[Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Ordinary missile cruisers might be a bit smaller than battleships, but the size is less the issue than the guns being very much secondary weapons at best.

If you regard the missiles as the offensive "guns" of the modern warship, the main consideration is that the modern ship has substantially fewer shots, but they're much longer-ranged and more damaging (to the point that nobody even tries to armour against them).

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

One issue which does not seem to have been mentioned is that as industrialized navies have gotten more and more expensive and irreplaceable they fight each other less and less, which means more and more naval developments are based on theories which have never been tested in action. The number of times that a fleet has fought another fleet since WW II is not very large. So whatever they use in your setting, some things will probably go horribly wrong the first time they are used in earnest, like in the Falklands War. And of course, procurement decisions rarely make sense outside of a particular bubble.

That isn't new. Even before WWII, capitol warships, and most esp. battleships, had become so freaking expensive that the nation-states that were able to field real battlefleets were often very hesitant to commit them to combat with a foe that might sink them (i.e. other comparable battlefleets). There never were very many head-on, all-out battlefleet battles and that was one of the big reasons why.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

I’m trying to work out what a naval task force would look like at TL10 as a thought experiment, and I’m having trouble deciding which options presented by Ultra-Tech are most effective. I’m concentrating on a safe-tech TL10, so no superscience or volitional AIs, and only limited genetic engineering (so it differs from Transhuman Space).

Depending on your interpretation, the principle component of a naval force (i.e. at the top of the admirals’ wish list when governments look at funding and procurement) could change from a surface aircraft carrier to a heavily stealthed battleship with a 160mm railgun and/or heavy missile armament with point defence lasers, or a drone-carrying submarine, which packs most of its offensive punch in non-volitional AI-controlled drones, which it launches before creeping back under the waves.

Some of the questions I’ve come up with are:

• Are TL10 infra-red cloaking and chameleon systems sufficient to hide surface ships from high-altitude sensors (either satellite or stratospheric drone, possibly with hyperspectral sensors), or would all warships end up being submarines so they couldn’t easily be found by passive electromagnetic sensors?
• Would there still be a role for manned combat aircraft or would drones operated by remote teleoperation or non-volitional AI completely take over the role?
• What would subsurface warfare look like at TL10? There’s a notable lack of effective underwater weaponry in Ultra-Tech, no torpedoes, and even blue-green lasers have rather lacklustre performance underwater, though the supercavitating mini-sub can mount a blue-green strike laser (according to the text on UT228, I'm not sure if this is useful though).
• Would Point Defence Lasers (UT115-6) be a viable defence against brilliant or genius TL10 missiles such as the hunter and striker missiles from UT168?
• Pyramid 3/37: Tech and Toys II introduces additional heavy weapons on p.22-27, including a 160mm indirect fire railgun, what sort of role would this play compared to missiles?
• Would warships bother with significant armour, or given the power of missiles and railguns and aircraft-mounted lasers would they assume the best defence is not to be found in the first place?
• Tilt-rotors, vertols and hovercraft are all possible options for personnel transport, the first two replacing the helicopter, is one of these clearly superior to the others?
• Is there any useful defence against bombardment from orbit?

I’m not sure there’s any firm answers to these, but I wondered what everyone thought and how other factors I’ve not thought of might influence matters.

As others have observed on-thread, the answer to every one of those depends on the details of the setting and the tech. There are many version of TL10, and a lot depends on what if any superscience is available.

(Some probably should be. From the POV of even as recently as 1917, 100 years ago, a lot of our current-day military tech embodies superscience, from the 1917 POV.)

To determine what your wet-navies can do, and what they do, you need to ask yourself what the details of the TL10 tech are, and also what kind of overall situation the world is in.

For ex, if the world has been wracked by warfare for a while, one side-effect is that a lot of delicate infrastructure is likely damaged or gone. Which in turn means that even some stuff we take for granted at early TL8 might actually not be available, even to a TL10 fleet.

For example, supposed anti-space weaponry is outperforming whatever countermeasures are available. In that case, the satellite system might be in ruins. Even 'neutral' satellites might be gone, or their owners might be classifying their output to keep it from the belligerents so the other belligerents don't knock down the satellites.

So stop and consider how many things are satellite dependent, and ask what it would mean if the satellites are gone. No reliable orbital surveillance, no reliable weather observation, communications forced into cables (fiber or otherwise), or otherwise more limited.

A whole lot of what we take for granted as 'normal TL8' tech is actually specifically dependent on a relatively wealthy and peaceful world, such as we've seen since the end of World War II. Change those parameters and suddenly what was commonplace becomes difficult or impossible.

Likewise, when it comes to AI, we're guessing. So are the authors of Vehicles and UT and all other sources. We really have no idea what kind of AI might be4 available at TL10. So you'd be equally valid deciding that there isn't any AI worth anything, or that it requires macroframe computers that simply won't fit into air-mobile machines, or it can't be made reliable, or whatever. So you can reasonably and fairly tweak the AI tech available as suits you, but the tweaks you make will have a big role in determining what, and if, wet navies are useful for or at all.

It's very instructive to look back at the period before World War II. At that time, nobody had any idea how the new technologies would play out in the event, and all sorts of theories were proposed, by amateurs, professional military men, scientists, and so forth. Some people got some things sort of right, but nobody got close to the way it all played out overall.

Another thing that is instructive from that period is the utility, or lack thereof, of treaties limiting weapons. The Kellogg-Briand Pact is the most (in)famous example, but there were others. As a rule, when a war between peer powers gets really hot, both sides will use whatever weapons and tactics work, rules or no rules.

[Johnny1A.2]

On the subject of communications: if the satellites have been destroyed, or the neutral powers won't let you have access to them (and even those might get wiped to keep spies from stealing data from them), then groundside radio/other and cables become absolutely vital.

If you have superscience communications, say neutrino beams or something, then you don't have to worry about it. But if you've lost your satellites, and fallen back on or always preferred undersea cables, one task for wet navies is to protect your side's cables and cut the other side's cables and keep them from laying more.

No cables and no sats and no superscience, suddenly world communications are back to TL6 levels, even if the tech base is TL10.

Tech assumption: Ground based and ship based lasers are very powerful, very accurate, and very reliable. They make air travel in combat zones highly iffy. In that assumption, a plane that overflies a laser base or a big ship is almost sure to go down, unless it's improbably big and heavy (or even then, if the lasers are hot enough).

So air combat is side-lined, and air travel is dangerous and expensive. You either have to put improbable amounts of armor on the plane or fly it at expensive altitudes, so surface ships became floating 'laser forts' that move around at sea to close the skies to the enemy.

(You could mount big lasers on air-mobile platforms, but there are two hard-sci issues, one is the power plant and the other is the heat sink. Wet-navy vessels have the edge of aircraft in both areas.)

The other side might counter by filling the sky with small, fast, remote/automated drones, but you could use lots of smaller lasers as well. You might even see a parallel to the carrier battle group, a couple of big laser ships with projectors that can reach LEO altitude, guarded by smaller ships with hundreds of lasers for protecting the big ship.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

You could mount big lasers on air-mobile platforms, but there are two hard-sci issues, one is the power plant and the other is the heat sink. Wet-navy vessels have the edge of aircraft in both areas.

Or you could put a big mirror on the aircraft.Then the friendly ship "shoots" the aircraft in its beam collector, and the beam is then re-directed toward the real target (or to another friendly aircraft, and so on, for longer chains before you reach the target).

Luke

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Or you could put a big mirror on the aircraft.Then the friendly ship "shoots" the aircraft in its beam collector, and the beam is then re-directed toward the real target (or to another friendly aircraft, and so on, for longer chains before you reach the target).

Luke

True, but that starts to get a bit Rube Goldbergish, and it looks to me like it's going to be trickier for the flying mirrors to accurately target ground/sea targets than vice versa. But yeah, it could work.

[Crystalline_Entity]

How likely is it that obtaining overflight rights from third-party/neutral nations would be problematic? To my mind, hypersonic flight is going to be really noisy due to the sonic boom, and most (democratic) governments would be reluctant to annoy their citizens by allowing foreign countries to fly over at supersonic speed - it's not their war, after all. Is there likely to be a way to mitigate the impact of the sonic boom at ground-level by TL10?

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I actually found it easier to do the TL10 military thought experiments in the recent military sci-fi setting building thread, because we could pick-and-choose elements to bring into action.

That sounds like it'd be worth me reading!

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

So revisiting this question again, hypersonic missiles are terrifying. It isn't too hard to build a 2 ton, HEDM rocket powered missile that flies at a leisurely 7200 mph, carries a 500 lb warhead (equivalent to a modern Harpoon), and hits for 6dx750 damage from the kinetic impact alone. To heck with orbital tungsten rounds, that's a TL10 battleship killer all by itself.

It's probably significantly cheaper than shipping tungsten rods to orbit too, and easier to reload!

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

* With some effort, I can make a "torpedo" that hits 1350 mph but it's 21m long, weighs 10.5 tons, and has 10 seconds of endurance, giving it a range of 7000 yards. It's big, loud, and only does 6x280 damage, which is a lot, but a heavily armored ship at TL10 might be able to shrug it off, especially since there's no explosive warhead.

Maybe submarines will use something like SUBROC, launching a missile into the atmosphere at high speed which then drops a supercavitating torpedo near its target? Though that sounds expensive and complicated - and don't submarines have to go to shallower depths to launch missiles?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

How likely is it that obtaining overflight rights from third-party/neutral nations would be problematic? To my mind, hypersonic flight is going to be really noisy due to the sonic boom, and most (democratic) governments would be reluctant to annoy their citizens by allowing foreign countries to fly over at supersonic speed - it's not their war, after all. Is there likely to be a way to mitigate the impact of the sonic boom at ground-level by TL10?

Sonic booms actually wouldn't be much of a problem for hypersonic, high altitude vehicles. From Wikipedia:
The power, or volume, of the shock wave depends on the quantity of air that is being accelerated, and thus the size and shape of the aircraft. As the aircraft increases speed the shock cone gets tighter around the craft and becomes weaker to the point that at very high speeds and altitudes no boom is heard.

That sounds like it'd be worth me reading!

It's here. Unfortunately, I think it fizzled out due to a lack of a clear source of conflict, but we did get some useful concepts and world building out.

Though that sounds expensive and complicated - and don't submarines have to go to shallower depths to launch missiles?

Probably not an issue by TL10. The only reason to go shallow would be to receive comms signals, and that could be done by trailing a long mono-filament aerial, or by sending out comms drones.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

How likely is it that obtaining overflight rights from third-party/neutral nations would be problematic? To my mind, hypersonic flight is going to be really noisy due to the sonic boom, and most (democratic) governments would be reluctant to annoy their citizens by allowing foreign countries to fly over at supersonic speed - it's not their war, after all.

That'll depend on a few things. How powerful the belligerent that wants to do the overflight will be a big factor, as well as how powerful their opponent is and how likely they are to strike at them while in the neutral country's territory. Geography will be a factor, too.

"Sure, we respect your sovereignty. But it would be very neighborly of you to allow us to overfly your territory whenever we feel like it. You do want to be a good neighbor, don't you?"

If you're as big and powerful as the belligerents, you can say 'no'. If you're not...well, then things may be different..

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Likewise, when it comes to AI, we're guessing. So are the authors of Vehicles and UT and all other sources. We really have no idea what kind of AI might be4 available at TL10. So you'd be equally valid deciding that there isn't any AI worth anything, or that it requires macroframe computers that simply won't fit into air-mobile machines, or it can't be made reliable, or whatever. So you can reasonably and fairly tweak the AI tech available as suits you, but the tweaks you make will have a big role in determining what, and if, wet navies are useful for or at all.

There not being any AI worth anything like that, is not really plausible. Even today autonomus aircraft are feasible to some extent and it is perfectly clear that computers will continue to significantly improve for at least a while longer. Also, even in a scenario without any computer hardware improvements at all, being able to develop and test software over many decades (or even centuries, slow or no computer hardware improvements are after all likely to slow down tech level progression) would be a huge advantage.

Even a very conservative assumption of the capabilities of future autonomous aircraft should take these factors into account.