yeah but if the carrier can be killed indifferent to the airplane then you don't need to be worry about the airplane. If I can drop your carrier within its attack range then it can't get into attack range without exposing itself.
Apparently you've never remoted into a PC from your phone. It is entirely viable. The trick is to change the way the touch screen works depending on context. So for example in an app designed for the phone's interface you could have a 1:1 ratio of touch to the screen.
However, when you're dealing with a program that assumed a mouse or any kind of finer motor control of the cursor... it makes sense to instead insert a cursor on the screen and treat the screen as a virtual touchpad which doesn't have a 1:1 ratio of movement. The relevant factor would be looking at where the virtual cursor was at any given moment and then orienting from that point. It is perfectly viable and I do it all the time with RealVNC and other remote apps as well as certain virtualization technologies that I use on my phone that likewise emulate a PC environment within my phone.
Let me explain the value for you here... corporations have a lot of software that really was designed for a desktop. Most of it isn't that hardware intensive but they're not going to recode it for your phone. If the phone is compatible with the software natively then they don't have to recode it. They can just install the same software on your phone and it will work just as if your phone were a tiny laptop.
Add to that lots of consumer programs that are often lacking on smartphones. Name almost any program or feature and there is a program on the desktop that does it better. What is more, the same programs on the desktop are far more likely to be free.
Beyond that... GAMES. Tablet and smartphone games are shit. Complete and utter bullshit in fact.
Which is why nearly every game on my phone is an emulator.
I have an OTG cable that I plug into my phone so I can get a proper gamepad and then I play old favorites like Soul Reaver, various NeoGeo roms, old favorites from Nintendo, old favorites from Sega, and then you can't forget ScumVM which lets me play all the old Lucas Arts games like Monkey's Island, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, etc.
I'm sorry, but ALL the program pools on ALL the mobile devices are shallow and full of shit when compared to the desktop. I can be excluded to using programs on the desktop from ten years ago and they'll still shit all over anything on the tablet or smartphone.
Why can't I run photoshop 7 on my tablet? Why can't I run an old corporate dos database? Why can't I run Fallout 1/2?
In no case is the tablet not up to the challenge from a hardware stand point because PCs at the times when those programs came out had lower hardware specs then most modern tablets today.
You say the interface is wrong? That problem was already solved. And worst case, I'll just use a bluetooth mouse or my OTG cable. If I am at a bar or something then it is a lot easier to whip out a tiny bluetooth mouse then it is bring along my laptop everywhere.
Sometimes it is more then enough that you can show up and pound a target into splitters and then sail away.
What is more, what happens when you don't rule the seas? What happens when your fleet can be destroyed at the press of a button by an enemy weapons platform?
You treat the navy as if their control of the seas was either easy or can be taken for granted. I really don't know what you're trying to say here. Your entire position baffles me.
From what I can see some conversion was still required. I couldn't just take a desktop program and run it.
What is more, how many devices was it really deployed on? I'm seeing like... one.
If MS or Apple released a phone that just ran windows/OSX that would be great. Sure, tweak the interface to fit the formfactor and interface but otherwise... just let me run the same programs everywhere.
Neither was compatible with standard windows software. I couldn't install photoshop on either. I couldn't install an old dos database on either. I couldn't really do anything that wasn't expressly coded for them besides maybe run some java applet. And at this point, pretty much any OS can run java applets.
Do you have an actual example that proves me wrong? I'm inclined to throw an insult at you... not because I'm mad at you but because I've noticed that tends to inspire people to actually make an effort to try and prove me wrong.
So just assume I said my dad could beat up your dad or something... and make a real effort to propose a compelling counter argument.
Girl culture doesn't find coding cool and never will. You're going to have to create a subversive counter culture that is contemptuous or indifferent to mainstream girl culture... and then indoctrinate as many girls into it as possible.
Don't like the terms? Fuzzy wuzzy them up if it makes you feel warm inside. But that is what you'd have to do... unless you want to just accomplish nothing. Which is fine too I guess so long as you stop wasting taxpayer dollars to do it.
Sometimes people need to be connected to the visceral reality of what is going on. It is one thing to reference something in the paper with words... it is another to show the crackling flesh peel off a screaming human being as he burns to death.
A lot of people don't understand things if they just read about it. Just a fact. Even seeing it on the news blow by blow doesn't get everyone but it does clue most people in.
The only remainder are the idiots that need it to happen right in front of them to really grasp what is going on. And there's no way the news can practically do that.
So... yeah. I'm in favor of having whatever the news people gathered made available. By all means, put up disclaimers so people can't claim to be surprised by what they're about to see.
Those that say they were surprised... well, those are exactly the sorts of people I was talking about. They don't f'ing understand what they're reading. Suddenly when they're showed the images they are shocked to suddenly see what was obvious simply from the text. That they are shocked means they are the sort that don't understand.
A fair number of the people that do see the video but are not shocked are the last group that need it to happen in front of them.
And there is a group beyond this that needs it to happen to them to understand. Like... they can watch someone get tortured in front of them and they don't really process that it hurts unless you take the hot poker and push it through their own skin. Then suddenly "oh my god that hurts"... no shit.
So yeah. If we lived in a dictatorship then I'd say there was no point so long as the people running the society were people that could read or people saw the video. Then who cares what the public is fed so long as they do what they're told.
But in a democracy, people need to know. It isn't acceptable to be this ignorant.
In regards to ISIS... They're obviously worthy of death. But I personally am tired of the US being always tasked to do this sort of thing and then eating shit from our ingrate allies afterwards. I'm quite happy to have the regional powers deal with it themselves. Jordan etc can have a party with ISIS. The so called atrocities will be on their heads instead of ours. And to make my position clear, I don't consider it an atrocity when you kill 100,000 psychopaths any more then I consider it an atrocity to kill one. And I don't consider that an atrocity either. Someone might call me a monster or whatever for that. Meh. I reserve the right to judge my fellow man and I reserve the right to kill them when I feel it is appropriate.
That is a right human beings have had for millions of years and I really don't see what has changed to make that not so.
What makes the world civilized instead of barbaric is that there are more people willing to kill you for acting like a barbarian then acting like a civilized person. The instant the civilized are outnumbered by the barbarians, the civilized world is in trouble.
Historical solution to that issue was to build walls, motes, and get really good at killing barbarians trying to come over the walls.
I worry about this stuff making cars less reliable. I have a car that is pretty much 100 percent mechanical. I don't think there is any computerized anything in it that is relevant to it. I'd just assume keep it that way.
I like my tech as bolt ons to the car. Give me the GPS and the stereo and whatever. But I'd like the portion of the car that is a car to be a "car" and not a computer.
I don't trust this nonsense when I'm going down the road at 80 miles an hour. Some of these systems are getting control of the braking for example which is completely unacceptable from my perspective. I saw that super bowl ad that showed off the ability of the system to slam on the breaks if something is in front of you. Absolutely not. I am driving the car or I am not.
Of course, I don't even have an automatic transmission. Stick or nothing.
There is no way this thing is half as efficient as a team of trained sailors manning firehoses etc. Here someone will say "what about toxic gas or heat? To which I point out fire fighters have had gas masks and protective clothing for awhile. And if the heat is overwhelming the clothing the your little robot is going to melt too.
Add to that... all you need to stop a fire is to cut off the oxygen in most cases. Very few fires even on a military ship are going burn without oxygen. So... what makes more sense? This robot? or slamming the bulkheads shut so they're airtight... not hard on a military ship since those bulkheads should be airtight anyway. And then flood the rooms with something that isn't oxygen. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, whatever.
Here someone will say "but what about the sailors dramatically caught in the rooms you're sealing? Well, they should be able to get out in most cases. Those that can't are either going to have to use some sort of breath mask that provides them with a personal oxygen supply or they're just boned.
The robot though... dumb dumb dumb. If something like this isn't practical in homes or cities then it is doubly stupid on military ships where they have lots of trained manpower on hand and the time pressure is a good deal more critical.
Possible uses of a firefighting robot.... I'm coming up with a blank. I think robots are generally really bad at disaster recovery because they don't improvise well. If everything is really predictable and consistent then robots are pretty good at dealing with it. But the more unpredictable things get the worse they do.
As fires especially in a military ship are not something you want to happen... when they happen and how they happen tends to be pretty unpredictable. They have contingencies mapped out but they don't know that that a fire will happen in a specific place. They just have a general policy for dealing with fires.
This is a text book human job until we get AI strong enough to improvise. At which point, you might as well just staff the entire ship with robots.
Look, the virtue of the cloud is that you like having easy access to the data. Probably you don't know how to set up or don't like the idea of using a personal FTP server or using the MyCloud system to set up your own cloud storage system.
I get it. However, if you actually want to be secure, then that is the bullet you have to bite.
The NSA is not going to hack 100,000,000 different micro servers especially considering that a lot of them are going to be different. They're all going to be behind different routers, running on different operating systems, and using different hosting packages.
And of course, they're all going to have different passwords even if most of them are "littlekitty35" or something. Simply divesting ourselves of centralized storage makes the NSA's policy of compromising a central data repository and mining it impractical.
If you want help setting up your own personal cloud server... Ask around. many of us know how to do it. Personally, I'm a big fan of just using a cheap as hell Raspberry pi, installing mycloud, etc on it and then just hosting my data off my personal internet connection. That seems quite reasonable to me. I also use an old laptop as a media server in my home. I've found the pi to be too slow to run HD content in many cases and certainly not strong enough to do real time transcoding if I want to share my home media liberary with my phone OVER the internet sort of like youtube... only with my movies, music, etc. I just sit down somewhere with wifi, log my phone into my home system, and I can browse all the content in my home file servers. Pull up a movie or file I want... and either stream it live to my phone at a bitrate my current internet connection can handle... or just download it to the phone.
Self hosting is way better. I can even share my content with friends really easily. I just give them the URL to the content stored on my system. Easy peasy. They can even upload things to my system if I want. It is perfect.
As to the powder magazine, I would point out that the magazine can go up with a single spark. The reactor even if breached won't go up unless it touches water. Yes... it is in the ocean and touching water is likely. But it is still more survivable then a breached powder magazine.
What is more, I don't think a breached reactor would go china syndrome because it wouldn't get hot enough. Certainly lots of steam and radioactive contamination. But no boom. As to the radiation and contamination, if the reactor sank and the sailors bobbed on the surface, I think they'd also be pretty safe from the radiation. After all, they're not going to drink the water in any case. Any any filtration system that removed the salt would certainly remove any radioactive heavy metals.
The only issue would be long term ecological contamination. Which is not great but in a war that would probably be the least of anyone's problems. The whole "cities turned to glass" thing would probably trump that concern.
I'd rather not judge this on the basis of the Argentinean military which I don't regard as especially competent. No offense to the people from Argentina, but I'm more concerned with super power level engagements like a dust up between the US and China.
If china launched a salvo of these things at a US carrier group, they wouldn't launch 7 of them. They might launch 70 of them.
That said, you are correct in a known weakness of these missiles. And that is that their angle of attack is somewhat constrained. Ideally you want to come out of the sky and land almost vertically on your target because it makes it hard for anything to get in the way of it. Hypersonic missiles however tend to follow a very straight trajectory and that makes them predictable and intercept-able in a way that cruise missiles for example are not. Obviously cruise missiles a good deal slower and you can usually knock them out of the air with a sea sparrow or the phalanx cannon. But then maybe what hyper sonic missiles need is a two stage rocket. First stage being a cruise missile that gains altitude and possibly confuses enemy defenses by starting the hypersonic phase from an odd angle. I mean, launch 50 of these and have them envelope the target and then all attack the carrier group from 360 degrees... and all from a relatively sharp angle so that you can't just move a ship physically in the way of it.
Again, war is about unleashing your demons. Think of a way to drop a carrier fleet using cutting edge technology. There are ways. The carrier's future is increasingly precarious.
On your last point, the idea would be to surface to launch drones and then dive. And probably only doing that after other assets had baited the locations of enemy shore batteries... and destroyed them.
For example, keep the carrier submerged, and surface a decoy drone that kicks out all the EM radiation of something that the enemy wants to kill. They attack it. Think of it like a wild weasel buoy. The thing just bobs on the surface saying "I am something juicy, KILL ME!:D" This reveals the locations of enemy shore batteries as well as whatever else the enemy might have in the area. Then you surface a submersible destroyer. Basically a submarine designed expressly to engage surface targets and maybe aircraft. That craft surfaces only long enough to fire a salvo at the enemy shore batteries. It might not even fully surface but merely rise to firing depth.
You go through that process a few times... rinse and repeat until you think you've depleted most of the enemy assets in the area. Then you surface your carrier as well as possibly some other support assets. The carrier flies a mix of wild weasels and recon planes over the target area. The wild weasels like the buoy are targeted by enemy anti aircraft batteries and painted by enemy radar installations. The recon planes note the location of all these assets and relay the information back to the fleet. Possibly the recon planes were shadowed by your own ground attack bombers so you can instantly hit those targets. Or maybe the bombers will be deployed in a second wave or maybe the fleet will just fire some cruise missiles/railgun rounds to pound those targets.
Again, rinse and repeat until you have unquestioned air superiority in your airspace. Then you deploy ground troops to take coastal installations supporting your troops both with ship batteries and close support bombers. You form a beachhead. And from that point you can reinforce your position with inexpensive cargo ships.
From here you can land army core engineers that can build up or secure local infrastructure which could mean gaining the capability to land long range heavy bombers that are far too large to land on carriers. Anything from Specter gunships, to B52s to whatever else people want. The idea however is big nasty planes that are all about beating the hell out of ground targets. Add to that heavy armor battalions... big mainline battle tanks... and lots and lots of troops. And then you just dance around the country side rope a doping fortified positions or rolling over poorly defended positions.
You cut off resources. Cut off supplies. Destroy/capture heavy machinery of any kind. Cut population centers off from each other. Trash their communication and command/control system... and occupy.
that isn't true. US carrier groups are used as mobile airbases to engage land targets and ensure air superiority over targets in range of the fleet. They are not merely transports. Unless you're saying they are transporting the planes. But they're not just transporting them but also supporting them. The planes have to land and the carriers let them land on US territory anywhere in the ocean. What is more, they also need to be coordinated, relayed intelligence, etc and the carrier is excellent at doing all these things. What is more beyond that the carrier is escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and other support ships such as attack submarines. All of that creates a potent sea power threat which can lob cruise missiles deep into enemy territory or storm beaches with marines.
I just deny your point that they're only there for transport. They do a lot more then that. The planes really are not a complete weapons system without the carrier backing them up. They don't have the logistics to hit targets that deep without the carrier.
... reconnaissance planes... passive sonar/acoustic listening buoys... etc. It is very hard to blind everything. What is more, it took years to put all those sats up. I really don't think they're going to drop them all that fast. And before that happens there are going to be some carrier group engagements.
A big threat of course would be the enemy just nuking your fleet. Really no defense against that besides the Russian "big dog" defense... I think that is what it is called? Don't the Russians have an anti ICBM defense system that just fires an ICBM at the ICBM? So a carrier group that had a ballistic sub in the flotilla could fire one of its missiles at the incoming ICBM and detonate it on intercept. An idea in any case... Couldn't hurt trying.
My mistake. I was following the development of the guns for some time and the last time I checked they had just equaled conventional naval guns.
Can you show me a link for your info? I'll check wikipedia and the project site. I sort of lost interest in it awhile ago when it appears to have stalled. But they apparently just didn't bother giving me a blow by blow on the internet.
You're assuming you couldn't scale the power up or down. If I turn the power down to.0001 percent on the rail gun then the round might slowly spit out the barrel and go right into the sea.
I don't see why I couldn't have the targeting computer appreciate all these variables and set the pitch of the barrel and the charge of the round to be correct for the range.
In WW1 and WW2 battleships would use varying amounts of powder to propel shots at different ranges. They had a chart that they worked off of... and the gunners would tell the powder crew how far the target was so they could load the correct amount of of powder behind the round. They typically worked with bags of propellant. I believe three or four bags was standard but there was nothing stopping them from putting only one bag behind the round if they wanted to do that.
I explained that actually. I assume the fleets would be traceable. The issue is that you can't engage them with anti surface weapons if they're deep enough in the water. A hypersonic missile fired from a modified fishing boat is not going to be able to engage a submerged fleet.
As to a nimitz sized submersible sub, there are a few things you could do that would make it more practical.
1. I don't know if it has to go to the same depths as an attack or ballistic sub. Really you just need to be below the radar threshold as well as too deep to strike with an anti surface weapon. Twenty meters might be enough. Just an idea there. And if you aren't rated for really deep depths then you don't need to worry so much about the seals.
2. As to man power, this is the 21st century, I'd want to make use of as much automation as I could get away with using. I'd want the systems to be as self contained as possible.
3. In addition, it would be nice if the drones were capable of landing on the water. I know, getting sea water in the engines is hard to design around. But maybe the engine ports close prior to landing and become water tight. Then you vent the remaining heat from the engine via heat exchangers into the water. That way if the carrier needed to dive it could have a radio buoy on the surface controlling the drones which maintained a cap amongst other things. But if they wanted to land because they were out of fuel they could just land in the water near the carrier and wait for the carrier to surface.
Look, here is what I'm trying to do - Think outside the box. Every war has this moment where people try to fight like they did the last war and it always goes badly for whomever really thought nothing would be different. The trick is to be ahead of the curve and not assume things will just be the same forever.
Take starwars... I know, a stupid movie. But it is even more stupid in that the battles are all based on WW2 carrier battles. Who thinks that is going to be relevant in vast future? Of course not.
You need to throw away existing paradigm, look at the technology raw, and think what is the nastiest thing I can do with this stuff?
Are aircraft carriers still the nastiest thing we can imagine? I think the submersible carriers are nastier.
As to their size... they don't need to be nimitz sized really. Just large enough that they have a reasonable payload. Possibly a quarter to a half the size of a nimitz is past the break even point where you're not just spending all your mass on propulsion and crew quarters so you have enough space/mass to spend on carrier capacity.
Think of the flat top carriers from WW2 that the US mass produced. They were crap carriers but they each held enough planes to be worth deploying and they were disposable if they were killed. Maybe if you're using submersible carriers, you use 2 or 6 of them in place of a nimitz. Which makes them more survivable still because you can't drop the carrier by killing one platform. You have to kill them all.
I didn't say otherwise. I am pointing out that submarines can be tracked. However, whether they are tracked or not, they cannot be engaged with surface weapons if they are submerged.
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It was just an example. Choose your hosting software of choice.
yeah but if the carrier can be killed indifferent to the airplane then you don't need to be worry about the airplane. If I can drop your carrier within its attack range then it can't get into attack range without exposing itself.
Apparently you've never remoted into a PC from your phone. It is entirely viable. The trick is to change the way the touch screen works depending on context. So for example in an app designed for the phone's interface you could have a 1:1 ratio of touch to the screen.
However, when you're dealing with a program that assumed a mouse or any kind of finer motor control of the cursor... it makes sense to instead insert a cursor on the screen and treat the screen as a virtual touchpad which doesn't have a 1:1 ratio of movement. The relevant factor would be looking at where the virtual cursor was at any given moment and then orienting from that point. It is perfectly viable and I do it all the time with RealVNC and other remote apps as well as certain virtualization technologies that I use on my phone that likewise emulate a PC environment within my phone.
Let me explain the value for you here... corporations have a lot of software that really was designed for a desktop. Most of it isn't that hardware intensive but they're not going to recode it for your phone. If the phone is compatible with the software natively then they don't have to recode it. They can just install the same software on your phone and it will work just as if your phone were a tiny laptop.
Add to that lots of consumer programs that are often lacking on smartphones. Name almost any program or feature and there is a program on the desktop that does it better. What is more, the same programs on the desktop are far more likely to be free.
Beyond that... GAMES. Tablet and smartphone games are shit. Complete and utter bullshit in fact.
Which is why nearly every game on my phone is an emulator.
I have an OTG cable that I plug into my phone so I can get a proper gamepad and then I play old favorites like Soul Reaver, various NeoGeo roms, old favorites from Nintendo, old favorites from Sega, and then you can't forget ScumVM which lets me play all the old Lucas Arts games like Monkey's Island, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, etc.
I'm sorry, but ALL the program pools on ALL the mobile devices are shallow and full of shit when compared to the desktop. I can be excluded to using programs on the desktop from ten years ago and they'll still shit all over anything on the tablet or smartphone.
Why can't I run photoshop 7 on my tablet? Why can't I run an old corporate dos database? Why can't I run Fallout 1/2?
In no case is the tablet not up to the challenge from a hardware stand point because PCs at the times when those programs came out had lower hardware specs then most modern tablets today.
You say the interface is wrong? That problem was already solved. And worst case, I'll just use a bluetooth mouse or my OTG cable. If I am at a bar or something then it is a lot easier to whip out a tiny bluetooth mouse then it is bring along my laptop everywhere.
Sometimes it is more then enough that you can show up and pound a target into splitters and then sail away.
What is more, what happens when you don't rule the seas? What happens when your fleet can be destroyed at the press of a button by an enemy weapons platform?
You treat the navy as if their control of the seas was either easy or can be taken for granted. I really don't know what you're trying to say here. Your entire position baffles me.
From what I can see some conversion was still required. I couldn't just take a desktop program and run it.
What is more, how many devices was it really deployed on? I'm seeing like... one.
If MS or Apple released a phone that just ran windows/OSX that would be great. Sure, tweak the interface to fit the formfactor and interface but otherwise... just let me run the same programs everywhere.
Neither was compatible with standard windows software. I couldn't install photoshop on either. I couldn't install an old dos database on either. I couldn't really do anything that wasn't expressly coded for them besides maybe run some java applet. And at this point, pretty much any OS can run java applets.
Do you have an actual example that proves me wrong? I'm inclined to throw an insult at you... not because I'm mad at you but because I've noticed that tends to inspire people to actually make an effort to try and prove me wrong.
So just assume I said my dad could beat up your dad or something... and make a real effort to propose a compelling counter argument.
Girl culture doesn't find coding cool and never will. You're going to have to create a subversive counter culture that is contemptuous or indifferent to mainstream girl culture... and then indoctrinate as many girls into it as possible.
Don't like the terms? Fuzzy wuzzy them up if it makes you feel warm inside. But that is what you'd have to do... unless you want to just accomplish nothing. Which is fine too I guess so long as you stop wasting taxpayer dollars to do it.
Sometimes people need to be connected to the visceral reality of what is going on. It is one thing to reference something in the paper with words... it is another to show the crackling flesh peel off a screaming human being as he burns to death.
A lot of people don't understand things if they just read about it. Just a fact. Even seeing it on the news blow by blow doesn't get everyone but it does clue most people in.
The only remainder are the idiots that need it to happen right in front of them to really grasp what is going on. And there's no way the news can practically do that.
So... yeah. I'm in favor of having whatever the news people gathered made available. By all means, put up disclaimers so people can't claim to be surprised by what they're about to see.
Those that say they were surprised... well, those are exactly the sorts of people I was talking about. They don't f'ing understand what they're reading. Suddenly when they're showed the images they are shocked to suddenly see what was obvious simply from the text. That they are shocked means they are the sort that don't understand.
A fair number of the people that do see the video but are not shocked are the last group that need it to happen in front of them.
And there is a group beyond this that needs it to happen to them to understand. Like... they can watch someone get tortured in front of them and they don't really process that it hurts unless you take the hot poker and push it through their own skin. Then suddenly "oh my god that hurts"... no shit.
So yeah. If we lived in a dictatorship then I'd say there was no point so long as the people running the society were people that could read or people saw the video. Then who cares what the public is fed so long as they do what they're told.
But in a democracy, people need to know. It isn't acceptable to be this ignorant.
In regards to ISIS... They're obviously worthy of death. But I personally am tired of the US being always tasked to do this sort of thing and then eating shit from our ingrate allies afterwards. I'm quite happy to have the regional powers deal with it themselves. Jordan etc can have a party with ISIS. The so called atrocities will be on their heads instead of ours. And to make my position clear, I don't consider it an atrocity when you kill 100,000 psychopaths any more then I consider it an atrocity to kill one. And I don't consider that an atrocity either. Someone might call me a monster or whatever for that. Meh. I reserve the right to judge my fellow man and I reserve the right to kill them when I feel it is appropriate.
That is a right human beings have had for millions of years and I really don't see what has changed to make that not so.
What makes the world civilized instead of barbaric is that there are more people willing to kill you for acting like a barbarian then acting like a civilized person. The instant the civilized are outnumbered by the barbarians, the civilized world is in trouble.
Historical solution to that issue was to build walls, motes, and get really good at killing barbarians trying to come over the walls.
Not sure if a better option has ever come up.
I worry about this stuff making cars less reliable. I have a car that is pretty much 100 percent mechanical. I don't think there is any computerized anything in it that is relevant to it. I'd just assume keep it that way.
I like my tech as bolt ons to the car. Give me the GPS and the stereo and whatever. But I'd like the portion of the car that is a car to be a "car" and not a computer.
I don't trust this nonsense when I'm going down the road at 80 miles an hour. Some of these systems are getting control of the braking for example which is completely unacceptable from my perspective. I saw that super bowl ad that showed off the ability of the system to slam on the breaks if something is in front of you. Absolutely not. I am driving the car or I am not.
Of course, I don't even have an automatic transmission. Stick or nothing.
There is no way this thing is half as efficient as a team of trained sailors manning firehoses etc. Here someone will say "what about toxic gas or heat? To which I point out fire fighters have had gas masks and protective clothing for awhile. And if the heat is overwhelming the clothing the your little robot is going to melt too.
Add to that... all you need to stop a fire is to cut off the oxygen in most cases. Very few fires even on a military ship are going burn without oxygen. So... what makes more sense? This robot? or slamming the bulkheads shut so they're airtight... not hard on a military ship since those bulkheads should be airtight anyway. And then flood the rooms with something that isn't oxygen. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, whatever.
Here someone will say "but what about the sailors dramatically caught in the rooms you're sealing? Well, they should be able to get out in most cases. Those that can't are either going to have to use some sort of breath mask that provides them with a personal oxygen supply or they're just boned.
The robot though... dumb dumb dumb. If something like this isn't practical in homes or cities then it is doubly stupid on military ships where they have lots of trained manpower on hand and the time pressure is a good deal more critical.
Possible uses of a firefighting robot.... I'm coming up with a blank. I think robots are generally really bad at disaster recovery because they don't improvise well. If everything is really predictable and consistent then robots are pretty good at dealing with it. But the more unpredictable things get the worse they do.
As fires especially in a military ship are not something you want to happen... when they happen and how they happen tends to be pretty unpredictable. They have contingencies mapped out but they don't know that that a fire will happen in a specific place. They just have a general policy for dealing with fires.
This is a text book human job until we get AI strong enough to improvise. At which point, you might as well just staff the entire ship with robots.
Look, the virtue of the cloud is that you like having easy access to the data. Probably you don't know how to set up or don't like the idea of using a personal FTP server or using the MyCloud system to set up your own cloud storage system.
I get it. However, if you actually want to be secure, then that is the bullet you have to bite.
The NSA is not going to hack 100,000,000 different micro servers especially considering that a lot of them are going to be different. They're all going to be behind different routers, running on different operating systems, and using different hosting packages.
And of course, they're all going to have different passwords even if most of them are "littlekitty35" or something. Simply divesting ourselves of centralized storage makes the NSA's policy of compromising a central data repository and mining it impractical.
If you want help setting up your own personal cloud server... Ask around. many of us know how to do it. Personally, I'm a big fan of just using a cheap as hell Raspberry pi, installing mycloud, etc on it and then just hosting my data off my personal internet connection. That seems quite reasonable to me. I also use an old laptop as a media server in my home. I've found the pi to be too slow to run HD content in many cases and certainly not strong enough to do real time transcoding if I want to share my home media liberary with my phone OVER the internet sort of like youtube... only with my movies, music, etc. I just sit down somewhere with wifi, log my phone into my home system, and I can browse all the content in my home file servers. Pull up a movie or file I want... and either stream it live to my phone at a bitrate my current internet connection can handle... or just download it to the phone.
Self hosting is way better. I can even share my content with friends really easily. I just give them the URL to the content stored on my system. Easy peasy. They can even upload things to my system if I want. It is perfect.
The first reasonable phone able to do that competently is going to be a game changer.
Yeah, that thing is neat... too bad he probably just wanted to use it to threaten people. Which sucks.
As to the powder magazine, I would point out that the magazine can go up with a single spark. The reactor even if breached won't go up unless it touches water. Yes... it is in the ocean and touching water is likely. But it is still more survivable then a breached powder magazine.
What is more, I don't think a breached reactor would go china syndrome because it wouldn't get hot enough. Certainly lots of steam and radioactive contamination. But no boom. As to the radiation and contamination, if the reactor sank and the sailors bobbed on the surface, I think they'd also be pretty safe from the radiation. After all, they're not going to drink the water in any case. Any any filtration system that removed the salt would certainly remove any radioactive heavy metals.
The only issue would be long term ecological contamination. Which is not great but in a war that would probably be the least of anyone's problems. The whole "cities turned to glass" thing would probably trump that concern.
I'd rather not judge this on the basis of the Argentinean military which I don't regard as especially competent. No offense to the people from Argentina, but I'm more concerned with super power level engagements like a dust up between the US and China.
If china launched a salvo of these things at a US carrier group, they wouldn't launch 7 of them. They might launch 70 of them.
That said, you are correct in a known weakness of these missiles. And that is that their angle of attack is somewhat constrained. Ideally you want to come out of the sky and land almost vertically on your target because it makes it hard for anything to get in the way of it. Hypersonic missiles however tend to follow a very straight trajectory and that makes them predictable and intercept-able in a way that cruise missiles for example are not. Obviously cruise missiles a good deal slower and you can usually knock them out of the air with a sea sparrow or the phalanx cannon. But then maybe what hyper sonic missiles need is a two stage rocket. First stage being a cruise missile that gains altitude and possibly confuses enemy defenses by starting the hypersonic phase from an odd angle. I mean, launch 50 of these and have them envelope the target and then all attack the carrier group from 360 degrees... and all from a relatively sharp angle so that you can't just move a ship physically in the way of it.
Again, war is about unleashing your demons. Think of a way to drop a carrier fleet using cutting edge technology. There are ways. The carrier's future is increasingly precarious.
On your last point, the idea would be to surface to launch drones and then dive. And probably only doing that after other assets had baited the locations of enemy shore batteries... and destroyed them.
For example, keep the carrier submerged, and surface a decoy drone that kicks out all the EM radiation of something that the enemy wants to kill. They attack it. Think of it like a wild weasel buoy. The thing just bobs on the surface saying "I am something juicy, KILL ME! :D" This reveals the locations of enemy shore batteries as well as whatever else the enemy might have in the area. Then you surface a submersible destroyer. Basically a submarine designed expressly to engage surface targets and maybe aircraft. That craft surfaces only long enough to fire a salvo at the enemy shore batteries. It might not even fully surface but merely rise to firing depth.
You go through that process a few times... rinse and repeat until you think you've depleted most of the enemy assets in the area. Then you surface your carrier as well as possibly some other support assets. The carrier flies a mix of wild weasels and recon planes over the target area. The wild weasels like the buoy are targeted by enemy anti aircraft batteries and painted by enemy radar installations. The recon planes note the location of all these assets and relay the information back to the fleet. Possibly the recon planes were shadowed by your own ground attack bombers so you can instantly hit those targets. Or maybe the bombers will be deployed in a second wave or maybe the fleet will just fire some cruise missiles/railgun rounds to pound those targets.
Again, rinse and repeat until you have unquestioned air superiority in your airspace. Then you deploy ground troops to take coastal installations supporting your troops both with ship batteries and close support bombers. You form a beachhead. And from that point you can reinforce your position with inexpensive cargo ships.
From here you can land army core engineers that can build up or secure local infrastructure which could mean gaining the capability to land long range heavy bombers that are far too large to land on carriers. Anything from Specter gunships, to B52s to whatever else people want. The idea however is big nasty planes that are all about beating the hell out of ground targets. Add to that heavy armor battalions... big mainline battle tanks... and lots and lots of troops. And then you just dance around the country side rope a doping fortified positions or rolling over poorly defended positions.
You cut off resources. Cut off supplies. Destroy/capture heavy machinery of any kind. Cut population centers off from each other. Trash their communication and command/control system... and occupy.
All pretty standard except for the first part.
that isn't true. US carrier groups are used as mobile airbases to engage land targets and ensure air superiority over targets in range of the fleet. They are not merely transports. Unless you're saying they are transporting the planes. But they're not just transporting them but also supporting them. The planes have to land and the carriers let them land on US territory anywhere in the ocean. What is more, they also need to be coordinated, relayed intelligence, etc and the carrier is excellent at doing all these things. What is more beyond that the carrier is escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and other support ships such as attack submarines. All of that creates a potent sea power threat which can lob cruise missiles deep into enemy territory or storm beaches with marines.
I just deny your point that they're only there for transport. They do a lot more then that. The planes really are not a complete weapons system without the carrier backing them up. They don't have the logistics to hit targets that deep without the carrier.
... reconnaissance planes... passive sonar/acoustic listening buoys... etc. It is very hard to blind everything. What is more, it took years to put all those sats up. I really don't think they're going to drop them all that fast. And before that happens there are going to be some carrier group engagements.
A big threat of course would be the enemy just nuking your fleet. Really no defense against that besides the Russian "big dog" defense... I think that is what it is called? Don't the Russians have an anti ICBM defense system that just fires an ICBM at the ICBM? So a carrier group that had a ballistic sub in the flotilla could fire one of its missiles at the incoming ICBM and detonate it on intercept. An idea in any case... Couldn't hurt trying.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying it is not possible to fire a projectile into orbit or beyond with a railgun?
True enough, and I imagine all sorts of stuff like that will be standard if we submerge our fleets.
My mistake. I was following the development of the guns for some time and the last time I checked they had just equaled conventional naval guns.
Can you show me a link for your info? I'll check wikipedia and the project site. I sort of lost interest in it awhile ago when it appears to have stalled. But they apparently just didn't bother giving me a blow by blow on the internet.
You're assuming you couldn't scale the power up or down. If I turn the power down to .0001 percent on the rail gun then the round might slowly spit out the barrel and go right into the sea.
I don't see why I couldn't have the targeting computer appreciate all these variables and set the pitch of the barrel and the charge of the round to be correct for the range.
In WW1 and WW2 battleships would use varying amounts of powder to propel shots at different ranges. They had a chart that they worked off of... and the gunners would tell the powder crew how far the target was so they could load the correct amount of of powder behind the round. They typically worked with bags of propellant. I believe three or four bags was standard but there was nothing stopping them from putting only one bag behind the round if they wanted to do that.
I explained that actually. I assume the fleets would be traceable. The issue is that you can't engage them with anti surface weapons if they're deep enough in the water. A hypersonic missile fired from a modified fishing boat is not going to be able to engage a submerged fleet.
As to a nimitz sized submersible sub, there are a few things you could do that would make it more practical.
1. I don't know if it has to go to the same depths as an attack or ballistic sub. Really you just need to be below the radar threshold as well as too deep to strike with an anti surface weapon. Twenty meters might be enough. Just an idea there. And if you aren't rated for really deep depths then you don't need to worry so much about the seals.
2. As to man power, this is the 21st century, I'd want to make use of as much automation as I could get away with using. I'd want the systems to be as self contained as possible.
3. In addition, it would be nice if the drones were capable of landing on the water. I know, getting sea water in the engines is hard to design around. But maybe the engine ports close prior to landing and become water tight. Then you vent the remaining heat from the engine via heat exchangers into the water. That way if the carrier needed to dive it could have a radio buoy on the surface controlling the drones which maintained a cap amongst other things. But if they wanted to land because they were out of fuel they could just land in the water near the carrier and wait for the carrier to surface.
Look, here is what I'm trying to do - Think outside the box. Every war has this moment where people try to fight like they did the last war and it always goes badly for whomever really thought nothing would be different. The trick is to be ahead of the curve and not assume things will just be the same forever.
Take starwars... I know, a stupid movie. But it is even more stupid in that the battles are all based on WW2 carrier battles. Who thinks that is going to be relevant in vast future? Of course not.
You need to throw away existing paradigm, look at the technology raw, and think what is the nastiest thing I can do with this stuff?
Are aircraft carriers still the nastiest thing we can imagine? I think the submersible carriers are nastier.
As to their size... they don't need to be nimitz sized really. Just large enough that they have a reasonable payload. Possibly a quarter to a half the size of a nimitz is past the break even point where you're not just spending all your mass on propulsion and crew quarters so you have enough space/mass to spend on carrier capacity.
Think of the flat top carriers from WW2 that the US mass produced. They were crap carriers but they each held enough planes to be worth deploying and they were disposable if they were killed. Maybe if you're using submersible carriers, you use 2 or 6 of them in place of a nimitz. Which makes them more survivable still because you can't drop the carrier by killing one platform. You have to kill them all.
I didn't say otherwise. I am pointing out that submarines can be tracked. However, whether they are tracked or not, they cannot be engaged with surface weapons if they are submerged.