Supercarrier help

[tater]

1 hour ago, GoSlash27 said:

Ah, but you still have to get within range. Fighters patrol many hundreds of km's away. They will spot you and call in strikes to take you out long before you get in range. That's something you've got to understand; carriers don't just steam around with their complement on their deck, waiting for trouble. They have air ops going 24/7. Those planes are out patrolling, hunting subs, shadowing suspicious vessels, etc. They maintain a constant air cover that protects hundreds of nautical miles away from the ships.

Not always, particularly in a ww2 setting. Modern craft would need to have radar running to scout any distance, which of course alerts foes to their location. In space, their location is known. In ww2, their locations were unknown, and they would only fly a tiny CAP close to the task force to force subs down (partially to spot and prosecute them, but really forcing a sub underwater in ww2 was often enough, as they could only make a couple knots without draining the batteries). When they thought there might be an enemy around (fleet units), only then would they fly scouting patterns, since operating aircraft at long ranges was risky.

That's something about the ww2 model that also doesn't work. The disproportionate nature of air vs sea power in ww2 just doesn't map to space. Say you have a fighter like an X-wing, Viper, etc. What's the duration he wants? A few hours? You are not going very far with any drive that is even vaguely Newtonian. A few km/s in direction X, then they have to turn around, kill that, and do the same in reverse, then kill that and match with the CV. So divide the total dv of the craft by 4, and that lets you know what velocity it gets to leave the mother ship with, so a small cone of future position. Anything short of hundreds of km/s of dv is gonna result in a boring fighter. Regardless, the combat is not dogfights, but literally jousting. Pass at some closign velocity, have one pass, kill velocity and head home, perhaps making another pass. That's it.

49 minutes ago, DDE said:

No. Primarily because only one nation even has full-fledged fleet carriers. The second half of the XXth century has been an era of asymmetric naval warfare.

Yeah, WW2 was a foregone conclusion overall, and particularly in the PTO. The Japanese lost the day they attacked Pearl Harbor. They never had any hope of winning. The US build ~140 aircraft carriers during the war (mostly small "jeep" carriers, but they still embarked about half as many planes as an IJN fleet CV).

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Doesn't require AGI. AlphaGo would do just fine. Running on a laptop.

If I asked about tarvel to Mars, would you get out paper, or consult trajectory browser at NASA? Would you use a slide rule, or a calculator (or wolfram alpha)? Assuming we're not talking steam punk, even old computers would be superior to people, and certainly current systems would be, even forgetting any improvements at all in computing.

BTW, I think if any civilization makes AI incompatible with their society, that;s a mistake they only get to make once.

AlphaGo is something designed to run on an data center not an laptop, fun to think of how colossus got one thing right as in warehouse of computer equipment. 
Things changes  fast 10 years ago good AI was as scifi as faster than light, and self driving cars was an joke. 
Still we have no idea of upper limit of computer systems, we know that an capital ship will have more than an million times the computer power of an missile and that you can restrict  communications between missiles. 
Your setting will be outdated anyway, however anything like close in air defense would be computers only, for the more strategic stuff an more powerful computer should fool an simply minded one. 

[DDE]

48 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, WW2 was a foregone conclusion overall, and particularly in the PTO. The Japanese lost the day they attacked Pearl Harbor. They never had any hope of winning. The US build ~140 aircraft carriers during the war (mostly small "jeep" carriers, but they still embarked about half as many planes as an IJN fleet CV).

I’m talking about the second half, the one where the other side didn’t really even bother with carriers.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Not always, particularly in a ww2 setting. Modern craft would need to have radar running to scout any distance, which of course alerts foes to their location. In space, their location is known. In ww2, their locations were unknown, and they would only fly a tiny CAP close to the task force to force subs down (partially to spot and prosecute them, but really forcing a sub underwater in ww2 was often enough, as they could only make a couple knots without draining the batteries). When they thought there might be an enemy around (fleet units), only then would they fly scouting patterns, since operating aircraft at long ranges was risky.

That's something about the ww2 model that also doesn't work. The disproportionate nature of air vs sea power in ww2 just doesn't map to space. Say you have a fighter like an X-wing, Viper, etc. What's the duration he wants? A few hours? You are not going very far with any drive that is even vaguely Newtonian. A few km/s in direction X, then they have to turn around, kill that, and do the same in reverse, then kill that and match with the CV. So divide the total dv of the craft by 4, and that lets you know what velocity it gets to leave the mother ship with, so a small cone of future position. Anything short of hundreds of km/s of dv is gonna result in a boring fighter. Regardless, the combat is not dogfights, but literally jousting. Pass at some closign velocity, have one pass, kill velocity and head home, perhaps making another pass. That's it.

Yeah, WW2 was a foregone conclusion overall, and particularly in the PTO. The Japanese lost the day they attacked Pearl Harbor. They never had any hope of winning. The US build ~140 aircraft carriers during the war (mostly small "jeep" carriers, but they still embarked about half as many planes as an IJN fleet CV).

This was my main point in first posting, fighters has no endurance but they are more than 20 times faster than ships. 
In space you need endurance, so you launch something more like missile torpedo boats than fighter jets, they can operate for months, you can give them good engines so they carry lots of missiles but they don't have the faster than light drive who is 10 times heavier than them, an small crew also give interaction drama, the missile commander want to be an hero while the pilot just want the bonus pay. 
Now you was supposed to be picked up by another carrier after the Mars attack run, however you own intel says it has been destroyed. 

And asymmetric warfare if then you have stealth planes and the enemy don't have radar. 
On the other hand the other side don't have no rules of engagement, they see it as top of foolishness, your side have until your causalities grow to high and you nuke from orbit. 
This part is a bit political but universal true. You can win an limited war against an stronger enemy but only if he see an continued fight as not cost effective. 

 

Edited January 22, 2018 by magnemoe

[tater]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

AlphaGo is something designed to run on an data center not an laptop, fun to think of how colossus got one thing right as in warehouse of computer equipment. 
Things changes  fast 10 years ago good AI was as scifi as faster than light, and self driving cars was an joke. 
Still we have no idea of upper limit of computer systems, we know that an capital ship will have more than an million times the computer power of an missile and that you can restrict  communications between missiles. 
Your setting will be outdated anyway, however anything like close in air defense would be computers only, for the more strategic stuff an more powerful computer should fool an simply minded one. 

Can't fool the defense systems, because physics. The fighter or missile has to evade perpendicular to the flight path of the weapon at least a vehicle radius during the flight time of the weapon (c, if a laser). For directed energy weapons, as the range decreases missing the target becomes completely impossible.

The bottom line is that in a setting with space warfare, the computers will be substantially better than anything available now. At the combat ranges shown in space opera movies, the computers can stay aboard the carrier, they fight in SW at ranges that would be tiny by WW2 standards, much less modern ones.

52 minutes ago, DDE said:

I’m talking about the second half, the one where the other side didn’t really even bother with carriers.

Was she hit by a bomb, or are her boilers from WW1?

Edited January 22, 2018 by tater

[GoSlash27]

46 minutes ago, tater said:

At the combat ranges shown in space opera movies,...

 Ah, but the combat ranges shown in the movies were necessary because cinematography. Not strictly necessary in Jhorriga's fictional universe. Naval combat was rarely pushed to the ranges shown in the movies even in WWII unless somebody screwed up. Or somebody with a rising sun flag decided that it was a one- way trip

Best,
-Slashy

1 hour ago, DDE said:

I’m talking about the second half, the one where the other side didn’t really even bother with carriers.

DDE,
 Okay, now I'm confused. Why am I looking at a pic of the Kuznetsov in the context of WWII?

Best,
-Slashy

[tater]

2 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

 Ah, but the combat ranges shown in the movies were necessary because cinematography. Not strictly necessary in Jhorriga's fictional universe. Naval combat was rarely pushed to the ranges shown in the movies even in WWII unless somebody screwed up. Or somebody with a rising sun flag decided that it was a one- way trip

Fighter engagement ranges were incredibly short for low muzzle velocity platforms (Bf-109s, and A6Ms, for example). Shoot at the sort of distance you might be behind another car on the highway. US aircraft with (typically) 4 or 6 x 0.50 cal guns typically engaged at longer ranges, as they had more ammo (a couple hundred yards). Bombs were dropped from ridiculously low alt vs shipping. Level bombing was ineffective vs shipping on the move, so it was dive bombers (from hundreds of meters alt), or mast-height attacks, skipping the wavetops.

Carriers would have been a couple hundred nm away from each other (so the enemy would look like ISS does to me when it flies over at best). Surface battles in WW2 were limited, and ranged from full on BB duels where without a crow's nest they've be well over the horizon, to point-blank, and everything in between.

Nothing is necessary because of cinematography. Early B5 battles would show a Narn cruiser fire a spinal-mount weapon into the black, then cut to a Centauri ship in orbit being cut in two (or vice versa). Making it clear what the ranges are is helpful in fleshing out the feel of things.

 

[DDE]

7 hours ago, tater said:

Was she hit by a bomb, or are her boilers from WW1?

That’s about the size of the problem. Archeotech boilers that nobody knows how to fix anymore, and the overhaul got postponed. 

But hey, at least this time, she didn’t need that tug.

4 hours ago, tater said:

Nothing is necessarybecause of cinematography. Early B5 battles would show a Narn cruiser fire a spinal-mount weapon into the black, then cut to a Centauri ship in orbit being cut in two (or vice versa). Making it clear what the ranges are is helpful in fleshing out the feel of things.

B5 and Andromeda are exceptions to the rule. They’re also TV series, so they don’t really compare.

6 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

Okay, now I'm confused. Why am I looking at a pic of the Kuznetsov in the context of WWII?

Because I didn’t mean WWII in the first place. I meant the Cold War, because @Cassel asked for an example of a carrier battle in the age of missiles.

Edited January 23, 2018 by DDE

[GoSlash27]

6 hours ago, DDE said:

Because I didn’t mean WWII in the first place. I meant the Cold War, because @Cassel asked for an example of a carrier battle in the age of missiles.

DDE,
 Ahh, I see.

It's all so confusing! The convo keeps skipping around from WWII to modern naval systems, to hard sci- fi to soft sci- fi...

  A lotta strands in ol' Dooder's head, man...

Best,
-Slashy

[StrandedonEarth]

On 1/22/2018 at 5:13 AM, KSK said:

TL:DR - McGuffin levels of technology are fine but give them consequences, give them weaknesses and let them shape the available military tactics in-universe. 

I had started having a brainstorm that had these characteristics before I read. So I think I'm on the right track, and I think i have a rational that works. One of the principals of SF (as I understand it) is that there's usually one major tech that's not currently theoretically possible that gets handwaved in, as long as it follows self-consistent rules. So I'm going to borrow some basic concepts from Larry Niven's Known Space and a sprinkle from an old SW novel. 

Part 1: Drives.

The major drive innovation will be a gravity planer/polarizer. This will operate on a quanta scale: the first one produced could only produce a maximum thrust of, say, 10kN. Nothing else could be coaxed into stable operation. The next quanta that was stable produced, say, a million times more thrust. The next theorized quanta level would be the size of a not-so-small moon and produce enough thrust to noticeably move a planet, if it could be built. The convenient thing about this drive is that the crew cabin is within the gravity polarizer field and moves along with it, such that squishy crewmembers don't feel the drive accelerate the ship. The inconvenient thing with these drives as that if they get too close, they interfere with each other and malfunction in various ways, such as not working at all or strobing off each other (which also becomes a tactical consideration).  Maybe if they get way too close the results get catastrophic? This prevents them from being clustered on capital ships, so that any gravship must be a single gravdrive ship. Delta-vee would be infinite (propellantless space drive, the Holy Grail of spaceflight) as long as it had (ludicrous amounts of?) power. Note that an attacking ship's kinetic energy can be used against it by putting something solid in its path.

So a space navy built around this drive would be naturally broken into speed acceleration classes as small ships (such as fighters) could accelerate much faster than larger ones.

Part 2: Why Crew?

Oh sure, powerful electronic computers are available. They're not too trustworthy in combat situations, however. EM hacking makes them vulnerable to a range of attacks from hacking and tampering to EMPing and getting cooked, unless carefully and heavily shielded. Electronic ordnance guidance systems rarely make it to a target for those reasons. The only reliable computers are either mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, or otherwise fluidic, and are not capable of being miniaturizable enough for long-range, un-spoofable guidance, never mind autonomous. Nope, the most capable and reliable computer available is the Mk I Human(oid) Brain, just like in WW2.

Part 3: Lasers?

Sure, they would certainly have a place. They also have weaknesses. It should be noted that lasers would be more effective against smaller targets like missile, which have less mass to heat up. Reflective and extreme-temp-resistant armor and other countermeasures mean that lasers, while useful, are not the solution to everything.

On 1/22/2018 at 6:57 AM, GoSlash27 said:

 The reason to use fighters is the same as it was in WWII; they can carry a weapon capable of crippling a capital ship or destroying an escort, can overwhelm the defenses when they attack in numbers with good coordination, and is much safer than having your capital ships and escorts slug it out like ships o' the line at Jutland.

And this is what the fighters are for, of course.

Edited January 23, 2018 by StrandedonEarth

[magnemoe]

On 22.1.2018 at 10:11 PM, DDE said:

I’m talking about the second half, the one where the other side didn’t really even bother with carriers.

Russia is primarily an land power, they are surrounded by land on 3 sides and ice on the forth. US is surrounded by Mexico and Canada
Look at land force power during the cold war for the other side, yes the US won by technology in the end but this was not given in 1970.

On topic, I assume Russia assumes none dare haul in an carrier and fine it for pollution  

[magnemoe]

17 hours ago, DDE said:

That’s about the size of the problem. Archeotech boilers that nobody knows how to fix anymore, and the overhaul got postponed. 

But hey, at least this time, she didn’t need that tug.

B5 and Andromeda are exceptions to the rule. They’re also TV series, so they don’t really compare.

Because I didn’t mean WWII in the first place. I meant the Cold War, because @Cassel asked for an example of a carrier battle in the age of missiles.

TV and movies are not realistic for naval warfare,they require way higher pacing even during WW2 fights, space would be way worse. 
Books are much better as you can keep an slow pace and still make it an thriller, note you will not make an big budget movie

No carrier sinking after WW2 as I know, Falkland war involved lots of missile strikes against an carrier group and sinking of an old cruiser and is probably the top.
Lots of better space warfare storries in books than star wars /trek, Man / Kzin war have a lot and lots involves fighters or single ships. 

[radonek]

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Part 1: Drives.

Beautiful.

 

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Part 2: Why Crew?

I can see a lot of reasons to invest in heavy shielding, biological computing and such. I still fail to see crew in there. You need to address at least two points:

1. ECLSS systems are heavy. Crew quarters are big.
2. Space navigation is complex, human brain is slow.

EMP weapons sure are intriguing, it begs a question - if crew can be protected from harmful EM radiation, why can't computers? It's just different wavelength.

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Part 3: Lasers?

…Reflective and extreme-temp-resistant armor…

Reflective surface assumes you know wavelength at advance. Ablative armor is more likely solution. Thing with lasers is, as visibly exhibited right here, that infinite power and no cooling is assumed. "Because StarWars". If you want to nerf them for your universe, all you need is look up cooling requirements. 

[DDE]

3 hours ago, radonek said:

Reflective surface assumes you know wavelength at advance.

It’s also repurposed bovine waste because reflective armour, any reflective armour, chars to black under high-intensity lasing light, so you’re back to square one.

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Russia is primarily an land power, they are surrounded by land on 3 sides and ice on the forth. US is surrounded by Mexico and Canada

Yes, which makes superficial comparisons ever more asinine.