanetry Buses (ICBM equivilents) carrying MIRV'ed warheads designed to bring thermonuclear ruin to Titan/Mars/Earth etc etc if the governments decide to go to war. The rest of it is espionage and little brushfire wars.
eg Future SF wars are just MAD ++ on steroids.
"The rest of it is espionage and little brushfire wars. "
Then we'll need the motherships and frigates/cruisers for the bushfire wars.
Although in operatic settings, they rather want to capture things instead of nuke them, even if they have planet destroyer weapons.
I think there should be a healthy mixture of lasers and kinetics : lasers for jam, blind defence system, kinetics for blowing things up.
About nuclear deterrence. True, we never had WWIII.
Proponents smugly assert that's because the system worked. Theirs was a good idea.
I would say it's more like playing Russian roulette and we just got every lucky.
That's the interesting thing, historically. Some strategies are sound and fail because of a bad roll. Some strategies are terrible but succeed by dumb luck. The conclusions drawn may be correct, may be dead wrong, and it can be very difficult to draw your own conclusions through all of the shouting and chest-beating.
I wonder if SF authors will finally start to catch up and write their fictional wars using a true cold war setting. 40,000+ NTR interplanetry Buses (ICBM equivilents)
____
I think the kicker there will be the decision loop. WWIII is taking place all on one planet, missiles are 20 minutes from their targets, bombers on-station what, 8 hours out?
This might work for Cold War in Sol where Jupiter and Earth are staring each other down and the arsenal is such that they will likely be released in one giant pulse.
As far as PMF goes, a single solar system is the only thing you can really assume. Once you have FTL, then you can talk about the marches.
The defining characteristic of a Cold War situation would have to be civilization-ending weapons that can be employed in a cataclysmic blow. It's insufficient to say merely that two powers are vast and cannot plausibly conquer one another; some idiot or coalition of idiots will come into power in the first empire or the second and a war will come. Even if the invader is thrown out proving correct the claim that the invaded could not be conquered, a war has still occurred.
On an interplanetary scale, if an empire cannot be wiped out in one go, you will have war. If FTL works on the subway map model where you must travel from system A to B and C to get to D, then systems M through Z might be too far away from the war to worry about it while the ones closer to D could be warred over.
The true destablizier for a Cold War situation would be if a new technology theoretically removes MAD or actually does in truth. SDI could not plausibly neuter the Soviet threat. But running it forward to the PMF, what if the world is ruled with kinetic weapons, the strategic "obliterate everything" kinetics stores in armored silo fortresses at the Geospace and Jovian lagrange points and cutter and frigate equivalents handle the peacetime and police action duties. Laserstars are laughed at as silly nonsense and the stuff of poor historic fiction.
A Jovian team makes a breakthrough and invents a proper ravening beam of death. It's ten times more effective than the existing laser technology and can render the entire Jovian system immune to kinetic strikes. Earth analysts show that it's impossible to build enough kinetics to overwhelm a fortress line because it's cheaper for the enemy to add capacity to the fort than for Earth to add MIRV's. You will bankrupt yourself trying to reestablish MAD.
So Earth begins a crash course trying to replicate the ravening beam of death technology. What happens to the balance of power? Jovian forces start flexing their muscles in Marspace. What does Earth do? Deploys frigates. Backed up by what? You're threatening a kinetic strike? Have we mentioned we've got beam forts?
And there you go.
jollyreaper:
"About nuclear deterrence. True, we never had WWIII.
Proponents smugly assert that's because the system worked. Theirs was a good idea.
I would say it's more like playing Russian roulette and we just got every lucky.
That's the interesting thing, historically. Some strategies are sound and fail because of a bad roll. Some strategies are terrible but succeed by dumb luck. The conclusions drawn may be correct, may be dead wrong, and it can be very difficult to draw your own conclusions through all of the shouting and chest-beating."
I don't know that anybody with a head on his shoulders would "smuggly" assert anything, about the Cold War, j. I suspect more cliches and craicatures at work in your thinking here.
In any case, how were we to avoid nuclear deterrence? Nuclear, and then thermonuclear, weapons were a fact of life. They weren't going to be avoided, or put back in the box (not in rational adult land, anyway). WRT the numbers, there were some excesses in stockpile shaping, but mostly the number of weapons expanded to fit the economic space available for them, simply because not having enough would have been worse than having too many, in the sense that it would increase the likelihood that an enemy would make a miscalculation and initiate an attack.
Now, this isn't theoretical for me. I was a Cold Warrior. I worked around nukes and I knew the people that worked directly on them and who commanded them. I can completely non-smugly report that there was much more hard work and skill that went into their non-use than there was luck. From what I read, that was true of both sides.
Amen to that. We owe our lives and civilizations to the unsung watch officers at NORAD and the PVO Strany who looked at radar plots and computer warnings that missiles were incoming, but stopped and double checked rather than ratcheting up the decision tree.
We have all heard the stories of radar returns from flocks of geese or the Moon or (in one case) a computer wargame scenario which was being played on the "live" consoles by accident, simple technical or procedural errors with civilization ending consequences.
Incedentally, attributing President Reagan's thought process to any cause is pretty irrisponsible. Neither you nor I know exactly how or why he came to the decisions he did (except in a broad historical context). Many of his moves may have been to explore where exactly it would be possible to "go off the reservation" and reset the game; Nixon's going to China was a similar ploy with some pretty similar game changing consequences.
As to hightened alerts during wargames, that always happened, sometimes with odd consequences. I recall hearing about the flap caused by EX OKEAN 75, where the Soviet Navy practiced a global deployment of their fleet. It suddently occured to people they had a vast number of ships already past the naval choke points like the G-I-UK gap, the Bosphorus and Sea of Okhotsk, and would be quite capable of contesting control of the opean oceans without first having to fight their way out...
Just a note, for those who may have given up looking, that there is a new front page post. :-)
Cool. I'll get in the last word on this thread before we start up on the new one. The new one looks like fun.
1. Cold War
Thucydides said...
Amen to that. We owe our lives and civilizations to the unsung watch officers at NORAD and the PVO Strany who looked at radar plots and computer warnings that missiles were incoming, but stopped and double checked rather than ratcheting up the decision tree.
...... Nixon's going to China was a similar ploy with some pretty similar game changing consequences.
=======
I think we all have a deep respect for all the men and women in uniform. Its the political decision makers at the top of the tree who put them in a position where human frailty and imperfections (as well as technical) can potential unleash doomsday on us all. There have been times in history where whole military units go crazy. Its lucky it never happened that two people went simultaneously crazy in any of the sides nuclear arsenals. Hypothetically if there were a separate reality/universe for each possibility I wonder what percentage in our history ended up in nuclear holocaust? 50% 60%? Ex Secretary of Defence McNamara thinks the chances of war in the Cuban crisis alone was 30%,
Nixon was underrated. And I think he's game changing Cold War destabilisation was a lot safer than Reagan's doubling your military spending and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Recognising Communist China was a brilliant piece of triangulation and he did it virtually solo against the wishes of his own ideological party.
He was also the first president to fly into the Soviet Union and actually talk to the Commies. Talking is good when you are aiming 40,000 thermonuclear warheads at each other. On a side note
I watched a documentary on the declassified Soviet/KGB stuff and their take on Nixon was he was a peacemaker. When he was brought down by watergate the Soviets couldn't believe the leader of the free world could be undone by a simple break in to a journalists office. (Stalin got away with mass murder - literally!). The KGB's interpretation of it was that it was an American military-industrial coup (to protect their own military spending) and the Soviets moved up their readiness levels accordingly.
Nixon was the pragmatic, hard headed bastard best suited to the times. Its just a pity his no-holds barred pragmatism spilled over into outright illegality. He was like a presidential Batman. The leader we deserved but not the one we needed.
2. Carriers as a capital vessel
Fair enough there are missions only carriers can do. There were quite a few missions (night fighting, shore bombardment, holding the line at (Surigao Straight) only Battleships could do in WWII but it didn't stop them from being utterly supplanted by Carriers. Mostly because the carrier could sink the Battleships with impunity.
I think there's a chance the carrier has to abandoned in a high intensity war because its just too vulnerable. The type of navy missions its good at (sea control, air cover) will just have to be abandoned because the carrier isn't survivable.
Modern Submarines are a supreme sea denial weapon. If they are in the area, hell if you think they are in the area then you dare not venture into that sea before you have sunk them. The British only dared venture into the Falklands after both of Argentina's crappy WW2 era subs were sunk - at port - by aircraft. Likewise the Argentinian Navy didn't venture into the area when the British just announced there was an SSN in the area (they were lying).
Supposedly the diesel-electric HMAS Rankin took photos of all 4 sides of one of the Nimitz CVNs at Rimpac then threw a flare up onto their deck to rub it in. I presume an Astute or Virginia is only limited by the number of torpedoes it carries. I know some submariners on other forums keep dropping hints they can sail right through a carries screen with impunity.
The new chinese anti-carrier ballistic missile (?DF-21) will complicate matters and become a graver threat to carriers as they mature. How many admirals are going to dare venture within 500km of the Chinese coast and conduct air operations (giving away their approximate location) if they know there are 100 of these bad boys ready to plunge down onto their carrier at mach 10 as soon as the chinese get a better more localised fix on the carrier's location?
Likewise if the chinese manage to build an Los Angeles SSN equivilent one day how many admirals are going to sail into the Taiwan straight if China has announced 3 of them are lurking?
There may be multiple missions only a carrier can do but their vulnerabilities are only getting graver. The problem is its arguable the definition of a capital vessel is it can only trully be matched by another capital vessel. And you cannot afford to lose them! I've read somewhere the USN thinks they have enough SSN's to sink everyone's navies (merchant and military) several times over. I think its arguable a modern submarine force like the USN's will make it impossible for any other type of surface warship to operate in an all-out war.
3. Battleships/Iowa Class etc etc
The Iowa's were really not that great as shore bombardment. I'm a bit biased because the USN was so in love with their WW2 era phallic relics they tried to pin the 1989 explosion in the Iowa's turret on an innocent sailer who happened to be gay.The 16 inch shells used (surplus) didn't carry much HE, they were mostly designed to kill battleships. The geriatric cannon weren't that accurate either and their low rate of fire is not ideal for shore bombardment. They gave the marines a big morale boost to see such huge ass cannons firing but their effectiveness was less than ideal. The Navy would have been better off developing a new 155mm Cannon and shared the army's new whiz-bang precision shells and long range rocket boosted shells. As a marine I'd rather have a GPS guided shell hitting the bunker or whatever than hoping one of the 60yo 16inch shells hits the right place.
The armor is irrelevent in modern warfare since the radar/radios/electronics was all exposed an a sunburst would mission kill an Iowa. Note in some way mission killing is better than sinking in a high intensity war since it takes lots of diverted resources to get that crippled vessel (with its 1700 crew) back home.
A bit extra on Reagan ....
He did become a lot less hawkish and engaged in negotiation a lot more in his 2nd term. He also dramatically about faced and turned to defensive items like the SDI (Star Wars) in his 2nd term.
Its not unreasonable something scared him a great deal during his 1st term.
And yes I know nuclear doctrine holds something like SDI is ultimately an offensive weapon but SDI wasn't sold that way to the public.
Locki said:"Its not unreasonable something scared him a great deal during his 1st term."
Sorry, Locki, but I was in the USAF during that period and I didn't get that impression. I saw it as being able to negotiate from a position of strength; the US military was (rightly or wrongly), viewed as having been in decline after the Vietnam war; Reagan's build-up reversed that perception. You also have to remember that you can't assign modern-day knowledge and attitudes to decades-old events; we, who lived through those times, had to make do with what we had, with what we knew at the time. Unless you are a lot older than you sound, let me give you some friendly advice; please don't make the mistake of judging historical events by modern standards, but instead by the same viewpoint held by the people who lived through those times.
Ferrell
... please don't make the mistake of judging historical events by modern standards, but instead by the same viewpoint held by the people who lived through those times.
Ferrell
Yeah thats more than fair criticism. I accept that.
By way of apology I was being deliberately contrary, with respect to Reagan, to see what it would bring up.
I'll admit that it is only with the benefit of hindsight we know the missile gap etc etc was not as great as thought.
But as you rightly pointed out the important thing from a negotiation point of view was the "perception" of the gap ... not the gap proper.
And Reagan certainly did his bit to motivate the American public and verbalise complex policy in terms the public could consume and support.
In the end he most certainly won the Cold War so any criticism on my part is a bit like sour grapes and more than than probably due to a bit of the "red tinge" my leftward leaning parents instilled in me during the 80s. (You got my age pegged just about right)
I will watch the new thread.
Basically I think, carriers should stay out of harm's way as they can, and serve as secure mobile base behind, and occupy things after missile salvos, smaller ships crippled defence.
Let's see...
1. The "Regan" defense buildup began in the Carter Administration, in reaction to Soviet intransigence over things like Afghanistan and (as already mentioned) a perception that the US military was going soft post-Vietnam.
2. Carriers have always been vulnerable to both enemy fleet- and shore-based attack. That's why defense suppression was always important in maritime campaigns in WW2. Nothing new there.
3. The Iowa class battleships had HE rounds, not just AP. Their Cold War utility in shore bombardment turned out not to be in direct support, but in battlefield shaping, in the sense of attacking enemy assets ashore that could contribute to enemy defensive of or offensive effectiveness, but which weren't in direct opposition to Marine forces on the ground.
Capital ships will continue to evolve, just like they always have.
I have seen one prediction that the Navy will migrate to much smaller carriers that carry flocks of UAV/UCAV's. The primary purpose of these mini carriers is to spot targets for surface action ships and submarines carrying long distance bombardment weapons like hypersonic boost glide weapons and electromagnetic railguns. Of course, this could be wildly off base in the real world, but is hardly an implausible evolution.
For people interested in thinking about this (and looking for departure points for their Larry Bond/Tom Clancy like technothrillers) the US is developing an integrated strategy known as AirSea Battle for their expeditionary forces.
I'm new to this site. I've been reading about people's views of future plausible space war and something sticks out to me. People easily postulate advanced AI but I don't think they understand the implications of that postulate taken it's logical conclusion.
If you have human level AI in your setting then you have Von Neumann machines. That means that there is no such thing as expensive. Your only cost is design cost which can be done by AI. So it doesn't matter how many spacecraft you build. Within 40 years of launching a single Von Neumann machine (say 5,000 tons) into the asteroid belt or Jupiter's moons, you could turn out 5*10^15 tons of material per year. So, 10,000 ton warcraft would not be useful for long. There could be missiles that size in a relatively short time. Heck, within 50 years of desktop computer sized human level AI, you could build every person on Earth their own Imperial Star Destroyer minus the FTL.
By the time we get AI and interplanetary ships, the firepower that could be easily thrown around is outside of our definition of reasonable.
So, how many ships do you need to police a solar system?
What is the optimal size for a ship, when cost does not factor into the equation?
When you can mass produce multi-megaton sized ships like GM builds cars, do you even build small ones?
Do kinetics just become relativistic weapons used against planets/moons?
Errick
I'm new to this site. I've been reading about people's views of future plausible space war and something sticks out to me. People easily postulate advanced AI but I don't think they understand the implications of that postulate taken it's logical conclusion ...
... von neumann machines ...
Errick
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Hi Errick,
I think the problem is what technologies are considered PMF vs what is considered post-PMF.
I think strong AI is generally considered more advanced than PMF.
Certainly strong AI, leading to the technological singularity is post PMF.
I've read quite a bit about von neumann machines and its reasonably arguable even with a strong AI its not possible to produce machines that can endlessly replicate themselves.
Also Von Neumann machines are certainly considered post-PMF.
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Re: Iowa Battleships as shore bombardment.
Don't ask me to reference but I've seen a lot of talk about how even the HE shells of the 16 inch guns of the Iowa carry a disappointingly small amount of HE. The AP rounds are of course useless for anything but bunker busting but the navy would rather drop a 500kg laser guided bomb on it anyway.
In terms of missile carrying capacity there's a lot of cheaper ways to get 32 tomahawks to sea (Arleigh burke class etc etc)
Suffice to say when the navy began designing a modern shore bombardment destroyer (Zumwalt then DDX or whatever its called now) they were intending for 2 x 155mm Cannon and a bunch of 100-200km range GPS guided missiles (derived from the standard) then a bunch of tomahawks.
I thought PGMs changed everything.
There's no longer any need or requirement for "battlefield shaping" of old with huge shore bombardments/artillery barrages or B-52 carpet bombing.
I m clearly against autonomous and self replicating robots...
Some lines are better not be crossed, otherwise we deserve a robot rebellion, or a tyrant ruling with robotic armies.
My first law of robotics would be : machine cant decide over human life, except when it wants to save one, for example a car stops before it would hit a wall.
Train computer gamers to be drone controllers if they want something.
I also doubt that AIs lead to singularity, there was a good article about crowdsourcing, how a human network can be better than a big supercompu.
s337101
You don't need Singularity type AI to have Von Neumann machines, controlled by remote control in the solar system, that can self replicate. You can that design tomorrow using industrial robotics. The problem is how big it will be. It will merely be an ecology of machines working together to self replicate. More advanced 3D printing technology is more important than AI. But if you have AI than can travel interplanetary distances and autonomously engage in 3 dimensional combat, then you can accomplish the easier task of programming them to turn an asteroid into copies of themselves.
TOM
I don't believe the singularity will happen like many believe. I do believe that expert systems will continue to be developed and that computers will get faster and smarter. I don't believe we will get Artificial General Intelligence. Human general intelligence is composed of emotional intelligence (nobody wants an emotional computer), survival instincts (self preservation is not desirable in a machine), computation (they already do this), creativity (outgrowth of survival instincts), mating instincts (machines don't have sex), gathering resources (useful for a self replicating system), language, facial recognition, and adaptability which is also related to survival. In other words, most of what comprises human intelligence is undesirable in a machine. Hence I think the trend for expert systems will continue. As for machines building machines, that is already happening. It will not be a problem as long as nobody builds a machine with survival instincts. Do not program your computer with self preservation. Considering that mark 1 humans have these things called nukes that can kill anything made out of matter, I'm not worried about a robot rebellion. I'm worried about political elites intentionally using robots to create a police state. But you have hit on another reason to have a human crew on a warship which is that we don't want robots with survival instincts and weapons.
You don't need nanotechnology to build a Von Neumann system. Nanotechnology just makes the system smaller. But if you have 10,000 ton space warships, you can have a Von Neumann probe. Heck NASA did design studies on self replicating systems weighing 100 tons. You have people talking about 10,000 ton warships. Think for a second what type of space infrastructure is required to build a 10,000 ton space warship. Build 20 of them and send them as a Von Neumann ecology into the asteroid belt. Is 200,000 tons of which half is payload enough to have a self replicating machine in your near future? How about 400,000? Take the same amount of resources for half of your space fleet and tell me if that is enough in your setting to build a Von Neumann ecology. If so then why have you not built one? If you can throw around 10,000 tons for a space warship which is a resource drain, than you can throw around equivalent or more for manufacturing and industrialization which will make you money. You will actually have Von Neumann factories in space before you have warships. Otherwise, what are your warships fighting over? And who are they fighting against? What is the most efficient way to mine the asteroid belt? What is the most efficient way to industrialize another planet? What is the most efficient way to terraform a planet? How did you build the civilian ships to get to Mars or wherever? You really can't get around it. If you have a space economy to fight over, then you have Von Neumanns. They will go hand in hand.
Errick
Errick:
"You don't need Singularity type AI to have Von Neumann machines, controlled by remote control in the solar system, that can self replicate. You can that design tomorrow using industrial robotics. The problem is how big it will be. It will merely be an ecology of machines working together to self replicate. More advanced 3D printing technology is more important than AI. But if you have AI than can travel interplanetary distances and autonomously engage in 3 dimensional combat, then you can accomplish the easier task of programming them to turn an asteroid into copies of themselves."
Trying to be tactful...executing a military mission with finished technological means is orders of magnitude less complex than going from raw materials in the ground to those finished products. First of all, it's highly unlikely that all of the materials necessary to reproduce an artifact are present in a single asteroid, or even a selection of several. and even if they are, one may have to totally dismantle an asteroid or two to get enough of a certain substancei n order to make only a few finished units. Transition metals heavier than iron, like gold, coper, and silver, are likely to be very evenly distributed throughout the asteroid population, because there aren't the geological processes to concentrate them like we find them on Earth. Yet they're absolutely necessary for high technology. So just on energy terms alone Von Neumann machines seem a non-starter.
But even if you can get the raw materials efficiently, you have to actually extract, refine, form, and assemble them into finished products. The tool set for that might, at an absolute minimum, mass several hundreds of thousands of tons. There really isn't such a thing as a Von Neumann machine, but one might just barely imagine a Von Neumann industrial economy.
But that economy would spend most of its effort on maintaining itself, not on reproducing itself -- things do get old and break down, after all, and only the absolute minimum of everything would be sent across space. So output would be diverted overwhelmingly into keeping the system going, rather than producing a new example of the system. One can easily imagine a Von Neumann megafactory sitting on a moon or an asteroid, working on itself, with a twin slowly taking form next door over several decades or even several centuries. And as soon as the twin is complete, it has to immediately go to work on its own maintenance first, before taking off for another work site.
All of this illustrates that a Von Neumann "machine" is in fact not a real machine, but a conceptual, invented to make a theroretical argument, not to accomplish a real world task.
You are a Von Neumann machine. Bacteria can reproduce in 20 minutes,
but your saying we can't design an artificial system to reproduce in less than several decades? Our future engineers must be horrible. They can't even match industrialization on modern day Earth.
Errick
Errick, you may be a 'Von Neumann' machine, but it took a billion years of evolution to get to this point; a non-biological 'Von Neumann' machine that achives the level of modern biological systems might take longer than the far side of the PMF.
Ferrell
Errick:
"You are a Von Neumann machine. Bacteria can reproduce in 20 minutes,
but your saying we can't design an artificial system to reproduce in less than several decades? Our future engineers must be horrible. They can't even match industrialization on modern day Earth."
The engineers that industrialized present day Earth couldn't have done it by design in a million years. There's simply too much necessary specialization, combined with too many interconnections between specializations, at too many levels. If you asked the the 100 best industrial engineers who ever lived to document how our industrial system works, they couldn't. How could one expect engineers at any level of sophistication and accomplishment to recreate it in a few tens or even hundreds of thousands of tons of machinery, even with a limited list of finished products in mind?
I have a reading assignment for you. Go to this link and read "I, Pencil":
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
Feel free to ignore the political arguments, since they are irrelevant to what I am trying to illustrate. What I am trying to illustrate is simply this -- even the most elementary technological artifacts are highly complex in origin. It's not defeatist to suggest that an industrial system is beyond design. It's simple humility.
Well, i can agree, that before we send settlers, it is good to deploy seeds of the infrastructure, (to test that our rockets are safe enough at the beginning...)
But i also think, reaching complete automation of complex processes are outside PMF...
Machines are very good for certain special tasks, but reach human level complexity... I have doubts that developing human level AIs will be ever viable.
You are a Von Neumann machine. Bacteria can reproduce in 20 minutes
And that is all they did for almost three billion years. Whatever caused the "Cambrian revolution" 500 million years ago did an incredible thing, it destabilized a system which was running in equilibrium.
I'm willing to bet the real reason that the Fermi Paradox hasn't been explained yot has a lot to do with this. If you could rapidly cruise the galaxy and look for Earth like worlds, the vast majority are probably covered in pond scum or something similar.
It also takes a great deal of effort to get bacteria to actually do things that are useful to us, mesing with bacterial DNA for genetic engineering of proteins or other useful "stuff" makes the bacterial workhorses very susceptible to damage and being out competed by "wild" bacteria. After 5000+ years of practice with domestic animals, ask yourself would a dog or a wolf last longer back in the natural environment? Wolves can do quite well in an urban or farm environment, unless humans level the playing field with firearms...
What i can imagine, is some hive mind, a factory producing small drones that collect ores, so the factory can manufacture new drones, and the rest of the ore can be shipped... but i think, maintaining and expanding the factory will require human guidance.
Tony said...
The engineers that industrialized present day Earth couldn't have done it by design in a million years. There's simply too much necessary specialization, combined with too many interconnections between specializations, at too many levels. If you asked the the 100 best industrial engineers who ever lived to document how our industrial system works, they couldn't. How could one expect engineers at any level of sophistication and accomplishment to recreate it in a few tens or even hundreds of thousands of tons of machinery, even with a limited list of finished products in mind?
I have a reading assignment for you. Go to this link and read "I, Pencil":
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
======
Sometimes people just say things that clarify concepts for me instantly. I've never liked the Von Neuman machine concept. Mostly because it was often related to molecular assembly nanomachines which I naturally dislike.
But I think the point a Von Neuman machine would in reality be an entire Von Neuman economy is valid. I would take the argument one step further and argue a Von Neuman machine/economy would for all intents and purposes be an entire artificial species.
Excellent link Tony. I'd come across the concept of course but mostly to do with the difficulty/impossibility of rebuilding larger scale stuff (petroleum economy/industrial civilisation) post nuclear holocaust. It had never occurred to me that even the humble pencil might be beyond a 20,000 post apocalypse subsistence farmers with a only a few copies of the Brittanica Encyclopedia to guide them.
2. Cold War recollections (Re: Ferrel/Tony)
To put some of my earlier views in context. I was a child when the cold war peaked in the 80's but I still remember 2 things:
a. I had two fears. Car accidents killing my family and nuclear war killing my family
b. I clearly remember watching it on TV live when Reagen proclaimed the USSR was the evil empire.
Now I'm not an American so my opinion was influenced by the international media and my parents. But even as a child the proclamation sent a chill down my spine. I knew the people in charge of the USSR thought they were the good guys and the USA were the bad guys. It was an ideological battle not a war against Lucifer. I also knew their leadership and nation had personally made unimaginable sacrifices in WWII and survived Hitler and then someone worse in the person of Stalin. Certainly our media potrayed it as a dangerous escalation in rhetoric.
As the Cold War faded from memory I started to believe it hadn't been that bad or that dangerous. Nuclear annihilation was just another childhood fear like the cupboard boogeyman.
For whatever reason I've had a bit more time to research the cold war and my world outlook is now altered by the fact I have a family of my own. Its obvious I was mistaken on two fronts. The soviets weren't just misguided or an alternate point of view. The Soviets had to go. But the awareness of how close the world came to the brink on multiple occassions also fills me with dread. The survival of our civilisation shouldn't come down to a single Soviet duty officer Colonel (Petrov) ignoring the 5 x Minutemen launches he presumed to be fake.(it was a false warning).
I presume we are only a handful of political crisis away from a Cold War sitatution returning again. The ICBMs and SLBMs are all still there. Despite the savage military cutbacks in everyone's miltiary budgets the one thing the British/Russians/French are maintaining are the SSBNs. The weapons are all ready to be used if the political context changes. I hope we never have to take the same risks again. Not having an appreciation of the risks the world's democracies had to take only adds to our future risk.
Locki:
"It had never occurred to me that even the humble pencil might be beyond a 20,000 post apocalypse subsistence farmers with a only a few copies of the Brittanica Encyclopedia to guide them."
That's a little stark. Modern, mass-produced pencils would be beyond them. The pencil as a class of tool they could probably do something about. Having said that, any pencils or substitutes they could make would bear a much higher economic cost per item.
An industrial economy relies on specialization for the wealth it creates. Even in the 1930s and 40s heyday of fully integrated industrial giants, sepcialization was the name of the game. An industrial engineer at GM Guide Lamp, for example, couldn't have told an engine designer at Pontiac much about engine castings, while the engine designer probably didn't know a thing about the sheet metal components that went into car headlights.
Imagine a Von Neumann robot economy just trying to maintain itself, much less produce copies. Imagine all of the industrial specializations it would have to deploy, and all of the knowledge that would have to be incorporated into its design. Imagine the list of industrial processes necessary to make a mining robot, and a list of the industrial processes necessary to make the tools to make that robot, and a list of the industrial processes necessary to process the output of that robot. There's a reason planned economies don't work -- nobody, no group, no group of gorups, could imagine all of the pieces and how they have to go together. And if you think about it, a Von Neumann architecture is the ultimate in planned economies.
"2. Cold War recollections (Re: Ferrel/Tony)"
It was just a phase we were going through. Sometimes our phases, both as individuals and as societies, are particularly dangerous. I see no more meaning in it that that. In fact, I think a big part of the danger came from giving things like Reagan's rhetoric more meaning than they deserved. But that seems to be a lesson people as a whole never learn...
Just a for the record, eocnlib is paid for by the Liberty Fund, a libertarian think tank responsible for helping muddy the political discourse in this country.
While modern politics might not have bearing on the relevance of an essay written in 1958, due caution is always warranted when accepting gifts from strangers. I rate an endorsement by Milton Friedman with as much suspicion as medical advice from Dr. "Icepick" Freeman.
The most seductive lies aren't the ones fabricated out of 100% BS, they're the ones that are mostly made of common sense and fact that would otherwise be fine except for some little pathogenic lie, like a delicious hamburger perfect except for the fecal e.coli in the patty.
jollyreaper:
"Just a for the record, eocnlib is paid for by the Liberty Fund, a libertarian think tank responsible for helping muddy the political discourse in this country."
Would you accept the Wikisource version:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
?
Please tell us where the author got his facts wrong about the nature of industrial systems, or the specifics of a mass-produced pencil's genesis.
Also please tell us where I said you had to accept the political message, or perhaps how it is irretrievably inseparable from the industrial economic story.
You can't because the author got his industrial engineering right, even if he subscribes to politics that that make certain people swoon in horror.
What I said has nothing to do with the story itself, just the company it's keeping.
jollyreaper:
"What I said has nothing to do with the story itself, just the company it's keeping."
Then it was a pretty unnecessary thing for you to say, given the fact that nobody was promoting the company, just the factual information.
You all will have to forgive me for diverting this line of comments to these rather small inquiry requests of mine. It's mostly issues that require a second opinion or two.
Of course, it's all along the lines of the initial blog entry theme.
First off is my initial rough spacecraft design. Here's the picture and blog entry of my rough warcraft idea for reference purposes. Oh, and fair warning: Links to Evil Website within the blog entry and ahead!
Anyway, my question is that though the rough idea is sound to a degree as far as I can tell, I simply have no idea how to give visual distinctiveness and identity with any other spacecraft type other than equipment-wise. I would say spacecraft "Class" but I'm not sure if that would be the more appropriate jargon considering that "Space is NOT an ocean" despite popular claims to the contrary.
And speaking of distinctiveness, while looking up the designs of the spacecraft to a particular roleplaying and war gamming franchise, there was one design element that had me perplexed that they call "Drive Fins". Here are some links to websites that have some pictures to illustrate what I am talking about.
In short, the source books describe the Drive Fins as both a Thrust Vectoring technique and as a heat sink. Personally I don't think that really adds up, and especially since I don't see any other type of radiator in the schematics, to have a heat sink that close to the very hot exhaust. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps there are heat resistant tiles on the surfaces that interact with the hot remass exhaust that insulate the heat sink that solves that problem.
Overall, I am simply curious if such an idea is even a remotely plausible solution to thrust vectoring and heat management.
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Thrust vectoring maybe, but (like you), I don't see any radiators...how long after they start their drive until their ship melts?
Ferrell
From what I could gather, apparently the Drive Fins (being heat sinks) ARE the radiators.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Isn't it counterproductive to have your primary means of thermal cooling be THAT close to what is undoubtedly plasma-state remass?
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About spaceship design, i dont really understand, what is the problem of atomic rockets with horizontal deck layout?
If i would like to land on a moon, i'd prefer landing on the ship's big belly. Docking to a space station or mothership, i can also rather imagine attach my belly to it.
Ok takeoff can be better vertical, but then everything has to be attached because the high G force. I would still prefer horizontal decks.
Do they want to mimic gravity by making constant G acc? That would be pretty nice...
About mimicking gravity and save crews from serious medical problems : ok motherships have enough radius for spinning, but on a smaller ship, you could feel different forces affecting your leg and head...
What do you think about telescopically extendable/retractable crew habitats?
If your deck is "horizontal" then your rocket engine would have to be centered on the "bottom" deck in order for the trust vector to pass through the quarters in the way you want. If the rocket was at the back, the thrust vector (and "gravity") would be parallel to the deck and everyone would be stuck against the wall.
In more practical terms, if the rocket is centered on the bottom deck and the deck is very long ("horizontal"), then there would be some very odd stresses on the ship. Think of carrying a long board balanced on your shoulder; the ends will be drooping down, perhaps by a lot. The ends of the deck will also be "drooping" when you are under weigh.
Extensible booms mounting habs is an old concept, there was a plastic model (Pilgrim Explorer) way back when which used the concept, and some spaceship designs in the Traveller 2300 game also had habs mounted on booms. You need a pretty impressive drive to take full advantage of this (forward is up/outboard is down); in the case of the Pilgrim Explorer the main reason for the folding habs was to present a slim profile for launch, everything "unfolded" once you were in space.
If the rocket was at the back, the thrust vector (and "gravity") would be parallel to the deck and everyone would be stuck against the wall.
Human tolerance for g force is bigger in perpendicular direction, the lowest if the blood goes into the head, middle if it goes from the head.
Acc perpendicular to human body is quite neutral, escalator like acc is less neutral.
Ok, that drooping can be a concern, but launch is only last for short times, most times acc will be pretty low or zero.
Otherwise it can be solved with manuevering thrusters at the front.
What if the ship lands? How will the crew move through vertical decks? If the ship needs some repair, refillment, this landing time can be bigger than the big acc time.
The ends of the deck will also be "drooping" when you are under weigh.
Well im not an engineer, but i dont really understand this.
Wont be the entire hull subjected to this?
Big waves dont make such things with the decks of a ship?
In case of horizontal decks, there will be still lots of vertical parts to relieve the stress.
Unless you have multiple rocket engines evenly spaced along the "bottom" of the hull, the stress will be concentrated in the center where the rocket engine is, and the ends will tend to "droop". I used the example of a long piece of wood because it is very clear, and the more you add braces to counter the "droop", the greater the mass being used for structure, which takes away from payload, life support, usable space etc.
Spacing rocket engines along the length of the hull reduces the amount of structural bracing, but now you have the mass of the engines, plumbing, control electronics etc. taking away from the things you want to do.
Now even in the real world of engineering, ships, aircraft, bridges and other structures bend, flex and otherwise are deformed by external and internal stresses. Most of the time, the bending and flexing is either too small to notice due to the scale or time span (a bridge expanding a few inches during a hot day won't move noticeably to the naked eye), but you can watch video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge flexing in the wind prior to self destructing to see the end point if you are not careful.
As mentioned, you can load up on mass with braces to counter, or use some very sophisticated engineering. The Vickers Windsor bomber in WWII was designed to be as light and strong as possible, and used an amazingly complex geodesic frame (where no two frame members had the same joining angle to each other) and had a stressed skin which required a tuning fork to properly apply. Needless to say, the Air Ministry rejected the design as being virtually impossible to mass produce. At any rate, bombers built with brute force engineering like the Lancaster and Halifax were capable of doing the same job, cost less and could be mass produced.
So you pick which parameters you want and accept some sort of price to achieve them.
Hmm I see.
Still, lots of vertical bulkheads will be needed even if there will be horizontal decks, for fragmenting the airspace.
So i think lots of horizontal and vertical walls will be included anyway, but the general horizontal layout is more humane.
Maybe i could even do, when there is big G force, for a short time, most crew members can slide back in their chairs to reduce their stress. Blood from head acc is much worse.
Catching up on the thread (real life intervened).
I'm very much with Tony on the drive/weapon thing. Phil, I'm sorry, but there is no way that this could possibly work in reality. You keep coming off as being totally out of touch with the reality of engineering, to the point of being annoying. I'm reminded of certain discussions with Tony on the nature of space warfare, but in reverse.
Actually, I've been agreeing with Tony more and more lately. This is getting slightly scary.
Going way back to the drone wars, I thought of a way in which having humans on board might actually perform the role that Tony said they would in discouraging conflict: export models.
The entire situation changes if you consider that the owning power and building power might not be the same. At best, a very well-built antidrone system might cost the builder a year of R&D and a week or two of yard time. The same is not true of an export buyer. They may not have access to the control code, which means that a lot more R&D is required, and on a smaller budget. Therefore, we can't assume that the buyer would be able to modify the vessels into drones in a timely manner, which leaves the humans at risk if they decide to attack someone. This actually sounds like a plausible idea for an exporter who cares about how the weapons are used. That's not to say that all exported warships would be this way, but the philosophy might work quite well for monkey models.
Tony:
I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, but the biggest factor may in fact have been Christianity, from which we get the concepts of individual worth and a rational universe. With those as philosophical starting points, it's hard not to be competitive and innovative over the long run.
I would definitely agree, more so as I am a Christian. More then anything else, that has defined our culture for the past 1500 years.
Locki:
One of the engineering types may correct me (Phil? Byron? Tony?) but I think chemical rockets work even better in a vacuum.
Somewhat. You will get a little bit higher specific impulse, but not a huge amount.
In a vacuum if it expended all of that energy just accellerating (no drag) it'll hit .... god only knows what speed. 100+ km/sec ??? Why are we even talking about lasers? Ditto armour or any sort of passive defence. Even a dinky 15kg Stinger missile will hit you at 4-8km/sec.
Not even close. The first stage should provide about 1 km/s of delta-V, the second 1.5 km/s, and the third about 1.3 km/s. These are rough numbers, as astronautix didn't have all the numbers that I would have needed for a full analysis. The point is that between the climb and the drag, it reaches about 1/3 of its theoretical maximum.
And I see you caught the problem. I'm not going to get rid of this, as I already did the work.
Ferrell:
Oh, and any rocket's theoretical maximum velocity is twice the exhast velocity; I doubt that an SM-3 (even in a vacuum) could reach 100 kps fast enough to reach burn-out before a target ship blew it up and/or lesurely moved out of it's path.
No, a rocket could theoretically reach ln(infinity)*Ve. I'm not quite sure what that means, but in practice, it is limited to around Ve for a reasonable-payload single-stager. Orbital boosters are about the most extreme things possible, as they have to deal with the deep gravity well.
TOM:
Its a great site, but to say fighters are inefficient because they need return fuel but not investigating all other torpedo boat missions, reusablity and other issues... i have to call it oversimplification...
Can we please not go there again? I'm not sure what you're referring to, and even if I was, you have yet to convince me that anything fighter-like would be used for anything that fighters get used for in fiction.
Oh, and happy 1000 posts everyone. Sorry I missed it.
Tony:
Thing is, in the real world, it usually is Purple AND Green, complementing each other. But of course, to recognize that would undermine the whole point of having an argument...
No, the point of the argument is to figure out if it's a purple-gray or a green-gray.
Thucydides:
The Japanese totally pooched Pearl Harbour because they failed to deny the logistics of the base to the enemy (if they were going to follow up with a landing right away, then maybe the miss could be justified) and because they failed to hunt down the aircraft carriers at the same time.
Failed to hunt down the aircraft carriers? Let's see. There are no carriers in the harbor. What do we do? Search a couple hundred thousand square miles of ocean for three carriers? That could take days. And we have no proof that the carriers are even in range (and I believe that two of the three weren't).
Now Napoleonic law and bureaucracy did manage to outlive him, but there were quite a few people who were equally happy with the system the Communists or the Taliban established. The major difference is mostly longevity and how history gets written. Had the Taliban made better choices in house guests, no one would have bothered with them and their horrific regime could have lasted for decades or centuries. It seemed back in the 70's that the USSR was going to last forever as well (hence the CoDominium stories of Jerry Pournelle), and if there was no President Reagan, they just might have limped along even to this day.
I'm not so sure about that. The argument about the Taliban is similar to arguments I've read that the Germans could have won WWII by enlisting the various Slavic groups that they liberated from the Russians (Ukrainians for instance). Sure they could have, but that wouldn't happen given their ideology.
Scott:
Unless we get something like the VASMIR or some other throttleable design, in which case you could have dual-purpose ships.
We have these today. They're called hall thrusters. Advanced lab models have the same performance VASMIR is promising in a few years.
Locki:
But even if an expensive nuclear drive is possible from an engineering and economic POV you may just be better hauling a 3 or 4 stage chemical rocket as your main weapon. It'll still have pretty spectacular delta-V (enough for engagement ranges out to tens of thousands of kilometers) and unmatchable accelleration.
The problem with staging is that it cuts deep into your payload mass. You have to duplicate engines and structure several times, and there are just that many more things to fail. The SM-3s warhead masses under 20 kg. (I couldn't find better numbers. The final dry mass is probably somewhere between 50 and 60 kg.)
The battleship itself looked like a kick ass ship. Big heavy armour, huge guns, loud noises beautifully purposeful silhoeutte. Its a no wonder the public couldn't accept a flat top, unarmed, fragile floating airport as its replacement for so long. Even in the 1980's the USN wasted millions reactivating the Iowa's and tying up 2700 valuable crewmen (thats enough to crew 27 destroyers or submarines!) because I suspect they looked totally kick ass and gave Ol' Reagan and his warhawks something very visible to cheer.
Where did these numbers come from? First off, they reactivated the Iowas for bombardment duty, which is still something we are lacking. Secondly, a Spruance-class destroyer has a crew of 334, not 100, and the Iowas each had a crew of about 1800. But I see Tony beat me to the punch on this one.
2. Space Shuttle with a few AMRAAMs and SM-3s onboard:
Lethatility = 2, Plausibility = 10 (we can do it now!), Story Potential = 9. Totals = 20
AMRAAMs would be useless in space. SM-3s, not quite as much, but only the upper stages would be of any use. Also, targeting would be a problem. You're better off with custom missiles and vessels.
On a more meta level, I would split plausibility between strict technological plausibility and operational plausibility. The first is what you suggested, the second is things like what I mentioned above. How realistic is it? Also, the total should be 21.
or as is rumoured the British allowing the bombing of Coventry in WW2
No, Churchill didn't know what the target was.
Modern Submarines are a supreme sea denial weapon. If they are in the area, hell if you think they are in the area then you dare not venture into that sea before you have sunk them. The British only dared venture into the Falklands after both of Argentina's crappy WW2 era subs were sunk - at port - by aircraft. Likewise the Argentinian Navy didn't venture into the area when the British just announced there was an SSN in the area (they were lying).
Um, that's not really the case. A lot of the supposed superiority of submarines comes from the way exercises are conducted. The carrier has a box it has to be in, which the submarine can then search.
Also, the Argentinian submarine? One (Santa Fe) damaged at sea and captured off South Georgia, while the other one was a nuisance for a while. Neither was sunk in port, and both menaced British surface ships at some point.
Submarines are by nature attritional weapons, unsuited for fighting pitched battles. They never (to my knowledge) stopped an invasion or defeated an enemy fleet on a tactical level. Both types are needed.
Locki, cont.:
The Iowa's were really not that great as shore bombardment. I'm a bit biased because the USN was so in love with their WW2 era phallic relics they tried to pin the 1989 explosion in the Iowa's turret on an innocent sailer who happened to be gay.The 16 inch shells used (surplus) didn't carry much HE, they were mostly designed to kill battleships. The geriatric cannon weren't that accurate either and their low rate of fire is not ideal for shore bombardment. They gave the marines a big morale boost to see such huge ass cannons firing but their effectiveness was less than ideal. The Navy would have been better off developing a new 155mm Cannon and shared the army's new whiz-bang precision shells and long range rocket boosted shells. As a marine I'd rather have a GPS guided shell hitting the bunker or whatever than hoping one of the 60yo 16inch shells hits the right place.
Again, where did you get this from? The reason they tried to cover up the overram in the turret was because the people in charge of investigating were the same ones who had run the munitions assembly line. It was not an attempt to cover the battleships ass, it was to cover their own. The was a high-capacity (shore bombardment) shell, and it was used extensively. NavWeps says it was 1,900 lbs. The bursting charge does seem a bit low, but it should be at least equivalent to a 500 lb bomb. So the vessel can put down the equivalent of 9 500 lb bombs twice a minute. Probably more then that, given the larger fragment weight. And the battleships were available right then, not in ten years like the new gun/ship.
Tony:
1. The "Regan" defense buildup began in the Carter Administration, in reaction to Soviet intransigence over things like Afghanistan and (as already mentioned) a perception that the US military was going soft post-Vietnam.
I think a lot of that had to do with congress, not Carter.
Jollyreaper:
What I said has nothing to do with the story itself, just the company it's keeping.
That makes no sense. It's a piece of writing, not a person. Anyone can get a copy and do whatever they want with it (copyright not withstanding). By this logic, we should attack both the Bible and the Koran because unsavory elements have kept company with both of those.
TOM:
The point of atomic rockets is that the decks will generally be perpendicular to the thrust axis. The only time this won't happen is when there are other constraints, like in the space shuttle, where it has to behave like an airplane, too. Any deep space craft is going to be a tower-style design. Cantilevering (flying saucers) is just not a good idea if it can be helped. I'm not sure exactly what the formula is right now, but I'm about to do all of that in school. The only way it's likely to happen is in vessels that also have to operate in an atmosphere regularly.
I'm going to stay out of most of the cold war stuff, given that I wasn't alive then. (Cue lots of "that makes me feel old")
If it docks onto a spinning station, then the situation is something similar to landing, if it docks perpendicular to the station, there will be big shifts in gravity.
If it docks parallel, the layout will change, both of them are annoying.
By flying saucers, you mean spinning ships?
In PMF we can only mimic gravity by spinning, so even if it will be more expensive, i'd still like to do that.
Like extending the low and top decks and spin them.
Prolonged zero-G cause several medical problems, it isnt only for the sake of comfort.
You asked, not to go THERE again, and i cant add that much to the things already written. Maybe i could sum in the other topic...
If it docks onto a spinning station, then the situation is something similar to landing, if it docks perpendicular to the station, there will be big shifts in gravity.
If it docks parallel, the layout will change, both of them are annoying.
I take it you havn't watched 2001 lately?
TOM:
If it docks onto a spinning station, then the situation is something similar to landing, if it docks perpendicular to the station, there will be big shifts in gravity.
You will never attempt to dock at the rim of a spinning station. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but there are few things I would want to do less. You'll either dock on the spin axis (a la 2001) or dock on a non-spinning section. For one thing, docking away from the spin axis is instant asymmetry, and it will have to be an enormous station (or a very small craft) for that to not be a problem. The orientation of the craft in such a situation (if one was mad enough to attempt it) is arbitrary, and I'd assume would occur with the thrust axis towards the center of the station, for structural reasons if nothing else.
By flying saucers, you mean spinning ships?
In PMF we can only mimic gravity by spinning, so even if it will be more expensive, i'd still like to do that.
No, I didn't. I was referring to a design which is more like a disc then a cylinder. Topologically, it's the same, but in this case, the engine only occupies a small amount of the bottom surface and the entire vessel is squat.
Spinning parts of the ship is difficult. Spinning the whole thing is somewhat easier. Given the travel times involved, most cargo and military ships could probably skip spin. The crew doesn't have to do anything strenuous on arrival and the cost and mass of the spin system is a pain. We've had three people stay up for over a year, and they were fine. If spin is required, the easiest thing to do is shut down the engine, take a bladder and a long cable, pump remass into it, and using the bladder as a counterbalance spin up the ship with thrusters. The downside is that you can't run your engine. Troopships and liners are the exception to the no-spin-required rule. The passengers would probably get cranky, and the troops need to stay in shape.
Ok if it never lands and never produce big g-force, then vertical layout is ok.
On deck layout, it may hardly be a big factor for deep space ships with milligee acceleration. I'm not sure it matters much whether objects drift slowly toward the deck or an aft bulkhead.
But in any case, I suspect that these ships will usually have a spin hab (or else spin the entire ship). Docking and EVA would then presumably be along the spin axis.
Yes, it would be visually cool to scramble fighters by 'dropping' them from the spin hab rim. (Didn't B5 do that?) Alas, it is very hard to come up with an excuse for that procedure.
TOM:
Ok if it never lands and never produce big g-force, then vertical layout is ok.
In that case, I would hesitate to call it a vertical layout. If the vessel is not going to have a perceptible G-force at any point, there is no reason to go with a defined deck layout per se. Even then, a cylinder is probably better arranged into a tower layout to avoid lots of wasted space.
Rick:
But in any case, I suspect that these ships will usually have a spin hab (or else spin the entire ship). Docking and EVA would then presumably be along the spin axis.
The big problem with spin is the structural requirements. The more I think about it, an integrated spin hab is probably the way to go, simply to avoid the increased mass requirements for the tankage and engines. My spreadsheet uses a structural safety factor of 16, which was chosen to give a reasonable structural mass for the low-acceleration vessels it usually uses. I need to modify that some, actually.
Rick:
On deck layout, it may hardly be a big factor for deep space ships with milligee acceleration. I'm not sure it matters much whether objects drift slowly toward the deck or an aft bulkhead.
Doing more thinking on this, milligee acceleration is hardly slow drifting. Even if a human would perceive no up or down, there would be a definite falling of objects.
1 milligee is 1 cm/s2. At this rate, an object left floating for 10 seconds would fall 50 cm, and be moving at 10 cm/s. At 17.3 seconds, it will have fallen 150 cm, about from eye level to the feet. In 100 seconds, it will have fallen 50 m, and be moving at 1 m/s. While not dangerous, getting hit on the head with, say, a pencil at that velocity (drop it from about 5 cm above your head for a comparison) is not something that you want to have happen regularly.
A microgee ship (like a solar sail) would be a completely different story. Objects accelerate at .01 mm/s2. In 10 seconds, it would move .5 mm, and be moving at .1 mm/s. To fall the length of our 50 m deck would take 3162 s, or most of an hour, and it would be moving at 31.62 mm/s, or slightly more then 1 in/s. In that case, ignoring gravity is largely plausible, but the same cannot be said for a milligee drive.
I recall in the Mote in God's Eye, the shuttle deck could be used to crash launch the ships "boats" during an emergency, but I rather doubt that you could recover the craft while the MacArthur was spinning.
Launching weapons like Kinetic Kill Vehicles from the rim of a spinning ship would provide some initial delta V and provide clear separation before the boost motor starts. Having launch or docking cradles on the outer surface of a spinning ship provides for a fast "getaway" as in the B5 "scramble" and to clear drones, KKV's and other vehicles from the main body, so long as you accept that the ship needs to be de spun for recovery.
The other advantage is that you only have the airlock conecting you to the secondary ships, rather than a large docking bay which needs huge airlock doors, massive pumps and other gear to deal with the pressurized volume inside the ship.
Byron said ...
Again, where did you get this from? The reason they tried to cover up the overram in the turret was because the people in charge of investigating were the same ones who had run the munitions assembly line. It was not an attempt to cover the battleships ass, it was to cover their own. The was a high-capacity (shore bombardment) shell, and it was used extensively. NavWeps says it was 1,900 lbs. The bursting charge does seem a bit low, but it should be at least equivalent to a 500 lb bomb. So the vessel can put down the equivalent of 9 500 lb bombs twice a minute. Probably more then that, given the larger fragment weight. And the battleships were available right then, not in ten years like the new gun/ship.
=====================
Nice to see you back Byron. Where do you get your defence information from Byron? Your sources seem to be quite a bit more accurate than mine.
DDX or whatever it was called was supposed to be the replacement for shore bombardment. I guess since marines have pretty much abandoned am opposed forced shore landings (hence V-22, hovercraft etc) heavy short range shore bombardment has disappeared
I've seen a number of informal discussions (no references available) that for shore bombardment puposes they'd rather have 2 127mm cannons (spruance/tico) firing 40-ish rounds per second than a big Iowa firing 18 rounds per second at the target.
With the advent of precision guidence the army tends to prefer small bang 250lb SDB and excalibur anyway. Something about a smaller charge more accurate charge allowing your marines to be closer to the target when they call in fire support.
2. Milligee accelleration and ship layout
If a spaceship is capable of milli-gee accelleration do people think this precludes spinning up your hab ring?
Wouldn't spinning the whole ship be a lot lighter from a
Locki:
Nice to see you back Byron. Where do you get your defence information from Byron? Your sources seem to be quite a bit more accurate than mine.
The information on the Iowa was inferred from the wikipedia article. The stuff on the gun came from www.navweps.com.
DDX or whatever it was called was supposed to be the replacement for shore bombardment. I guess since marines have pretty much abandoned am opposed forced shore landings (hence V-22, hovercraft etc) heavy short range shore bombardment has disappeared
DDX itself is a terrible design. See here.
With the advent of precision guidence the army tends to prefer small bang 250lb SDB and excalibur anyway. Something about a smaller charge more accurate charge allowing your marines to be closer to the target when they call in fire support.
Remember that they were reactivated in the 80s, before precision guidance took off. I'm fairly certain (again, informal sources) that they cannot be reactivated within any reasonable timeframe today, congressional orders nonwithstanding.
2. Milligee accelleration and ship layout
If a spaceship is capable of milli-gee accelleration do people think this precludes spinning up your hab ring?
Wouldn't spinning the whole ship be a lot lighter from a
No, spinning the whole ship would not be lighter. The problem is that the structural requirements for spin are significantly higher then those reiquired for milligee acceleration. My spreadsheet uses a safety factor of 16 for milligee ships to bring structural mass to a reasonable level. Any spin section has to withstand accelerations of at least .5 G or so, which makes it very heavy.
This has forced me to reconsider my earlier suggestion about attaching a bag and spinning with it. Unless the vessel normally accelerates quite quickly (torchship levels) the structural mass penalty would be prohibitive.
'Light and strong' is practically a mantra in the aerospace industry; I'm pretty sure that any spacecraft designed to spin would take into account the added stress that the spinning would put on the structure; sure, it wouldn't be as lightly built as a 'craft that wasn't designed to spin, but you may have to put up with the compromise for long endurance spacecraft (for the health of the crew). This also makes me think that more spacecraft designs will incorporate magnetic radiation shielding to save on mass(even though it may increase power requirements).
Ferrell
Ferrell:
'Light and strong' is practically a mantra in the aerospace industry; I'm pretty sure that any spacecraft designed to spin would take into account the added stress that the spinning would put on the structure; sure, it wouldn't be as lightly built as a 'craft that wasn't designed to spin, but you may have to put up with the compromise for long endurance spacecraft (for the health of the crew). This also makes me think that more spacecraft designs will incorporate magnetic radiation shielding to save on mass(even though it may increase power requirements).
The problem is that the loads imposed by spinning are about three orders of magnitude larger then the loads imposed on a milligee ship that doesn't have to spin. Light and strong is obviously a goal, but the added structural requirements will be a very large performance penalty. This would suggest to spin as little of the ship as possible, and to avoid spinning if it can be done. A professional spacer might simply shrug and accept that he's not going to be dropping down to Earth after the trip without a few weeks in a low-G recovery hab.
'Light and strong' is practically a mantra in the aerospace industry; I'm pretty sure that any spacecraft designed to spin would take into account the added stress that the spinning would put on the structure; sure, it wouldn't be as lightly built as a 'craft that wasn't designed to spin, but you may have to put up with the compromise for long endurance spacecraft (for the health of the crew). This also makes me think that more spacecraft designs will incorporate magnetic radiation shielding to save on mass(even though it may increase power requirements).
Ferrell
====================
I sgree the ship will be built light and structurally strong through all axis thus enabling simulated gravity through spinning the entire ship for the coasting phases of the journey.
Its a warship. Its going to have some passive damage resistence and redundancy in its structure.
If ships are throwing gigawatt lasers and mach 50 KKVs at each other you're going to want some redundancy in the structure and not just make the warship be so lightly built it can "just" withstand milligee accelleration but fold like a tin can if it is subjected to slightly more force.
Actual armor is probably useless though.
I'd imagine building the warship structurally strong enough so it can withstand a piddly 0.5g of spin is worth it from a passive defence point of view.
Civilian starships are a completely different matter though.
Byron said...
.... I'm going to stay out of most of the cold war stuff, given that I wasn't alive then. (Cue lots of "that makes me feel old")
========
Oh come now Byron. We always get your opinion on everything else :)
Everyone has a right to an opinion on historic events whether they were alive or not. Besides everyone has espoused their opinion on WWII and even Napolean on this thread. I'm pretty sure not even Milo or Rick can give us their firsthand impressions of the Napoleonic wars.
You very well may have a more unbiased opinion anyway. I was a child and heavily influenced by the parents and an anti-US left wing government at the time. Tony/ Ferrel/past servicemen on the blog are influenced by their experiences in the armed forces. As long as we give the elderly, more venerable members of this blog the respect they deserve for their long life :) - than as far as I'm concerned its game on when discussing the cold war.
One of the advantages you might have is since the end of the cold war a lot of declassified information has come out of Russia and its fascinating to see what they were really thinking and countermoving in response to the West's strategies.
I'll get you started on some of the scarier stuff we didn't know about the USSR at the time. It helps form a better more rounded view of the events. Since it seems wikipedia sources are not too embarressing around here I'll just link back to the relevent wikipedia articles rather than use something more official
1. Dead Hand. An almost completely automated system designed to launch ALL of the USSR's surviving nuclear arsenal (40,000+ warheads)if it detected a nuclear decapitation strike on Moscow. You'll note since the Soviets assumed they'd be annihilated they were in fact intending to take everyone with them. So China, South Africa and even poor old Brazil (!!!!) had a few thermonuclear warheads put aside especially for them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29
2. Biopreparat: A totally illegal biological weapons program with industrial scales of weaponised anthrax able to be mounted to ballistic weapons for a trully "we're taking everyone with us 2nd strike"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat
3. We recently discovered that during the entire Cuban missile crisis there were about 50 tactical nuclear weapons on Cuba and a Soviet submarine with the authorisation to use its nuclear torpedoes during the "quarantine" of Cuba. The army had permission to fire nukes with no further notice if Kennedy had lost his nerve and ordered an invasion. We didn't know the sub had nuclear torps and scared the hell out of it by dropping practice depth charges all around it. Apparently, the captain was preparing to fire his torp but was stoppped by his 3rd in command. You can see why the space blockade thread is not my favourite fictional scenario. Nuclear war was very very close during the crisis and came down to a few military commanders holding their nerve.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_11/cubanmissile
4. Able Archer 1983. The soviets were getting increasingly paranoid and for some crazy reason thought the military exercise was a prelude to an invasion and first strike. They raised their readiness level almost to the equivilent of Defcon1. The scary thing is we didn't realise they were scared to well after the fact. Not talking is bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
5. Multiple false alarms especially with the Soviets crappy early warning system. Apparently one Colonel Petrov during Able Archer 1983 almost singlehandedly prevent nuclear war when he refused to pass on notification his system showed 5 inbound minutemen. He knew it had to be an error because if the USA were launching a sudden first strike they'd probably put more like 5000 missiles into the air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
I can tell you, being able to see the ridge where enemy artillery and tanks are stationed. It was even more frightening when, years later, I found out that they were planing to nuke us from the get-go. Anyway, the perception I had at the time was that the Soveits were planning to eventurally invade, starting a conventenal war, and only upgrading to nuke if they started to lose. Of course, we were wrong about that...
The lession for all of us here is:
Unless you REALY know what the other guy is thinking, the probability of someone doing something foolish and starting a war is greatly increased.
Ferrell
Ok, that first sentence should have read, "I can tell you, being able to see the ridge where enemy artillery and tanks are stationed, was a sobering experiance." Teach me to try and write when the dog wants to play fetch.
Ferrell
Locki:
I sgree the ship will be built light and structurally strong through all axis thus enabling simulated gravity through spinning the entire ship for the coasting phases of the journey.
Its a warship. Its going to have some passive damage resistence and redundancy in its structure.
If ships are throwing gigawatt lasers and mach 50 KKVs at each other you're going to want some redundancy in the structure and not just make the warship be so lightly built it can "just" withstand milligee accelleration but fold like a tin can if it is subjected to slightly more force.
Actual armor is probably useless though.
I'd imagine building the warship structurally strong enough so it can withstand a piddly 0.5g of spin is worth it from a passive defence point of view.
Civilian starships are a completely different matter though.
The problem is just how strong a vessel would have to be to withstand the spin. I could even argue that a stronger structure is a bad idea. If the ship gets hit, a light structure will mean the ship takes less damage, as there is less stuff in the way. Also, it's a lot easier to repair.
Oh come now Byron. We always get your opinion on everything else :)
I guess my point was that, unlike everyone else, I wasn't alive for that, so I didn't feel totally qualified to comment. On the other hand, as you point out, my persective is probably more objective, as I've never felt the threat of nuclear war all that personally.
I actually knew about all of that stuff beforehand. On one hand, there is the simple fact that the US can't be held responsible for what they didn't know. Reagan didn't realize that Able Archer would look that much like a real attack, for example. This is mostly the fault of the Soviets, who in their desire for secrecy managed to deny western leaders a view of their mindset. They couldn't understand the West's mindset, so we came to the brink.
On the other hand, Reagan's gamble was quite simple. He bet that the Soviets weren't so attached to their system that death was better then letting it collapse. And he had to make that bet, because in a sense it was already made. If that wasn't true, then when the collapse came, we were all doomed anyway. See Red Storm Rising for a less extreme version of the alternative.
Oh, and the threat of the "Dead Hand" system (properly called perimetr) is massively overstated. See this.
All in all, I largely have to side with Tony and Thucydides on this one. (And again with the weird feelings.) From the perspective of an American, Russia is just hard to understand. I read Richard Pipe's The Russian Revolution recently, and I could hardly believe what had happened, and that people had somehow gone along with it. Take that inability to understand Russia (and vice versa) and you have the stage set for some very close calls. Thank God none of them actually connected.
Hmm, if not all the ship is spinning, how non spinning and spinning parts joint?
Can the spinning part held by a strong magnetic field, so there are no friction?
What about the possibility, that docking is at the standind part, but the docked ship or missile lifted up to the rim, so it can be launched with bigger delta-V?
Byron:
"The problem is that the loads imposed by spinning are about three orders of magnitude larger then the loads imposed on a milligee ship that doesn't have to spin."
You're presuming that the enitre ship is the same diameter along the spin axis. That's a little presumptive, isn't it? The structural spine could be a fraction of the total spin diameter. And habs and tankage positioned outboard of the spine would most likely be sufficient strength to handle spin stresses simply by virtue of being able to contain gasses and fluids at pressure. Finally, even under a miligee of acceleration, the structural spine has to carry the mass of the entire ship. Under spin it only has to carry, at points of attachment, whatever it's local mass is and the mass of whatever parts of the ship are attached directly outboard. Somehow I think the designers can cope.
Tony:
You're presuming that the enitre ship is the same diameter along the spin axis. That's a little presumptive, isn't it? The structural spine could be a fraction of the total spin diameter. And habs and tankage positioned outboard of the spine would most likely be sufficient strength to handle spin stresses simply by virtue of being able to contain gasses and fluids at pressure. Finally, even under a milligee of acceleration, the structural spine has to carry the mass of the entire ship. Under spin it only has to carry, at points of attachment, whatever it's local mass is and the mass of whatever parts of the ship are attached directly outboard. Somehow I think the designers can cope.
Admittedly, I did assume the ship would be the same diameter throughout, which is not entirely valid. However, even if the rest of the ship is 10% of the diameter of the outside of the hab, it will still be under about two orders of magnitude higher loads then it would be in the case of a non-spinning milligee ship. I'm honestly not sure what a minimal tank would be able to stand for structural reasons. Ask me next week.
That said, the central core has to be able to handle all the force of the various parts. That strikes me as being a potential problem. It might amount to only a doubling of the structural mass. Or it might be less. The ship has to be able to withstand thruster operation, after all.
Two more things occurred to me about the issues with spin:
1. Besides the structural issues, every piece of equipment aboard will have to be designed to work in zero-G, under thrust (which might not be a lot different from zero-G) and under spin (which is likely to be a lot more different). This is unlikely to make the engineers happy.
2. We do not have anywhere near enough data to determine the spin requirements. The sum total of data points on human response to gravity is two: 0 and 1. We have no clue what would happen to someone who spends 16 hours a day in 0 G, and the other 8 sleeping in a 1 G environment. We don't know if .1 or .5 G is enough to get us what we want. For that matter, we haven't defined what we want. Does the crew have to be fully functional on Earth immediately after they voyage? Or is it OK for them to be weak, so long as they avoid the worst of the debilitating effects? All of these questions need answers before we can continue this discussion with any measure of confidence. If sleeping in 1 G is enough, then there is no reason to spin the whole ship. Put the bedrooms out on tethers, and spin them around. If being at .1 G all the time is sufficient, spinning the whole ship looks better.
If spinning is necessary for crew health -- heck, just crew efficiency -- then it will be done, at the rate required, to the extent required. The how or why seems of little lasting interest to me, even as an engineering problem. It's clearly not impossible. It just bears a certain opportunity cost WRT other ship functions.
I have to agree with Tony; we know it can be done, from an engineering standpoint, so spinning the ship (either in total or part) will be more about crew health and effectiveness. I'm thinking that high endurance spacecraft will have some type of spin-habs.
Ferrell
Tony:
If spinning is necessary for crew health -- heck, just crew efficiency -- then it will be done, at the rate required, to the extent required. The how or why seems of little lasting interest to me, even as an engineering problem. It's clearly not impossible. It just bears a certain opportunity cost WRT other ship functions.
This is basically a non-statement. "If it's needed, it will be done." I completely agree, but my point is that the opportunity cost might be quite high, and we have no way of knowing what it is. I'm unwilling to make assumptions about this, probably to avoid the one thing that bugs me about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Ferrell:
I'm thinking that high endurance spacecraft will have some type of spin-habs.
Define high endurance. Months? Years? Would a typical freighter have one? What about a warship?
Byron:
"This is basically a non-statement. 'If it's needed, it will be done.' I completely agree, but my point is that the opportunity cost might be quite high, and we have no way of knowing what it is. I'm unwilling to make assumptions about this, probably to avoid the one thing that bugs me about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I won't say it's a profound statement, but it's hardly meaningless. It defines the relationship of spinning habitat to the rest of the ship -- if it's needed at all, it's a critical mission requirement. One could no more ignore it than a dreadnought designer could ignore firepower, protection, or speed. Or, to play in your ballpark, you can't make a plane without wings (lift) or engines (thrust). Whatever has to be done to achive a necessary design feature will be done to achieve it.
And that has all sorts of meaning. There are certain things you can't assume away, no matter what your other requirements are. They have to be engaged and built in to the design. How you can invert that insight into "make[ing] assumptions" is curious, to say the very least.
"Define high endurance. Months? Years? Would a typical freighter have one? What about a warship?"
From ISS experience, months is a good place to start. What kind of ships? I would have to say all manned ones that were expected to go more than a couple of months between crew reliefs -- maybe not even that long.
Byron said:"Define high endurance. Months? Years? Would a typical freighter have one? What about a warship?"
Tony went more than a month, I'd go more than a week and a half for "high endurance", basicly if you want to go further than the Moon, I'd think you'd need a spin hab in your ship.
Ferrell
Possibly the simplest way to deal with the conflicting requirements of a spaceship (spin, zero g and thrust) would be to mount the habs on a set of arms or booms that are hinged together at the front of the spine.
If the ship is under spin, the booms swing out until the floors of the habs face outwards ("outboard is down"). When the ship is under weigh, the booms pivot back until the combined spin + thrust vector brings the gravitational effect back in line with the orientation of the hab ("forward is up"). For a non PMF ship, the booms could fold right back along the axis of the spine when accelerating at 1 G. For 0 G, the interior would be padded and have a profusion of hand and footholds (or be coated in velcro to match the slippers and gloves of the crew. 2001 was very prescient in this regard).
1. Zero-G and long duration cruises
Remember there's always more than one way to tackle a problem. Keeping a crew fit and healthy in microgravity is arguably a medical problem, not an engineering problem. Medical science may yet give a solution to microgravity that is far cheaper than to solve via engineering. I always thought medical technology may combat many of the dangers of prolonged microgravity on the body. As we understand the processes better its not inconveivable drugs (anabolic steroids, bone stabilisers like bisphosphonates), electrical stimulation and carefully crafted exercise regimes could stop or greatly slow the muscle and bone loss. We are already using electrical stimulation to stimulate bone growth so it may help with the skeletal weakening in zero G too.
Also from a medical science point of view. There is no evidence spinning a rather small diameter centrifuge (with the differences in acceleration between head and foot height) to generate 0.3-1g will actually keep a crew fitter and healthier than if they had just been exercising normally in zero-G.
I think if the problem becomes large enough medical technology may come to the rescue. Even genetic engineering may help.
On a side note when designing ships I have to admit I never particularly got caught up thinking about the weight penalty simulating gravity with centrifugal force would entail anyway. I assumed either a hab ring or spinning the entire ship would be done if the weight penalty wasn't too great.
If the weight penalty is very large and long mission duration is essential then you will just have to go unmanned. Realistically it looks like any space exploration of note in the next 30+ years will be unmanned anyway.
2. Byron: Carriers operating under limitations during naval exercises.
It is kind of true the submarines have an advantage during naval exercises since they know the approximate rectangle the carriers are operating in. However, if you consider the prime purpose of a carrier is to project power (rather than sea denial) its approximate position is given away pretty quickly as soon as it begins air operations against a modern foe. If the strike range of its fighters is 1000nm and it wants to stay as far away from the enemy coast as possible (a good idea) than the carrier is realistically going to be somewhere in a fairly predictably long and skinny rectangle. Meanwhile every shore based anti-ship missile, anti-ship ballistic missile, submarine and ship based missile will be doing its best to find the carrier in that relatively narrow box.
Apparently in the Nato campaign in Kosovo out of something like 20,000+ air sorties over 90 days something like 20+ percent were SEAD and they never quite succeeded in knocking out the Serbian air defences.
Carriers look awesome nowadays because they are perfect for beating down the nearest African dictator with a personal “military” with the skill of a 6yo girl scout. The carrier and its aircraft can operate with complete impunity and bomb till they run out of fuel or just get bored. I wonder how well a carrier would go projecting power against a modern, disciplined foe using their antiquated air defences with skill and imagination (Serbia) or even worse an ultra modern military able to defend themselves and shoot back at the carrier directly.
3. Ferrel on Cold War service
Thank you for sharing your recollections of your service during the Cold War. I find it a fascinating period in history and I believe its complexity will only be appreciated in the far future. I often think the servicemen and women who served during cold war never quite get the recognition they deserve. It was the most dangerous time in human history and because our servicemen served with discipline and honour a apocalyptic mistake was never made and our politicians had a chance to work out their differences peacefully. When the world needed it most the militaries on both sides completed their mission (deterrence) with distinction. It mightn’t be as glorious as fighting cave to cave with a bunch of terrorists but I think history will view it as the more important battle “not fought”.
I wonder how the servicemen on the other side feel about the cold war? In some ways they served even more honourably. They too served with discipline and restraint and their only reward was to see the political system they defended be badly discredited in the recent past.
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of so many great books guys. That “to read” pile keeps getting higher and higher.
Locki : carrier vs advanced enemies : i had a new maybe non-PDF idea, what if the carrier could go underwater like a sub? /Normally it would operate above water, but duck below for protection./
Otherwise i think it depends on recon, whether they can find the carrier sooner, or the attackers can find the big missile sites earlier, and neutalize their threat, you cant just attack the carrier with anything.
For shore invasion, superior forces were always needed, i dont think it will change, i also dont think, you wont need mobile bases.
Thucydides:
Any PMF craft that is long-duration enough to need spin is unlikely to have any significant length of time under significant acceleration, and for the times when they are accelerating, seats should do the trick. On the other hand, pivoting might reduce the structural loads on the arms themselves.
Locki:
Good point on medical efforts to combat zero G.
Hiding a carrier is possible.
Byron: Hiding a Carrier.
I'm pretty sure I've read that essay once before but it was good to refresh my memory. I don't doubt the US Navy is quite adept at using its CBGs to strike and disappear just as the essay described. But it is a very specific situation. The carrier is on the strategic offensive where it has the luxury of time.
For a full size Nimitz CVN to justify its enormous costs there are going to be times when its going to have to abandon the Ninja stealth strategy and just stand and trade and try to generate its maximum 200-ish sorties a day to achieve its mission objectives. If you only ever intend to dance around and put a up a few strikes a day you are probably better off with smaller, cheaper (and more!) carriers or launching a couple of hundred tomahawks from the nearest SSGN. This is to say nothing of the carriers equally primary purposes of providing yoru ships with air cover!
If the carrier is being used defensively eg
1. Desperately holding back the chinese invasion force of Taiwan or
2. Trying to knock out the North Korean army as quickly as possible before it lays waste to Seoul
3. Establishing air cover for your amphibious assault/convoys
Its not going to have the option of putting up a alpha few strikes per day and then fading away. In fact the first two scenarios will probably mean you want to sit tight and just generate your full 200+ sorties per day in support of the defence.
Which leaves you in a far more predicatable location and consequent vulnerabilty to the plethora of anti-carrier weapons every modern military is hurridly equipping themselves with.
If the carrier instead strikes and fades and consequently puts up far fewer strikes in the defence of Taiwan then the Chinese probably consider this a fair trade and an effective neutralisation of the carrier - meanwhile their armies quickly get on with the real business of say occupying Taiwan.
I'll play hypothetical scenarios for a while. I'm assuming the carriers will be used similarly to the Korean war where they are holding the line whilst the US tries to reposition forces as quickly as possible. So I'm tasking your carriers with the mission of delaying the Chinese as long as possible whilst reinforcements are rushed in.
I'd do the following:
(i) Place every available diesel sub in a 300nm radius of my landing site - say 12 SSKs.
(ii) Have whatever SSN's I can spare roaming free
(iii) Make sure I have plenty of Su-27s flying air cover and make sure my army is carrying plenty of SAMs of every description - this means whatever strikes the carriers put up are going to have waste a lot of their resources on SEAD and counter-air.
(iv) Have as many of those new nifty DF-21s anti-ship ballistic missiles placed within range of Taiwan but outside the carriers 300nm strike range ready to pounce as soon as you get a decent fix.
At least in this scenario the carrier will be reduced to dashing in, putting up the occassional strike and then disappearing again. It'd probably just be more economical to fire a stack of cruise missiles at your targets.
Also I wonder how effectively the carrier can "disappear" if its operating in contested airspace? It'll probably want its AWACs and CAP fighters flying patrols with their radars ON to avoid any nasty suprises.
Really the whole situation with carriers reminds me of the steady decline and fall of the Battleship. New weapons were constantly invented to destroy the battleship (mines, torpedoes, aircraft, submarines) and they kept coming up with solutions to keep the mighty battleship relevent (radar controlled AA guns, proximity fuses, extra deck armour, anti-torpedo bulges, destroyers etc etc) but eventually it just couldn't project power effectively either militarily or economically. In 1943-44 the carriers and their aircraft were relatively primitive and there were many missions the only the Battleship could perform eg night fighting, holding the line at Surigao Straight, anti-aircraft fire or sustained shore bombardment but I'm sure every admiral in the US Navy was wishing they could swap out all of their Battleships for an Essex class carrier. I can't help the carrier is in a similar position today.In my amateur, armchair general opinion of course ..
Tom: submersible carriers
I'm pretty sure more informed people have convincely laid out the engineering reasons this is a very difficult thing to achieve. I do note that the big submarines of today Virgina etc carry a pretty disappointingly low weapons load in proportion to their displacement. I'd bet even if it were possible a 100,000 tonne submersible Nimitz carrier could probably only carry 10-15 fighters.
Also submerging to disappear doesn't get around the problem I've outlined above where the big expensive carrier is just forced to stand and fight to justify its enormous cost.
Intererstingly, on a laterally related issue they 've started experimenting with launching UAVs and AAM's from submarines. I'm sure they are small relatively modest things with very little if any weapons though.
Cold war:
I came across this essay whilst looking up Able Archer. Its a pretty poignant look at the effect the cold war and its high state of tension had on the families of our servicemen and women. It makes a nice read http://aazavala.hubpages.com/hub/Reforger
Locki:
Carrier operations in the Balkans were unusual. Normally, the carrier would launch a single mass strike, putting most of its aircraft over the target at once. That then allows it to run away once that strike is finished. A carrier task group at speed is almost immune to submarines, as the submarine can't hear anything even if it can keep up. Admittedly, it would be better if the whole group was nuclear, but that's not really the point.
The first two scenarios can be achieved with alpha strikes. The last is more of a problem, but you never attempt an amphibious landing unless you have a big margin of superiority.
TOM:
Locki : carrier vs advanced enemies : i had a new maybe non-PDF idea, what if the carrier could go underwater like a sub? /Normally it would operate above water, but duck below for protection./
Not gonna happen. Period. Carriers are always volume-limited, and a submarine has to have a specific gravity greater then one. You'd have to have big holes in the pressure hull to get the aircraft through, and that in turn limits diving depth and damage resistance. The need for a large flight deck will do bad things to the acoustic signature, unless you want to use seaplanes. I'm in agreement with Locki on this. You might get 25% of the aircraft complement, if you make a very shallow-diving version. A true submarine might get 10%. And in a big war, nuclear depth charges might be in use. In a little war, there is no need for this sort of protection.
Drone submersible carriers might be doable, though. We can already launch cruise missiles from underwater which are just expendable drones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Cormorant
This drone would operate out of a ballistic missile submarine's tubes. Float to surface, fly mission, arrive at rendezvous point and get recovered by a submersible bot.
The program was cancelled. While a full-sized super-carrier might be more generally useful, I would think that a stealthy sub carrier could have a lot of specialty use. It's all a question of how much compromise has to be made for thus versus doing things the usual way.
While I am not an expert in carrier operations, one reson we still have carriers (and navies still build them; the JSDF has recently aquired a very sleek carrier DDH 181 Hyūga) is the flexibility they offer.
Competing ideas like the proposed Arsenal ship of the 1990's (essentially a barge with up to 500 cruise missiles on board) or the earlier "Strike Cruiser" (Think of an Ageis criser with the entire superstructure removed and also carrying over 100 missiles in the VLS cells) could solve certain technical problems (an Arsenal ship could launch the equivalent of several alpha strikes faster and for far less than the cost of an aircraft carrier), they were single purpose ships. The Soviet Union had similar ideas with their Charlie and Oscar cruise missile subs, Oscars were quite large by western standards and could volley 24 nuclear tipped cruise missiles at enemy carrier battle groups or shore targets.
Aircraft carriers can tailor their missions in ways an arsenal ship cannot, and can also participate in such missions as the 2004 humanitarian relief mission to Indonesia after the Tsunami. This is not to say that ships like Strike cruisers or Arsenal ships don't have a place in the Navy (or even the space navy!), but a force which relied too much on these types of ship would be quite inflexible. Aircraft carriers will evolve over time (probably getting smaller and being home to flocks of UAV's and UCAV's) but should remain in service for some time to come. Don't forget the idea of a Battleship is quietly being revived in the form of heavy cruisers armed with railguns capable opf bombarding shore targets over 200 Nautical Miles away.
Locki: Carriers, unlike cruisers or destroyers, are never found at sea alone; they are always accompanied by frigates, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, etc. that provide air defense and anti-submarine protection, as well as long range attack (i.e. cruise missiles), so an Aircraft Carrier is the central unit that a task forse is built up from, not a stand-alone warship and really can't be judged in a 'vacuum'...
Ferrell
Arsenal ship
Pro's: 1 ship, a full carrier's alpha strike of firepower.
Con's: Can only do it once, then needs reloads
Every missile's $1 mil a pop
But we'd have to calculate the total cost of pew-pew for both systems. A cruise missile just sits in inventory and, aside from maintenance like refueling when the ship returns to port, they're pretty much wooden rounds, no shipboard maintenance required, at 100% readiness 24/7.
With a carrier, you are looking at the cost of the carrier, every escort ship and all of their crews, plus the aircrews, plus the practice required to keep everyone proficient, plus all the retirement expenses. And don't forget fighters cost something like $2,500/hr between fuel and maintenance.
So, the Libya strike had 100 cruise missiles and cost $100 million. Well, how much does an equivalent strike by carrier aircraft cost once you factor in all the overhead? Factor the overhead for the cruise missiles as well.
The only thing I know for sure is the answer for both will be ridiculous.
Locki : wouldnt you build bases, because they are vulnerable to an artillery strike?
Ok, bases dont sink, but they cant move or hide either.
Motherships in space cant hide (they might find cover) but after they unload their FAC/corvettes, that charge and position themselves on low orbit, motherships can outrun most PDF missiles.
Actually, motherships would probably retreat to high ground (GEO or beyond) to get out of range of the incoming missiles, as well as have a much wider sensor "horizon", more time to take action and especially more time to deploy countermeasures and weapons.
In high orbit they also have the ability to contribute to the fight by sending sensor data to ships in low orbit and provide a much greater situational awareness for them.
Aircraft Carrier as a Capital Ship (political asset)
I actually think the discussion of carriers has been vaguely on topic. It does relate back to what a capital ship really is. A large part of the carrier's raison d'etre is political and not just pure military.
I suspect the US Navy knows exactly how deadly something like an SSN is for sinking ships in a high intensity modern war is. After all its arguabe the USN's investment in submarines is even greater than its resources invested into naval aviation.
The fact is the likelihood of fighting a high intensity war against a foe like China in the Taiwan straight is extremely unlikely and effectively WW3, armageddon, end of the world territory anyway. So the carrier's survivability in such a conflict is only a small factor any admiral needs to plan for.
The carriers are awfully useful for striking the fear of god into the nearest tinpot dictator and this is the most likely scenario the USN will face in the next 30+ years so its worth having a large fleet of carriers lying around. The carriers are unparalleled as military instrucments able to exert political pressure. However, the USN has hedged its bets and is packing an enormous fleet of (?) 40+ LA class subs, 20+ Virginias, 3 Seawolf class and the 4 converted Ohio SSGN's. If China or Russia ever venture to sea I wouldn't be surprised if its the SSN's that are tasked with the business of doing most of the fighting and the carriers come in to mop up afterwards.
So the carrier is the capital ship because its the biggest, most politically visible and most flexible ship for the widest range of probable missions the USN is likely to face in the forseeable future. Its not necessarily the baddest mother in the fleet (Submarines once, Submarines twice, holy jumping etc etc ....). It may not be particularly survivable in a full scale war but that isn't the point. The USN is unlikely to fight one of these anyway and it has plenty of other less politically valuable assets to throw at the problem if war breaks out.
Tom - land bases
Land bases and runways have proven to be exceedingly difficult to knock out. Runway cratering munitions, mines, cluster bombs etc etc have all proven to be disappointingly ineffective at shutting down a runway for more than a day or two agaisnt a determined and skilled foe. Its very hard to mission kill a runway
Carriers on the otherhand are much easier to mission kill. Missile into the catapaults, a torpedo under the keel can all potentially damage the carrier enough to force it to withdraw. There's a lot of stuff that burns really hot on a carrier. See the fire on the Forrestal from a single Zuni rocket hitting just the wrong place on the deck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire.
Before I get howled down I admit its probably damn hard to send a 100,000 tonne CVN to the ocean floor. But there's plenty of things you can do to make flight operations difficult/impossible for a reasonable period of time. Even the armored battleships with their all of nothing scheme of armor were relatively easy to mission kill (Hit on the Bismark causing it to lose fuel and abandon its mission).
Damn 4096 character limit ...
Carrier battle group from a military point of view ..
I used to be a diehard battleship fan and can still name each of the turrets of the Bismark and its total HP rating. I was convinced the mighty armored behemoths could have still ruled the seas if only they were given a fair chance and the right design and the right doctrine. When it slowly dawned on me they were always a useless dinoasaur and one of the least decisive naval vessels ever created I felt somewhat jilted all my schoolboy doodling of atomic powered, super armored battleships was in vain.
I can't help but notice some parallels between the battleships passing and the current situation with carriers.
The Battleships were similarly part of a battlegroup/fleet designed to protect it long enough to bring its big guns to bear. They had cruisers to scout ahead, destroyers to handle the submarines and the doctrine of the USN and RN called for the carriers to operate in support of the Battleships and provide them with air cover, long range strike power etc to allow the big boys to bring their guns to bear. But when full scale war finally erupted the carriers proved so effective all of the enemy ships were long sunken before the big 16 inch guns could be brought to bear. Instead of the carriers operating in support of the battle line they quickly became the primary weapon. The admirals kept holding on to their battleships "just in case" but they were reduced to stable AA platforms.
I think a carrier battlegroup is potentially going the same way as the battleship. If a CBG has SSNs to range ahead (perfect for killing the enemy fleet), Destroyers/Cruisers/SSGNs to launch cuirse missiles by the dozen, Aegis ships to erect an almost total no fly zone over the fleet and provide theatre ballistic missile defence (SM-3s) and a few rail gun equipped destroyers to bombard anything within 200nm of the fleet then really what is their left for your big expensive carrier left to do? Its arguable the carrier itself is no longer providing the decisive firepower.
It strikes me if you are going to play the fade and smash ninja tactics Byron outlined above you are probably better off with just a few much smaller surface ships (railgun destroyers with aegis destroyers in support) run around as stealthily as possible and launch sudden suprise attacks out of the blue. Its just not the sort of mission that seems particularly well suited to a very large, very expensive carrier.
Obviously the discussion on HAL as a real character was making my head hurt ....
Thought I'd just clarify. I know the railgun equipped ship is 20-ish years in the future.
Just substitute in Arleigh Burke/Arsenal ship optimised for Land Attack (155mm 50nm extended range cannon shells, SM-2 land attack missile ranging around 100nm and cruise missiles).
Its really late now so I've probably made heaps of grammatical/spelling errors.
schoolboy doodling of atomic powered, super armored battleships was in vain.
Well, as long as we're talking about fantasy territory, that's what they could have done with the Battleship movie. Instead of stupid space aliens, make it be the ultimate atomic battleship. 100,000 ton displacement, eight reactors, four turrets tossing armor-piercing, high-explosive, and kiloton atomic shells.
Realistically speaking, any weapon that represents such an intense concentration of resources is going to draw an inordinate amount of enemy attention and likely be too easy to cripple. In the choice between plentiful decent weapons and few uber-weapons, go for numbers.
But since we're talking fantasy, have fleets of super-battleships duking it out on the high seas. Screw that alien crap.
The USSR threw the dice on really powerful single purpose ships like the Kiev class "Battlecruiser" and the Oscar class cruise missile submarines, and basically ended up with a very powerful, brittle and inflexible policy tool. The Soviet Navy provided very little in the way of either sea control or political power projection, unlike the USN.
As for the future evolution of the USN, I can see long range fire support devolving back to surface and underwater platforms supported by small aircraft carriers flying "flocks" of UAV and UCAVs to do target spotting and sensor overwatch. A ship like the Hyūga may actually be considered far too large to be a successful carrier in some future navy.
Just as a point of information, the U.S. has had a law (for nearly 100 years, I think), that the USN must name its most powerful vessels after States...hince the "Ohio" class submarine.
Ferrell
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