Military applications for P2P (split from SpaceX)

[YNM]

9 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Let's say the US Gov't decides against helping out someplace that needs it, like say, Puerto Rico after a storm.  Elon can toss them a rocket full of food, water and meds, and he's a hero.

Let's say the US Gov't decides to do something, but someone else won't let us: say, a massive volcano erupts in the middle of N'Djamena but the good people of Nigeria and Cameroon express displeasure at US planes flying overhead... USAF drops a rocket into Chad airspace, from space, lands humanitarian aid and 'donates' the steel & rocket engines.

Have you not seen a place after a storm ? Or earthquake ? Or tsunami ? Or how strong rocket exhaust is ? (and trust me lahar is even worse.)

Last thing we need is for someone to blindly fly a 9 m diameter tank into the middle of a wreck to create an even larger wreck.

Plus disaster relief isn't just about food, water and meds. It's about providing people with support for how to get back to their life. Landing a giant rocket once doesn't help much.

Edited June 7, 2021 by YNM

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, YNM said:

Have you not seen a place after a storm ? Or earthquake ? Or tsunami ? Or how strong rocket exhaust is ?

Last thing we need is for someone to blindly fly a 9 m diameter tank into the middle of a wreck to create an even larger wreck.

Plus disaster relief isn't just about food, water and meds. It's about providing people with support for how to get back to their life. Landing a giant rocket once doesn't help much.

I've actually participated in DR missions.  They are quite complicated - and very easy to 'mess up' because they are inherently political.  Down to the neighborhood level - you help out people in one gang's territory and the neighboring gang is liquided.

Most of the world is tribal. 

PR on the other hand is global - and quite often nations and international conglomerates will do quite useless things to impress their friends and neighbors. Or if not useless - perhaps just not the most efficient. 

Throughout this topic I've pointed out that landing a single rocket or even several a week is of limited military utility - but there are scenarios where it can be further developed and add strategic depth. The tactical benefits are at best minimal and inherently risky. 

We shouldnt minimize the humanitarian possibility and PR power, however.  100 tons of supplies in the right place at the right time is pretty damn good.  Take a look at the USMC '7 Ton'   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Tactical_Vehicle_Replacement

14 truckloads of aid can help isolated communities quite well.  As has been pointed out - the US maintains a lot of stuff around the world, but it is impossible to anticipate every need.   There are lots of places where you might be able to clear out a parkinglot but not have a good 'zone' to use as an LZ or drop-zone for fly-by supplies, much less an airfield.  Yes - a helicopter (or fleet of them) can drop supplies into that parkinglot - but what if you discover that what you really need to help out 'Island Nation X' is a critical 30-ton part for their power station that will get their water and sewage back on line.  Traditional shipping might take a week to a month to get the part where it is needed - the dropship could do it in days.  (Caveat: you could also do the C-5, helicopter, ship, helicopter shuffle - which is in our current capabilities... but you lose the 'wow'.)

So in both the military and humanitarian applications a fast P2P capability merely enhances, not replaces, our current structure 

Edited June 7, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[DDE]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We shouldnt minimize the humanitarian possibility and PR power, however.  100 tons of supplies in the right place at the right time is pretty damn good.

15 Il-76s last year offer a good case study.

https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN21D28K

Imagine the media noise level on disaster relief Thunderbirds.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, DDE said:

15 Il-76s last year offer a good case study.

https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN21D28K

Imagine the media noise level on disaster relief Thunderbirds.

That was a masterful play by Putin.  He even sent a plane to the US.

[YNM]

18 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We shouldn't minimize the humanitarian possibility and PR power, however.

For one I don't think people would accept a giant rocket coming in and out day and night even with the clearances international airports have. Here we build stuff up to the airport fence so it's really only 300 m from a private dwelling / community facility max in most cases. The sound and vibration would probably be something people don't accept when it's the last thing they want to have (like in the case of earthquakes, esp. if they continue for months). And no I question you can land on flooded grounds like in the case of tsunami or tropical cyclones, or in places where there are a lot of water anyway (welcome to East and SE Asia where we plant our sustenance crops in mini-swamps all over the place).

18 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

They are quite complicated - and very easy to 'mess up' because they are inherently political.

I will admit that this is true. Back when we had the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami there were basically a huge amount of tension in the area beforehand due to separatist movement, and it could be said in a way that the disaster made for breaking of this tension; but something people have also pointed out, albeit I'm sure there's not a lot of it overall, are humanitarian cases where they themselves have some amount of motivation either politically or religiously. Will say that since I can't find any sources of it (nor am I going to do it now) it's probably not as bad as what people have been telling me in the past and more recently.

That being said it's why partly they've been holding off foreign aid a bit longer when the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami happened. While the area worst affected itself isn't having any terrible problems beforehand, nearby are areas that are politically and socially "hot".

Also there are weird cases like some volcano eruption - esp. in 2010 Merapi eruption where some of the populace just wouldn't heed the gov't warnings until the person the public trusted died in a pyroclastic flow himself.

18 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

what if you discover that what you really need to help out 'Island Nation X' is a critical 30-ton part for their power station that will get their water and sewage back on line.  Traditional shipping might take a week to a month to get the part where it is needed - the dropship could do it in days.  (Caveat: you could also do the C-5, helicopter, ship, helicopter shuffle - which is in our current capabilities... but you lose the 'wow'.)

Usually there are emergency power generation ship that you can send instead... back in 2016 we had this contracted, and they helped through various disasters in the years after.

Edited June 8, 2021 by YNM

[StrandedonEarth]

Well let’s see… If no runway is available, then the existing options are paratroopers or chopper. The max a chopper can lift is 22 tons. 

So for disaster relief, nothing could beat the combined payload and speed potential of Starship; 100 tons of supplies is only an hour away from anywhere. It could be made to land almost anywhere with minimal prep (fly enough and clear of flammables)

Dreaming portion: Payload section with a fold-out PV power plant, or supplies. Tank section built to split and extend out for conversion into Quonset-hut style shelters

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

@YNM - I remember reading an 'after action' or seeing an expose about what happened after Western-style aid assisted with DR in some island nation in the Indian Ocean.  

Basically, the story goes, prior to the disaster the locals lived a very traditional life with society largely adapted to being self sufficient even if not enjoying the 'things' of the wider developed world.  Once outsiders came in to help the locals survive the disaster, all the kids quit doing the tedious work necessary to keep their traditional economy and society functioning - instead preferring to listen to radios, have phones and work for cash.  Instead of helping the locals to rebuild with the stuff they were used to and could maintain on their own, trailers and containers were used to house the displaced and ramshackle 'temporary' buildings built with imported, flown in stuff (that cannot be readily acquired).  Years later, people are still living in the 'temporary' buildings which are rotting and unable to be maintained.  Kids refuse to do the work necessary to keep the families fed - and those who can find work are either leaving or keeping stuff for themselves.

IIRC - there is some road that is paved with good intentions.

Change is not only hard, it is disruptive.

There's a whole host of articles about whether it is better to let indigenous people in places like the Amazon continue to live traditionally (effectively stone-age tech), even if that means they only have an average life expectancy of about 40 years, or if its better to move them into the slums (because they don't have the skills to do any of the 'technical' jobs of modern-day Brazil and live anywhere else) - where they can enjoy a 60 year average lifespan thanks to modern medicine and the welfare of others. 

 

On a similar note: if interested, look for critiques of the American experiment in Afghanistan post-9/11... not focused on the military adventure, but rather look for articles on how ineffective 'stability' work was.  Example: the Taliban arose from a widespread dislike of the incessant warfare between tribes (warlords), and was an attempt to foster 'peace' throughout the land (Pax Romana style: if you liquid us off, you die... follow the rules and behave... you live).  Despite the problems with their extremist religious law and how they allowed Al-Qaeda to operate there, once the US came in and started throwing money around (very clumsily, I might add) - the warlord problem came screaming back into existence.  The US would throw $30k at a problem that might have been solved by $1300 and a road.  The guy and his family who got the $30k got rich and powerful, and found ways to keep the Americans happy and the money flowing.  His family and friends thrived, and were positioned well to point at their old enemies and say 'bad guys live there.'  There was never any effective development of an economic base that could survive the absence of US interest - and interest, I might add, that was not altruistic and development focused - but rather... well you know.

Those of us in the Military study this stuff - but it's largely out of our hands.  Civilians want fast.  Effective and transformative is rarely fast.  And once you create a monster problem you often spend the next few years trying to mitigate the problem you created - presuming you recognize the problem and have the political will to resolve it.

Which - very very few people have the political will to solve their own problems, much less those of another who lives far, far away.

Edited June 7, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[DDE]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

That was a masterful play by Putin.  He even sent a plane to the US.

He neglected to include power adapters for the ventilators. And a suspicious hospital fire cast doubt on the reliability of this particular type. But this was all beside the point, since the ventilators were made by the sanctioned KRET and all this was a silly flex.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 minutes ago, DDE said:

all this was a silly flex.

Yep - and sometimes that matters

[YNM]

15 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

So for disaster relief, nothing could beat the combined payload and speed potential of Starship; 100 tons of supplies is only an hour away from anywhere. It could be made to land almost anywhere with minimal prep (fly enough and clear of flammables)

You try standing next to a landing Starship 300 m away, few times a day, when you know your family members or friends might've died due to the ground shaking, and you don't have a house to live in (or it's not safe to be in your house anymore).

15 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Civilians want fast.  Effective and transformative is rarely fast.  And once you create a monster problem you often spend the next few years trying to mitigate the problem you created - presuming you recognize the problem and have the political will to resolve it.

Yeah. Even developed countries struggle, in a way, to adapt to these things. There's a good reason they keep the 3.11 death toll open.

Although the other option is to be completely submissive, and it's honestly not great either.

Edited June 8, 2021 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, DDE said:

power adapters for the ventilators.

A reason for the Americans to have a think about proper standards.
Nothing can be just set into their outlets.

12 hours ago, YNM said:

in the case of earthquakes

The landing rocket will blow away all what hadn't fallen on earthquake and break the rest of the glasses.

On the other hand, it prepares a construction site for further rebuilding.

***

Btw, had any Falcon ever landed on a non-prepared ground? On a swamp? On sand?

Edited June 8, 2021 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

The landing rocket will blow away all what hadn't fallen on earthquake and break the rest of the glasses.

On the other hand, it prepares a construction site for further rebuilding.

And what, burn the victims trapped inside along with it ?

I mean mass graves aren't any much better but at least you know where the bodies are and where there aren't bodies. There's a reason the Palu earthquake in 2018 was really the worst one since it involves liquefaction of two villages, where victim's bodies are just trapped inside the soil forever. They're never going to rebuild the villages since a) you don't know where everything was, b) you don't want to build on places where it's possible to happen again (and this goes for the wider city as well, which is why there are talks to completely relocate the city), and c) wouldn't be great to know you're building on top of mass graves of unidentified victims.

[Codraroll]

One point I haven't seen discussed much in this thread is the fact that Starship (or similar derivatives) has two (largely overlapping) capabilities that can be useful. The first one is the immediate one: It can soft-land. Possible uses for this capability has been discussed at length already.

However, I don't think its uses would necessarily require landing. The second capability of Starship is that of surviving atmospheric re-entry and slowing down to terminal velocity at a very precise location. An expendable Starship, one designed to manage the re-entry part but not necessarily soft land, could be used to jettison large amounts of cargo over any point on Earth at a very short notice. Such an expendable Starship could even be a lot cheaper than one intended for re-use, as the bit about re-lighting engines or folding out landing legs or suchlike could just be skipped entirely.

Earlier in the thread I mentioned mine-laying as a potential use for this capacity. The Starship could scatter a truly enormous amount of ordnance over a limited area before smashing belly-first into the terrain. But there could be other uses too.  Spreading a million battery-powered signal jammers over enemy territory (have fun trekking through the bush trying to track down every single one so your communications equipment can start working again), or enough propaganda leaflets to wallpaper a city, or maybe other types of cargo jettisoned with little parachutes. 

I'd be an expensive way to transport stuff, and it would be far less precise than flying stuff in with a cargo plane, but it would be able to put stuff on the ground, more or less intact, anywhere, at extremely short notice. It wouldn't even require a landing site, just somewhere a Starship can be crashed somewhat safely. If you have some control of the airspace, and the time to wait a bit, flying in a conventional cargo aircraft would probably be a better option, but if you can't wait or can't fly, a Starship dropping out of the sky with the goods could be a viable emergency option.

[DDE]

16 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

Earlier in the thread I mentioned mine-laying as a potential use for this capacity. The Starship could scatter a truly enormous amount of ordnance over a limited area before smashing belly-first into the terrain. But there could be other uses too.  Spreading a million battery-powered signal jammers over enemy territory (have fun trekking through the bush trying to track down every single one so your communications equipment can start working again), or enough propaganda leaflets to wallpaper a city, or maybe other types of cargo jettisoned with little parachutes. 

I'd be an expensive way to transport stuff, and it would be far less precise than flying stuff in with a cargo plane, but it would be able to put stuff on the ground, more or less intact, anywhere, at extremely short notice. It wouldn't even require a landing site, just somewhere a Starship can be crashed somewhat safely. If you have some control of the airspace, and the time to wait a bit, flying in a conventional cargo aircraft would probably be a better option, but if you can't wait or can't fly, a Starship dropping out of the sky with the goods could be a viable emergency option.

You forget one more option: the stuff above can be done with artillery (as well as aircraft, so two options).

Spoiler

I mean, smaller artillery than a Starship lobber.

Edited June 8, 2021 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

If blow it with hydrogen, it will be a (sub)orbital zeppelin with turrets.

[YNM]

1 hour ago, Codraroll said:

Such an expendable Starship could even be a lot cheaper than one intended for re-use, as the bit about re-lighting engines or folding out landing legs or suchlike could just be skipped entirely.

Problem is that at this point we are just basically using Starship as an ICBM but to be fair we're talking military uses.

[Codraroll]

3 minutes ago, YNM said:

Problem is that at this point we are just basically using Starship as an ICBM but to be fair we're talking military uses.

More or less, yeah. But it'd be a very, very big ICBM.

[kerbiloid]

Quote

200 to 400 feet

 

The exact size of the iceberg will probably never be known but, according to early newspaper reports the height and length of the iceberg was approximated at 50 to 100 feet high and 200 to 400 feet long.

 

How Large Was the Iceberg that Sank the Titanic? - NAVCEN

They could land Starship on the iceberg and save the Titanic passengers.

At least, give them inflatable lifeboats.

P.S.
A minute ago I thought, it's Titanic has rammed into the iceberg. Now I know that vice versa.

Edited June 8, 2021 by kerbiloid