It's not a flawless way to fix it, but it would make it at least a bit more difficult to foil, neh?
It would also be impossible to use. 98.6 degrees is the temperature of certain orifices in your body. These orifices are generally pretty good at maintaining a certain amount of heat. However, your hands and feet are extremities that do not keep a constant temperature. In fact, your body will sometimes shut off the blood flow if it needs the heat somewhere else.
This means that you'll never be able to accurately predict the lower bounds of finger temperature. Someone may have just been outside in cold weather. Or they may have poor blood flow to their hands (e.g. my wife's hands barely even show up on an heat sensitive screen). Similarly, they may have just touched a warm car door, or lit up a cigarette. Maybe they have some coffee in their hands.
Basically, there's almost no way short of human or artificial intelligence to near flawlessly determine if the fingerprint belongs to a real human or not.
For large, serious, database work, you don't pick MySQL, you pick Oracle. Oracle is hardly a has been, and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates seem to trade places for the world's richest man with some regularity.
Is this a troll, or are you really screwing up that badly? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it:
1. Microsoft SQL-Server took the top TPC ratings, not MySQL. Maybe someone has rewired your brain to always think "MySQL" (not surprising around here), but it was never mentioned in my post.
2. It is completely irrelevant whether Oracle is truly cutting edge or not. It is also irrelevant if Oracle is a better product. (Which it is.) As long as Microsoft can generate the impression that Oracle is simply trying to save their skin, people will think of them as "old". It's similar to the situation with Unix where everyone thought of it as "old" even tho cutting edge OS development has always happened on the Unixes first.
When Microsoft says something's not serious, but IBM spends a billion dollars marketing it, Oracle says it's their preferred platform, and Dell sells it on their big machines, it's pretty clear that Microsoft is failing to understand customer requirements. "Everybody else is talking about Linux, but Microsoft doesn't seem to know anything about it" leads to "Microsoft is not keeping up to date on technology".
Keep in mind that Microsoft was in the perfect position to portray IBM as a mainframe "has-been". They could have easily targetted IBM directly with a campaign stating that IBM is attempting to bring back the days of Big Mainframes. IBM even makes it easy with their special versions of Linux that run on big iron!
Microsoft could then point out that Oracle is also a "has-been" that failed to take the top TPC against SQL-Sever. Thus they're jumping on IBM's bandwagon of selling their products to a small niche market of Linux lovers.
While all of that may be stretching the truth, it would still keep Microsoft from having to say anything about Linux other than "it's a toy created by a bunch of hackers." Thus Microsoft's mistake was in attempting to attack Linux directly as if it were backed by a company. Linux doesn't actually have a company to attack directly, so it was about as effective as bombing Internet nodes. Had they gone focused on Linux's corporate support infrastructure, they could have effectively dismantled Linux's Enterprise attempts without directly killing Linux. (A bit like bombing the internet nodes to Washington DC. Far more focused and effective.)
Unfortunately, your comparison is lacking. If we we're to draw a true analogy of what Microsoft's stance should have been, then it would be more like the New York Yankees pretending that the Marlins were a complete non-threat. As long as the Marlins don't manage to embarass the Yankees at any point, the Yankees can continue to keep fans from suspecting that the Marlins are getting better. But if the Marlins are doing poor to average and the Yankees started telling the press that the Marlins are their biggest competitor, the Yankees would instantly balloon the credit of a team that no one should be concerned about.
It's not that much different with Microsoft. Microsoft has battled with Unix varients for a very long time, and has always managed to come out on top thanks to "pretty interfaces". Linux is certainly getting better, but many managers dismissed its supporters as biased. The moment Microsoft began a defamation campaign on Linux was the moment that Microsoft-friendly managers began turning their heads. Linux was no longer a toy in their eyes, it was a real product that Microsoft considered a serious threat. And if it was a threat to Microsoft, might it actually be better than Microsoft?
I think this whole "Shared Source" concept is one of the worst things Microsoft can do. In fact, even responding to Linux as a credible threat is the worst thing they can do. By admitting that Linux is a credible threat, they've convinced the world that Linux might be a product that's useful for something. If they simply continued to carry the tagline of "Linux is older than Windows and has little to show for all that time. We don't consider them a competitor," the big execs with $$$ wouldn't take Linux very seriously. The shared source concept only makes it worse by stating that "There may be something to this Open Source thing."
...that the winner is just going to have a really hot, photogenic girlfriend;)
That gives me a good idea. Someone should take a picture of a young lady in a diner looking like she's busy writing something highly intelligent. For the caption write, "Young lady finds the answer to world peace!"
If they're true fans, how could they NOT pcik that one?;-)
You don't understand. The wash isn't free like "have some free beer!" No! It's free as in Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness! To that end, you can wash your own damn car! Think of how much free-er-er you'll be!!!
Hmm... maybe I'll pay the kid next door to do it while I'm busy doing a market analysis.
I remember a place in Detroit on Michigan Avenue called Bill's (I think) Firearms and Auto Parts.
In Adam's County, Wisconsin, there's a store called "Al's Guns and TVs". For some reason, it always makes me think of a "ride the rail" video game. Damn expensive hobby, tho.
Interplanetary Internet links would be disastriously slow...Internets would be mostly seperated by the planets themselves.
Given that bandwidth would start becoming less of a concern over interplanetary transmissions, I'm guessing that the Inter(pla)net would be developed around some form a queued requests for large information archives. e.g. A request for slashdot.org would return all current pages and images. Large file downloads would probably come in separate requests.
Explosive propulsion must include both fuel and oxidizer. Half of that (the oxidizer) will be pulled from the air for railguns.
You might want to recheck how railguns work. The only reason we're discussing fuels is because the DD(X) will be powered by Gas Turbines, a form of generator that burns Diesel/Kerosine to produce power. Recent ships such as the Queen Mary 2 have used Gas Turbines as electric generators to power the ship by electric propulsion. The advantage of this design is that unused power from the engines can be redistributed across other ships systems as needed.
the energy available from chemicals suitable for use as fuels is higher than the energy available from chemicals suitable for driving shells out of gun barrels
Generally, yes. The reason why Petroleum products are not used for cannons is that they are slow burning. i.e. There's no explosive force. Something like Gun Powder produces fewer kilowatts of power per unit, but its ability to fast burn makes it ideal for overcoming friction and propelling a shell to high velocities.
Keep in mind that these seem like operational proofs of concept - I'm sure people are thinking along those lines already.
That's fair enough. Given the amount of paperwork a nuclear reactor takes, I can imagine that they'd want to wait until phase 2.
Gas turbine makes sense for non-electric drive since you can throttle those babies up and down quickly. Can't do that with a nuclear plant - lots of transmission needed as a result. Big battleships probably don't care about quick ramp-up/down. Subs certainly do - I guess they just have lots of transmission.
Keep in mind that you no longer have these problems once you make the drive system independent of the power system. Traditional ships have this flaw. These new designs decouple the systems and allow the power to flow where needed.
In a real battle they aren't going to sustain fire all that long without access to fuel.... In the former case, a ship will probably last all of an hour in actual combat before being sunk.
I don't know about that. Many of the WWII battles lasted days on end. While the weapons may be more powerful, the countermeasures have scaled to match. (Even if the countermeasure is simply "keep the hell out of range".)
They don't care about nuclear-armed bombers or bases on US soil - they can't really do that much damage to Chinese soil
Why not? A neutron bomb would have a nice effect on China's few main cities and military installations. Once you're outside those areas, there's practically no technology to speak of.
If those next-gen death rays prove themselves in combat I'm sure we'll be seeing boats that are nothing but a big nuclear generator with a million microwave dishes on them. But nobody wants to pay for that when they still don't have the death rays that use all the power on the current ships...
Hmm... the idea of nuclear ships with death rays makes me all giddy. Who cares about an incoming missile barrage when you can sweep them out of the sky with multi-gigawatt masers? =D
What are you talking about, the Cole being small? It's an Aegis - only half the length of the largest ship in our fleet.
Don't let her length fool you. She only displaces about 8,000 tons. The largest ship in our fleet is the USS Enterprise with a displacement of about 85,000 tons. That makes the Aegis boats (which I will grant are large for destroyers) about 1/10th the size of a Carrier. So yes, destroyers are "small".
Yorktown only "survived" the bomb hit to its deck, with the loss of 66 crew. It was taken out by two torpedoes.
Bomb *hits*, plural. She took three bombs to her deck and was still able to be repaired enough to reach 20 knots. When the two torpedos hit, she was taken out of the battle, but most of her crew was still alive. You complain that she lost 66 crew to bomb attacks. Out of the nearly 3,000 men on board, that's not a bad survivability rating. Until someone invents Deflector Shields, people will die when bombs make contact with a naval vessel.
Two other points I'd like to make. First, the Yorktown was rushed out the door without adequate repairs. Even her air group had to be partially replaced with those from the Saratoga to get her to sea on time. Had she been fully operational, she may not have had to leave the fight. The Lexington also took three bombs and two torpedos and was still able to make 25 knots and launch planes. Had they not been worried about the fires giving away their presence to the Japanese, she would have sailed back to port for repairs. It took FOUR more torpedos to scuttle her after the crew was evacuated.
Secondly, had the Yorktown or Lexington been a Jeep, she would have sunk to the bottom with pretty much all of her 850 crew members. 850 people! As opposed to a REAL carrier where 80-90% of the crew survive the battle. The Navy is working hard to improve this by adding more automation to modern carriers. In a hit, there would be fewer crew to injure or kill.
How about the dinky little boat that hit the Cole? 225kg. A rather small operation, easily financed by a couple of people with an axe to grind, but they were easily able to supply the sort of firepower that Japanese bombs in WWII supplied.
I said it before, and I'll say it again. A torpedo boat is a torpedo boat. And 225kg of explosives is nothing to scoff at. Perhaps you like to explain how a ship in port would have been able to avoid the explosion, and how the explosion would have managed to neither put a hole in the ship, or kill anyone?
Cole didn't sink. Yeay. It took 250 million dollars to fix it, and they killed crew. That's (1/2? 1/3?) the cost of building a brand new one.
And this is a problem because... ??? The US spent less money than building a new ship, and got their ship back in service a lot sooner than a new ship.
And the bad guys killed some people. WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN? If you bomb or torpedo a boat, PEOPLE DIE.
I don't understand this fascination of yours with some mythical Jeep carriers that could have somehow prevented a ship in port from getting attacked. The solution to the problem of Guerilla attacks against Naval vessels is to keep the vessels in open waters. When they're in open waters, nothing can touch them.
They're going to abuse whatever ones they can! They're going to cheat in any way physically possible! That's the point!
It's not about cheating. It's about war. In war, you find any way possible to kill the enemy. The only problem with terrorists is that they kill people without a real cause. They can never win a war, they just like to kill as many people as possible.
A dozen reinforced speedboats hitting a submarine as it leaves port?
Yeah. Cause those will stand up to the military guns just fine. (Not.) Thanks to nuclear power, there's only one port that submarines need to visit: high security military ports for nuclear refueling. And they
So for 6 rounds a minute you'd need 169 MJ every 10 seconds. That's the full output of a 16.9MW genset.
That's not that ridiculous.
I didn't say it was ridiculous. I said it was a tremendous drain on the ships energy supplies. Leaving a fight because you're out of fuel is not funny. Nuclear power sources provide much more tactical flexibility because they can deliver more power for orders of magnitude longer. More power also means more high energy weapons. What commander *wouldn't* want the flexibility to fire railguns, masers, lasers, and move the ship at the same time?
It seems that nuclear makes sense when your ships survivability is dependent on your ability to generate power.
Sorry, I forgot the marines. Carriers can also carry a compliment of marines and amphibious vessels. This allows the carrier to deploy ground forces long before the army can be shipped in. Jeep Carriers just wouldn't have the space for marines or their vehicles.
Big ships have their own survivability problems - look at the Cole.
The Cole is a small destroyer, not a big ship. She's of a very similar size to the Jeep Carriers you're proposing. On their survivability, the sailors referred to the CVE designation as "Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable". Given a choice, the sailors would have much rather been sailing on a damaged and barely patched carrier that could take half a dozen bombs, multiple torpedo hits, massive fires, and STILL survive another 24 hours before capsizing. THAT is survivability.
505 friggin feet long, but it lost 17 crew and had 39 injured due to a little dinky boat.
A torpedo boat is a torpedo boat. The whole point of a torpedo boat is that it's supposed to be small, fast, and able to deliver a powerful torpedo to a much larger ship. Torpedo boats were invented in the Chilean Civil War of 1891, and proved effective at routing large ships. The response to this new type of Guerilla warfare was a very fast ship known as a Destroyer. Destroyers would have more speed than their torpedo boat counterparts, and would be able to provide enough firepower to route these boats before they reached ANY target.
The USS Cole IS such a destroyer. I say "is", because she took the blow exactly like she was designed to. She did not sink, and was still capable of delivering massive firepower to an enemy vessel. She was actually shipped back to Norfolk and is now back in service. And before you bemoan the number of lives lost, allow me to point out that 17 lives is a fairly normal death count for a torpedo hit.
Big ships are great for when people are playing by *our* rules, but not when people are playing by *their* rules.
The only rules the bad guys abused was the fact that the Cole was parked in a friendly harbor, undergoing refueling operations. Having small boats pass by is not an uncommon thing in a harbor. That's why non-military harbors are considered a very vulnerable position for a ship. Had the Cole been refueled by a tanker on open waters, she would have fired on ANYTHING that got too close without authorization. The terrorists simply took advantage of the Cole's temporary lack of a near invulnerable position.
he advantage to them is that when they take a hit, there's less loss of money and life.
No, there's more loss. On a smaller boat, you've got a few hundred men and women who immediately die when the ship is hit. On a large ship, you've got thousands of whom only dozens die in each hit. And with the survivability of the large ship, it will be far cheaper to repair and rescue than to let it sink to the bottom. Take the example of the Yorktown I linked to above. Before she capsized, an attempt was planned to salvage her and bring her back in the fight. THAT is cost effective. Having to build a new ship from new metal, new systems, new weapons, new decks, and new crews is cost *in*effective.
I already mentioned that the case of Afghanistan was mostly due to ground logistics, not naval;
Then why are you arguing for smaller carriers? Ground logistics is a matter of pre-positioning, air transport, and ship transport. If someone screwed one of those up (ESPECIALLY for the Middle East!) then they deserve to have their head handed to them on a platter.
And with a bigger rival, you're not going to want just one carrier group on the scene.
Are you not arguing that the problem is that we have smaller rivals fighting Guerilla warfare? Besides, fights with larger rivals are all about knowing where the enemy has his pieces. You can be damned sure that the U.S. had an equal task force near every USSR task force. Should a war break out, they would close in and engage one another. Right now, no one is deploying any large forces other than the US.
When you're talking about mach 5 and such a projectile doesn't behave as if it was a stone you threw at something. It doesn't go *thok* and either bounce off or go through it's target.
What makes you think it would be flying at Mach 5? An asteroid is such a big problem because it has enough momentum to continuously overcome drag. But a railgun munition fired on a 250 mile ballistic trajectory will instead go up, then back down. Since it expended most of its energy on the way up, it's going to be flying at terminal velocity on the way down. Without knowing more, it's difficult to predict what that velocity would be. However, it's most likely only slightly supersonic upon impact. In addition, an asteroid has a lot of dust and frozen gasses to release in the "big boom". A solid metal shell would have an extremely high vaporization point, and would most likely cut through a carrier deck as if it were paper-machete.
Well, not exactly. In order to win the contract BAE systems had to accept most of the Thales design.
So in fact the UK are building French designed carriers, and France has decided to buy another built to the same design.
So, the French build the worst carrier in the world. Next they turn to the British for a better design. But instead of accepting the British design, they try to force their proven crappy design on the British? Sounds like espionage to me. Let's hope that the Brits are smart enough to turn that one down.:-/
That's odd. Somehow my first response ended up at the bottom. That first part should read:
Don't know the speeds involved, but Jerry Pournelle wrote once about dropping cannon balls from earth orbit. A 100 pound weight falling from orbit explodes on hitting the earth like a 2000 pound bomb; weather is barely a factor since at the speeds involved you punch through significant atmosphere in a few seconds. And exactly what could you do to stop it -- how do you do anything to a hunk of iron moving at miles/kilometers per second.
You deflect it. The longer the distance, the less it takes to change its course enough so that it missed. Granted, that may take a few years of R&D before they get that one down.
Don't know the speeds involved, but Jerry Pournelle wrote once about dropping cannon balls from earth orbit. A 100 pound weight falling from orbit explodes on hitting the earth like a 2000 pound bomb; weather is barely a factor since at the speeds involved you punch through significant atmosphere in a few seconds. And exactly what could you do to stop it -- how do you do anything to a hunk of iron moving at miles/kilometers per second.
50 rounds laid down in a 100 yard square area in a few seconds from 250 km would be discouraging to any occupants or equipment.
And where are you going to get 50 rounds a second? These ships only have about 80MW of power to provide. I believe the article stated that they could fire 6 rounds per minute. My guess is that's for closer ranges than 250 miles. (Hey, when did we switch to klicks, anyway?)
Also would make a handy anti-aircraft weapon. Pretty much anything that would show on radar could be hit, and the short flight time would make evasive action a lot less effective. Suppose the thing operated in the 10 km/s range. At a 20 km range, you'd have two seconds to react. And if anyone thinks a frigate would take damage, imagine what a shot-put sized cannon ball would do to a jet fighter if it hit.
But the distance still makes targetting a real PITA. I could see squadrons of F-22s making it standard practice to "slalom" in on a target. (F-22s have individual engine control, so they can turn pretty damn fast.) The only way you'll get a firing solution is if their pattern is too predictable. Not to mention that you'd probably have to aim the gun for an air kill. The GPS guidance is great, but I sincerely doubt that it would be sufficient to adjust for the flight path of Jet Fighters.
You deflect it. The longer the distance, the less it takes to change its course enough so that it missed. Granted, that may take a few years of R&D before they get that one down.
That's being replaced by 4 advanced design turbines that will put out about 80 megawatts, used to power electric ship motors and provide power to the rest of the ship.
Sorry to interject, but 80MW is NOT sufficient power to run both the weapons systems and the propulsion. Keep in mind that 80MW is *maximum* power output. Maximum power output will drain the fuel stores extremely fast. Presumably, some of that power will be automatically assigned to defensive and communication systems such as RADAR, GPS, Radio, Satellite Uplink, Targeting, and simply keeping the lights on. With the remaining power, the ship can either move under military power or charge the rail gun. It simply doesn't have enough power to do both.
Even more interesting is that the article spoke of adding Masers to the inventory of high energy weapons. Now the commander will have one MORE decision to make: Does he move the ship, charge the railguns, or fire the Masers? He'd better make the right decision, because the boat will be sunk if he makes the wrong one. Not to mention that his ship wouldn't be able to sustain battle for more than a few hours. At 80MW, the ship will be running about 130 liters of fuel through the turbines each minute. He simply can't stay in a firefight for very long that way.
No, unless they start equiping these ships with Gigawatt nuclear reactors, they won't be able to help very much in a surface engagement. What they WILL be able to do (and thanks to the posters who pointed this out to me) is bombard stationary installations like RADAR stations, Airfields, and beach defenses. The Marines will love them, and they'll cost less than pulling the battleships out of reserve.
The French one may be smaller, but it's common knowledge that they can keep it up longer. [ducks!]
If you mean "keep it laid up for repairs", you're absolutely right. The French may have built the Queen Elizabeth II, but they've been giving leasons to the world on how NOT to build an aircraft carrier. Just to rub a little salt in, they're now considering purchasing a British designed carrier! (Oh, the irony!);-)
VTOL carriers allow for tiny carriers - no need for a big runway.You have small, fast ships that can get within range of their targets in weeks instead of months
Sounds like you'd like to revive JEEP carriers. They left service because they were really only a war requirement. Not to mention that the advent of Jet Planes required larger decks. It wasn't until the invention of the Harrier that small decks became practical again. They're also not as survivable as the big carriers, which have greater range, ability, and armor.
That being said, the cost of running a bunch of small carriers can actually be larger than running a single, large-scale carrier. The only advantage to the smaller boats is that they can be in more places. This is less of a problem when you consider that the U.S. currently operates about a dozen full-size carriers.
The key issue isn't maneuverability, although that can be nice. It's speed of deployment. It took us over a month before we were ready to attack Afghanistan; according to Woodward's interview with Bush, he was furious over this fact (and with good cause!).
Ummm... the Enterprise was on the scene almost immediately. She was just leaving the Gulf at the time, and did full reverse rudder (without orders!) when her commanding officer learned of the Sept. 11 attack. In theory, the carriers should be positioned in such a way that the U.S. can move a carrier on the scene within days. If Bush was pissed off, it's probably because someone screwed up the carrier positioning. Thanks to Clinton, they were probably sitting over by Bosnia instead of the Persian Gulf.:-/
We really need to get away from this cold-war mentality heavy-armor massive-craft fighting style.
It's probably worth pointing out that the carriers have done so well because they're the most versitile ships we have. Not only do their planes give them a tremendous strike distance, but their large size makes them perfect for carrying the latest electronics platforms, missile systems, and other useful upgrades. In other words, the carriers have lasted because they adapt to the situation.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a flawless way to fix it, but it would make it at least a bit more difficult to foil, neh?
It would also be impossible to use. 98.6 degrees is the temperature of certain orifices in your body. These orifices are generally pretty good at maintaining a certain amount of heat. However, your hands and feet are extremities that do not keep a constant temperature. In fact, your body will sometimes shut off the blood flow if it needs the heat somewhere else.
This means that you'll never be able to accurately predict the lower bounds of finger temperature. Someone may have just been outside in cold weather. Or they may have poor blood flow to their hands (e.g. my wife's hands barely even show up on an heat sensitive screen). Similarly, they may have just touched a warm car door, or lit up a cigarette. Maybe they have some coffee in their hands.
Basically, there's almost no way short of human or artificial intelligence to near flawlessly determine if the fingerprint belongs to a real human or not.
For large, serious, database work, you don't pick MySQL, you pick Oracle. Oracle is hardly a has been, and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates seem to trade places for the world's richest man with some regularity.
Is this a troll, or are you really screwing up that badly? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it:
1. Microsoft SQL-Server took the top TPC ratings, not MySQL. Maybe someone has rewired your brain to always think "MySQL" (not surprising around here), but it was never mentioned in my post.
2. It is completely irrelevant whether Oracle is truly cutting edge or not. It is also irrelevant if Oracle is a better product. (Which it is.) As long as Microsoft can generate the impression that Oracle is simply trying to save their skin, people will think of them as "old". It's similar to the situation with Unix where everyone thought of it as "old" even tho cutting edge OS development has always happened on the Unixes first.
When Microsoft says something's not serious, but IBM spends a billion dollars marketing it, Oracle says it's their preferred platform, and Dell sells it on their big machines, it's pretty clear that Microsoft is failing to understand customer requirements. "Everybody else is talking about Linux, but Microsoft doesn't seem to know anything about it" leads to "Microsoft is not keeping up to date on technology".
Keep in mind that Microsoft was in the perfect position to portray IBM as a mainframe "has-been". They could have easily targetted IBM directly with a campaign stating that IBM is attempting to bring back the days of Big Mainframes. IBM even makes it easy with their special versions of Linux that run on big iron!
Microsoft could then point out that Oracle is also a "has-been" that failed to take the top TPC against SQL-Sever. Thus they're jumping on IBM's bandwagon of selling their products to a small niche market of Linux lovers.
While all of that may be stretching the truth, it would still keep Microsoft from having to say anything about Linux other than "it's a toy created by a bunch of hackers." Thus Microsoft's mistake was in attempting to attack Linux directly as if it were backed by a company. Linux doesn't actually have a company to attack directly, so it was about as effective as bombing Internet nodes. Had they gone focused on Linux's corporate support infrastructure, they could have effectively dismantled Linux's Enterprise attempts without directly killing Linux. (A bit like bombing the internet nodes to Washington DC. Far more focused and effective.)
Unfortunately, your comparison is lacking. If we we're to draw a true analogy of what Microsoft's stance should have been, then it would be more like the New York Yankees pretending that the Marlins were a complete non-threat. As long as the Marlins don't manage to embarass the Yankees at any point, the Yankees can continue to keep fans from suspecting that the Marlins are getting better. But if the Marlins are doing poor to average and the Yankees started telling the press that the Marlins are their biggest competitor, the Yankees would instantly balloon the credit of a team that no one should be concerned about.
It's not that much different with Microsoft. Microsoft has battled with Unix varients for a very long time, and has always managed to come out on top thanks to "pretty interfaces". Linux is certainly getting better, but many managers dismissed its supporters as biased. The moment Microsoft began a defamation campaign on Linux was the moment that Microsoft-friendly managers began turning their heads. Linux was no longer a toy in their eyes, it was a real product that Microsoft considered a serious threat. And if it was a threat to Microsoft, might it actually be better than Microsoft?
I think this whole "Shared Source" concept is one of the worst things Microsoft can do. In fact, even responding to Linux as a credible threat is the worst thing they can do. By admitting that Linux is a credible threat, they've convinced the world that Linux might be a product that's useful for something. If they simply continued to carry the tagline of "Linux is older than Windows and has little to show for all that time. We don't consider them a competitor," the big execs with $$$ wouldn't take Linux very seriously. The shared source concept only makes it worse by stating that "There may be something to this Open Source thing."
No power in the 'verse can stop a slashdotting
I won't let them! They can't take Serenity away!
You can't take the sky from me...
(Yes, I've been itching to say that.)
...that the winner is just going to have a really hot, photogenic girlfriend;)
;-)
That gives me a good idea. Someone should take a picture of a young lady in a diner looking like she's busy writing something highly intelligent. For the caption write, "Young lady finds the answer to world peace!"
If they're true fans, how could they NOT pcik that one?
What about Free Wash: Free
You don't understand. The wash isn't free like "have some free beer!" No! It's free as in Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness! To that end, you can wash your own damn car! Think of how much free-er-er you'll be!!!
Hmm... maybe I'll pay the kid next door to do it while I'm busy doing a market analysis.
I remember a place in Detroit on Michigan Avenue called Bill's (I think) Firearms and Auto Parts.
In Adam's County, Wisconsin, there's a store called "Al's Guns and TVs". For some reason, it always makes me think of a "ride the rail" video game. Damn expensive hobby, tho.
Interplanetary Internet links would be disastriously slow...Internets would be mostly seperated by the planets themselves.
Given that bandwidth would start becoming less of a concern over interplanetary transmissions, I'm guessing that the Inter(pla)net would be developed around some form a queued requests for large information archives. e.g. A request for slashdot.org would return all current pages and images. Large file downloads would probably come in separate requests.
Explosive propulsion must include both fuel and oxidizer. Half of that (the oxidizer) will be pulled from the air for railguns.
You might want to recheck how railguns work. The only reason we're discussing fuels is because the DD(X) will be powered by Gas Turbines, a form of generator that burns Diesel/Kerosine to produce power. Recent ships such as the Queen Mary 2 have used Gas Turbines as electric generators to power the ship by electric propulsion. The advantage of this design is that unused power from the engines can be redistributed across other ships systems as needed.
the energy available from chemicals suitable for use as fuels is higher than the energy available from chemicals suitable for driving shells out of gun barrels
Generally, yes. The reason why Petroleum products are not used for cannons is that they are slow burning. i.e. There's no explosive force. Something like Gun Powder produces fewer kilowatts of power per unit, but its ability to fast burn makes it ideal for overcoming friction and propelling a shell to high velocities.
Keep in mind that these seem like operational proofs of concept - I'm sure people are thinking along those lines already.
... In the former case, a ship will probably last all of an hour in actual combat before being sunk.
That's fair enough. Given the amount of paperwork a nuclear reactor takes, I can imagine that they'd want to wait until phase 2.
Gas turbine makes sense for non-electric drive since you can throttle those babies up and down quickly. Can't do that with a nuclear plant - lots of transmission needed as a result. Big battleships probably don't care about quick ramp-up/down. Subs certainly do - I guess they just have lots of transmission.
Keep in mind that you no longer have these problems once you make the drive system independent of the power system. Traditional ships have this flaw. These new designs decouple the systems and allow the power to flow where needed.
In a real battle they aren't going to sustain fire all that long without access to fuel.
I don't know about that. Many of the WWII battles lasted days on end. While the weapons may be more powerful, the countermeasures have scaled to match. (Even if the countermeasure is simply "keep the hell out of range".)
They don't care about nuclear-armed bombers or bases on US soil - they can't really do that much damage to Chinese soil
Why not? A neutron bomb would have a nice effect on China's few main cities and military installations. Once you're outside those areas, there's practically no technology to speak of.
If those next-gen death rays prove themselves in combat I'm sure we'll be seeing boats that are nothing but a big nuclear generator with a million microwave dishes on them. But nobody wants to pay for that when they still don't have the death rays that use all the power on the current ships...
Hmm... the idea of nuclear ships with death rays makes me all giddy. Who cares about an incoming missile barrage when you can sweep them out of the sky with multi-gigawatt masers? =D
What are you talking about, the Cole being small? It's an Aegis - only half the length of the largest ship in our fleet.
Don't let her length fool you. She only displaces about 8,000 tons. The largest ship in our fleet is the USS Enterprise with a displacement of about 85,000 tons. That makes the Aegis boats (which I will grant are large for destroyers) about 1/10th the size of a Carrier. So yes, destroyers are "small".
Yorktown only "survived" the bomb hit to its deck, with the loss of 66 crew. It was taken out by two torpedoes.
Bomb *hits*, plural. She took three bombs to her deck and was still able to be repaired enough to reach 20 knots. When the two torpedos hit, she was taken out of the battle, but most of her crew was still alive. You complain that she lost 66 crew to bomb attacks. Out of the nearly 3,000 men on board, that's not a bad survivability rating. Until someone invents Deflector Shields, people will die when bombs make contact with a naval vessel.
Two other points I'd like to make. First, the Yorktown was rushed out the door without adequate repairs. Even her air group had to be partially replaced with those from the Saratoga to get her to sea on time. Had she been fully operational, she may not have had to leave the fight. The Lexington also took three bombs and two torpedos and was still able to make 25 knots and launch planes. Had they not been worried about the fires giving away their presence to the Japanese, she would have sailed back to port for repairs. It took FOUR more torpedos to scuttle her after the crew was evacuated.
Secondly, had the Yorktown or Lexington been a Jeep, she would have sunk to the bottom with pretty much all of her 850 crew members. 850 people! As opposed to a REAL carrier where 80-90% of the crew survive the battle. The Navy is working hard to improve this by adding more automation to modern carriers. In a hit, there would be fewer crew to injure or kill.
How about the dinky little boat that hit the Cole? 225kg. A rather small operation, easily financed by a couple of people with an axe to grind, but they were easily able to supply the sort of firepower that Japanese bombs in WWII supplied.
I said it before, and I'll say it again. A torpedo boat is a torpedo boat. And 225kg of explosives is nothing to scoff at. Perhaps you like to explain how a ship in port would have been able to avoid the explosion, and how the explosion would have managed to neither put a hole in the ship, or kill anyone?
Cole didn't sink. Yeay. It took 250 million dollars to fix it, and they killed crew. That's (1/2? 1/3?) the cost of building a brand new one.
And this is a problem because... ??? The US spent less money than building a new ship, and got their ship back in service a lot sooner than a new ship.
And the bad guys killed some people. WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN? If you bomb or torpedo a boat, PEOPLE DIE.
I don't understand this fascination of yours with some mythical Jeep carriers that could have somehow prevented a ship in port from getting attacked. The solution to the problem of Guerilla attacks against Naval vessels is to keep the vessels in open waters. When they're in open waters, nothing can touch them.
They're going to abuse whatever ones they can! They're going to cheat in any way physically possible! That's the point!
It's not about cheating. It's about war. In war, you find any way possible to kill the enemy. The only problem with terrorists is that they kill people without a real cause. They can never win a war, they just like to kill as many people as possible.
A dozen reinforced speedboats hitting a submarine as it leaves port?
Yeah. Cause those will stand up to the military guns just fine. (Not.) Thanks to nuclear power, there's only one port that submarines need to visit: high security military ports for nuclear refueling. And they
So for 6 rounds a minute you'd need 169 MJ every 10 seconds. That's the full output of a 16.9MW genset.
That's not that ridiculous.
I didn't say it was ridiculous. I said it was a tremendous drain on the ships energy supplies. Leaving a fight because you're out of fuel is not funny. Nuclear power sources provide much more tactical flexibility because they can deliver more power for orders of magnitude longer. More power also means more high energy weapons. What commander *wouldn't* want the flexibility to fire railguns, masers, lasers, and move the ship at the same time?
It seems that nuclear makes sense when your ships survivability is dependent on your ability to generate power.
Sorry, I forgot the marines. Carriers can also carry a compliment of marines and amphibious vessels. This allows the carrier to deploy ground forces long before the army can be shipped in. Jeep Carriers just wouldn't have the space for marines or their vehicles.
Big ships have their own survivability problems - look at the Cole.
The Cole is a small destroyer, not a big ship. She's of a very similar size to the Jeep Carriers you're proposing. On their survivability, the sailors referred to the CVE designation as "Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable". Given a choice, the sailors would have much rather been sailing on a damaged and barely patched carrier that could take half a dozen bombs, multiple torpedo hits, massive fires, and STILL survive another 24 hours before capsizing. THAT is survivability.
505 friggin feet long, but it lost 17 crew and had 39 injured due to a little dinky boat.
A torpedo boat is a torpedo boat. The whole point of a torpedo boat is that it's supposed to be small, fast, and able to deliver a powerful torpedo to a much larger ship. Torpedo boats were invented in the Chilean Civil War of 1891, and proved effective at routing large ships. The response to this new type of Guerilla warfare was a very fast ship known as a Destroyer. Destroyers would have more speed than their torpedo boat counterparts, and would be able to provide enough firepower to route these boats before they reached ANY target.
The USS Cole IS such a destroyer. I say "is", because she took the blow exactly like she was designed to. She did not sink, and was still capable of delivering massive firepower to an enemy vessel. She was actually shipped back to Norfolk and is now back in service. And before you bemoan the number of lives lost, allow me to point out that 17 lives is a fairly normal death count for a torpedo hit.
Big ships are great for when people are playing by *our* rules, but not when people are playing by *their* rules.
The only rules the bad guys abused was the fact that the Cole was parked in a friendly harbor, undergoing refueling operations. Having small boats pass by is not an uncommon thing in a harbor. That's why non-military harbors are considered a very vulnerable position for a ship. Had the Cole been refueled by a tanker on open waters, she would have fired on ANYTHING that got too close without authorization. The terrorists simply took advantage of the Cole's temporary lack of a near invulnerable position.
he advantage to them is that when they take a hit, there's less loss of money and life.
No, there's more loss. On a smaller boat, you've got a few hundred men and women who immediately die when the ship is hit. On a large ship, you've got thousands of whom only dozens die in each hit. And with the survivability of the large ship, it will be far cheaper to repair and rescue than to let it sink to the bottom. Take the example of the Yorktown I linked to above. Before she capsized, an attempt was planned to salvage her and bring her back in the fight. THAT is cost effective. Having to build a new ship from new metal, new systems, new weapons, new decks, and new crews is cost *in*effective.
I already mentioned that the case of Afghanistan was mostly due to ground logistics, not naval;
Then why are you arguing for smaller carriers? Ground logistics is a matter of pre-positioning, air transport, and ship transport. If someone screwed one of those up (ESPECIALLY for the Middle East!) then they deserve to have their head handed to them on a platter.
And with a bigger rival, you're not going to want just one carrier group on the scene.
Are you not arguing that the problem is that we have smaller rivals fighting Guerilla warfare? Besides, fights with larger rivals are all about knowing where the enemy has his pieces. You can be damned sure that the U.S. had an equal task force near every USSR task force. Should a war break out, they would close in and engage one another. Right now, no one is deploying any large forces other than the US.
When you're talking about mach 5 and such a projectile doesn't behave as if it was a stone you threw at something. It doesn't go *thok* and either bounce off or go through it's target.
What makes you think it would be flying at Mach 5? An asteroid is such a big problem because it has enough momentum to continuously overcome drag. But a railgun munition fired on a 250 mile ballistic trajectory will instead go up, then back down. Since it expended most of its energy on the way up, it's going to be flying at terminal velocity on the way down. Without knowing more, it's difficult to predict what that velocity would be. However, it's most likely only slightly supersonic upon impact. In addition, an asteroid has a lot of dust and frozen gasses to release in the "big boom". A solid metal shell would have an extremely high vaporization point, and would most likely cut through a carrier deck as if it were paper-machete.
Well, not exactly. In order to win the contract BAE systems had to accept most of the Thales design.
:-/
So in fact the UK are building French designed carriers, and France has decided to buy another built to the same design.
So, the French build the worst carrier in the world. Next they turn to the British for a better design. But instead of accepting the British design, they try to force their proven crappy design on the British? Sounds like espionage to me. Let's hope that the Brits are smart enough to turn that one down.
Images can be found here and notes from the work can be found here .
Where's the wireless link? All I see is empty sky!
That's odd. Somehow my first response ended up at the bottom. That first part should read:
Don't know the speeds involved, but Jerry Pournelle wrote once about dropping cannon balls from earth orbit. A 100 pound weight falling from orbit explodes on hitting the earth like a 2000 pound bomb; weather is barely a factor since at the speeds involved you punch through significant atmosphere in a few seconds. And exactly what could you do to stop it -- how do you do anything to a hunk of iron moving at miles/kilometers per second.
You deflect it. The longer the distance, the less it takes to change its course enough so that it missed. Granted, that may take a few years of R&D before they get that one down.
Don't know the speeds involved, but Jerry Pournelle wrote once about dropping cannon balls from earth orbit. A 100 pound weight falling from orbit explodes on hitting the earth like a 2000 pound bomb; weather is barely a factor since at the speeds involved you punch through significant atmosphere in a few seconds. And exactly what could you do to stop it -- how do you do anything to a hunk of iron moving at miles/kilometers per second.
50 rounds laid down in a 100 yard square area in a few seconds from 250 km would be discouraging to any occupants or equipment.
And where are you going to get 50 rounds a second? These ships only have about 80MW of power to provide. I believe the article stated that they could fire 6 rounds per minute. My guess is that's for closer ranges than 250 miles. (Hey, when did we switch to klicks, anyway?)
Also would make a handy anti-aircraft weapon. Pretty much anything that would show on radar could be hit, and the short flight time would make evasive action a lot less effective. Suppose the thing operated in the 10 km/s range. At a 20 km range, you'd have two seconds to react. And if anyone thinks a frigate would take damage, imagine what a shot-put sized cannon ball would do to a jet fighter if it hit.
But the distance still makes targetting a real PITA. I could see squadrons of F-22s making it standard practice to "slalom" in on a target. (F-22s have individual engine control, so they can turn pretty damn fast.) The only way you'll get a firing solution is if their pattern is too predictable. Not to mention that you'd probably have to aim the gun for an air kill. The GPS guidance is great, but I sincerely doubt that it would be sufficient to adjust for the flight path of Jet Fighters.
You deflect it. The longer the distance, the less it takes to change its course enough so that it missed. Granted, that may take a few years of R&D before they get that one down.
That's being replaced by 4 advanced design turbines that will put out about 80 megawatts, used to power electric ship motors and provide power to the rest of the ship.
Sorry to interject, but 80MW is NOT sufficient power to run both the weapons systems and the propulsion. Keep in mind that 80MW is *maximum* power output. Maximum power output will drain the fuel stores extremely fast. Presumably, some of that power will be automatically assigned to defensive and communication systems such as RADAR, GPS, Radio, Satellite Uplink, Targeting, and simply keeping the lights on. With the remaining power, the ship can either move under military power or charge the rail gun. It simply doesn't have enough power to do both.
Even more interesting is that the article spoke of adding Masers to the inventory of high energy weapons. Now the commander will have one MORE decision to make: Does he move the ship, charge the railguns, or fire the Masers? He'd better make the right decision, because the boat will be sunk if he makes the wrong one. Not to mention that his ship wouldn't be able to sustain battle for more than a few hours. At 80MW, the ship will be running about 130 liters of fuel through the turbines each minute. He simply can't stay in a firefight for very long that way.
No, unless they start equiping these ships with Gigawatt nuclear reactors, they won't be able to help very much in a surface engagement. What they WILL be able to do (and thanks to the posters who pointed this out to me) is bombard stationary installations like RADAR stations, Airfields, and beach defenses. The Marines will love them, and they'll cost less than pulling the battleships out of reserve.
The French one may be smaller, but it's common knowledge that they can keep it up longer. [ducks!]
If you mean "keep it laid up for repairs", you're absolutely right. The French may have built the Queen Elizabeth II, but they've been giving leasons to the world on how NOT to build an aircraft carrier. Just to rub a little salt in, they're now considering purchasing a British designed carrier! (Oh, the irony!)
VTOL carriers allow for tiny carriers - no need for a big runway.You have small, fast ships that can get within range of their targets in weeks instead of months
:-/
:-)
Sounds like you'd like to revive JEEP carriers. They left service because they were really only a war requirement. Not to mention that the advent of Jet Planes required larger decks. It wasn't until the invention of the Harrier that small decks became practical again. They're also not as survivable as the big carriers, which have greater range, ability, and armor.
That being said, the cost of running a bunch of small carriers can actually be larger than running a single, large-scale carrier. The only advantage to the smaller boats is that they can be in more places. This is less of a problem when you consider that the U.S. currently operates about a dozen full-size carriers.
The key issue isn't maneuverability, although that can be nice. It's speed of deployment. It took us over a month before we were ready to attack Afghanistan; according to Woodward's interview with Bush, he was furious over this fact (and with good cause!).
Ummm... the Enterprise was on the scene almost immediately. She was just leaving the Gulf at the time, and did full reverse rudder (without orders!) when her commanding officer learned of the Sept. 11 attack. In theory, the carriers should be positioned in such a way that the U.S. can move a carrier on the scene within days. If Bush was pissed off, it's probably because someone screwed up the carrier positioning. Thanks to Clinton, they were probably sitting over by Bosnia instead of the Persian Gulf.
We really need to get away from this cold-war mentality heavy-armor massive-craft fighting style.
It's probably worth pointing out that the carriers have done so well because they're the most versitile ships we have. Not only do their planes give them a tremendous strike distance, but their large size makes them perfect for carrying the latest electronics platforms, missile systems, and other useful upgrades. In other words, the carriers have lasted because they adapt to the situation.
Did you say the ERGM's effective range is approx. 41 NANOMETERS?
41 Nautical Miles. That's ~47.18 miles, or ~75.93 klicks (kilometers).