Some of the Most Random Tech Questions Ever

[Moar Boosters]

. Can artillery even hit moving things?

Sure.... The germans shot down a crapload of planes in WW2 by firing 88mm shells into the sky.

Much of the fire was random and didn't hit much, but they also had radar targeted systems which were accurate enough to be greatly feared by allied pilots.

Modern artillery is laser guided and can adjust it's course mid flight. They can fire 3 shells from the same gun at different angles and have them all hit simultaneously. I'm sure they could hit a giant flying behemoth if it came within range. Leading a target is schoolboy science.

[Mazon Del]

Pretty much the only way that flying aircraft carriers are going to become real is if we figure out some physics trick that lets us easily and cheaply toss thousands of tons in the air. Antigravity is of course the usual go-to for this in sci-fi circles. If the Q-Thruster type engines do work AND they work near what Fetta says the 2nd Gen Cannae drive can do, then yes it is likely we will get one of these sometime within the next 100 years. Frankly we'd end up having flying Navies which would be pretty badass. Now of course, we need one of these things to work. Anti-gravity is still a crackpot pipe dream, and the Q-Thruster is still unproven. What the next year will hold as far as the QT is concerned, we will have to see.

Personally I'd love to have flying warships and whatnot. If anybody is interested in this sort of thing and likes board games, I recommend looking into Leviathans. A hexmap based game of ship maneuvering and combat. Pretty excellent but it will get LONG. Plus the French are admittedly OP. However this is supposed to follow the history the group was trying to establish. Britain makes first flying battleship, is the best. French watch closely and build a battleship that solves assorted problems on the British ship. French ships beat Britain in the opening battles of what is leading towards WW1 in this alternate history universe. They are supposed to release other nations eventually and as time goes on there will be an "arms race" of development for the ships in the game.

[rasheed]

I just love how a Random tech questions thread turned into how to kill a flying aircraft carrier thread.

[WestAir]

My vote is still on improbable. I have a hard time seeing an air carrier be more effective than a water supercarrier. A lot of the super carriers strengths come from the armada of subs and missile cruisers and support craft around it.

[LaytheAerospace]

The durability of a modern aircraft carrier is being dramatically overstated. Even the US Navy doesn't think they're as indestructible as this thread is claiming.

The truth is, the reason supercarriers work as part of a carrier strike group is because the carrier itself is so very, very weak. It needs several other ships to protect it, because it can't do an adequate job of protecting itself. It's huge, slow, and has pathetic armaments compared to ships that don't need to dedicate their volume to carrying planes instead of guns.

And forget about nukes. The real way you take down a carrier is with lots of small, cheap attackers. The Navy ran some exercises to evaluate how a CSG would perform against an enemy lacking major naval power, around the time Iran was threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. What they found was that large numbers of attackers in small boats (think Captain Phillips) could easily overwhelm the defenses of the CSG using small arms and explosives. The people who designed the ships in the CSG never anticipated needing to defend against such an attack. The small ships vastly superior maneuverability kept them out of the line of fire long enough to come up and plant explosives directly on the ships' hulls. I'm not kidding, that actually worked in real life (though with simulated explosives, of course).

An airborne carrier is going to have all the same problems, but would have less armor, fewer guns and no strike group to support it. Modern air to air missiles cost anywhere from $100k to $1M or so. If your carrier costs $100B, then I can shoot 10,000 of my best missiles at it and spend an order of magnitude less to destroy it than you did to build it. Drones are another concern, getting smaller, cheaper, faster and deadlier every day. It's simply an impractical weapon, and it only gets less practical as time goes on.

Full disclosure, I worked as a defense contractor for a few years out of college, working with the Missile Defense Agency and Langley AFB, writing software to analyze radar data (among other things).

[Klingon Admiral]

carrier ships

Which are, arguably, also huge, expensive and vulnerable.

[Laie]

The durability of a modern aircraft carrier is being dramatically overstated. Even the US Navy doesn't think they're as indestructible as this thread is claiming.

As close to unsinkable as humanly possible, but even the debris from an "intercepted" rocket may cause substantial damage. A barrage of 50 is pretty much guaranteed to take the carrier out of service for a while, even if none of them scores a direct hit.

And I don't know who brought up the idea of the flying carrier being armored as well, and how super-size becomes more efficient... but I started to imagine something on the scale of the spaceships from Independence Day.

[cicatrix]

Pretty much the only way that flying aircraft carriers are going to become real is if we figure out some physics trick that lets us easily and cheaply toss thousands of tons in the air.

The energy needed to lift that thing will remain the same. We're speaking of cheap energy here. From my point of view, whoever has that source of cheap energy would win any war without a fight. Everyone will queue up to get some. No need for flying carriers.

[Moar Boosters]

And I don't know who brought up the idea of the flying carrier being armored as well, and how super-size becomes more efficient... but I started to imagine something on the scale of the spaceships from Independence Day.

Me too. It's got to use some sort of advanced technology to create lift.

It doesn't matter how big you make the craft, you're never going to reach a point where it's so big it's efficient enough to put battle-ship armour on a wing, rotor blade or gas envelope. All the methods we currently have to generate lift are very weight dependent.

[Mazon Del]

It's huge, slow,...

Actually due to the mechanics of ships and moving through water, of the "big" ships carriers tend to be quite fast. They have terrible maneuverability of course, but their speed is nothing to scoff at. The speed a carrier can get from true "military power" to the engines (the moment when you redline the engines with no safeties) is still classified. They are only allowed to use it in battlefield emergencies to preserve the secrecy of how fast it can actually go. It isn't going to be outrunning any torpedos or light attack boats. But it isn't something to scoff at.

[LaytheAerospace]

Actually due to the mechanics of ships and moving through water, of the "big" ships carriers tend to be quite fast. They have terrible maneuverability of course, but their speed is nothing to scoff at. The speed a carrier can get from true "military power" to the engines (the moment when you redline the engines with no safeties) is still classified. They are only allowed to use it in battlefield emergencies to preserve the secrecy of how fast it can actually go. It isn't going to be outrunning any torpedos or light attack boats. But it isn't something to scoff at.

Fair point, though I was really speaking about maneuverability.

That said, a traditional carrier would actually be a great deal more maneuverable than an airborne one, I think. Planes roll while turning, whereas a ship just shifts its rudder. An airborne carrier would have to limit its roll rate to avoid damaging the contents of the ship or exerting undue stresses on its ludicrously huge wings. Traditional carriers can stop when they get on target, an airborne one has to keep moving in an enormous circle to stay on target.

Also, it's worth noting that perfectly reliable missile defense systems don't exist, and probably never will. A large fraction of all the missiles fired at any target will hit it, even if it has the best missile defenses in the world. Air to air missiles commonly have a kill probability of 40-70%, with pilot skill playing a greater role than countermeasures in avoiding being shot down. An airborne carrier can't maneuver, so it just has to hope that its countermeasures work perfectly 100% of the time.

Think of active missile defense as shooting a bullet with a slower bullet, and the first bullet knows you're coming. In the specific case of ICBMs, this bullet is maneuverable, carries decoys, travels at hypersonic speeds, has a miniscule radar cross section, emits little radiation and is dead cold. The DoD is (last I checked) dumping obscene amounts of money on the MDA to try to solve these problems, but thus far, their only successes have been in highly controlled conditions, and the success rate still wasn't very high.

Something as expensive as this would also warrant a specialty weapons system, like the Exocet, Penguin or Harpoon. And remember, they get to design those missiles after you build and launch your air carrier. But that's only if your carrier manages to not get shot down by the existing stock of weapons perfectly adequate for the task. Really, you don't even need missiles. Armor piercing incendiary rounds, like those fired from the GAU-8/A Avenger, or the relatively puny M-61 Vulcan would do just fine for a tiny fraction of the cost. Given that the plane is going to be flying in a nice, straight line, the normal 1km effective range of the weapon is likely to be extended quite a bit. With a firing rate of 4,000-6,000 rounds per minute, the moment an aircraft armed with one of these closes to firing range, your carrier is dead.

Edited November 14, 2014 by LaytheAerospace
Typo

[DaveofDefeat]

Modern supercarrier missile defense system consists of a dozen or more anti-aircraft autocannons linked to a central control system and set to automatically track and fire on anything moving towards it.

Most missile defense systems are self contained units containing their own radar and computer system that can automatically identify track and engage targets. This is to enable the systems to continue operating in the event of damage to the main ship.

I think you overestimate the effectiveness of missile defense systems.

Also I believe submarines can still be a threat to these carriers by launching anti ship missiles from directly below the carrier, allowing minimal reaction time for the defense systems.

[problemecium]

I'm admittedly late to the discussion, but I'm bored so here's my two cents:

1. Would a flying aircraft carrier be practical in any way?

Unlikely. Perhaps a very large blimp (a la the one in "Stealth") could be useful for in-flight refueling or as some sort of temporary base (assuming you can avoid getting shot down by missiles), but if you mean an "Avengers"-style helicarrier, I laugh at the thought. Those things must have gone through about a googol gallons of fuel every minute xD

2. Could the EmDrive be enhanced by including more microwave compression chambers?

Yes, but as I've mentioned it's essentially a space propeller. You can make it into a slightly better space propeller, but it's still going to take you ten thousand years to get anywhere ;P

[Beowolf]

The cool thing about flight of any kind is that the bigger you get, the more efficient flying gets. Proportionally speaking, that is. So there is nothing theoretically wrong with the principle of a flying aircraft carrier. It'd be basically be a series of nuclear reactors driving huge fans, all paved on top with an air strip, but that's basically what you're asking for.

I don't have it handy but saw someone go through the math of flying an aircraft carrier once. Even diamond wasn't strong enough for the stresses on the rotor blades. Splitting the load up into lots of smaller fans wouldn't do it. Adding jet engines firing straight downward didn't do it either. Look at a picture of a heavy-lift helicopter. Note how big the rotor is compared to its payload. Scale that up to carrier size, and look at how much rotor area there should be vs. what the comic book illustrators use. Now, realize that when you scaled it up, you invoked the cube-square law and so the situation is actually far, far worse than what you just imagined.

Besides, if it was possible, all of the gigawatts from that series of reactors ends up going into the air as heat. Besides the sun, the flying carrier would be the biggest, brightest infrared target on the planet. Far too easy to hit. No matter how many defenses you put on such a monster, all the enemy has to do is fire one too many missiles at it and it dies in flames.

[K^2]

I don't have it handy but saw someone go through the math of flying an aircraft carrier once. Even diamond wasn't strong enough for the stresses on the rotor blades. Splitting the load up into lots of smaller fans wouldn't do it. Adding jet engines firing straight downward didn't do it either. Look at a picture of a heavy-lift helicopter. Note how big the rotor is compared to its payload. Scale that up to carrier size, and look at how much rotor area there should be vs. what the comic book illustrators use. Now, realize that when you scaled it up, you invoked the cube-square law and so the situation is actually far, far worse than what you just imagined.

That's because using rotors to push air straight down is a stupid way to fly an aircraft carrier. What you want to do is use the structure itself as a lifting body. So you want to be blowing air over the surface, rather than straight down. This also lets you distribute the load much, much better. The overall shape of the craft would probably be roughly oval. Though, it might make sense to just go with a disk at that point.

[NERVAfan]

Me too. It's got to use some sort of advanced technology to create lift.

It doesn't matter how big you make the craft, you're never going to reach a point where it's so big it's efficient enough to put battle-ship armour on a wing, rotor blade or gas envelope. All the methods we currently have to generate lift are very weight dependent.

Well... a gas envelope, extremely theoretically, maybe - the square cube law works in the favor of buoyant things like airships.... the bigger it is the heavier the envelope can become. But the needed size would be so huge that it would never be financially feasible.

Something on a scale of miles might be able to afford quite significant armor though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_%28tensegrity_sphere%29

(and that would have been lifted just by a slight temperature difference - if it was hydrogen filled, the lift would be vastly more.)

[cicatrix]

Let me suggest something that would theoretically make this crazy idea about flying carriers more real. Instead of making an airborne carrier - make it orbital. You could theoretically assemble something huge in orbit, fill it with spaceplanes and orbital bombs and terrorize the whole planet

Making it in orbit would make it also easier to defend since there are only limited options that can de-orbit such a vessel. (Well, of course, as soon you start to build one, others would start to develop things that can kill it )

[peadar1987]

Let me suggest something that would theoretically make this crazy idea about flying carriers more real. Instead of making an airborne carrier - make it orbital. You could theoretically assemble something huge in orbit, fill it with spaceplanes and orbital bombs and terrorize the whole planet

Making it in orbit would make it also easier to defend since there are only limited options that can de-orbit such a vessel. (Well, of course, as soon you start to build one, others would start to develop things that can kill it )

Except that would be nearly impossible to defend if someone was really determined to destroy it. Thing about a large orbital target is you don't even need to be close to it to attack it. Launch a cannister full of depleted uranium slugs into a retrograde orbit, crack it open half an orbit away, and you have a bunch of deadly shrapnel hitting the carrier head-on at 16 km/s. There is pretty much no way to defend against that, the carrier is getting annihilated.

[Sky_walker]

I got a cheaper solution: Launch few cubesats on highly elliptical orbit, and then pretend you lost contact with them while making an orbital maneuver. Carrier will have too much inertia to dodge them, and bang, in few seconds you won't have any usable carrier.

[Tommygun]

I don't think attaching a country with an orbital or flying aircraft carrier would be necessary.

Just wait a few years for them to go bankrupt.

[cicatrix]

Except that would be nearly impossible to defend if someone was really determined to destroy it. Thing about a large orbital target is you don't even need to be close to it to attack it. Launch a cannister full of depleted uranium slugs into a retrograde orbit, crack it open half an orbit away, and you have a bunch of deadly shrapnel hitting the carrier head-on at 16 km/s. There is pretty much no way to defend against that, the carrier is getting annihilated.

Oh, my, I forgot about that Still, if the armor is thick enough... (I'm not really serious)

[cicatrix]

I don't think attaching a country with an orbital or flying aircraft carrier would be necessary.

Just wait a few years for them to go bankrupt.

The trick with that thing is to kill all the bad guys before you go bankrupt

[peadar1987]

The trick with that thing is to kill all the bad guys before you go bankrupt

Hmm... "Gigantic Orbital death machine" would suggest to me that these people probably are the bad guys!

[cicatrix]

Hmm... "Gigantic Orbital death machine" would suggest to me that these people probably are the bad guys!

Such things are usually built as a universal peace-keeping (enforcing) tool for protecting the innocents.

[K^2]

Hmm... "Gigantic Orbital death machine" would suggest to me that these people probably are the bad guys!

Only if they lose. If they win, they get to decide who the bad guys are, and why they had to use the orbital asteroid defense platform to help fight these bad guys.

I've always thought that "Death Star" was only called that because the Rebels won. Had it been the other way around, it'd probably be known as "Orbital Installation Infallible," or something else that's neutral but firm.