Antigravity nation vs teleportation nation (RAR)

[Zor]

In this scenario we have an earthlike planet with two continents of south america size with a landbridge 1,000 km long and about 200-100 km across connecting them on one hemisphere, and a series of archipelligos on the other with about as much landmass as africa spread about, but no island larger than Madagascar. The planet also has two moons. Either one of the continents has about the same amount of natural resources as south america, and more are available in the achipelligo, although this planet has no fissile materials. There are two major civilizations on the planet, with a more or less modern level of technology and a population of about 300 million total. They are also at war, but they have two major diferences, first of all none of them have atomic or biological weapons. Each also has one distinct technology.

The northern nation has an antigravity system. These allow them to elevate payloads safely and reliably to a maximum altitude of about 22 kilometers from sea level with marginal enegry cost. This ranges from personal lift harnesses worn like backpacks to 400 meter long ships. The system, while useful for controlling altitude is not useful for tranportation elsewhere.

The southern has another system that has revolutionized transportation, Quantum Displacement based teleportation. This system requires two terminals and swaps what is on one for what is on the other, so long as they are within 50,000 km from each other. These terminals range in scale from units about 10 kilograms which can teleport single kilogram payloads every five seconds (if both terminals have power, to which a wall socket can provide enough juice) to 50,000 kilogram stationary transmitters that can send 5,000 kilograms. Most of them are perminantly paired with an oposite exit, there are network transmitters, these are ten times as expensive, but unliked the fixed conventional ones you can dial in a destination terminal.

Engineers have applied these to both military and civilian ends. Neither side can reverse engineer the others technology, at least not until well after the other has been conquered.

Of these two states, which one has the advantage in military conflict?

Zor

[Blayne]

This is admittedly a challenging question; both technologies largely make the entire notion of a "front line" meaningless and strikes me as MAD depending on how much you can abuse the technologies in question. You could teleport lob a nuke at someone or use your anti grav technology to tear apart a continent. Anti-grav's advantages is that it would be nearly universally applicable to make for example; mechs. Though both technologies could allow for easy access to space and bypass the need for a space elevator; and both could be useful for traveling quickly through space.

I'm genuinely stumped, I'm going to lean towards teleportation depending on its limitations, as even with anti grav maybe you can just teleport a bomb into the person's thingy?

fake edit: I see you do place a few fairly tough limitations on them; space elevator comes to mind as still being applicible with a little more effort.

Depends on how portable the technology in question is, if you can sneak teleporters behind the front lines you got a zerg nydus canal foothold situation. Or still sneak a nuke.

AntiGrav dudes still got the more versatile technology, but teleporter guys can move reinforcements from one front to another so fast it makes the autobahn a joke. Also space travel; set up a teleporter in orbit and you got a space drydock/shipyard. Or wait until it orbits over the enemy continent and rain down tungsten slugs or nukes.

Really depends on creative loophole abuse.

[Simon_Jester]

Um. Are these teleporters transmitter-to-receiver, or transmitter-to-anywhere?

[Zor]

Um. Are these teleporters transmitter-to-receiver, or transmitter-to-anywhere?

Two types, two terminals which swap material on either side exclusively and more expensive networked ones that can dial in to other terminals. Either way, you need something on both ends.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

Huh.

That grossly limits the military potential of the teleporter except as a first-strike weapon. One obvious application is to covertly secure a large stretch of land in the middle of the enemy's country, build a (very large) teleporter in the middle of it, and start beaming in several regiments of land based mobile ICBM launchers, one at a time. If you're cunning enough you just might get away with putting dozens of your own missiles inside the enemy's detection and warning networks, within a few minutes' flight of their key targets.

Of course, there are a number of ways to foil such an attack.

If nothing like that can be managed, I'd actually predict that the edge goes to the antigravity dudes for their ability to build flying battleship-analogues.

[Terralthra]

Place teleporter end-nodes inside strategic bombers' fuel tanks and ordinance bays: presto, your bombers can stay airborne and drop bombs effectively indefinitely.

Place teleporter end-nodes aboard aircraft carriers. Refueling and resupply for blue water operations simplified immensely.

Place teleporter end-nodes in SLBM launch bays. Your submarines can now launch much larger numbers of missiles on extended patrols.

Place a teleporter end-node on a satellite which orbits over the antigravity nation. Teleport tungsten rods at predetermined spots along the orbit for low-cost rods of god, with no launch-time ammunition limitations.

Military potential for cheap teleportation is...really really high.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, you're right.

The SLBM teleporter concept is a variation on the theme I was getting at with land-based mimssile teleporters. The resupply and refueling issues I hadn't thought about so much- honestly I don't think of those as crippling problems for conventional military, although in some respects they may be- we can already keep permanent airborne bomber watches if we choose to, but cannot drop six times a bomber's take-off-weight in bombs on a single sortie, so teleporters are good for that yeah.

One really important question is how teleporters cope with different moving frames of reference. Orbiting satellites move fast relative to the ground-based telesender; is momentum conserved when I beam something to the satellite? Or to a different latitude? Or to the other side of the Earth, where the surface is moving 700 km/hr THAT way instead of 700 km/hr THIS way due to the planet's rotation?

[Simon_Jester]

OK, you're right.

The SLBM teleporter concept is a variation on the theme I was getting at with land-based mimssile teleporters. The resupply and refueling issues I hadn't thought about so much- honestly I don't think of those as crippling problems for conventional military, although in some respects they may be- we can already keep permanent airborne bomber watches if we choose to, but cannot drop six times a bomber's take-off-weight in bombs on a single sortie, so teleporters are good for that yeah.

One really important question is how teleporters cope with different moving frames of reference. Orbiting satellites move fast relative to the ground-based telesender; is momentum conserved when I beam something to the satellite? Or to a different latitude? Or to the other side of the Earth, where the surface is moving 700 km/hr THAT way instead of 700 km/hr THIS way due to the planet's rotation?

[Sky Captain]

I think anti grav would have more applications than teleportation from mining, construction and transportation work to military hardware.

How heavy load can be lifted with anti grav? You said 400 m ships. If they have cargo capacity like oil tanker or bulk carrier of similar size then it is easy to build a strategic bomber force from Hell. Imagine 100 000 + tons of bombs in a single load. Few dozen of such bombers could basically destroy any nation in a single mission with conventional carpet bombing if they couldn't be stopped. Heck, with such payload capacity it would be possible to easily wipe out cities by just dropping rocks from 22 km altitude no need to manufacture obscene amounts of conventional explosives.

[Rossum]

Well, the teleporter system seems like a pretty useful technology for moving things across the nation. I suspect that their network would mostly consist of paired teleporters built into hubs. If building one networked teleporter costs as much as ten paired ones then just build ten paired ones and place them next to eachother so that ten times as much stuff can be sent through at a time.

They might have a few networked ones or spare paired teleporters placed near these hubs as backup in case an enemy sabotages a part of their network.


The antigrav nation could use their tech to built huge airborn aircraft carriers. One big ship in the air loaded with smaller bombers and fighters and then send them out on fighting or bombing runs. The main carrier itself could be outfitted with point-defense guns and cannons. I imagine the ability to mount howitzers (or some similarly powerful long-ranged gun) on a airship and then park it a few miles up and away from an enemy city could let them bombard their opponent with impunity. Get some suitable optics, controls, and powerful enough bullets and you could have snipers wearing anti-grave backpacks floating in the air firing at enemy tanks with anti-material rifles from miles away (or a machine-gun variant like the Browning M2).

Even if their technology can't rapidly move platforms around, it could lift them up and let engines move the platforms as normal. This lets them establish bases, long-range platforms, and build various aircraft that can just fly over their enemies defenses.

The Teleporter nation would have an advantage with logistics and being able to move personnel and equipment around quickly and discretely (even if the Antigravs manage to get some flying snipers or bombers across enemy lines, the Teleporters could potentially build all of their major installations in secure bunkers and never have to send their stuff in trucks that can be intercepted or shot at). And as mentioned before they could use teleporters to send through supplies like fuel and the like. A group of spies heading behind enemy likes could bring a 10 kilogram terminal and then send through various 1 kilogram packages as long as they've got a battery or power source for it.

Hmm, depending on how modular these teleporters can be and the potential of building them in the field, you could wind up with spies sneaking in pieces of a 10 kg teleporter, assemble it, send through more pieces, send in more supplies, and then start making bombs and stockpiling weapons or whatever. Any individual group with one of those could potentially bring "unlimited" resources with them to do their job.

As for sending people, depending on how much their soldiers weigh (I'm going to toss out 250 lb or 113 kilograms as a soldiers weigh unless it's much less) then the teleporter needed to transfer them would be 2,500 lbs or 1,130 kilograms. I'm pretty sure you could fit that and a power supply into a truck. Get a truck with a teleporter and power supply and you can start sending through soldiers once you get them behind enemy lines (or just have one of these at each base and be ready to send in reinforcements at a moments notice... or retreat as needed).




Anyway... speaking as someone who has little experience with military campaigns but has lost alot in Team Fortress 2... I'm going to say that the Teleporter Nation has a pretty decent advantage here and could probably win this. As an Engineer, I've found that its not so much me that wins matches so much as being able to rapidly bring in the people who know what they are doing towards the front lines. Now, unless there is a secret Invisibility or Disguise nation here then I'm seeing this as a case of (flying) Snipers vs Engineers with both sides having soldiers and stuff to help them out and no pesky spies ruining everyones day.

Teleporter Nation just has to build secure bases and set up teleporters inside them to resist whatever bombing or long-range sniping campaign the Antigrav Nation has. Then, build modular teleporters that can be rapidly assembled and brought out into the field and rapidly push their forces forward. Plus, having an established and hopefully secure supply line set up around their nation would allow for them to draw on resources and rapidly move them around (I mean, being able to send any physical object up to 50,000 km instantly would completly revolutionize transportation). To say nothing of the fact that with human-teleporting systems they could potentially evacuate whole camps or areas without worrying about enemy shooting down fleeing personell.

A lack of trucks to move people around (well, send in the teleporter and then move the people through) means they can either transport people without losing too many men or there won't be pictures of blown up trucks or wreckage to discourage the civilians. Just have their men getting trained and kept back at base, then suit them up and teleport them a few hundred thousand kilometers in the span of minutes (depending on how many links in the network they have to go through) and then send them out into the field. Then if they get injured they can be rapidly sent back to a hospital.

Also, the fact that the teleporters switch the mass of the objects on them could help out alot. If they are sending things one-way then the teleporter on one end might have to send back some junk object like rocks or a volume of water for the effect to work. In a military campaign it could be that personell wanting to go home could just get assigned "countermass duty" and have them get sent home while a fresh soldier is sent in. Injured personell can easily get sent home the moment they need anything of similar mass sent their way (so the teleporters can work at maximum speed both ways and sending alot of stuff one way doesn't prevent them from sending stuff back... and could infact encourage it).

So yeah, Teleporter Nation looks like it will win due to superior logistics and the ability to get soldiers rapidly to and from the front lines securely.

[Blayne]

A friend of mine suggested making a durable teleporter unit into an artillery shell and fire it behind enemy lines and then teleport in a nuke.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Uh, have you actually read the OP? This planet somehow has NO fissile materials. No nukes. Sorry everyone. No biological weapons either.

If we assume that each nation is totally committed to the war, how about using some of the modular teleporters snuck in by spec-ops teams to release nasty chemical weapons into convinient places? I can't see prevaailing winds being a problem if the continents are a thousand miles apart.

On the matter of no fissile materials though, I'm fairly certain that would make the planet lifeless, given that radiogenic heating is what stopped Earth freezing solid a few billion years back. Or this this more a case of "no fissile materials in useable amounts/deposits on/near the surface"?

[Rossum]

One thing this reminds me of is the Don't build Death Stars, build astromechs post I read awhile ago. The general idea is that instead of building big expensive revolutionary things (like say airborne aircraft carriers or flying snipers) then something more tested that complements well with the rest of your military system (like teleporters) would be better.

The antigravity tech can only be used in levitating things and possibly building floating platforms or aircraft. The teleporters can have any number of uses that complement both military and civilian sectors of the economy. Even if the Teleporter Nation wasn't at war they could use their stuff to rapidly deliver things around (and again being able to sent stuff 50,000 kilometers away instanly) would let them pay for themselves.

Its a question of whether the antigravity would give one nation a big enough advantage to counteract the massive boost to economics and military that the other nation would get from teleporters.

[Zor]

On the matter of no fissile materials though, I'm fairly certain that would make the planet lifeless, given that radiogenic heating is what stopped Earth freezing solid a few billion years back. Or this this more a case of "no fissile materials in useable amounts/deposits on/near the surface"?

If that needs to be the case, then so be it. Either way, neither of these sides are mustering up enough uranium for even a single messily Tac-Nuke.

Zor

[Beowulf]

Teleporters. It absolutely revolutionizes logistics, which is the primary way of winning a war, especially a war like this. It even revolutionizes something like building a warship. You don't need much ammunition storage (only enough to be able to fire until the next load of ammo comes through). You don't need much bunkerage (only enough to run the engines at max power until you can get another jolt of fuel). You don't need spaces for accomodation (send the personnel home to sleep, send hot food directly to the ship, etc). You'd essentially just wrap the ship around the engines, the weapons, and the sensors. Bombers don't need to carry fuel. Bomb bay is just big enough to launch as many missiles as you want to launch in a given time period. Marine assault ships just have a big ass flight deck, and well deck to dock smaller ships. Everything else get transported from home. You never need to have convoys. Your bases are just well defended teleporter farms. Your troops go home at night.

Antigravity? That lets you have a flying aircraft carrier. But you still have to deal with resupplying it. Teleportation? you've got a helicarrier, with the ability to get all the fuel it needs.

Crazy ass teleportation idea, if teleportation is energetically cheap enough: utilize the change in pressure from having a high altitude, and a low altitude teleporter pair to generate power. Teleport a sealable box from low to high. Allow air to leave box through impeller system. Seal box, teleport back to low end. Allow air into box through impeller system. Seal box, and repeat. At most, you end up with 15 psi of pressure that you can utilize (high side is in orbit)

[Hawkwings]

I'd like to know what teleporter nation does when my fleet of flying battleships is dropping bombs on all cities with impunity from 22km up.

[Rossum]

I'd like to know what teleporter nation does when my fleet of flying battleships is dropping bombs on all cities with impunity from 22km up.

Considering that each teleporter has a range of 50,000 km while the South American continent is about 7,500 km from the northern tip to the southern tip then by the time your ships hit any city then all the civilians could be teleported to the other side of the country while the military sent in all of their fighter jets and missiles and launch them at your ships.

Or, they could have placed a large teleporter on an aircraft carrier, sailed it right up to your coastline, and been spamming fighter jets and bombers onto your cities.

You have a few dozen huge airships that took months to build and turn into so much scrap if they get shot down? They have hundreds of smaller aircraft that they can store anywhere in their country and have flown straight into yours within minutes.

[Blayne]

A game of supreme commander gone wrong (or horribly right?).

Basically: The teleporter side can teleport any group of units within a certain cluster and bring them to any other teleporter versus...

The team that has flying Big Boy's (pointed down of course).

[madd0ct0r]

then the anti-grav nation needs to get smarter too.

anti-grav ICBMS, capable of changing altitude incredibly rapidly whilst not slowing in horizontal flight. Heck - they could even just rocket along at 10m off sealevel.

anti-grav ship mines - that clamp to a warship, lift it nice and high and then drop it. Or even just leave it hanging there for high altitude salvage sweepers to collect it, flush it out and tow it to the high altitude shipyards to be refitted or broken down for scrap.

heck - swarms of aerial mines that require no energy to just drift will make life difficult for the teleporters. Given that and the combination of attack helicopter, jets and tanks that are possible, I really think the anti-G's will own the skis and dominate in battlefield maneuverability. The teleporters will be forced to adopt 'castle' defenses around their gate positions, leaving them rather more reactive then is wise.

Even though the Anti-G's can't reverse engineer captured teleportation gates, nothing stops them from dumping them underwater with a mine attached. If they can hack the gate sufficiently to be permanently 'on' then the seawater gusher will make that entire gate 'farm' difficult to use, potentially disrupting the 'port network or at least forcing even more resources to go into new gates and redundancy and less into actual forces.

People are talking about teleporting sam missiles in from central stockpiles - how about antigrav- bunker busters? rocket that plunges deep below the soil line and negates gravity all the way up to the surface? Sheer soil pressure at the sides of the effect would force stuff inside the cone upwards, with the eventual result being the surface 'boiling' with waves of soil slowly overturning each other. Makes quicksand look like granite.
How many of those would be needed to render all cropland near impossible to farm?
How many to make a facility utterly worthless to maintain?

How about mining vehicles that reduce the effective weight of the soil above and in front of them, letting it be forced up by nothing more then a sloping dozer blade? Teleport Nation can respond with huge concentration of force, but that won't stop the anti-gravvers striking with impunity from above or below.

[Formless]

Whatever advantage the anti-gravity nation has in terms of space goes away the instant the teleporter nation puts a teleporter in space. Suddenly you have instant access to orbit, like a space elevator on steroids. Anti-gravity could be a useful technology for exploring the rest of the cosmos (depending on whether you can make a field effect propulsion drive-- but then, teleportation is arguably FTL, so even that might be a wash) but for waging war its not really a game changer.

[madd0ct0r]

Whatever advantage the anti-gravity nation has in terms of space goes away the instant the teleporter nation puts a teleporter in space. Suddenly you have instant access to orbit, like a space elevator on steroids.

Until the anti-gravvers float up a 200m square sheet of heavy steel and leave it sitting in the orbital path....

[Formless]

How, exactly, are they going to get a huge ass piece of metal up there without it getting shot down? Moving something with anti-gravity is slower than moving something with teleportation.

"Sir, the station's radar is picking up a large metal object at ten thousand feet and climbing. It looks like some sort of impactor."

"Teleport a missile up there and frag the damn thing."

"There are already twenty of them on an intercept course, sir."

"Of course there is. Have a laser broom up there within the hour to sweep away the debris and shoot down any future attacks. Make sure those idiots don't try that again."

[Blayne]

If both are operating at the same time than the teleporters won't have enough time to secure space superiority before the AntiGravitons get there too and contest it.

[Formless]

You miss the point. If there is a contest for space at all, then neither anti-grav nor teleport technology will be the deciding factor for deciding who has space superiority. This brings the argument back to who has overall strategic advantage. And as pointed out, you can't beat teleportation for the ultimate logistics game changer.

[Hawkwings]

I'm not talking about airships, I'm talking about flying battleships. How do you plan on shooting down a gigantic hunk of armor at 22km altitude? That's 72,000 feet. Your jets can't fly that high and armor plating laughs at anti-air missiles. Plus I can mount anti-missile defenses on my floating sky-fortresses.

OK sure, you can evacuate all your civilians from the city. But that means I win, since I destroy your city and tie up your national teleporter grid for a good few hours at least. And oh by the way, now you've got millions of refugees to deal with. Teleporter nation will have to turtle up in their fortress cities, or go underground. But now antigrav has the advantage. If this were the case I'd firebomb all your farms and let you starve out.

Antigrav nation has obvious air superiority. They will also likely have space superiority, as putting stuff in orbit is so much easier for them, since they can skip the first 22km of atmosphere. Sure, teleporters in space, but ASAT is easy. What good is a missile going to do against a giant piece of metal? Hit it? Oh wonderful, now instead of one object headed at your precious satellite, you've got 20 fragments. Actually, this would likely happen early on, leaving minimal orbital access to both sides given the amount of debris in the air. No GPS, no satellite communications, etc. But oh wait, this works out great for antigrav nation since 22km up is pretty good, and you can have great big armored communications platforms floating in the area, doing datalinking and positioning.

Oh, your carrier parked off my shore? Let's see how it likes an antigrav-floated rocket-propelled steel brick on a collision course. What are you going to do, shoot it down? With what? Heck, forget that, just float a big rock over the carrier and drop it. And those jets and bombers? Well, good luck trying to shoot down my flying armored jet/tank hybrid. Or floating defense platform.

Antigrav is game-breaking because it removes the requirement for flying things to be lifted by wings or rockets. Suddenly you have things that are high, move fast, and have tons of armor. This makes them a lot harder to shoot down.

Sure, teleporters allow for better logistics and positioning. But what use is that when your enemy has almost invulnerable positions?