Supercarrier help

[GoSlash27]

57 minutes ago, Cassel said:

Not for me

Cassel, Fair enough, but it's not for you. It's Jhorriga's universe and he wants space fighters.

Best,
-Slashy

And again, I agree with DDE; you really don't want to use a giant all- purpose ship in fleet maneuvers. There are too many conflicting mission requirements and a super- ship is bad at all of them.

Imagine taking an entire carrier task force and welding them into a single giant ship. You'd wind up with a behemoth that can't do the job of any of the ships that comprise it. If you put it into combat against another carrier task force, it will be destroyed in short order.

 

 

[Cassel]

59 minutes ago, DDE said:

Facepalm.

One nuke gets through and a ship is gone. ANY ship.

Agree on nuke part, one nuke and your entire fleet is gone, but if your fleet is only one ship it is not that much as you would lose those 15 ships.

 

Quote

You don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket, because the sword is always more potent than the shield.

That is why you want all your planes on one ship? I want to split planes on 5 ships, so even if one goes down, rest of group may continue battle with air support.
 

Quote

And that's before we talk displacement and the sacrifices needed to combine mutually exclusive design elements in one platform.

There was any navy battle with modern carrier group vs other carrier group? Or you are just assuming that this is best solution vs anything?
 

Quote

Double facepalm.

You do realize that the all-in-one capability would result in obscene under-armour volume, which in turn would require a ludicrous amount of material to protect, right? Later battleship only protected a minor part of the ship with any meaningful armour.

This is the critical part of an aircraft carrier. Just you try and armour it up:

 

This part was about space-ship, so very little small stealth planes, only for scouting, as I said.
In space I can't really see how multi-class group battles can work, because better armor and better range wins instantly. There is nowhere to hide, there is no way to avoid laser beam, you can't turn to avoid being hit. If single projectile can penetrate unarmored carrier that means game over in space.

On water it is almost same, only way to hide is to go behind horizon line to avoid laser, but rockets or projectiles still can hit navy. That is why I am for all-in-one ship to focus your defences on smaller spot, it is easier to cover from rocket fire 1 ship than give same level of protection to 15 ships.

 

35 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Cassel, Fair enough, but it's not for you. It's Jhorriga's universe and he wants space fighters.

Best,
-Slashy

And again, I agree with DDE; you really don't want to use a giant all- purpose ship in fleet maneuvers. There are too many conflicting mission requirements and a super- ship is bad at all of them.

Imagine taking an entire carrier task force and welding them into a single giant ship. You'd wind up with a behemoth that can't do the job of any of the ships that comprise it. If you put it into combat against another carrier task force, it will be destroyed in short order.

 

I know, he wants this, but as for science forums I am making counterarguments ;-)

I didn't said welding, I said make single ship size of nimitz or even smaller, with fewer planes. Instead of 50 planes on single deck, make 5 ships and 10 planes on each. That would make it more universal and fleets wouldn't be so large, instead of 15 ships take 5 to single mission, that make maneuvers simpler and faster?

For smaller mission one ship would be enough, while right now if you need to use 2 planes you need entire carrier and this huge group to protect carrier, that is bad tactics imo.

Edited January 20, 2018 by Cassel

[GoSlash27]

Quote

I know, he wants this, but as for science forums I am making counterarguments ;-)

Well, *scientifically* speaking, everyone who knows anything about naval warfare disagrees with you.

27 minutes ago, Cassel said:

I didn't said welding, I said make single ship size of nimitz or even smaller, with fewer planes. Instead of 50 planes on single deck, make 5 ships and 10 planes on each. That would make it more universal and fleets wouldn't be so large, instead of 15 ships take 5 to single mission, that make maneuvers simpler and faster?

Wouldn't work out well at all which is why it's not done that way. A flotilla of Kiev class aviation cruisers would have it's head handed to it by a proper carrier battle group. Naval combat does not lend itself to standardization. Each type of ship has unique combat roles, and it's armament and size are optimized to it's role.

Best,
-Slashy

 

Edited January 20, 2018 by GoSlash27

[radonek]

3 hours ago, Cassel said:

In space I can't really see how multi-class group battles can work, because better armor and better range wins instantly. There is nowhere to hide, there is no way to avoid laser beam, you can't turn to avoid being hit. If single projectile can penetrate unarmored carrier that means game over in space.

It is actually quite easy to avoid laser beam - you just move out of it's way. It's just matter of staying at distance where light lag is larger then oomph of your propulsion. You can't dodge laser beam, but you can move at random. This would obviously be bonecrushingly uncomfortable for crew. And guess what - a drone can handle high-g maneuvring just fine while making smaller target. Armed with equivalent laser weapon, I don't see how crewed ship could stand a chance even in one-on-one fight with something cheaper and easier to produce. 

[DDE]

11 hours ago, Cassel said:

Agree on nuke part, one nuke and your entire fleet is gone, but if your fleet is only one ship it is not that much as you would lose those 15 ships.

On the contrary. Your versatile battlestars would be exponentially more expensive than any specialist ship. You’d be lucky if you could afford one for the price of those fifteen.

11 hours ago, Cassel said:

There was any navy battle with modern carrier group vs other carrier group? Or you are just assuming that this is best solution vs anything?
 

No, because the various carrier-battleships never made it off the drawing board to begin with. The flight deck required for fixed-wing aircraft both a) imposes a minimum size requirement and b) prevents the ship from having pretty much anything else on its deck - can’t mount battleship turrets in sponsons, and those launch tubes on the Kuznetsov really cut into her hangar capacity.

This sort of fiction was abandoned in the 1930s and was never returned to.

[DDE]

11 hours ago, Cassel said:

one nuke and your entire fleet is gone

Wait. Missed that one.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

On the contrary, anti-ship nuclear tests have shown that only slightly dispersing your ships limits nuclear weapon damage, especially nuclear torpedo damage, to a single ship.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-not-all-anti-ship-missiles-tipped-with-nuclear-warheads/answer/Alec-Zander

Looks terrifying, right? Except all prompt casualties were ships within 1150 yards. Everything else was broadly salvageable or repairable had it been equipped with CBRN sprinklers (technically the CounterMeasure WashDown System, CMWDS) - the vapourized radioactive seawater permeates steel and makes the whole ship lethally "hot".

And that's an UNDERWATER blast.

Edited January 21, 2018 by DDE

[Cassel]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

 

No, because the various carrier-battleships never made it off the drawing board to begin with.

I was saying about modern carrier + battle group, this idea was tested in real battle? Do they ever fought vs real opponents (same group carrier + escort) or they only have fight plans on paper?

13 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

Well, *scientifically* speaking, everyone who knows anything about naval warfare disagrees with you.

 

 

I see that some people disagree, but I can't find any real battle between two modern carriers and their escort, so until that happens I will stick with my opinion.

Right now we argue like who would win USS Enterprise or Imperial Star Destroyer? :-)

Edited January 21, 2018 by Cassel

[DDE]

16 minutes ago, Cassel said:

I was saying about modern carrier + battle group, this idea was tested in real battle? Do they ever fought vs real opponents (same group carrier + escort) or they only have fight plans on paper?

I see that some people disagree, but I can't find any real battle between two modern carriers and their escort, so until that happens I will stick with my opinion.

Right now we argue like who would win USS Enterprise or Imperial Star Destroyer? :-)

Midway, Coral Sea, et cetera et cetera. The missiles don't upset the balance THAT much, and they've quickly became mutual.

On top of that, those fight plans are very detailed.

Just now, DDE said:

Right now we argue like who would win USS Enterprise or Imperial Star Destroyer? :-)

According to old canon documents? One shot from SSD's secondary turbolasers would blow the Enterprise in two.

We're talking gigatons per bolt.

[Cassel]

32 minutes ago, DDE said:

Midway, Coral Sea, et cetera et cetera. The missiles don't upset the balance THAT much, and they've quickly became mutual.

On top of that, those fight plans are very detailed.

 

So, no? They never fought real battle and all you got is paper plans.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Cassel said:

So, no? They never fought real battle and all you got is paper plans.

Taking the hardline empiricist route are we?

Very well. I'll just be here, waiting for the deck plans and blueprints of your hypothetical multimission superwarships.

[GoSlash27]

4 hours ago, Cassel said:

I see that some people disagree, but I can't find any real battle between two modern carriers and their escort, so until that happens I will stick with my opinion.

Cassell,
 You will never see a battle between a carrier air group and a flotilla of heavy aviation cruisers because nobody is silly enough to deploy a flotilla of heavy aviation cruisers as a task force. Therefore your opinion will (thankfully) never be proven wrong.

Best,
-Slashy

 

[tater]

23 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

The space battles in this universe are going to look like ww2 air battles with fighters flying everywhere and explosions. This ship is going to have various computer controlled elements (such as some point defence stations, etc).

How fast can they go? What weapons do they have, and how far away can they engage targets? Is it some sort of magical space drive with no conservation of momentum so they can dogfight? Every single element needs to be fleshed out. Why can't battleships move just as nimbly as fighters, for example? Do they have control of gravity (people stand around on ships like in Star Wars), etc.

 

Regarding nukes, anything short of an actual impact detonation of a nuke is going to be substantially less effective than many people imagine. 1/r², plus the fact that any such craft are designed for a high radiation and heat environment anyway.

Edited January 21, 2018 by tater

[DDE]

30 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Cassell,
 You will never see a battle between a carrier air group and a flotilla of heavy aviation cruisers because nobody is silly enough to deploy a flotilla of heavy aviation cruisers as a task force. Therefore your opinion will (thankfully) never be proven wrong.

Best,
-Slashy

 

What's more, the TAvKRs were merely an escort ship. The flagship class were these, with triple the surface-to-surface firepower at barely half the tonnage:

[GoSlash27]

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

Right now we argue like who would win USS Enterprise or Imperial Star Destroyer? :-)

Actually, thinking about it... you've got a point here.  1) your opinion has no bearing on this conversation, 2) your opinion has no bearing in the real world either since nobody's considering doing anything so silly as what you propose. 3) Your opinion is uninformed because you haven't studied naval history and doctrine.

I don't know why I've bothered arguing with you about it. Seems a pretty pointless exercise.

Carry on,
-Slashy

[tater]

WW2 naval airpower worked for a number of reasons (in no particular order).

1. Sensor ranges were relatively short, so that ships could hide, and longer range intel required either aircraft, or pickets (which might be submarines).

2. Aircraft are substantially faster than ships (an order of magnitude faster). This is because they move through different media, in part.

3. Aircraft can carry weapons that can destroy ships.

4. Aircraft have substantially limited duration in flight compared to ships.

5. Weapons are capable of missing. Both weapons used by the aircraft, as well as the AAA.

 

For this to be true in space combat, you have to pretty much destroy physics.

1. Nothing can hide at ranges where craft can engage with each other within weeks or possibly months (assuming WW capital ship sized vehicles are a thing).

2. If you posit some sort of magical drive that makes fighters 10X faster than ships... it's difficult, and you better flesh it out in substantial detail or I'll wonder why you don't slap all the fighter engines ona  battleship, and have a battleship-fighter. It makes almost no sense.

3. This is possible, and indeed if fighters move at speeds where they can cross substantial distances in space quickly enough (they need to come home, after all, else they are just small ships), then their own KE is a substantial weapon.

4. Else why not put a stateroom on the "fighter" and make it a small ship, and dispense with the larger "carrier" anyway?

Edited January 21, 2018 by tater

[Jhorriga]

1 hour ago, tater said:

How fast can they go? What weapons do they have, and how far away can they engage targets? Is it some sort of magical space drive with no conservation of momentum so they can dogfight? Every single element needs to be fleshed out. Why can't battleships move just as nimbly as fighters, for example? Do they have control of gravity (people stand around on ships like in Star Wars), etc.

 

Regarding nukes, anything short of an actual impact detonation of a nuke is going to be substantially less effective than many people imagine. 1/r², plus the fact that any such craft are designed for a high radiation and heat environment anyway.

Magical space drive, they do have.

Battleships would move slower because it seems more fitting. (Keep in mind not everything in this universe is based off scientific fact. chunks of it are just there because it seems cooler or it would allow more action.)

Artificial gravity generators are present within most ships, but seatbelts are still used on shuttles and fast moving craft like fighters.

[GoSlash27]

44 minutes ago, DDE said:

What's more, the TAvKRs were merely an escort ship. The flagship class were these, with triple the surface-to-surface firepower at barely half the tonnage:

Yeah, the old Kirov class battlecruisers. Adm. Gorshkov certainly loved his cruise missiles...

Best,
-Slashy

[tater]

5. If directed energy weapons are a thing, then they cannot miss. Ever. Seriously. Every shot hits, every time.

To miss, the target has to evade by at least a cross-sectional (as viewed from the weapon shooting) radius  during the flight time of the weapon.  At 3000km, this is 1/100th of a second. If the craft radius is 2m, this requires it change direction at 2000g. (that's actually a lower bound, since I'm assuming it doesn't instantly reach the 200m/s it takes to move a radius in 0.01s).

So if there are directed energy weapons that can damage fighters, the fighters are destroyed equal to the rate of fire of the AAA fire. Or that ROF divided by the number of hits required to kill.

Edited January 21, 2018 by tater

[GoSlash27]

35 minutes ago, tater said:

5. If directed energy weapons are a thing, then they cannot miss. Ever. Seriously. Every shot hits, every time.

To miss, the target has to evade by at least a cross-sectional (as viewed from the weapon shooting) radius  during the flight time of the weapon.  At 3000km, this is 1/100th of a second. If the craft radius is 2m, this requires it change direction at 2000g. (that's actually a lower bound, since I'm assuming it doesn't instantly reach the 200m/s it takes to move a radius in 0.01s).

So if there are directed energy weapons that can damage fighters, the fighters are destroyed equal to the rate of fire of the AAA fire. Or that ROF divided by the number of hits required to kill.

Well, he could invoke a maguffin concept like a "vortex cannon" to slow the fire down. Let's say the energy and equipment required to generate a sufficiently- powerful laser beam is impractically large. They instead use a technology that directs the energy into a toroid to make a more powerful shot. The downside is that the shot travels at a much lower speed.
 

Spoiler

 

 

^ Something like this, but with photons instead of air.

Best,
-Slashy

Edited January 21, 2018 by GoSlash27

[tater]

Photons move at c in vacuum.

If spacecraft can make vast amounts of power (required, even with magic drives), then they could make powerful lasers. 

So even if you make up a dumb weapon that is slower than light, I’ll just use the gigawatts available for a laser and kill everything with “not magic.”

Or does the universe somehow disalllow things that already work? You might have to literally posit magic. Ie: magic exists, and disallows anything contrary to WW2 in space (because of a spell or something).

Fighters in space make no sense, sadly. 

[GoSlash27]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

Or does the universe somehow disalllow things that already work?

tater,
 I'd argue that such that such things don't already work. We don't currently have directed energy weapons powerful enough to knock down airplanes or sink ships. What we do have is way too heavy and unwieldy to employ as a practical weapon. That's why we use cannons.
 Invoking the "dumb weapon" maguffin, allows the story to proceed while sidestepping these problems. All directed energy weapons fire at a slow enough velocity to be dodged, which is why volume of fire is important. Small cannons cause sufficient damage to small targets, and enormous cannons cause sufficient damage to large targets.

Best,
-Slashy
 

[DDE]

2 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

Yeah, the old Kirov class battlecruisers. Adm. Gorshkov certainly loved his cruise missiles...

Best,
-Slashy

Well, considering that the following sounds a lot like what's promised in LRASM and late Tomahawks...

Quote

The missile, when fired in a swarm (group of 4–8) has a unique guidance mode. One of the weapons climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. The missile responsible for target designation climbs in short pop-ups, so as to be harder to intercept. The missiles are linked by data connections, forming a network. If the designating missile is destroyed the next missile will rise to assume its purpose. Missiles are able to differentiate targets, detect groups and prioritize targets automatically using information gathered during flight and types of ships and battle formations pre-programmed in an onboard computer. They will attack targets in order of priority, highest to lowest: after destroying the first target, any remaining missiles will attack the next prioritized target.

Clever girl.

[tater]

2 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

tater,
 I'd argue that such that such things don't already work. We don't currently have directed energy weapons powerful enough to knock down airplanes or sink ships. What we do have is way too heavy and unwieldy to employ as a practical weapon. That's why we use cannons.
 Invoking the "dumb weapon" maguffin, allows the story to proceed while sidestepping these problems. All directed energy weapons fire at a slow enough velocity to be dodged, which is why volume of fire is important. Small cannons cause sufficient damage to small targets, and enormous cannons cause sufficient damage to large targets.

One, we have functional directed energy weapons. They can knock out missiles (I know people who work on them). By functional I mean they are mounted on aircraft, or built to shipboard weapon specs (size/mass wise). I used to see the airborne laser platform flying around all the time here (back when it was on a C-135 at the AF weapons lab here, not the 747 version).

Anyway, OP is postulating ships the size of BSG, or Star Wars type capital ships. To move at all, they require such vast amounts of power that the only current limitations of directed energy weapons are not an issue. If you are generating terawatts of power, the heavy lifting for laser weapons is already done.

You cannot "maguffin" directed energy weapons to fly slower than they should fly, that's absurd. SW blasters look even slower than actual bullets, for example (dumb). Or, I should say, you CAN do that, but it's impossible for anyone to suspend disbelief.

 

[Cassel]

1 hour ago, tater said:

One, we have functional directed energy weapons. They can knock out missiles

Does that counts?
 

 

[GoSlash27]

1 hour ago, tater said:

 

You cannot "maguffin" directed energy weapons to fly slower than they should fly, that's absurd. SW blasters look even slower than actual bullets, for example (dumb). Or, I should say, you CAN do that, but it's impossible for anyone to suspend disbelief.

 

Tater,

Well sure ya can. It's not so impossible for "anyone" to suspend their disbelief, just you. People have been making scientifically inaccurate sci-fi since the beginning. It doesn't get in the way of the story for most people.

 Besides, what's the deal with you trying to dissuade him from having space navies, fighters, etc if that's what he wants? It's his story. He could do "star galleons of the Sirius main" if he chooses.

Why not help him instead of dumping all over his vision?

Best,

-Slashy