We started to learn this in WWII, the last time carriers were involved in naval battles (to my knowledge). Carriers are too big, too expensive, and too easy to hit. Not that I'm defending the French's flaccid carrier fleet, but carrier size isn't what I'd use as penis surrogate when comparing navies.
Um, hello? What the Battle of Midway and many other engagements taught us is that the carrier is a mobile weapons platform with a strike range far beyond any conventional missile. The distances have increased, but keeping the carrier out of the line of fire has always been a priority. The screening ships are supposed to handle scouting and direct engagements. While they keep the enemy at bay, the carriers can provide massive strike capability within minutes. The Battle of Midway was so important in this respect because the Japanese sent their carriers out front and their battleships to the back, while the US keep their carriers in the back and their battleships to the front. Guess who got the pounding?
How many ways could we sink a target that size? Let's see... cruise missles, super-sonic torpedoes, and soon rail guns.
Actually, it would take something the size of a nuke (or a lucky hit) to sink a carrier. Take a look at how many hits the Yorktown and Essex class ships took during WWII. Now note that the current carriers are over three times their size, with much better survivability. Also, Railguns suffer from a traditional problem with projectiles: lack of collateral damage. Most bullets are designed to flatten and spread out as they hit the target. This allows them to maximize damage over a larger area. In the end however, you still can't get a much larger hole than the projectile. (Although shotguns allow for a lot of "splash" damage.) So intend of causing the big BOOM everyone was hoping for, a railgun would most likely just put a relatively small hole in the ship. Thus you'd need to aim for critical areas instead of recklessly lobbing them like with missiles.
While one could argue about putting a price tag on doing things right, this answer does seem to make the most sense. If you're firing at stationary targets like radar installations and Air Bases, a few railgun ships would significantly help in reducing enemy abilities before charging in. That being said, I hope like hell they bring a few tankers along. With the energy requirements of these weapon systems, they're going to need all the fuel they can get!
BTW, a few more numbers. The US's most advanced Destroyers in service currently are capable of putting out a maximum of ~75MW. The Gas Turbines on the new Swedish Ship "Visby" are capable of a maximum military power of 4MW per turbine. That company's largest Turbines put out only 7MW per.
Cause YOU know how much energy each of those weapons would draw compared to a reactor that would fit on the ship?
A fair enough answer. I have to mostly guess at the power requirements due to the exact design being classified, but there is a lower ceiling on how much power these things can use. The laws of physics don't allow you to obtain energy for free. It HAS to come from somewhere.
One gentlemen was kind enough to provide some numbers on energy delivered to a target. 16.9 MJ is tremendous in of itself, and would require the full output of a gas turbine to power. There is a trick however. The poster gave the figure in energy delivered to the target. The actual launch energy must be significantly higher for it to reach its destination. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 10x the 16.9 MJ is actually a low figure.
Assuming that it takes 10x the energy for launch, you are now requiring 169 MJ of energy to launch a single projectile. That's one HELL of a lot of energy. Even if we assume that you have several Gas Turbines to cover the energy costs, you still have the issue of fuel. Given that kerosine has an energy density of 36.8 MJ/liter, you'll easily burn through about 4.5 litres of fuel for every launch. (Probably a lot more due to inefficiencies.) That may not seem like much, but once the ship is out of fuel, it can't maneuver and it can't power its weapon systems. In other words, if these ships were nuclear powered, they could stay in a fight much longer (having MONTHS to YEARS worth of power with all systems at maximum draw) instead of bowing out after only an hour or so of fighting.
One thing no one seemed to mention is that rail-guns can be resupplied at sea. In order for missiles to be resupplied, the ship has to come back to port.
Pardon me while I ask an obvious question, but why not? I can understand that larger rockets might require fitting inside their launchers. These are also something of one shot rockets. But what about smaller missiles? The warhead might not be as powerful, but you're exchanging a less powerful warhead for a higher rate of fire. Higher rate of fire means that you can saturate the enemy's countermeasures and guarantee at least a few hits. If you pummel him long enough and hard enough, he'll sink just as surely as firing a few big rockets at him.
Is it? All that energy has to come from somewhere. If you're charging your railgun with a few hundred gigajoules of energy, you're burning a LOT of fuel. For a Nuclear Vessel, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. It would simply need to carry a bit more material, or double its refueling stops. (e.g. Instead of every 10 years, they refuel every 5 years.) But these ships are Gas Turbine powered.
rate of fire
This one I definitely don't follow. Where's the energy coming from for a high rate of fire? Does the captain have to order a pre-charge cycle? Would that mean that he'd be able to fire 5-10 shells before having to wait for a 10-20 minute recharge cycle? That's going to have a serious impact on the ship's tactical ability.
Also a bit of safety thrown in- the rail gun rounds require no propellants (read: explosives), so there's no the problem of a hit to a turret sparking off a chain reaction of explosions.
Fair enough. Magazine hits are always a big problem. But couldn't one argue that the magazine storage no longer matters when fighting battles with such powerful weapons? If you're hit by a nuke/railgun/maser/large missile, your ship is dead anyway.
What this effectively does is put the firepower & range of the battleships into the smaller ships.
This is definitely nice. But what I'd like to know is if military doctrine has swung back in the direction of Battleships? AFAIK, the invention of the Aircraft Carrier made Battleships obsolete. Since a carrier can launch planes at nearly any range (even outside the 250 miles of the Railgun), it has far better strike capability. In addition, pilots provide intelligence to both the offensive weapons and evasive maneuvers that not even a missile can achieve.
Not to mention that France only has ONE active aircraft carrier (Charles de Gaulle) which is about 1/4th the size of a standard US carrier. How pathetic is that? At least they used Nuclear instead of Diesel.
Speaking of which, I don't understand why they don't simply fit these destroyers with Nuclear Power Plants instead of Gas Turbines. Sure, the turbines are powerful, but they won't provide the same amount of power draw that nuclear plants can. I'd hate to be the captain who has to choose between firing the Railgun, the Maser, or moving the ship. If he was captaining a Nuclear ship, he could order all three options at the same time!
What I'd like to know is, what kind of tactical advantage does a railgun bring? Sure, it can hit a target some 200+ miles out, but so can a missile. Missiles also have the advantage of being self-guided. All this thing is, is a way to build a more powerful battleship. And yet, the U.S. has put all of its Battleships on active reserve. In their place, they've been deploying missile carriers at a lower cost and higher degree of flexibility.
In short, what does the railgun bring to a Real World(TM) battle?
The Romulans had Plasma Torps, but I think that was a later development after the first Romulan war.
It was actually first deployed in the ST:TOS episode "Balance of Terror". The Romulans used their new super-weapon (along with their secret cloaking device) to go around blowing up Federation starbases.
Interesting to note, according to the "old" star trek material I have, namely the Star Fleet Tech manual printed in the 1970's.
Wasn't that the one that had an explanation of 3D chess, and claimed that McCoy was well versed in Chiropractics? I actually thought that was a really cool book, but since it was out of print, I had to check it out from the library.:-(
The Romulan war was ended and the Netrual zone treaty negotiated using communications and the Federation and Romulan didn't meet face-to-face. Sounds like a nasty war.:)
This was actually well established in "Balance of Terror". If you remember, none of the crew knew what Romulans looked like. When their spycam revealed that the Romulans looked like Vulcans, the navigator-of-the-week accused Spock of being a spy.
Everyone knows that in the future, man will evolve without a penis. Thusly, your comment of rape is completely unsupportable!;)
Well, at least that explains Archer. Thank God they fixed that by the time they gave Kirk a Starship. I mean, who would want to give a starship to a Captain with no balls?! Oh, wait...
Seriously, you make a look for good points!
Thank you! I think...:-)
Seriously, just watching the old episodes of TOS would have given B&B some of these ideas. However, the rest of them come from my never ending quest to inform people that we already have the technology to go Interplanetary, and with a little development, Interstellar. If you're curious, google "NERVA Rocket", "Orion Nuclear", and "Sea Dragon Rocket" for stuff we already did much of the R&D on. Google "Nuclear Salt Water Rocket" and "Deadalus Rocket" for even more advanced designs. Once we're in space, then we'll have a solution to the problem of Antimatter.
Right now Antimatter requires a LOT of energy to create a few particles per hour. Position a station closer to the Sun, and you could tap it for all the energy you need. Antimatter could become the next fuel storage method, and the solution to building C-Ships (ships that travel at near light-speed). If we ever figure out the problem of creating a wormhole (with exotic matter or otherwise), we could create a set of "Jump Gates" or "Stargates" between nearby Solar Systems. Send out a C-Ship for a 4-8 year trip (probabaly about a year subjective) and have them set up the remote gate. Voila, instant star travel.
Where this leads into Enterprise is a series of TV movies I've been conjuring up in my head. (Not that it will ever see the light of day, but...) The first movie would deal with the social-poltical ramifications of building the first manned Nuclear Space Ship. It would be an excellent opportunity for drama as you have two sides (for and against) at each other's throats. It would finish with the craft blasting off.
The second movie would deal with colonizing Mars, and how Earth responds as the excitement dies down. Could Mars colonists prove that Mars is a worth while investment?
The third movie would deal with the new Solar economy as mining, trading, and cruise ships become the new economic boom. (Similar to the Industrial Revolution.) Of course, political unrest by the various colonies and traders could start the first Solar War.
The forth movie would peer into the far future where we use C-Ships to travel from star to star, setting up new Wormhole Gates along the way. Throw in some standard "something's gone wrong, and it's probably ancient aliens" syndrome, and you've got the makings of a Sci-Fi movie that both entertains and gives a realistic view of what we might one day achieve.
Straining my memory here, but I think it was "Balance of Power" where an entire planet went Nazi.
Whoops! The Nazi episode is "Patterns of Force", and I just verified that the planet did indeed fire a nuke. The Romulan episode was "Balance of Power".
Didn't Spock once describe this historically, in TOS referring to back before anyone had phasers and photon-torpedoes?
I do believe it was mentioned in the Episode about Romulan Plasma Torpedos. Especially since the "navigator of the week" blew up in a fit of rage about how "those bastards killed innocent people during the war".
And didn't some lesser-developed planet once launch nuke tipped missiles at them once?
Straining my memory here, but I think it was "Balance of Power" where an entire planet went Nazi.
...and another episode where some succubus type women was aboard the ship. I think there was some lesbo sexual tension on the later, maybe even a lesbo kiss.
That sounds like "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds". Come on? You didn't laugh your butt off at that one? That was one of the best pieces of TV in history!
BTW, in case you don't remember, the plot was that the FireFly crew took a contract to stop some bandits. After the ship takes off, they find a stowaway who was supposedly awarded as a wife to the Captain as part of his payment. Given how private the Captain is, the whole situation becomes hilarious as he tries to avoid her. In the end, it turns out that she was a professional seductress who was hired to lure the FireFly into a trap where it would be broken down for salvage.
I commented that the promised spec $/lbs payload (the important factor for any transport system, after security) was blown by a factor of close to a hundred(!!). NASA knew their launch assumptions where totally unrealistic, which the promised launch costs where based on.
You answered "Is it the engineers' fault that the cargo for a shuttle flight per week just didn't exist?"
(Maybe it lives up to some revised spec from the middle of the project, but that wasn't your point.)
The Shuttle was all ABOUT revised specs. At every stage of development, the government and air force changed the specs. The engineers who worked for NASA delivered a craft that was light years ahead of any other space vehicle of the time. It STILL stands as the most advanced space vehicle ever to fly. (The Buran was somewhat more advanced, but that was primarly because they learned from NASA's mistakes.) Now you can huff and puff all you want about individual launch costs, but the engineers built what they were told to build. It failed because it simply wasn't a viable craft for so early in the economic development of space hardware.
Your answer still isn't relevant to my point. I don't think you can answer.
No, my answer is simply that you have politics on one hand who are double dealing and everyone trying to get what THEY want, then you have engineers on the other who do their best to deliver what is asked of them. No, the shuttle is not cost effective. In fact, most of the figures were for previous designs instead of the final design. For example, you'll note that the robot tug that was supposed to compliment the Shuttle was never built. The Shuttle COULD have been cost effective if they'd chosen ONE concept and stuck with it. Instead they wasted some of the most powerful engines in existance on weight for both Cargo and Humans.
I'm not going to discuss the horrendous costs of the Space Station, etc. You lost your credibility in the DC-X thread, too. I have better things to do.
Did someone piss in your corn flakes today? Would you like me to believe that someone had intentionally rigged the DC-Y landing gear to fail? Sorry, but I don't. I do believe that NASA handled the thing in a pretty bone-headed way. But keep in mind that NASA managed to also crash their pride and joy, the X-33. I spoke with a gentlemen who was working on the project at the time. Surfice it to say that he was less than generous to the guy who was remote piloting it when it hit the ground.
We'd lose the excitement of the dog fight, and instead get something more like Das Boot in space. Which I'm not saying wouldn't be cool.
Having sat through DS9's idea of war, Voyager's idea of war, and now Enterprise's idea of war, I have one thing to say: Dogfighting is highly overrated.
In fact, TOS did it right. If you remember, war scenes would generally be about positioning the Enterprise correctly, then firing off volleys as the ships attempted to maneuver at warp speeds. TNG brought the Dog Fighting concept up, but it really did play out like cannons at a distance.
Then we get DS9. Where we see them do loop-de-loops on one hand, then attempts to "flank" the enemy on another. (Who the hell was writing this diatribe?) While I wasn't keen on the Battlestar Galactica remake, they at least did this right. Both sides launched their missiles across the void, and you hoped like hell most of them missed. (Although armor helps.)
My beef with the technology in Enterprise is that it is static and boring. When I first learned of the premise of Enterprise, there was something I was really looking forward to about it but which hasn't happened. I just assumed that one of the most interesting things about a ST prequel would be seeing how the early Federation learned about new technologies, tried to adopt them, made lots of mistakes, and slowly improved upon them.
What? Like the "forcefield-invented-by-Reed" episode, or the "Phase-Cannons-invented-by-Tucker" episode? Yeah, there was a lot of potential there, but B&B pissed it away.
For example, I though it would be really cool if the early Enterprise eventually gets some deflector shields, but they suck and they're always breaking.
Actually, I'd rather have seen something more contemporary. The torpedos were the right idea, but they were pop-caps. They SHOULD have been fighting space battles the way God intended them to be fought: With Nuclear Warheads! By God, it would have been cool to see them plotting the trajectory of each warhead, and sweating bullets as each enemy torpedo barely missed! It would have been even better if the only protection they had was some form of radiation shielding. I mean, BLOW A FEW HOLES IN THE THING.
When the Romulan War broke out (oh wait, they screwed that up), you would have seen the Enterprise fighting side by side with her less advanced counterparts, and watched in horror as friends made over the last few episodes bit the dust. Make it like WWII! Bring back the combined thrill and horror of what a REAL war is like. Nooooo, instead we have to hold onto Shields, Phasers, Photon Torpedos, Romulan Cloaking Devices (WTF?), and other future goodies. Oh, and the Borg have to show up to make things interesting. And the Science officer has to wear a Catsuit. (Do you what kinds of problems that would cause on a REAL ship like Enterprise? You'd constantly be having to deal with situations of attempted rape!)
Did you watch "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds"? It only got better after that, with truly great pieces of cinema like "Out of Gas". Also, you've got to love how Captain Reynolds handles the hostage situation in the Pilot episode. (Which was aired LAST for some stupid reason.) Most people judge the show by the Train Heist episode and the Reavers Episode because they were aired first. However, they were also the worst episodes of the series. Except for when the Captain kicked the bad guy into the engine. Oh, yeah. No pansy ass Janeway here!;-)
I sincerely hope we weren't talking Sun/Earth Lagrange points! But if we were, my apologies to you....
Indeed, I was. I tend not to even think about the Moon's Lagrange points. I guess I've always considered the Moon's pull to be too weak to be of much use in stabilizing a station there. i.e. It would be too easy to accidently drift out of the gravitational "lock-in". OTOH, the Earth/Moon L1 point was featured in Jules Verne's "A Trip from the Earth to the Moon" and its "sequel", so I guess I should remember it better than that.
The early Seasons were definitely painful, but things did get a bit better when 7 of 9 came on. Despite the fact that they hired her for T&A, she was the only character who had a moral dilemma more interesting than "I can remember being born! No, really." That being said, there were really only two REALLY GOOD episodes of Voyager:
Year of Hell and Equinox
Damn fine bit of entertainment, even if the former had dumb references to the Titanic and a big reset button at the end.
The DC-X (as explained in the book, "Lost In Space", about the debacle that IS NASA management) did not explode due to inherent problems with the design.
My point is not that it exploded due to an inherent problem, but that both the DC-X and that X-33 were destroyed, and NASA simply didn't have a budget to build another one. If they had a *focused* project with real funding, a crash would have been nothing more than a setback. (After all, you have to expect that some things will go wrong.)
DC-X was then 'purchased' (taken over) by NASA and away from the engineers that had designed and built it, put in the hands of people with no experience base with the technology / platform, and then run through a set of "tests" that of course failed due to improper manual ground procedures followed by the improperly trained NASA 'ground staff'.
As I said before, never attribute to malice when stupidity will do. In fact, one of NASA's biggest problems was the "brain drain" they experienced in the 90's. Since Clinton pretty much guaranteed that the space program was going to go nowhere, and NASA engineering salaries were slowly dropping, all the smart people moved on to the private sector.
It's even more frustrating when you realize that we have the technology today to cheaply lift thousands of tons per launch, and build craft that could cruise around the Solar System at high speeds. Of course, Nixon's administration didn't WANT heavy lift vehicles. They wanted a token space program that wouldn't drain anything from the US Budget. In doing so, he stomped on the hopes and dreams of millions of people. Instead of Space Stations, Moon Bases, and Mars Flights, we got the Space Shuttle. An amazingly engineered turkey that couldn't decide if it was built for Cargo, Human Transport, or Military Spy Missions. And since it tried to shortcut economic development, the craft failed at ALL of its purposes. Special, isn't it?
The Shuttle as designed didn't have the turnaround for that. By a very large margin.
The politicians wanted to stretch the cost of the Shuttle over time, so the Shuttle was designed with a slow turnaround. It was also designed so that an Overhaul could put it back on track for fast turnarounds. Too bad that not even one payload per month materialized.
BTW, the one shuttle launch per week would have been stretched out across the fleet. This would give the shuttle a four week turnaround time instead of a one week turnaround time.
And yes, DC-Y's use of totally new technologies might have been stupidity and not a way to kill the project. Are you arguing that is better?
No, I'm not arguing that it was a good decision. I'm arguing that the government couldn't be bothered to fund NASA for development of individual technologies. Instead NASA decided to apply their "faster, better, cheaper" concept and got burned when it didn't work. Even more frustrating is that it would have been impossible for the X-33 to fly if ALL the technologies didn't work out right the first time. That kind of sucks when you consider the the Space Shuttle at least had some weight to give during the safety upgrades.
You complain about killing useless, totally overexpensive, systems after decades? I agree, it should have been done earlier. It's sad for humanity when the US' space program is mismanaged.
How was Space Station Freedom over-expensive and useless? It would have made Moon and Mars trips far more cost effective than a straight-from-earth rocket. The only reason why the ISS is useless for this purpose was because they put it in the wrong orbit so that the Russians could reach it.
Not that he was a bad character, I always thought the Picard-Q fight was the brightest point in the series, Picard's humanity being a perfect foil to Q's view of humans as worthless.
Ah yes, one of my favorite exchanges was probably from the worst Q episode ever (Hide and Q):
Picard: Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction. "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension , how like a god..."
Are you seriously arguing that the Shuttle "met the specs"??:-)
It met the engineering specs. X amount of cargo, hypersonic cross range ability, variable passenger load, horizontal landing, etc. Is it the engineers' fault that the cargo for a shuttle flight per week just didn't exist?
Then we have the way that NASA threw their weight around (DC-X, etc) to kill potential competition to the Shuttle. It has maimed the US space program for decades, but lots of jobs depends upon the shuttle...
The DC-X blew up. So did the X-33. Given that you should never attribute malice where stupidity would do, I'd say that the real problem was a lack of focus by NASA. As an example, the X-33 was almost entirely composed of untested technology (hydrogen slush, composite tanks, lifting body design, etc.). Was that really wise?
Besides, NASA's stumbling around comes very much from the constant scaling back of their programs. Regean and Bush gave the go ahead for Space Station Freedom, a real layover point for trips to the moon and Mars. Clinton scaled back the program and forced NASA into the whole "International Space Station" concept. Now the Space Station is as useless as the Space Shuttle. How is anything supposed to get done if all the projects keep getting killed?
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We started to learn this in WWII, the last time carriers were involved in naval battles (to my knowledge). Carriers are too big, too expensive, and too easy to hit. Not that I'm defending the French's flaccid carrier fleet, but carrier size isn't what I'd use as penis surrogate when comparing navies.
Um, hello? What the Battle of Midway and many other engagements taught us is that the carrier is a mobile weapons platform with a strike range far beyond any conventional missile. The distances have increased, but keeping the carrier out of the line of fire has always been a priority. The screening ships are supposed to handle scouting and direct engagements. While they keep the enemy at bay, the carriers can provide massive strike capability within minutes. The Battle of Midway was so important in this respect because the Japanese sent their carriers out front and their battleships to the back, while the US keep their carriers in the back and their battleships to the front. Guess who got the pounding?
How many ways could we sink a target that size? Let's see... cruise missles, super-sonic torpedoes, and soon rail guns.
Actually, it would take something the size of a nuke (or a lucky hit) to sink a carrier. Take a look at how many hits the Yorktown and Essex class ships took during WWII. Now note that the current carriers are over three times their size, with much better survivability. Also, Railguns suffer from a traditional problem with projectiles: lack of collateral damage. Most bullets are designed to flatten and spread out as they hit the target. This allows them to maximize damage over a larger area. In the end however, you still can't get a much larger hole than the projectile. (Although shotguns allow for a lot of "splash" damage.) So intend of causing the big BOOM everyone was hoping for, a railgun would most likely just put a relatively small hole in the ship. Thus you'd need to aim for critical areas instead of recklessly lobbing them like with missiles.
While one could argue about putting a price tag on doing things right, this answer does seem to make the most sense. If you're firing at stationary targets like radar installations and Air Bases, a few railgun ships would significantly help in reducing enemy abilities before charging in. That being said, I hope like hell they bring a few tankers along. With the energy requirements of these weapon systems, they're going to need all the fuel they can get!
BTW, a few more numbers. The US's most advanced Destroyers in service currently are capable of putting out a maximum of ~75MW. The Gas Turbines on the new Swedish Ship "Visby" are capable of a maximum military power of 4MW per turbine. That company's largest Turbines put out only 7MW per.
Cause YOU know how much energy each of those weapons would draw compared to a reactor that would fit on the ship?
A fair enough answer. I have to mostly guess at the power requirements due to the exact design being classified, but there is a lower ceiling on how much power these things can use. The laws of physics don't allow you to obtain energy for free. It HAS to come from somewhere.
One gentlemen was kind enough to provide some numbers on energy delivered to a target. 16.9 MJ is tremendous in of itself, and would require the full output of a gas turbine to power. There is a trick however. The poster gave the figure in energy delivered to the target. The actual launch energy must be significantly higher for it to reach its destination. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 10x the 16.9 MJ is actually a low figure.
Assuming that it takes 10x the energy for launch, you are now requiring 169 MJ of energy to launch a single projectile. That's one HELL of a lot of energy. Even if we assume that you have several Gas Turbines to cover the energy costs, you still have the issue of fuel. Given that kerosine has an energy density of 36.8 MJ/liter, you'll easily burn through about 4.5 litres of fuel for every launch. (Probably a lot more due to inefficiencies.) That may not seem like much, but once the ship is out of fuel, it can't maneuver and it can't power its weapon systems. In other words, if these ships were nuclear powered, they could stay in a fight much longer (having MONTHS to YEARS worth of power with all systems at maximum draw) instead of bowing out after only an hour or so of fighting.
One thing no one seemed to mention is that rail-guns can be resupplied at sea. In order for missiles to be resupplied, the ship has to come back to port.
Pardon me while I ask an obvious question, but why not? I can understand that larger rockets might require fitting inside their launchers. These are also something of one shot rockets. But what about smaller missiles? The warhead might not be as powerful, but you're exchanging a less powerful warhead for a higher rate of fire. Higher rate of fire means that you can saturate the enemy's countermeasures and guarantee at least a few hits. If you pummel him long enough and hard enough, he'll sink just as surely as firing a few big rockets at him.
Cost effectiveness
Is it? All that energy has to come from somewhere. If you're charging your railgun with a few hundred gigajoules of energy, you're burning a LOT of fuel. For a Nuclear Vessel, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. It would simply need to carry a bit more material, or double its refueling stops. (e.g. Instead of every 10 years, they refuel every 5 years.) But these ships are Gas Turbine powered.
rate of fire
This one I definitely don't follow. Where's the energy coming from for a high rate of fire? Does the captain have to order a pre-charge cycle? Would that mean that he'd be able to fire 5-10 shells before having to wait for a 10-20 minute recharge cycle? That's going to have a serious impact on the ship's tactical ability.
Also a bit of safety thrown in- the rail gun rounds require no propellants (read: explosives), so there's no the problem of a hit to a turret sparking off a chain reaction of explosions.
Fair enough. Magazine hits are always a big problem. But couldn't one argue that the magazine storage no longer matters when fighting battles with such powerful weapons? If you're hit by a nuke/railgun/maser/large missile, your ship is dead anyway.
What this effectively does is put the firepower & range of the battleships into the smaller ships.
This is definitely nice. But what I'd like to know is if military doctrine has swung back in the direction of Battleships? AFAIK, the invention of the Aircraft Carrier made Battleships obsolete. Since a carrier can launch planes at nearly any range (even outside the 250 miles of the Railgun), it has far better strike capability. In addition, pilots provide intelligence to both the offensive weapons and evasive maneuvers that not even a missile can achieve.
nope, that would be *France*.
Not to mention that France only has ONE active aircraft carrier (Charles de Gaulle) which is about 1/4th the size of a standard US carrier. How pathetic is that? At least they used Nuclear instead of Diesel.
Speaking of which, I don't understand why they don't simply fit these destroyers with Nuclear Power Plants instead of Gas Turbines. Sure, the turbines are powerful, but they won't provide the same amount of power draw that nuclear plants can. I'd hate to be the captain who has to choose between firing the Railgun, the Maser, or moving the ship. If he was captaining a Nuclear ship, he could order all three options at the same time!
What I'd like to know is, what kind of tactical advantage does a railgun bring? Sure, it can hit a target some 200+ miles out, but so can a missile. Missiles also have the advantage of being self-guided. All this thing is, is a way to build a more powerful battleship. And yet, the U.S. has put all of its Battleships on active reserve. In their place, they've been deploying missile carriers at a lower cost and higher degree of flexibility.
In short, what does the railgun bring to a Real World(TM) battle?
The Romulans had Plasma Torps, but I think that was a later development after the first Romulan war.
:-(
:)
It was actually first deployed in the ST:TOS episode "Balance of Terror". The Romulans used their new super-weapon (along with their secret cloaking device) to go around blowing up Federation starbases.
Interesting to note, according to the "old" star trek material I have, namely the Star Fleet Tech manual printed in the 1970's.
Wasn't that the one that had an explanation of 3D chess, and claimed that McCoy was well versed in Chiropractics? I actually thought that was a really cool book, but since it was out of print, I had to check it out from the library.
The Romulan war was ended and the Netrual zone treaty negotiated using communications and the Federation and Romulan didn't meet face-to-face. Sounds like a nasty war.
This was actually well established in "Balance of Terror". If you remember, none of the crew knew what Romulans looked like. When their spycam revealed that the Romulans looked like Vulcans, the navigator-of-the-week accused Spock of being a spy.
Everyone knows that in the future, man will evolve without a penis. Thusly, your comment of rape is completely unsupportable! ;)
:-)
Well, at least that explains Archer. Thank God they fixed that by the time they gave Kirk a Starship. I mean, who would want to give a starship to a Captain with no balls?! Oh, wait...
Seriously, you make a look for good points!
Thank you! I think...
Seriously, just watching the old episodes of TOS would have given B&B some of these ideas. However, the rest of them come from my never ending quest to inform people that we already have the technology to go Interplanetary, and with a little development, Interstellar. If you're curious, google "NERVA Rocket", "Orion Nuclear", and "Sea Dragon Rocket" for stuff we already did much of the R&D on. Google "Nuclear Salt Water Rocket" and "Deadalus Rocket" for even more advanced designs. Once we're in space, then we'll have a solution to the problem of Antimatter.
Right now Antimatter requires a LOT of energy to create a few particles per hour. Position a station closer to the Sun, and you could tap it for all the energy you need. Antimatter could become the next fuel storage method, and the solution to building C-Ships (ships that travel at near light-speed). If we ever figure out the problem of creating a wormhole (with exotic matter or otherwise), we could create a set of "Jump Gates" or "Stargates" between nearby Solar Systems. Send out a C-Ship for a 4-8 year trip (probabaly about a year subjective) and have them set up the remote gate. Voila, instant star travel.
Where this leads into Enterprise is a series of TV movies I've been conjuring up in my head. (Not that it will ever see the light of day, but...) The first movie would deal with the social-poltical ramifications of building the first manned Nuclear Space Ship. It would be an excellent opportunity for drama as you have two sides (for and against) at each other's throats. It would finish with the craft blasting off.
The second movie would deal with colonizing Mars, and how Earth responds as the excitement dies down. Could Mars colonists prove that Mars is a worth while investment?
The third movie would deal with the new Solar economy as mining, trading, and cruise ships become the new economic boom. (Similar to the Industrial Revolution.) Of course, political unrest by the various colonies and traders could start the first Solar War.
The forth movie would peer into the far future where we use C-Ships to travel from star to star, setting up new Wormhole Gates along the way. Throw in some standard "something's gone wrong, and it's probably ancient aliens" syndrome, and you've got the makings of a Sci-Fi movie that both entertains and gives a realistic view of what we might one day achieve.
Straining my memory here, but I think it was "Balance of Power" where an entire planet went Nazi.
Whoops! The Nazi episode is "Patterns of Force", and I just verified that the planet did indeed fire a nuke. The Romulan episode was "Balance of Power".
Didn't Spock once describe this historically, in TOS referring to back before anyone had phasers and photon-torpedoes?
I do believe it was mentioned in the Episode about Romulan Plasma Torpedos. Especially since the "navigator of the week" blew up in a fit of rage about how "those bastards killed innocent people during the war".
And didn't some lesser-developed planet once launch nuke tipped missiles at them once?
Straining my memory here, but I think it was "Balance of Power" where an entire planet went Nazi.
...and another episode where some succubus type women was aboard the ship. I think there was some lesbo sexual tension on the later, maybe even a lesbo kiss.
That sounds like "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds". Come on? You didn't laugh your butt off at that one? That was one of the best pieces of TV in history!
BTW, in case you don't remember, the plot was that the FireFly crew took a contract to stop some bandits. After the ship takes off, they find a stowaway who was supposedly awarded as a wife to the Captain as part of his payment. Given how private the Captain is, the whole situation becomes hilarious as he tries to avoid her. In the end, it turns out that she was a professional seductress who was hired to lure the FireFly into a trap where it would be broken down for salvage.
I commented that the promised spec $/lbs payload (the important factor for any transport system, after security) was blown by a factor of close to a hundred(!!). NASA knew their launch assumptions where totally unrealistic, which the promised launch costs where based on.
You answered "Is it the engineers' fault that the cargo for a shuttle flight per week just didn't exist?"
(Maybe it lives up to some revised spec from the middle of the project, but that wasn't your point.)
The Shuttle was all ABOUT revised specs. At every stage of development, the government and air force changed the specs. The engineers who worked for NASA delivered a craft that was light years ahead of any other space vehicle of the time. It STILL stands as the most advanced space vehicle ever to fly. (The Buran was somewhat more advanced, but that was primarly because they learned from NASA's mistakes.) Now you can huff and puff all you want about individual launch costs, but the engineers built what they were told to build. It failed because it simply wasn't a viable craft for so early in the economic development of space hardware.
Your answer still isn't relevant to my point. I don't think you can answer.
No, my answer is simply that you have politics on one hand who are double dealing and everyone trying to get what THEY want, then you have engineers on the other who do their best to deliver what is asked of them. No, the shuttle is not cost effective. In fact, most of the figures were for previous designs instead of the final design. For example, you'll note that the robot tug that was supposed to compliment the Shuttle was never built. The Shuttle COULD have been cost effective if they'd chosen ONE concept and stuck with it. Instead they wasted some of the most powerful engines in existance on weight for both Cargo and Humans.
I'm not going to discuss the horrendous costs of the Space Station, etc. You lost your credibility in the DC-X thread, too. I have better things to do.
Did someone piss in your corn flakes today? Would you like me to believe that someone had intentionally rigged the DC-Y landing gear to fail? Sorry, but I don't. I do believe that NASA handled the thing in a pretty bone-headed way. But keep in mind that NASA managed to also crash their pride and joy, the X-33. I spoke with a gentlemen who was working on the project at the time. Surfice it to say that he was less than generous to the guy who was remote piloting it when it hit the ground.
Not 100% sure, but I think you might want to look up "diatribe." I don't think it means what you think it means.
:-)
From dictionary.com:
A prolonged or exhaustive discussion; especially, an acrimonious or invective harangue; a strain of abusive or railing language;
Although I was actually referring to the DS9 scripts of the battles as diatribe, I did misuse the word in my zeal.
We'd lose the excitement of the dog fight, and instead get something more like Das Boot in space. Which I'm not saying wouldn't be cool.
Having sat through DS9's idea of war, Voyager's idea of war, and now Enterprise's idea of war, I have one thing to say: Dogfighting is highly overrated.
In fact, TOS did it right. If you remember, war scenes would generally be about positioning the Enterprise correctly, then firing off volleys as the ships attempted to maneuver at warp speeds. TNG brought the Dog Fighting concept up, but it really did play out like cannons at a distance.
Then we get DS9. Where we see them do loop-de-loops on one hand, then attempts to "flank" the enemy on another. (Who the hell was writing this diatribe?) While I wasn't keen on the Battlestar Galactica remake, they at least did this right. Both sides launched their missiles across the void, and you hoped like hell most of them missed. (Although armor helps.)
My beef with the technology in Enterprise is that it is static and boring. When I first learned of the premise of Enterprise, there was something I was really looking forward to about it but which hasn't happened. I just assumed that one of the most interesting things about a ST prequel would be seeing how the early Federation learned about new technologies, tried to adopt them, made lots of mistakes, and slowly improved upon them.
What? Like the "forcefield-invented-by-Reed" episode, or the "Phase-Cannons-invented-by-Tucker" episode? Yeah, there was a lot of potential there, but B&B pissed it away.
For example, I though it would be really cool if the early Enterprise eventually gets some deflector shields, but they suck and they're always breaking.
Actually, I'd rather have seen something more contemporary. The torpedos were the right idea, but they were pop-caps. They SHOULD have been fighting space battles the way God intended them to be fought: With Nuclear Warheads! By God, it would have been cool to see them plotting the trajectory of each warhead, and sweating bullets as each enemy torpedo barely missed! It would have been even better if the only protection they had was some form of radiation shielding. I mean, BLOW A FEW HOLES IN THE THING.
When the Romulan War broke out (oh wait, they screwed that up), you would have seen the Enterprise fighting side by side with her less advanced counterparts, and watched in horror as friends made over the last few episodes bit the dust. Make it like WWII! Bring back the combined thrill and horror of what a REAL war is like. Nooooo, instead we have to hold onto Shields, Phasers, Photon Torpedos, Romulan Cloaking Devices (WTF?), and other future goodies. Oh, and the Borg have to show up to make things interesting. And the Science officer has to wear a Catsuit. (Do you what kinds of problems that would cause on a REAL ship like Enterprise? You'd constantly be having to deal with situations of attempted rape!)
Bah. Enterprise. Horrible garbage.
Did you watch "Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds"? It only got better after that, with truly great pieces of cinema like "Out of Gas". Also, you've got to love how Captain Reynolds handles the hostage situation in the Pilot episode. (Which was aired LAST for some stupid reason.) Most people judge the show by the Train Heist episode and the Reavers Episode because they were aired first. However, they were also the worst episodes of the series. Except for when the Captain kicked the bad guy into the engine. Oh, yeah. No pansy ass Janeway here! ;-)
I sincerely hope we weren't talking Sun/Earth Lagrange points! But if we were, my apologies to you....
Indeed, I was. I tend not to even think about the Moon's Lagrange points. I guess I've always considered the Moon's pull to be too weak to be of much use in stabilizing a station there. i.e. It would be too easy to accidently drift out of the gravitational "lock-in". OTOH, the Earth/Moon L1 point was featured in Jules Verne's "A Trip from the Earth to the Moon" and its "sequel", so I guess I should remember it better than that.
The early Seasons were definitely painful, but things did get a bit better when 7 of 9 came on. Despite the fact that they hired her for T&A, she was the only character who had a moral dilemma more interesting than "I can remember being born! No, really." That being said, there were really only two REALLY GOOD episodes of Voyager:
Year of Hell and Equinox
Damn fine bit of entertainment, even if the former had dumb references to the Titanic and a big reset button at the end.
The DC-X (as explained in the book, "Lost In Space", about the debacle that IS NASA management) did not explode due to inherent problems with the design.
My point is not that it exploded due to an inherent problem, but that both the DC-X and that X-33 were destroyed, and NASA simply didn't have a budget to build another one. If they had a *focused* project with real funding, a crash would have been nothing more than a setback. (After all, you have to expect that some things will go wrong.)
DC-X was then 'purchased' (taken over) by NASA and away from the engineers that had designed and built it, put in the hands of people with no experience base with the technology / platform, and then run through a set of "tests" that of course failed due to improper manual ground procedures followed by the improperly trained NASA 'ground staff'.
As I said before, never attribute to malice when stupidity will do. In fact, one of NASA's biggest problems was the "brain drain" they experienced in the 90's. Since Clinton pretty much guaranteed that the space program was going to go nowhere, and NASA engineering salaries were slowly dropping, all the smart people moved on to the private sector.
It's even more frustrating when you realize that we have the technology today to cheaply lift thousands of tons per launch, and build craft that could cruise around the Solar System at high speeds. Of course, Nixon's administration didn't WANT heavy lift vehicles. They wanted a token space program that wouldn't drain anything from the US Budget. In doing so, he stomped on the hopes and dreams of millions of people. Instead of Space Stations, Moon Bases, and Mars Flights, we got the Space Shuttle. An amazingly engineered turkey that couldn't decide if it was built for Cargo, Human Transport, or Military Spy Missions. And since it tried to shortcut economic development, the craft failed at ALL of its purposes. Special, isn't it?
The Shuttle as designed didn't have the turnaround for that. By a very large margin.
The politicians wanted to stretch the cost of the Shuttle over time, so the Shuttle was designed with a slow turnaround. It was also designed so that an Overhaul could put it back on track for fast turnarounds. Too bad that not even one payload per month materialized.
BTW, the one shuttle launch per week would have been stretched out across the fleet. This would give the shuttle a four week turnaround time instead of a one week turnaround time.
And yes, DC-Y's use of totally new technologies might have been stupidity and not a way to kill the project. Are you arguing that is better?
No, I'm not arguing that it was a good decision. I'm arguing that the government couldn't be bothered to fund NASA for development of individual technologies. Instead NASA decided to apply their "faster, better, cheaper" concept and got burned when it didn't work. Even more frustrating is that it would have been impossible for the X-33 to fly if ALL the technologies didn't work out right the first time. That kind of sucks when you consider the the Space Shuttle at least had some weight to give during the safety upgrades.
You complain about killing useless, totally overexpensive, systems after decades? I agree, it should have been done earlier. It's sad for humanity when the US' space program is mismanaged.
How was Space Station Freedom over-expensive and useless? It would have made Moon and Mars trips far more cost effective than a straight-from-earth rocket. The only reason why the ISS is useless for this purpose was because they put it in the wrong orbit so that the Russians could reach it.
See for yourself. L4 is 93,000,000 miles out. Or are we talking Earth/Moon L points? That would still be 200,000 miles out for L1.
Not that he was a bad character, I always thought the Picard-Q fight was the brightest point in the series, Picard's humanity being a perfect foil to Q's view of humans as worthless.
Ah yes, one of my favorite exchanges was probably from the worst Q episode ever (Hide and Q):
Picard: Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction. "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension , how like a god..."
I see us one day becoming that..."
Are you seriously arguing that the Shuttle "met the specs"?? :-)
It met the engineering specs. X amount of cargo, hypersonic cross range ability, variable passenger load, horizontal landing, etc. Is it the engineers' fault that the cargo for a shuttle flight per week just didn't exist?
Then we have the way that NASA threw their weight around (DC-X, etc) to kill potential competition to the Shuttle. It has maimed the US space program for decades, but lots of jobs depends upon the shuttle...
The DC-X blew up. So did the X-33. Given that you should never attribute malice where stupidity would do, I'd say that the real problem was a lack of focus by NASA. As an example, the X-33 was almost entirely composed of untested technology (hydrogen slush, composite tanks, lifting body design, etc.). Was that really wise?
Besides, NASA's stumbling around comes very much from the constant scaling back of their programs. Regean and Bush gave the go ahead for Space Station Freedom, a real layover point for trips to the moon and Mars. Clinton scaled back the program and forced NASA into the whole "International Space Station" concept. Now the Space Station is as useless as the Space Shuttle. How is anything supposed to get done if all the projects keep getting killed?