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Automating Future Aircraft Carriers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Britain and France will jointly build three new huge aircraft carriers which will be delivered between 2012 and 2014. With their 60,000 tonnes, these 275-meter-long carriers will be the largest warships outside of the U.S. Navy. They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use. StrategyPage tells us that these ships will need at most a crew of 800 sailors instead of 2,000 for ships of that size today. At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works."
Aircraft carriers are obselete.
The US Navy's main project right now is the DD(X) destroyer. It uses advanced automation (damage control, weapon countermeasures), stealth, advanced radar, reduced crew, full control/integration with the rest of the fleet. The best toy: Its capability for rapid-fire, pinpoint 155mm shell attacks from up to 100 miles away may sometimes eliminate the need for aircraft carriers entirely, resulting in an operational cost probably an order of magnitude or two cheaper than a carrier, and with very little chance of any casualties. Of course many of those same capabilities are also going to soon be added to cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc.
It doesn't sound as impressive as a new aircraft carrier, but for most scenarios it's going to have amazing results. It's meant to be the first ship to arrive, and carriers will only be used for prolonged engagements.
Of course, sometimes you want more boots on the ground. Perhaps the "excess" will be put in the army?
Hmm, suprising, guess the UK still hasnt figured out its completely screwed energy wise........their lifecycle timespan is so far out of whack with projected energy availabilty they must be smoking dope. Seems pretty silly to plan on having that kind of mobile airpower around if you dont have the fuel to use it !! Heck, global warming might make it a better idea to use the carriers as islands for housing people LOL.
So, is there any chance at all that the Aircaft Carriers will actually stay in use for the entire 50 years? Won't be replaced by anything newer or better?
I would guess they would be.
The real problem with this mentality is that these are warships. Smaller crews are vastly less efficent at damage control and have much smaller margins for casualties before the ship ceases to be combat effective. Automation is all well and good but ships that size NEED vast crews simple due to the unpredictable nature of sea service. Imagine if you have a gastro outbreak onboard and 400 of your crew are down. Larger crews can absorb unexpected events much more easily than smaller ones. Plus most of these studies tend to ignore hte fact that less crew means more and longer watches for the duty stations that remain. The US is moving to this right now with the new San Antonio LPDs and DDX program but they are facing the same choices. Reality wise we'll probably see much more automation and relyability but I have serious doubts if anyone will field a warship of this size without a crew of at least 1/2 the normal rate.
Roland's rent is due
Not sure what I think of this... On the one hand, if it's possible to save loadsamanny by automating non-critical jobs, then fair-enough, sounds cool. And the brits have something of a history in designing warships - presumably they'll not have forgotten too many of the important bits ...
:( ] is being adaptible. It'd be a real shame if the plug fell out of the automated aircraft-landing computer because of a nearby explosion ... Yes, I'm being facetious, but the point isn't. Machines can only perform within their limitations, and people frequently perform outside their normal potential when (a) their life depends on it, and (b) there's no other option...
On the other hand, during a conflict, a carrier is a pretty juicy target, and one thing humans *are* good at in combat [apart from dying
So, as long as we don't go to war, it'll probably be excellent. If we do, I hope they've thought of the consequences...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
If they run Vista for controls, I wouldn't even be worried about any security issues,
I would be worried if they ever make it out of the dry dock.
You can't handle the truth.
Would you like help?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
60,000 tonnes
Damn straight. And they'll be built using American weight too, not that Roland frou-frou "tonne" crap.
If a sailor averages $100k in upkeep a year, then sailor costs per year were $10 billion per 50 years. It costs $4 billion to build a boat, so figure it was $14 billion over fifty years.
This boat only costs $8 billion over fifty years.
Seems to me that the answer isn't "figure out how to do damage control with 40% of a regular crew complement." Seems to me the answer is "You were gonna send three of these things to blow up the bad guy good; send five instead, it's still cheaper."
-JDF
One can hope that their automated systems are every bit as successful as Denver International Airport's big automation effort. Except instead of conveyor belts moving baggage it'll be nuclear powered, managing missiles and explosives.
Seriously, how much experience does France and England have with aircraft carriers of this size? None whatsoever from what I can tell. I'm deeply skeptical that they're going to magically find the means to reduce the personnel requirement by over 50%, least of all by making use of utterly untested technology. And on a warship no less! In a time of war I'd greatly prefer somewhat redundant personnel on board, rather than a ship being run by technology which has not been battle-tested.
I don't like this trend at all.
The more money we have to pay and the more lives we have to put at stake in order to go to war, the less likely it is that we actually do go to war.
The only way that war becomes "fair" is if both sides incur the same 'cost' of the war (monetary, soldier deaths, civilian deaths, etc.). If 33,773 American soldiers or civillians died because of our involvement there, we'd be pulling our troops out as fast as we possibly could.
With this, we're spending less money and putting fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally higher number of foreign militants. At what point does war become a targeted genocide? We're putting our enemies in a position where their only method of directing their anger twoard us is by targeting civillians in suicide attacks. This scares the hell out of me.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This gives them the ability to project power. Which is something England and France cannot currently do.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
What computer lasts 50 years? Steel plate, sure, but silicon and plastic?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The planes provide excellent protection. They even do a fair job against subs if you count devices dragged below helicopters, though a few subs of your own would be nice.
You certainly don't need a battleship anymore. Sea-skimming missles, torpedos, and automatically operated defense guns have changed things over the years. This isn't 1945.
Team these up with a fleet of laser equipped sharks and poison dart dolphins, and... look out bad guys. Just better hope they don't all become 'self aware'...
Alright, so the way I see it, the news here is that they're building these carriers. Good for them. I don't particularly care, but I understand that others here do. My complaint, rather, comment, is that the focus is on the money. The summary claims that the governments will save $6 billion by building these, but neglect that they could save $8 billion in building costs + billions more in employment costs.
So shouldn't the news be that the carriers are being built, not about how much the UK and French governments are "saving"?
One Electro-Magnetic Pulse will wipe out all their
Off-The-Shelf network equipment making the grand armada worthless.
The sea is a place it's expensive to send sailors. After all, we have to house, feed, and entertain them when they're off duty. Building more housing for sailors increases size, which increases fuel use, and decreases operational range.
Substitute astronaut for sailor in that. Automation will be critical to space flight, for all the reasons it's useful here. Fewer astronauts means fewer people to send to Mars for 3 years, or at least it'll allow those people to get more done. This will make spaceflight cheaper, and it'll increase range, because it's easier to supply ten people for 3 years than it is to supply 15. Less food, less fuel, less money.
Computer, fire two missles
hacked by chinese, you 1s 0wn3d
Oh Shit!
Table-ized A.I.
Yes. Because the French are perfectly capable of building an effective nuclear powered aircraft carrier. With a long enough flight deck and everything.
</sarcasm>
Absit Invidia
In the Falkands war, HMS Sheffield had 22 dead and 24 severely wounded out of a crew of 312.
...the article paints the picture this is something that happened today, but it's not - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4780630.stm
In fact, the carriers are already being built - all that's been signed is a formal agreement, with France giving Britain payment for prior research and development. They've actually been under construction since December!
After hundreds of years of compertition the Brits and the French are working together in improving their Navies? Talk about setting your pride aside for the sake of strength. The French must really be getting sick of being second rate naval powers. This must be part of the Projet de loi de programmation militaire 2003-2008
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
Russians, for one, have missiles that fly just above water and only go up when they're close and it's time to attack. They're impossible to intercept because radars can't see them due to reflections from water. Launch a few of these and this $4B toy will sink like a fucking rock. US, no doubt, has similar tech. Russians also have supercavitation torpedoes which no one can intercept because of their speed. This is not even taking submarines into account. A sub can stay close to the sea floor with motors turned off. Once this thing goes above it, it will just launch half a dozen torpedoes and move on.
Carriers are only useful against countries that don't have (or can't buy) such rockets / torpedoes / subs and don't have decent airforce or submarines. Those countries can be "shocked and awed" without aircraft carriers, though.
is because the "missing" half of the crew will actually be outsourced to India.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
This'd be their eleventh carrier. Their current carrier took part in UN missions in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, as well as missions in Kashmir in 2002.
If I'm remembering correctly, they also used a carrier in the First Gulf War.
Hey! The Charles de Gaulle was very effective... at irradiating the crew...
It's kind of odd that the French leave the US in the dust with respect to civillian reactors, but everything they've learned seems to go out the window when they try to fit one in a ship's hull.
Perhaps France will soon see war as a way to divert attention from all the troubles at home.
Cool, just like the United States. It is, afterall, a time-tested strategy...just make sure you win.
With that kind of employee cost, shouldn't they look at outsourcing?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Building a warship does NOT represent savings.
Special french software onboard, to facilitate the automation:
incObject = radar.reflection.recognize();
if(incObject.type == "enemy")
surrender();
Another problem...
with the French involved, it will automatically revert to a "surrender" mode when conflict arises.
I think you've got a little willy.
Who exactly is this aimed at?
There are no major nation states left that could maintain a sustained war a la WWI or WWII any more. Every European state lacks the trained cadre of military personel to field a major army. Any every small nation is so outclassed by even 20 year old US/NATO equipment that spending billions on "next generation" systems makes no economic or military sense. Russia lacks economic power to play, and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Example, the US Abrams tank is 2-3x better than any other tank it will meet except perhaps the British Challenger tanks. The US could build a tank for a fraction of the cost that would still outclass anything it will face.
The sheer military and technological superiority of even decades old weaponry is why most of the world has shifted to guerrilla or terrorist political tactics.
The french already have a full sized aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle. As to what they will do with it, I presume the same thing America does with her carriers: project their power overseas. Many make the argument that America should encourage Europe to develop a more powerful military to reduce the strain on their taxpayers to "patrol the world".
"is that those English pigs don't want them to be nuclear powered, so they'll have to use diesel,"
Not that I see anything in TFA on what kind of power plant these ships will use, but assuming your "not nuclear" statement is right, unless the Royal Navy continues with their "all VSTOL" policy, it's rather silly to power an aircraft carrier with diesel. Instead, they'll probably use a steam plant to both move the ship and prime the catapults (kinda like the USS Kitty Hawk). And steam plants really don't care what you toss into the boiler; usually they burn whatever byproducts the oil refineries can't convince anybody else to buy.
Not even the hinges on the doors last fifty years. An aircraft carrier is a serious exercise in maintenance.
There are parts that are replaced almost as often as they're used. There's a hook on the bottom of the jets which catches a cable stretched across the deck. That's how the jets land on such a short runway. The hook is replaced something like every five landings.
Aircraft carrier personnel are far more used to maintenance schedules than anybody you'll meet... well, anywhere. Computers are far from the most finicky items they have to deal with.
I was only guessing about diesel, this seems to imply it's going to be gas turbines.
Hopefully these new aircraft carriers won't suffer the same fate as the Enterprise in Star Trek 3. An undermanned aircraft carrier is no match for a Klingon battlecruiser. And they better not skimp on the self-destruct mechanism either.
When they modernized USS Missouri in the mid-80s they cut the crew complement roughly in half. It didn't mean longer watches; it meant fewer duty stations. The new automation systems on board (and fewer small guns to man) meant that it didn't take as many crewmembers to perform the same tasks any more.
New engineering technology, for example, can cut the number of men it takes to operate an engine room from 25-30 down to 5-10. And more of those jobs are monitoring systems jobs, as opposed to manual labor, which reduces fatigue and reduces the chance of injury.
It works fine if it's properly designed and managed.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
From the article:
"An aircraft carrier must fight, and find the enemy, and do a lot of other stuff."
Brilliant writing there. Very eloquent. No, really, I mean it, and other stuff.
Simply outsource the grew work. It is MUCH cheaper!!
$6 billion is pretty good savings, but if they were to skip building the ships entirely, they would save another $12 billion on top of that, for a total of $18 billion saved. I'm sure people can think of lots of uses for $18 billion that are more valuable than deploying aircraft carriers...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There goes my karma :( :))
I only meant "English pigs" as a joke, it's sort of traditional for the French to call the English that way since the 100 year war (I apologize to the English who might have been offended, I don't want to be mean to the people who brought monty python
This doesn't make the point about the absence of nuclear power any less valid though.
They can travel hundreds of miles before striking a ship, way beyond any ship's detection range, similar to cruise missiles. That's the whole point of having them - to not have to send expensive ships that can be easily destroyed by aircraft or cannons or missiles.
Now obviously the sailor's pay isn't the only form of compensation they are counting when saying how much a sailor costs. They have to factor in insurances (health and life) plus possible GI Bill and then the physical realities of housing (or whatever that's called on a ship), food, clothes, and the like. But still, if most of the grunts on the ship are making $30K or less, that's on awful lot of food to make up the extra $70K a year!
Maybe the UK and France just pay their soldiers a lot better...
I cost my employer close to £100K a year, yet my salary is less than a third of that. Most of the extra costs go on training, accomodation costs (services, heating, etc), employment taxes, pensions, and providing me with the IT I need to do my job.
I imagine that most jobs are the same. Pretty much every job has overheads...
It isnt running NT4!
No, they won't. Here's what will happen:
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works.
I really cannot see where they get this figure from, being a ex USN guy. I served back in the late 70's to early 80's and the pay was around 17k if I remember right. I was offered a 16k reinlistment bonus, but still.?
As far as the automation's concered, I can't see why this is such a great thing. Others have mentioned damage control, and thats a serious issue on a ship.. since fire, flood and such are a daily possiblity. Also, standing watch and checking systems is just a damn given. Then, the PMS (Planned Maintence System) is there for a reason. Gezzz.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
So buy a new aircraft carrier for $4 billion or two B2 bombers for $4.4. Now that's a dilemma
It's rather odd to cooperate on such a thing. Think of all the places where bugs (spy equipment) could be planted.
I suppose that each side figures that they will do the best job of bugging a ship. Probably the Brits get US or Israeli help at that, and the French get Russian or maybe German help.
This is nuts. Come on people, build your own aircraft carriers.
Food/clothing/laundry/environment (heating cooling, clean water) while on the submarine/carrier ? Transportation to and from ? Even you as a civilian (presumably) cost your employer far more than your base pay, not only in training and other costs, office space etc but just in matched payroll taxes, and other costs most people dont numerically factor into their pay (e.g. healtcare). These costs for the military where they are responsible for taking care of basic necessities like food and clothing while performing your job are going to be that much higher.
It works fine if it's properly designed and managed.
True, but that's the tricky part. The automated systems would need to be very redundant and resistant to battle damage. I'd hate to see the crew cut down purely for cost savings, and then find out later that the design was poor (see the sinking of the HMS Sheffield). Sometimes the extra crew, even if just used for ballast normally, could come in very handy if the warship took damage in combat just as an extra margin of safety.What you say is silly - more money and lives = less likely for war.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
If people really want a fair war, they should implement my proposal:
Before any country can launch an _offensive_ war (not defensive) there must be a referendum.
If the result is less than x% (75%?) of the total possible voters, then the leaders/politicians involved in the war proposal get put on death row (and there's no offensive war launched).
Then a subsequent referendum is then held to redeem each of those politicians. If the politicians/leaders aren't redeemed, they will eventually be executed.
If it turned out that an offensive war was justified after all, the executed politicians get a posthumous award and their families get an extra pension benefit.
If it turns out that the leaders misrepresented stuff and there was a war, the leaders get put on death row.
This way, even sociopathic leaders who might lie about being reluctant to send young men to sacrifice their lives, might actually be reluctant to wage war without good reason.
Now, if indeed 75% of Country A decide that they want to attack Country B, then you have the following effects:
1) Country A soldiers know that their leaders are willing to lay down their own lives for the war.
2) Country A soldiers know that their countrymen are mostly in favour of war.
3) Country B soldiers should feel better about trying to wipe out Country A in defense (instead of the usual killing people you really have nothing against and you suspect they have nothing against you actually and they just got misled by their leaders). Even if it means nukes or WMDs or whatever it takes.
4) Country A should be well aware of 3) when it comes down to voting.
Now isn't that fair?
In the old days kings would lead their men out to battle and risk their own lives, and their men would have it no other way.
Nowadays that won't be practical nor even applicable. But my proposal will help leaders do the same thing at least in principle.
Islamic Republic of France declared, falls. French half of crew pulled off for home security duty during attempts to supress the gorwing Islamic rebellion.
Uh huh. At what point do the aliens invade, again?
Well first of all, this is the French - not US.
Second, it costs money to feed, clothe the sailors. It costs money to house them. To build a carrier that can hold 2000 workers costs money compared to one that holds 800 people. A carrier is a floating city. They have shops, gyms, housing, food areas, and so on. All that costs money.
Look who posted this. Sigh. He's just trying to drive traffic to his blog again.
Picard: We've never needed a crew before.
Jokes are supposed to be funny.
Perhaps France will soon see war as a way to divert attention from all the troubles at home.
It's well known that France wants to be a real superpower (again), and if this means adopting the measures used by the only superpower left - so be it.
You were talking about the US, non?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
What they really ought to do is cover these suckers with radio transmission blocking material and fill these suckers with robots, then you really would need to put few real human lives at risk and so the robots could not be hacked. I guess we need to develope the technology first, but seriously, then people will stop complaing about our soldiers dying, but they would complain about the costs of developing and implimenting the technology and they would also complain about how much we are relying on technology. War has cost - biological, psychological, political, cultural, and economic. Take your pick.
Have you read this bit of news? I get this vision of a poodle bearing it's teeth. Not a pretty sight!
The French are mostly passifists. But when you fuck when them, they snap!
Life is not for the lazy.
Who clears this crap. Military begets military. If money mean effort, $6B is alot of kids taught to love to learn.
The problem is, most software out there is hopelessly bug-ridden. Even the military stuff. I know - I helped debug some of it. Until there are enough highly competent programmers that "zero defect" can have a literal meaning, computer-controlled warships are going to be a fiasco.
(Those with LOOONG memories, old copies of Practical Computing from the 1980s, and a fondness of sci-fi might come up with another reason it's a bad idea. There were several military scenarios in the short story section, over the years, that would definitely be valid today.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It can be argued that the usage of those bomb was more precisely to show the capability to the soviet, which were already "in sight". Japan was already on its way to surrender. And NO, the majority of the civilian were not in position to fight bush after bush on their own soil, on the contrary of the rethoric heard often. Heck a conventional bombing a-la-Dresden on military installation would have been better and showed the japan it can only surrender.
What was choosen instead, and this is a remarkable new tactic that all protagonist used during the whole war, was targeting civilian , which culminated with the A bomb. Depictable.
Some more detailed information about the project can be found here: the British part (aka CVF) and the French part (aka PA2).
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Full size? The USS Ronald Reagan is 2 1/2 times the size with double the number of aircraft. Just doesn't seem to make sense to call the Charles De Gaulle full size when pretty much every US carrier is double the size.
The Hundred-Years War reference gets me thinking: If France and England go to war against each other again, who gets the carriers?
The links in Roland's slashdot posts are not anymore to his own blog, but directly to the original article. And he has a special tag. Really, no one is plugging anything here, what do you want more? You can just skip it if you don't want to read it.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is what air cover is all about. As you might imagine, detecting and neutralizing (a/k/a "blowing to bits") any platforms capable of launching such an attack is the first priority of the air wing based on a carrier. They're generally quite good at it, too. This is why you don't want to get within a dozen miles of a carrier group without being very sure you have the commander's permission.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So Battlestar Galactica hasn't aired in England or France yet?
;-)
Figured that would have put them off all that automation stuff?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Navy_CVF_progra mme
c urement
f t_carrier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_defence_pro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_French_aircra
When you reduce the number of people onboard all is fine until there is a havaria happens (torpedo hit, reef, hull crack, etc.) Then you will not be able to cope with the damage control and drainage tasks due to lack of manpower and the vessel goes down with all hands aboard. E.g. check the case of the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier "Shinano", which was the same size as the twin mega-battleships Yamato and Musashi. It was hit by a mere four torpedos fired from a US submarine and sank on its virgin journey, because it had less than half of the full compliment of sailors. In turn, the combat-ready, fully manned Yamato and Musashi needed upwards of a dozen torpedos and heavy bomb hits each to sink.
The desire to have much less people on an aircraft carrier is probably political, e.g. the Nimits class is now 6000+ guys in a tincan. If that is sunk it is TWO 9/11 happening at once. Aircraft carriers are big easy targets, although I doubt anyone would dare to sink a nuclear powered on considering waters would become too radioactive to fish for decades and in most seaside countries much of the population would starve without seafood.
The pre-WWI german navy fleetbook specified that the service life of warships should be 20 years. The british post-Jutland battleships had to serve 30-32 years until scrapyard and were very worn by the end. I doubt modern equipment lasts longer, although I heard some US warships are now made of stainless steel to reduce maintenance reqs. Uncle Sam has too much money on hand.
No one seems to have explained why the Brits are commissioning these new carriers, so I suppose I'll have to.
Back in the 60s/70s, there was a theory that with expected missile developments, big warships would just be easy targets. And if you lost a big ship, you lost a major part of your fighting force.
The Falklands is instructive here. Taking the Belgrano out stopped the Argentine Navy at a stroke - if they had taken out the Canberra, Hermes or Invincible the Brits would probably have had to go home.
The answer would be a new generation of small carriers, cheap enough to build lots, so the loss of one would not be a major disaster. The idea had a lot going for it. Lots of ships meant that it was easier to maintain the world-wide navy role, and always have a ship near the scene of any trouble spot. You could make use of the S/VTOL Harrier. The Royal Navy loved the idea of overtaking the US Navy in this important category, and it meant more ship captain's jobs.
Both the US and the UK navy considered the idea. The US dropped it, and the UK went for it. Then the beancounters moved in.
Instead of a large fleet of small ships, the RN got a small fleet of small ships. This produced the worst of all possible worlds, a few, vulnerable ships. The RN have been suffering like this for the last 20 years, and have only recently been able to revert to getting the big ships back. Funnily enough, the US now seem to have a renewed interest in the 'lots of small ones' idea. perhaps it's time has come?
The chances that dirty bombs and snipers will come to a nieghbour hood near you is large. Not to sure the big ship is going be much help.
"Never say Never."
We didn't put the Germans in concentration camps.
Just some American citizens that happened to have surnames with lots of K and SH and W sounds.
Of course there is a difference between "internment camps" and "extermination camps".
On the last NATO manouvres on the north atlantic (in the 80s), the first ships simulated sunk (on the first day, too) were the aircraft cariers. Sunk by diesel subs, I might add.
Sure, times have changed. These days, aircraft carriers are used to, um, protect themselves. The aircraft are very rarely used for actual missions (bombers and the like are flown in from Far Away). An AC is an easy ship to sink - it's an enormous and slow target, and modern bombs and missiles are ore than accurate enough to quickly and cheaply dispose of these $xx billion toys.
Besides - what's this about SAVING taxpayers money? You save it by building three aircraft carriers? Are you nuts? Are you expecting another major war?
There are two sides to this: if you get involved in a major, serious war (not the idiotic one-sided bombings the USA has been up to in order to increase some company profits), the carriers will be sunk reasonably soon.
If there is no major war (well, I do have some hopes left), they'll be an enormous cost (*much* higher than expected), and then they'll be scrapped.
Bah.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I helped design that low-flying shit which you know nothing about, luckily. You'd be scared to step onto a military ship if you knew as much as I do. Read up on Yakhont anti-ship missiles which is an earlier version of these missiles. 300KM range, fire and forget, pseudo-random maneuvers in flight, imprevious to jamming, flies at 2.3Mach. Can be launched from the ground, from the sub or from whenever else you want. It fully expects that you'll be able to detect its launch. It flies at 15KM altitude early in its flight cycle, but goes down to 5 meters above water when approaching the target. "Approaching the target" means target is within reach of its radar, at 75KM. Best of all, this stuff can be launched by dozens at a time. It can also be adjusted so that if one rocket hits a ship and there are other ships nearby, AI in other rockets will direct the remaining rockets from the launch group to hit other ships. Or they can be all directed to attack the largest ship (say, an aircraft carrier).
You won't be able to shoot it down. It's kind of like Satan ICBM, where warheads fly fast, maneuver in flight, and come in by dozens at a time.
Why does france need an aircraft carrier?
All they need is something that can run away real fast.
This makes automation systemes simple:
The radar detects somethin -> Turn boat around -> Raise white flag(almost forgot that 1)->run like hell
tazz
It was John McCain's (yes, the Senator) aircraft fuel tank that exploded. Someone else's missile hit it though.
>> 50-75 mile effective range when flying low-profile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-19
This baby is supersonic, can be launched in "flocks" of 20 with one missile flying high and conducting reconnaissance and others flying low. If the high flying one gets hit, another one takes its place. It has AI, it maneuvers in flight, it can carry 500KG regular or 620KT nuclear warhead. And believe me, even 200 of these don't cost as much as one fully loaded aircraft carrier. And it has attack range of 360 miles.
OK but for $2M you can get 200 tons of solidly engineered crane equipment on 12 wheels like a Demec AC200. Multiply by 300 to get 60,000 tons, this leaves $3.4 billion unaccounted/carrier.
They use a M$ OS then they are screwed when the whole system dies in the middle of battle or get hacked by some script kiddie in China that makes all monitors in the ship suddenly repeat "I R China U buY?"
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
Aircraft carriers are obselete.
In a major fleet engagement against a worthy adversary (Which the US and NATO hans't had since the demize of the USSR) yes, one suspects the US super carriers of today are excessively vulnerable and losing even one of them would certainly be extremenly painful experience for the Americans both in terms of money and expecially prestiege and civillan morale/political support on the home front. They are, however, valuable when it comes to projecting strategic air power agianst third world dictatorships and regional powers such as Iran that cannot or have, at most, only a limited chance of penetrating the protective screen of a super carrier and seriously threatenting it. Basically super carriers are still useful for quiclkly making air support available for conflicts such as the US led wars in Iraq. Conflicts which a 19th century British general of the Victorian army would instantly reckognize as being similar in character to the a colonial punitive expeditions of his own time. What is really interesting is how would one of these new carriers would cope when hit by, say, a salvo of large sized modern ASW missiles? I mean one would expect that the skeleton crew would have extreme troube coping with the extensive damage since most of the automated systems would either be out of commission or working at limited capacity.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
a country such as the US or EU which has basic respect for the rules of war (eg, the Geneva Convention)
Haha where have you been hiding?
The primary purpose of the Royal Navy was to patrol, maintain and protect the British Empire.
"What Empire?" I hear you scoff. Well, the UK still has dozens of little islands all around the world full of Her Majesty's subjects who want to remain British contrary to the wishes of thier neighbours.
The Royal Navy forgot about them during the cold war and became obsessed about hunting soviet submarines. They didnt need big aircaft carriers for that.
The cost of that negligence was the Falklands war. Luckily Britain still had the (about to be decommisioned) HMS Hermes and newly built HMS Invincible aircraft carriers. The Argentinian air force with thier new fangled exocet missiles couldnt sink them because the air cover provided meant they couldnt get close enough.
So why should the UK government be spending billions to defend a few thousand islanders and thier sheep?
Because not defending them would be poltical suicide. If it were not for the Falklands recapture - Thatcher would have lost the 1983 election and Britain would still be a socialist trade union dominated hellhole, pretty much like France is now.
It has allways seemed to me that the US's Carrier fleet is vastly oversized. We have like 9 Nimitz class aircraft carriers in service, with another one underconstruction right now. An ideal solution would be to sell three of these to our European allies. This would work great for all concurned. This could downsize the US's oversized fleet and net us a pretty chunk of change. On the EU's side even one of the older Nimtz class carriers is still a lightyears ahead of their current carriers and buying our old ones would be much cheapier then designing and constructing an entirely new class.
Don't forget that $100k USD is only £57k GPB due to Britains extremely strong exchange rate compared to the much weaker dollar. When you keep in mind that the navy pays for sailors food and accomodation on top of things like pensions and possibly training this figure makes a lot more sense.
Russians believe there won't be anything to effectively counteract these missiles til 2020. And those folks are VERY conservative in their estimates. NATO doesn't call it "Shipwreck" for nothing. :-) Sunburn, while a cool weapon in itself, and designed specifically to defeat Aegis, is not the best anti-ship missile in Russian arsenal. And even so, it's enough to scare US Navy shitless.
With more and more unmanned/low-staffed vehicles, surface ships, aircraft and more and more 'smart' missiles and bombs being developed, the world's most powerful armies need not worry about casualties of war, except those that occur in their pocketbooks.
What is going to stop a government with an army of fearless, autonomous fighting machines from waging war? The biggest reason not to right now is public outcry against the needless sacrifice of servicemen and women, and the only reason beyond that is international outcry - But who cares about them, when you can silence them with the threat of mobilizing your mechanized, unmanned forces onto their soil, too?
When war becomes a safe place for a soldier to be, the world shall know a new age of war, and a new age of fear, where war crimes do not exist, are not harkened to, and will never be accounted for. The world's fate will be decided on whether or not these nations feel it is worth the expenditure, not the loss of life.
With so much interest in unmanned vehicles, what is going to stop this kind of future?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use.
This is like my girlfriend. She's telling me she has saved money when she has bought a skirt from a sales. I never can convince her that she would saved even more money by not buing a fucking skirt.
Seems to me that politicians are to useless war machines as vain girls are to clothes.
After I stopped laughing, I'd say "Sure, I could, but a computer is not necessarily the best place for it". I would explain that computers and automated systems are excellent for routine, highly predictable things, but after years and years of research and experimentation, the US Marines and the US Navy couldn't get computerized control rooms to work out very well.
Their solution, the one that worked best of all, was colored T-shirts for crew, and a scale model of the aircraft carrier in the control room. The scale model has coins and other tokens on it that represent aircraft, fuel, bombs, people, etc. And people are there moving the tokens around in real time, so at a glance, all the decision makers were on the same page and knew the entire scene. The interface is simple- childishly simple and effective. No training required. Also, the tokens can be shifted to "try out" a scenario too. Sure, a big-ass LCD screen with digital tokens could be used to do the same thing. But would it be cheaper or more effective? Especially in a battle situation?
Was is also a creative excersize as much as anything- perhaps moreso. So far, you can't automate that.
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It's not so long since the UK MoD specified that all new warships would be running Windows NT (or one of its descendents) on all computer systems, whether they were for typing a letter to the Admiral or controlling the navigation, engines, weapons, communications etc.
The last time the English and French undertook a project like this i.e. Concorde - the costs soared five-fold between planning and implementation - to £1.134 billion - and the production models sold never even covered part of the cost. This has all the hall-makings of yet another Anglo-French financial disaster - although if they do as well with the carrier as they did with concorde we shall see some interesting technology. I lived under the concorde flight path for years - I could set my clock by it - and when it was retired I realised that I would miss it's elegant grace and beauty, the only SSL passenger transport in the world, as I would never see it fly again. Even if it was a little noisy ....
But a military service, dedicated to functioning on ships, means the majority of the personnel, are on ships, and that would be where they die.
Imagine if I said, the majority of birds die in trees.
The majority of elephants die on the ground..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
War is unpredictable. One has to be ready for anything, including the unpredictable. That's why every weapon system is big, heavy, clunky, and expensive. You want to have primary systems, secondary systems, and maybe backups for both. You don't want to have any single point of failure that can knock you out of action. Applies to machinery, and also to human organizations. You want to have lots of guys that spend most of their time doing make-work, like chipping paint, peeling potatoes, and washing the decks. When the baloon goes up, they'll likely be dragging the dead from their posts and taking their places.
That's one reason why there are so many crewmembers on an aircraft carrier.
The other reason is that there's room for them.
They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use.
The moment we start designing warships specifically to reduce their operating costs over their lifespans, is the moment that a tragedy is lurking in the future.
I'm not saying "damn the costs, full contractors ahead!" at all, but shouldn't a navy (and by extension, all parts of the military) be given a cost parameter and build the most EFFECTIVE combat systems within that budget?
Because I see that (from TFA) they are being heralded as wonderfully efficient and low cost carriers, but nowhere do I see anything about how effectively they will FIGHT...um, shouldn't that be the point? A warship is purpose built to make war more effectively. That's all.
The TFA closes by mentioning they will arrive just in time for the centennial of the First World War. Ironically, part of the reasons for British naval dominance over a much newer and frankly better-built Kriegsmarine was that
a) the Germans had put (for some logical reasons, it has to be admitted) much of their reliance in battlecruisers, which in wartime were found to be horrible compromises. Battlecruisers were lightly armored, heavily gunned ships meant to be overarmed for anything that could catch them, and too fast for anything that could outgun them. In practice, it was the opposite: they were underarmored for anything that they could catch, and their heavy guns (the general measure of ship potency at the time) constantly misled most admirals to use them as heavy line-of-battle ships, for which they were terrifically unsuited.
b) the leaders of the British Admiralty essentially were willing to bugger the British treasury to built fully capable ships with as few compromises as possible, the result being the HMS Dreadnought, which effectively obsoleted all other ships of the time.
Want to save money? Heck, let's convert half the hull space to cargo, and let the ships carry breakbulk around the world to offset their costs! Stupid idea? Absolutely. But not a great deal stupider than deliberately removing the flexibility and capability of a modern ship's personnel and replacing them with fallible and inflexible automation.
-Styopa
As any country who has seen a US supercarrier appear off their coast, it is the ultimate projection of force. Like nuclear weapons everyone wants one. The US Navy is not standing pat. With global strategic threats are increasing from Russia and China, the CVN-21 should up the ante considerably.
an ill wind that blows no good
at $100K each and 1200 programmers at $150K each to keep the things running. Okaaay.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
True, it is temporarily combat ineffective. However, being able to take hits, the be repaired to fight again (with crew mostly intact) is far more desirable than reading headlines about a ship being sent to Davy Jones' Locker with no hope of recovery and all hands lost.
...as the USS Enterprise, circa 2300. Capt. Kirk ran a tight ship with about 420 guys/gals/beings. Less than that didn't seem to work, as the M-5 automation experiment had some bugs.
But I don't think the Enterprise lasted anything like 50 years, did it? -A, -B, -C, -D, -E....
Sorry to tell you, but this story is almost 50 years old. It is told with the "Missouri", "Enterprise", "Nimitz", "Carl Vinson", and now the "Lincoln". This is the first time I heard it with a Canadian LH keeper. Usually its told as if it were on the east coast with a peon Seaman LH keeper telling the big ship driver to alter course.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"even with America as a rouge superpower"
We look good in blush, for a superpower, that is.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Seriously, how much experience does France and England have with aircraft carriers of this size [60,000 tonnes]? None whatsoever from what I can tell.
You should do some research before answering your own questions wrongly in public. The British invented aircraft carriers, and the first large fleet carriers were converted from the battlecruisers Furious, Glorious and Courageous. The British carriers "Eagle" and "Ark Royal", built about 1960 and now scrapped, were officially 45,000 tons, but in fact displaced about 55,000 tons after refits.
Both Britain and France maintained large battle fleets in WWI and II and in in 1914 fact Britain had a fleet larger than any other two navies (eg USA + Germany) combined. In 1912, say, the building in Britain of a squadron of four 25,000 ton battleships would hardly have been mentioned in the newspapers and certainly not argued about. How times have changed!
OMFG Sailors get 100K/year?! Screw electrical engineering, I'm joining the Navy! Accelerate my paycheck!
you'd heard enough about it already.
(Not dissing your father - just your digression.)
That report smells like a hoax. It's written about as well as your typical post on /. Samples:
The quotations are followed by a note of suspicion from the author of the EnergyBulletin column:
The US Armed Forces use a *lot* of energy, so it is plausible that they are actively pursuing energy efficiency technology. It also makes sense that they would seek localized generation and fuel independence to reduce exposure to breaks in supply lines. Nevertheless, I question the authenticity of this paper.
My vision of what will be required in the future will be the stealth equivalent (although they are already stealthed to some extent) version of a super Arleigh Burke destroyer with a serious bone in its teeth.
I agree, the Swedes of all people have been doing some really interesting work with their Visby class corvette. I'm not is a position to assess how tactically viable this project is but it certainly looks REALLY interesting.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Then there shouldn't be any problem with US Navy going to Persian Gulf against Iran, right? Iran only has Moskit/Sunburn missiles, which is a smaller range (but higher speed) variation of the same set of ideas. BTW, both Yakhont and Moskit/Sunburn these days can effectively counteract Aegis, they don't just make them unmodified for decades.
That's the way it happens with the US - like in that old joke where Russians used pencil and NASA spent billion dollars building pen that writes in space. Russian anti-tank weapons fired off the shoulder penetrate US tanks (demonstrated in Iraq). Russian ICBM warheads can penetrate US anti missile defense (thankfully, not yet demonstrated). Russian anti-aircraft defense can shoot down ANY American war plane, no matter how fast and no matter the altitude. Russian fighter jets exceed the capabilities of their US counterparts. Russian tanks work fine in the desert (as opposed to US tanks). All of this is built at 1/10th the cost. Chinese have it. India has it. Iran has it. Whoever else is willing to buy (with obvious exceptions) can have it, too. Be glad Iraq did not have latest Russian gear.
1. The USAF has exactly zero Apaches. And very few helicopters, period. Those are almost exclusively the province of the other services. The zoomies didn't consdider helicopters (or close air support in general) to be cool.
:-)
2. The A-10 is specifically a low level (close air support) platform (that's what the "A" means - (ground) attack).
I return you to your arguement, already in progress.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
The next great war will be found by the american public guerilla style against the US military from within. I'd like to see more postings about such guerilla systems in development that could actually be used to end the domination of todays geopolitical police state so that finally humanity can be free and live without fear of being judged and criminalized in a beuracratized slander operation.
So once again our military is preparing for past wars.
As for the conspiracy theory tag - we would do well to not ignore extreme examples of what has happened in other democratic states so that the similar things (but not as extreme) cannot happen. The guys that went after De Gaulle had done a lot of torturing and had egos inflated so much that they thought they could do everything better than anyone else - so they tried to kill the President and take over. Pointing out the extreme example in France and saying that bad things could happen elsewhere when people that have commited all kinds of atrocities overseas come home is no "conspiracy theory", but a reason to stop barbarous behaviour and keep agencies under firm state control. You would have to take a lot of care to make sure that agents who participated in these acts do not get into positions where they can damage the state and bring the war home. Some idiot back from some black ops camp posted to DHS torturing suspicious but innnocent airline passengers to death on home soil could bring down a government - and torturing people does make the perpetrators lose touch with reality and consider that they are beyond following orders because they are already used to breaking the rules.
To sum up - barbaric short term solutions can also hurt the state that uses them in a variety of ways. A state that tortures people overseas can end up doing it at home even if the state forbids it - because the torturers broke the rules in the first place and think that they are above laws.
sounds great.. and that will work equally well in every country.. because we all know that elections are _ALWAYS_ fair (just like in Belarus and Ukraine :)
- official site;
- TotalPlaystation preview and review;
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- Gametrailers.com video
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When other contries have a stealth cruise missile and airplanes, our carriers will be vulnerable.
Of course, only a top-tier country could have such a thing... And they would be very worried about *our* steath aircraft and stealth cruise missiles... Hence, not a threat after all...
"sounds great.. and that will work equally well in every country.. because we all know that elections are _ALWAYS_ fair (just like in Belarus and Ukraine :)"
So what's your point?
I claim my proposal will be either better or not worse than the current situation.
Isn't that just great...billions for more war toys...squat for human beings. When are we going to stand up and stop this profoundly anti-life insanity?
IIRC it was because they tried to cut corners by modifying a nuclear plant originally designed for a sub rather than starting for scratch - makes sense on paper, but sub reactors solve a significantly different set of engineering challenges - as a result they ended up with the worst of both worlds, an overly complex and underpowered carrier barely capable of leaving port for the first few years of its service life.
Political pressures and cost overruns added to the problems, for example the novel propeller design never worked properly and the Charles de Gaulle is now fitted with props from its predecessor, the Foch. To add insult to injury, this actually make the Charles de Gaulle slower than the (conventionally powered) Foch.
This is an interesting background article on the current situation.
Absit Invidia
Defense Industry Daily has a trio of articles that seem relevant to this discussion. One covers the British CVF future carrier design, background, and relevant contracts. The second covers the related French PA2 carrier project, which will now be a CVF design collaboration. The third covers, not DD(X), but the USA's CVN-21 carriers that will replace the Nimitz Class beginning around 2013 - AND how the manpower savings work out. When you see that, some of the concerns expressed here can be put to bed (but some remain valid). All come with useful diagrams, photos, etc.
The US conversion of 4 Ohio Class SSBN (nuclear missile subs) to Special Forces and steath strike missions gives the US Navy a platform with the same potential relevance and situation-affecting punch as a carrier, albeit for different kinds of missions. Aircraft carriers remain exremely valuable in many, many war scenarios, however - and more than a few peacetime ones as well. For instance, the US carriers' ability to distill very large quantities of fresh water from the sea (it's good to have a nuclear plant on board) was very helpful in the tsunami's aftermath. For versatility and usefulness over a wide range of scenarios, there are still no real substitutes for aircraft carriers. People predict their demise - but then, they've been doing that to the tank for almost 40 years now, and Iraq showed that there is still no substitute for a tank. Same for the carriers. Personally, gotta say that I'm not so hugely positive about the DD(X), myself. Here's a DID article covering DD(X), with a bunch of links that you may find informative.
Winds of Change.NET
"Liberty. Discovery. Humanity. Victory."
The USAF ate plenty of humble pie figuring that out in Vietnam, and usually hopes to supress the SAMs with ECM and targeting launch sites, so that they can take their sweet time at altitude.
If USAF gets into a situation where they can't supress the SAMs, they'll probably start taking their chances with the AAA.
Luke, help me take this mask off