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

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You missed one. Long range air defense. Carrier-launched interceptors can reach a long way over the horizon and other surface ships are highly vulnerable to sea skimming attacks when limited to their own sea level air defenses.

Sorry, I'm not sure how this is relevant. I'm postulating fighters with enough long range to reach over the horizon to half way round the globe. Any particular naval group would be under their umbrella. If you need them nearby for immediate defense, then they'd have a long enough dwell time to remain with the group on patrol for a shift before returning to their distant ground base, with another patrol arriving to relieve them, thus not requiring a local carrier.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Possible, but quite possibly not. It depends on the tech assumptions. And without some pretty drastic switches flipped, they won't have those ranges and speeds.

Of course, but it's one viable pathway. GURPS doesn't have much detail about TL10 vehicles, but Ultra-tech gives nuclear-powered air-rams to civilian flying cars at TL11, as one data point, and sub-orbital ballistic passenger planes at TL9, as another.

The point is, if you have long-range hypersonic strike vehicles, either you won't need carriers, or you'll need some other justification for carriers to be necessary.

The other concern would be that everywhere is "somewhere". If the ocean is intensively farmed and entities are established on it, you may have those airstrips, even in the middle of the ocean.

But those would mean there are more ground bases (static surface bases?), not that you still need carriers.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

In addition to Fred's comment about using aircraft carriers for mobile interception of enemy air assets, I would have some concerns about flying hypersonic strike missions. You're inevitably going to increase your thermal signature at that speed, so your stealth goes down, and your aircraft are easier to intercept. Hypersonic might let you evade missiles but it won't help you evade lasers. There's also a concern that it probably doesn't take a lot of damage to render an airframe unfit for hypersonic flight (without necessarily making it unable to fly in general). Having a friendly base nearby for recovering damaged aircraft might be helpful.

My concern is that a big floating carrier is an easier target than an incoming hypersonic strike vehicle. I guess it depends on the various parameters and breakpoints of their respective stealth characteristics. A plus or minus to either side of the equation could shift the paradigm towards or away from being carrier-based.

I think there's space for hypersonic capable aircraft that launch off an aircraft carrier for subsonic, stealthy strike missions and return to that carrier.

I was considering that perhaps carriers continue to exist in the same role as modern helicopter carriers or as cargo receiving platforms for the carrier group- although that changes a carrier's role to another utility vehicle in the squadron rather than being its centrepiece.

For stealth missions, we might see submersible carriers, although Wikipedia seems to be against the idea.

[Crystalline_Entity]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

What's the energy source for your tech base? How scarce is it?

I'd been assuming that fusion power could be make portable enough to be useful on a vehicle such as a warship or submarine. I'm undecided on just how small - Vehicles 2e has fusion air-rams, which would effectively let an aircraft fly indefinitely, but I'm not sure whether that will have other consequences.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

* Orbital facilities can roughly locate surface fleets and subs near the surface, but without enough precision to destroy them.
* Orbital bombardment is ineffective against moving targets, targets with stealth, or targets with adequate PD.

I think I'm happy with those assumptions; from reading the comments posters have made in this thread it sounds like there's no real consensus on how easy it is to aim orbital bombardment, or protect against it.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I think you may have to work on more reasons why subs aren't the dominate force and surface forces still exist. Quick math against GURPS Vehicle 2nd edition suggests that a sub that carries the same payload and armor as a surface ship has about 4-6% more weight devoted to armor and internal structure, and is slightly more expensive. The sub is going to be 80% as fast with the same power plant as the surface ship. Is that enough to make a difference? I'm not sure.

I'm not really convinced that's enough to make a difference really, I might have to rethink about why the default mode of transport isn't submarine. Or indeed whether it should be, and I just need to reconsider some of my mental images!

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Hmm, the bit I'm actually hanging up on is the railgun armed battleship escort.

Maybe calling them battleships was wrong, I quite like the idea of warships carrying railguns; would it be more plausible to have a guided-missile frigate armed with railguns in place of guns as a secondary armament?

Originally Posted by lwcamp

It is very difficult to jam highly directional signals (light tight-beam microwave communications). One method I've seen discussed was to have a chain of drones, each with line-of-sight to the next, to relay communications back to HQ. They can also be semi-autonomous - give them a mission ("destroy this target", "blow up any anti-air defenses") and off they go to do their thing without communication. You can even do reconnaissance without long range communication - the drone just has to get back to within line-of-sight of a friendly base or ship.

Luke

That's handy to know - plus I suppose lasers would help, though I imagine they'd be more affected by cloud than microwaves.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

.....unless the drone carries a nuclear warhead.

A list of "Reasons why no one commonly uses nukes." is probably prominent on your to do list.

That's a good point; at TL10 you can fit a micronuke into a 64mm warhead. For that matter, if you can afford it you can get 100mm antimatter warheads. I could handwave and say that there are social and moral constraints (as there are now), but I do wonder if in wartime the utility of such weapons would outweigh such concerns - taking out a very-hard-to-detect submarine with a nuclear depth charge would be rather tempting...

Originally Posted by ericthered

To me it sounds like the OP wants the trappings of modern earth, but souped up to be ultra tech.

That was my original instinct, I just imagined naval warfare would be like it is now but with ultra-tech weaponry, with no major paradigm shifts in tactics or technology. I started the thread because I'm not sufficiently expert to work out the logical consequences of ultra-tech and wanted to get some opinions rather than just reskin TL7/8 warfare!

[Crystalline_Entity]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

In addition to Fred's comment about using aircraft carriers for mobile interception of enemy air assets, I would have some concerns about flying hypersonic strike missions. You're inevitably going to increase your thermal signature at that speed, so your stealth goes down, and your aircraft are easier to intercept. Hypersonic might let you evade missiles but it won't help you evade lasers. There's also a concern that it probably doesn't take a lot of damage to render an airframe unfit for hypersonic flight (without necessarily making it unable to fly in general). Having a friendly base nearby for recovering damaged aircraft might be helpful.

I think there's space for hypersonic capable aircraft that launch off an aircraft carrier for subsonic, stealthy strike missions and return to that carrier.

Part of my justification for the aircraft carrier is that for any mission profile, the effective payload/capability of aircraft depends on it's launch profile, in descending order:

Ground-based.
Catapult launched long deck aircraft carrier.
Short take-off aircraft carrier.
Vertical take-off.

I don't suspect that's going to change at TL10. A full deck aircraft carrier's planes are going to carry more weapons, have better defenses, whatever you care about, than the kind of light airframe you can launch from a battleship on a short catapult.

So I can see a situation where unescorted battleships can't get through the enemy's ground based strike aircraft even though the aircraft carrier's planes can't reliably get through the enemy's ground based interceptor aircraft. But the carrier's planes can hold off enemy strike aircraft and interceptors (especially if they're fighting defensively within range of the battleships' PD/ADA lasers), and that lets the battleships get close enough to the enemy coastline to make use of their railguns.

That's really useful, thanks. I might be wrong, but I seem to remember from playing with GURPS: Vehicles a while ago that it was actually hard not to make an aeroplane which can travel faster than sound if you wanted it to be able to take off vertically, the amount of thrust required to do a vertical take-off was enough to push it beyond the sound barrier in level flight.

I do wonder if I should just abandon railguns in favour of missiles though, they do sound as if giving them a logical purpose is quite hard (as Anthony said:

Originally Posted by Anthony

a weapon system in search of a purpose.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Of course, but it's one viable pathway. GURPS doesn't have much detail about TL10 vehicles, but Ultra-tech gives nuclear-powered air-rams to civilian flying cars at TL11, as one data point, and sub-orbital ballistic passenger planes at TL9, as another.

The old GURPS: Vehicles gave fusion air-rams TL10 (which I think is still TL10 in 4e); I can see the idea of building an aircraft which doesn't have to refuel would be quite popular with the military, though I imagine it would have a large thermal signature so it might not be very stealthy.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I was considering that perhaps carriers continue to exist in the same role as modern helicopter carriers or as cargo receiving platforms for the carrier group- although that changes a carrier's role to another utility vehicle in the squadron rather than being its centrepiece.

I'd wondered the same thing; if combat aircraft were all drones, carriers may well end up looking like the concept UXV combatant, with a landing pad for personel and cargo transfer by vertol or tilt-rotor.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

For stealth missions, we might see submersible carriers, although Wikipedia seems to be against the idea.

I like the idea of a submersible carrier from a story point of view, I actually assumed it was impractical which is why I didn't consider them!

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

The point is, if you have long-range hypersonic strike vehicles, either you won't need carriers, or you'll need some other justification for carriers to be necessary.

You might end up with something like amphibious assault ships - meant to be the jumping-off point of an amphibious landing, of which providing its air support is just one component, and thus carrying a whole lot more than just some aeroplanes.

Yes, you might have hypersonic air support craft, but unless you can have a whole lot of them on immediate call your reaction time suffers.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

For stealth missions, we might see submersible carriers, although Wikipedia seems to be against the idea.

Umph. There are certain basic difficulties here. The core problem is that the carrier needs to be surfaced in order to launch or recover aircraft, and when it's surfaced it's just as vulnerable as a conventional carrier. It can't have escorts (unless you design a bunch of submarines for that purpose, and somehow keep them coordinated with the carrier); it has a great big hole through the pressure hull and a large buoyant space inside…

I went into this at greater length on my blog.

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

I'd been assuming that fusion power could be make portable enough to be useful on a vehicle such as a warship or submarine. I'm undecided on just how small - Vehicles 2e has fusion air-rams, which would effectively let an aircraft fly indefinitely, but I'm not sure whether that will have other consequences.

So you're running those off deuterium (separation from seawater)? Hard to justify military actions against energy sources then. Food production?

At standard GURPS 4e TL10, railguns (which have a brief niche in TL9 if you don't allow ETC, or if you use one of the fixes that have been suggested over the years) are largely replaced by lasers even as personal weapons.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Umph. There are certain basic difficulties here. The core problem is that the carrier needs to be surfaced in order to launch or recover aircraft, and when it's surfaced it's just as vulnerable as a conventional carrier. It can't have escorts (unless you design a bunch of submarines for that purpose, and somehow keep them coordinated with the carrier); it has a great big hole through the pressure hull and a large buoyant space inside…

These are valid problems for a surfacing carrier. However, TL10 might let us consider a submarine carrier as a platform for stealth submersible aircraft that launch and recover underwater. Not sure what role that'd have though, apart from inserting SEAL-like missions.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

These are valid problems for a surfacing carrier. However, TL10 might let us consider a submarine carrier as a platform for stealth submersible aircraft that launch and recover underwater. Not sure what role that'd have though, apart from inserting SEAL-like missions.

Yeah, the Cormorant drone was supposed to do something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Cormorant

If you can just remove the need to recover the aircraft afterwards, it all gets much easier. But then you call the platform a missile submarine.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I was considering that perhaps carriers continue to exist in the same role as modern helicopter carriers or as cargo receiving platforms for the carrier group- although that changes a carrier's role to another utility vehicle in the squadron rather than being its centrepiece.

Definitely.

Here's some assumptions I'm using for my (imagined) task forces:
* multiple Great Powers that are economic/technological peers
* MAD concerns mean that nukes/anti-matter aren't used
* MAD concerns mean that launching conventional warhead ICBMs from the homeland is risky - the other powers can't tell if an ICBM has a conventional or WMD warhead in flight. if you bother to get close enough to launch SRBMs/rail guns, people assume it's not a WMD
* limited wars are fought to conquer non-vital territories (ie, allied/dependent nations)
* laser PD is powerful but not absolute, and is better against missiles/torpedoes than railgun slugs
* armor mostly works against non-nuclear threats
* ground based strike aircraft can kill unescorted naval forces; naval aircraft can hold off ground based strike aircraft near a naval force but can't reliably penetrate past ground based interceptors and air defenses

So you end up with naval task forces that escort landing forces and use moderately short-ranged rail guns (ie, 50-100 miles in a low arc) to soften up defenses/conduct gunboat diplomacy. Battleships are back in style, as you need a big ship to carry the big railguns, large fusion plants to power them, and heavy armor armor to keep them alive. Aircraft carriers are capital ships, but they're mandatory escorts for the battleships, not primary strike forces.

It's one possibility, and matches several of the scenes that Crystalline_entity was looking for.

More fiddling with Vehicles is leading me to the conclusion that submarines have an offense problem in the TL10 world of blue-green lasers. Conventional torpedoes, running at ~75 knots, have great range but spend too much time inside in PD envelope. Rocket powered supercavitating torpedoes running at ~150 knots have terrible, terrible range, under 2 miles. I guess the solution might be to only supercavitate for the last couple of seconds.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

More fiddling with Vehicles is leading me to the conclusion that submarines have an offense problem in the TL10 world of blue-green lasers. Conventional torpedoes, running at ~75 knots, have great range but spend too much time inside in PD envelope. Rocket powered supercavitating torpedoes running at ~150 knots have terrible, terrible range, under 2 miles. I guess the solution might be to only supercavitate for the last couple of seconds.

The concept of torpedo starts to slide into being an autonomous offensive drone: it may spend hours or days sneaking very very slowly into position before lighting off the noisy drive when a target becomes available, and it may even develop into a bus/payload system to carry several fast short-range torpedoes (which may themselves move out on conventional drives to hide the location of the launcher, then light off the rockets).

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

* MAD concerns mean that nukes/anti-matter aren't used
* MAD concerns mean that launching conventional warhead ICBMs from the homeland is risky - the other powers can't tell if an ICBM has a conventional or WMD warhead in flight. if you bother to get close enough to launch SRBMs/rail guns, people assume it's not a WMD

Reading about the US's Prompt Global Strike program, their concern in testing a hypersonic rocket glider was that it would be mistaken for an ICBM launch and start a nuclear war. Not sure how much of a consideration that would be at TL10, but treaty considerations could be one restriction on long distance hypersonic craft that keeps carriers important.

Conventional torpedoes, running at ~75 knots, have great range but spend too much time inside in PD envelope. Rocket powered supercavitating torpedoes running at ~150 knots have terrible, terrible range, under 2 miles. I guess the solution might be to only supercavitate for the last couple of seconds.

Vehicles might be out-of-date in that regard. The Russian VA-111 travels up to 9 miles at 200kts at TL7-8, and this article mentions 300kts.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Sorry, I'm not sure how this is relevant. I'm postulating fighters with enough long range to reach over the horizon to half way round the globe. Any particular naval group would be under their umbrella. If you need them nearby for immediate defense, then they'd have a long enough dwell time to remain with the group on patrol for a shift before returning to their distant ground base, with another patrol arriving to relieve them, thus not requiring a local carrier.

.

With fusion air-rams you can have that indefinite dwell time but you probably want AI "pilots" to take advantage of it. Sending back to the other side of the world for replacements due to combat or operational losses is going to be extremely inconvenient

Accompanying the CAP (Combat Air Patrol) drones is probably a big flying wing with long range sensors (like radar) to look over the horizon. It's possible that such a platform will be in orbit rather than flying in air but wherever it is the surface ships need it.

Yes, it will be an obvious target but even forcing the enemy to shoot it before moving on to your surface ships is some help.

"Seven league boots" missions are alright for planned strikes against immobile targets and they can even work somewhat for armed reconnaissance missions ("Here is a bomb. Go find something to drop it on."). However when the groundpounders radio for back-up it works a lot better if it's physically close.