10-15-2017, 04:38 PM | #101 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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).
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10-15-2017, 08:05 PM | #102 | |
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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10-15-2017, 08:20 PM | #103 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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(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.
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10-15-2017, 08:29 PM | #104 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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.
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10-15-2017, 09:06 PM | #105 | |
Join Date: Nov 2004
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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10-15-2017, 09:56 PM | #106 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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10-16-2017, 12:08 AM | #107 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2015
Location: England
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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?
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10-16-2017, 12:40 AM | #108 | |||
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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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. Quote:
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10-16-2017, 01:56 AM | #109 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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"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..
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10-16-2017, 04:20 AM | #110 | |
Join Date: Mar 2014
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Re: [Ultra-Tech] What would naval warfare at TL10 look like?
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Even a very conservative assumption of the capabilities of future autonomous aircraft should take these factors into account. |
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naval warfare, ultra-tech |
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