Antigravity nation vs teleportation nation (RAR)

[madd0ct0r]

thinking more on non-miltary uses:

we can probably estimate teleport mass-transport speeds (ncluding getting everyone on to the pad and off again) using construction standards for lifts.
Presumably you'd have minimise cost by 'chain-lines' - where you teleport from A to B to C to D (where you get off)
Periodic stations handling more then 1 chain line would be handled much the same way as 'change here' railway stations are now.
Presumably there'd also be 'express' 'porters that would let you go A-J-T before dropping into the 'local' T-U-V-W line
And finally larger stations (rare) might also have a 'dial in' teleporter or two to cover service outages elsewhere on the network. These are 10x cost though, so generally they'd be rare.

Maximizing population throughput whilst minimizing cost is an intresting discrete maths challenge. I wonder if it'd go hub and spoke or overlaid mesh?

Thinking on the anti-gravs last night:
1) you could get ultra-heavy trains with near zero weight
2) the mass is still there, so acceleration and deceleration will have to cope with the large mass AND the low friction due to low weight
3) Assumng that can be solved, the only bonus I can think of (well, except bridges being much easier) is you could use canted wheels to get much tighter cornering at the same speed/weight. This might make rail network geometry a little less restrictive.

honestly though - i'm having trouble coming up with good civilian uses.

[Beowulf]

Civilian uses: freaking flying cars!

Rails aren't actually that great of a usage, as railways already have a fairly low rolling resistance, and with antigravity, you'd have to have the cars be affirmatively attached to the rail, rather than merely resting on it, to avoid derailing. Of course, if you do that, you already have the tighter cornering at speed.

If antigravity is reliable enough, you could have high rises that have trains coming out of the middle of the structure, allowing reduced usage of elevators, and increased floor space (as you don't have to spend as much floor space/floor on elevator shafting.

Helicopters instantly become obsolete. Why spin a rotor and expend vast quantities of fuel when you can have an AG generator, and sip fuel? Probably end up with something like propfans to push it along, but those can be more optimized for propulsion, and mechanically simpler than a rotor head.

[Purple]

Could an anti gravity machine like that not be used as a de facto inertial compensator? In that case, cargo transfer might simply be a function of firing stuff out of a canon and grav chuting it over a desired destination.

[madd0ct0r]

as long as the cargo can withstand the intial acceleration, yes.

I suppose you could have it being 'fired' along a high speed conveyer belt, or swung by ballista - both have slower acclerations

[PeZook]

The flying battleships would be more maneuverable than people give them credit for ; At 22km of altitude, drag would be neglible ; You could easily push the thing around at 900 kmph using nothing more than a few jet engines (well, you'd need rockets at 22km).

HOWEVER, there are two basic problems: fuel consumption, and drag at lower altitudes (you'd need to descend to, say, drop bombs accurately).

Let's say you would want the thing to accelerate at a plodding pace of 10 m/s^2, with a top speed of 900 kmph in upper atmosphere. Assume further that the battleship has a drag coefficient and frontal area equal to a Boeign 747 (a VERY VERY generous assumption).

So you need 450 kN of thrust for acceleration at 10 m/s^2 and 15 kN or so at speed to overcome drag at 900 kmph and 22km of altitude (assuming pressure of about 4 kPa). Achievable easily enough with a single engine equivalent to half the performance of an RD-107 (soyuz booster engine)

BUT...the engine, operating at full thrust, burns 321 kilograms of fuel per second. So how much fuel would it eat?

To get up to speed you need to burn for 25 seconds = 8 tons of fuel using your rokkit engine. Sustaining that velocity will cost about 5 kilograms of fuel per second to counter drag, so travelling for an hour = 18 tons of fuel. An Iowa could bunker about 7600 tons of fuel, but fuel oil is a bit denser (also heavier) than the RP-1/LOX, though of course you should probably use a different fuel etc so I can't be bothered to figure out realistic bunkerage of rocket fuel anyways. Let's just assume it's equal.

So the skylord could travel for 423 hours in cruise mode. Lots of range indeed.

But I guess you might want to drop bombs with a semblance of accuracy, and thus you need to descend your battlewagon to something saner, like 10 kilometres. Well, drag at 900 kmph increaes to 65kN, which is entirely managable ; You'd have to give up some acceleration, top speed and increase fuel consumption somewhat. Even at sea level, the drag is only 271 kN at 900kmph.

Solvable by adding more engines.

Changes in drag coefficients introduce problems, but not insurmountable ones ; If the skylord has ten times the total frontal area of a 747 and four times the drag coefficient, then:

Code: Select all

drag at 22 km: 434 kN
drag at 10km: 2.6 MN
drag at sea level: 11 MN

Pretty bad at 10km, crippling at sea level ; So don't fly at sea level, and use lots of engines.

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Negation of the need to generate lift is, as we can see, a very serious advantage. Still, a more sensible approach would be to simply build ARMORED BOMBERS with extreme range and speed, since a flying battleship would still be easy to attack using relatively crude (and also cheap) weapons, like ballistic missiles carrying hundreds of armor-penetrating submunitions.

With bombers, though, you could seriously economize on engine requirements ; Overall, a rocket engine is actually rather simple, and you can get away with using very, very few engines to power your armored superbombers. Economical? Depends on costs of the antigravity system.

Naturally, it's not guaranteed it will overcome the advantages offered by a teleporter economy, that would be operating vastly more efficiently than anything the antigrav people could come up with. No delay for transport of raw materials and parts, no shipping of fuel around (crude gets teleported straight to refineries, refined fuel directly to receivers) - a mother of all just-time systems ; Hell, their air defence system could just teleport missiles to where they are needed to defend against air attack, thus reducing the total number of missiles needed to defend the country (freeing up resources for other tasks), to say nothing of things like refuelling tanks in the field ; Instead of a hundred trucks, you use a few heavily armored teleporter vehicles, that can follow tanks around. Same for all other supplies: armies could sustain an advance INDEFINITELY, especially since you could use teleporters to constantly rotate fresh troops in.

An advance by teleport guys would literally not need to stop for sleep. Only mechanical breakdowns would matter.

[Simon_Jester]

The flying battleships would be more maneuverable than people give them credit for ; At 22km of altitude, drag would be neglible ; You could easily push the thing around at 900 kmph using nothing more than a few jet engines (well, you'd need rockets at 22km).

No you wouldn't. That's only about seventy thousand feet up; there are jet aircraft which fly that high. Albeit specially designed supersonic ones, usually.

The "flying battleship" might actually be streamlined into a teardrop or area-ruled shape, without the wings of a supersonic plane and with a much greater density. The engines would stick off the sides on relatively stubby 'winglets.'

If it was that fast (picture a bigger nastier XB-70, without the wings)... well, it would present a lot of problems for defenders in the teleport nation. Teleport technology as written here doesn't help much for air defense against very fast moving targets, as far as I can tell. Granted it lets you teleport missile launchers into the enemy's path, but a big part of your problem is that the enemy can just go "oh shit," change course slightly, and be thirty miles away from where you expected him in about a minute. How rapid a response can your SAM-teleporters manage? How fast can they interface with the fixed defense net? This remains a nontrivial problem, although teleportation makes it easy.

You also run into trouble dealing with numerous bombers closing in from many directions. If you teleport a huge pile of missiles to stop one, they won't be in position to stop others.

Negation of the need to generate lift is, as we can see, a very serious advantage. Still, a more sensible approach would be to simply build ARMORED BOMBERS with extreme range and speed, since a flying battleship would still be easy to attack using relatively crude (and also cheap) weapons, like ballistic missiles carrying hundreds of armor-penetrating submunitions.

It depends how fast the battleship is.

It might be desirable to create 'armored bombers' which are protected against typical SAM warheads and require specialized antitank munitions to defeat... but which can move at hundreds of miles an hour in three dimensions, making them very difficult targets for antitank weapons.

[PeZook]

It depends how fast the battleship is.

It might be desirable to create 'armored bombers' which are protected against typical SAM warheads and require specialized antitank munitions to defeat... but which can move at hundreds of miles an hour in three dimensions, making them very difficult targets for antitank weapons.

Yep, exactly my point: hitting a 45 thousand tonne object with a ballistic missile delivered scattergun is relatively simple compared to trying to hit a 1,5 thousand tonne hypersonic bomber ; it will still be armored so well that it'll be basically impervious to fragmentation warheads, yet just as fast as an airplane, and you'll have way, way more of them.

EDIT: That said, without nuclear weapons, these bombers aren't as much of a mortal threat as the real-life XB-70 ; You might see a lot of chemical warfare, but that's nothing compared to nukes.

[Purple]

What technology level are we talking about here? Because with modern tech I am pretty certain that you could make some sort of JDAM like round to drop directly down onto a target from a flying battleship without needing to go low to aim. All you would need than is a good on board navigation system for the battleship it self. And in case of flexible ground targets a spotter with a laser pointer.

[PeZook]

In a total war scenario you shouldn't depend on GPS guidance.

So it's inertial/laser/image recognition, and that can be totally fucked by atmospheric conditions.

[Purple]

Well if all else fails you could use a rapid up-down sensor buoy like thing. (That came out confusing) Basically you have a small craft that is all sensors and an anti gravity machine. You drop it down to take a snapshot and pull it back up. Or just use deployable antigrav jet pack guys to designate targets for you. Or fire cruise missiles. Or you know... a billion other things that don't rely on WW2 like air fleets flying over their target and dropping seas of bombs inaccurately.

[PeZook]

Cruise missiles are actually a great idea, since you can take advantage of the fact you can armor the fuck out of them.

And then do the above: take advantage of antigrav for extreme range and speeds.

[Simon_Jester]

In a total war scenario you shouldn't depend on GPS guidance.

So it's inertial/laser/image recognition, and that can be totally fucked by atmospheric conditions.

Something like Tomahawks is still practical, where the guidance depends largely on terrain imaging radar. It's not perfect, but it gives you reasonable accuracy, especially if you can fire off a hundred of them because you bomber is just that big.

[vengence]

Well if all else fails you could use a rapid up-down sensor buoy like thing. (That came out confusing) Basically you have a small craft that is all sensors and an anti gravity machine. You drop it down to take a snapshot and pull it back up. Or just use deployable antigrav jet pack guys to designate targets for you. Or fire cruise missiles. Or you know... a billion other things that don't rely on WW2 like air fleets flying over their target and dropping seas of bombs inaccurately.

The use of UAV surveillance, maybe equipped with laser designators would work well. you could do something like have a bomber at 22km and a uav at 2 km circling the target, say the supply depot for the advancing army, or mass transport hubs or any other important point in the transportation network, and a payload of really accurate ordinance comes and cuts off major supply lines.

Naturally, it's not guaranteed it will overcome the advantages offered by a teleporter economy, that would be operating vastly more efficiently than anything the antigrav people could come up with. No delay for transport of raw materials and parts, no shipping of fuel around (crude gets teleported straight to refineries, refined fuel directly to receivers) - a mother of all just-time systems ; Hell, their air defence system could just teleport missiles to where they are needed to defend against air attack, thus reducing the total number of missiles needed to defend the country (freeing up resources for other tasks), to say nothing of things like refuelling tanks in the field ; Instead of a hundred trucks, you use a few heavily armored teleporter vehicles, that can follow tanks around. Same for all other supplies: armies could sustain an advance INDEFINITELY, especially since you could use teleporters to constantly rotate fresh troops in.

one of the big advantages of antigrav is that they can put stationary defensive platforms some kilometers up that puts them out of range of most all retaliatory strikes, an advancing army would have to rely heavily on air support to take out weapons platforms, and air power would be in the hands of the antigrav forces.

__________________________________________________________________________

Some of the greatest advantages the antigrav's have is air superiority, they can have supply routes outside the range of most attack they have greater mobility and flexibility in operations, an enemy fighter is attacking you? climb a few thousand feet and they can't follow missile on your tail, rapidly adjust your altitude and it looses its lock, enemy ground forces advancing floating artillery platforms, in cunjunction with UAV spotters takes down heavy targets, or warthog style attacks, just to name a few possibilities.

[Sky Captain]

Yeah, large hypersonic bombers are actualy what I had in mind. Without the need to generate lift to stay airborne although you would want some aerodynamic control surfaces to help with maneuvering at high speed and minimal care about additional weight there are lots of design possibilities. For example airframe shape optimized for low drag with few jet engines for economical cruising and a rocket engine or two for high acceleration and hypersonic speed for deep penetration of air defense networks. At cruise speed of maybe 700 - 900 km/h that thing would have global range and still be capable of hypersonic dash under rocket power.

EDIT: That said, without nuclear weapons, these bombers aren't as much of a mortal threat as the real-life XB-70 ; You might see a lot of chemical warfare, but that's nothing compared to nukes.

Well, if they each have ~1000 ton payload of conventional bombs even a few bombers could easily devastate average sized city causing damage similar to small nuclear bomb. Large payload capability also would allow to carry monster bunker busters, imagine a guided 200 ton penetrator bomb dropped from bomber traveling at mach 6 - 8 hitting at 1,5 km/s. Only very deep (and expensive) bunker complexes could hope to survive that.

[khursed]

Something tells me, that it might simply come down to who has the best intelligences.

For example, say the anti-grav nation knows exactly where the teleporter nation's power facilities are, and hits them hard, then they are stuck with a lot of very useless teleporters.

The main advantage I see of the anti-grav, is that it provides a very powerful helper to their military, whereas the teleporter themselves are more helpful for the logistic.

I'm sure you can create awesome teleporter based weapons, same with anti-grav, so unless we're giving more specific, it's going to be nearly impossible to come up with realistic scenario.

For one, As much as I like those flying battleship, one of the main reason they came up with a treaty to restrict them in the first place, is how outrageously expensive it is to build one that floats. I mean, can you even imagine how expensive a flying battleship would be?

Are we talking two nation with the USA's industrial base fighting one another, or more like France Versus England?

Do they both have similar tech for war like the USA does today? Or is their tech level lower?

What about their population? Also, what would they consider victory? Will they fight to the bitter end in a genocidal war, or will they talk about peace when they go bankrupt or their industries are leveled by enemy forces?

[PeZook]

Well, if they each have ~1000 ton payload of conventional bombs even a few bombers could easily devastate average sized city causing damage similar to small nuclear bomb. Large payload capability also would allow to carry monster bunker busters, imagine a guided 200 ton penetrator bomb dropped from bomber traveling at mach 6 - 8 hitting at 1,5 km/s. Only very deep (and expensive) bunker complexes could hope to survive that.

No...not really.

First of all, a single bomber with 1000 tons of bombs will have to do several runs in order to hit all the important targets, even if it can release a swarm of targeting drones and uses smart weapons exclusively (there's issues with laser interference, available frequencies etc. which limit the amount of targets you can mark simultaneously) to increase per-bomb effectiveness.

Second, 1000 tones of bombs isn't anywhere like an actual nuclear attack. Allies were regularly dropping 3-4 thousand tons of various bombs on German cities in 1945 without wiping them out. 1000 tonnes will devastate a city and kill a great many people, but a single nuclear-armed bomber can instantly wipe out huge and important parts of your nation if it ever gets through. It's a vast difference in sheer scale of destruction resulting from even a minor failure of your air defence system.

Now...1000 tones of NERVE GAS is a whole other thing entirely. Still not quite nuclear, though it causes much of the same type of issues.

[PeZook]

So...is there a reason why I wasn't mercilessly ridiculed yet, despite making an obvious and incredibly embarassing mistake in the simplest physical calculation possible? On a forum which is supposed to be full of people keen on critical analysis, maths and logic?

[vengence]

You have a bomber(more likely a bomber wing with escorts) 22km up circling the city, they drop their targeting drones, then start deploying their payloads. They probably target their anti air defenses first then transit points, supply depots and weapons factories. At this point the city is crippled and they move on to the next target. most likely they will not want to destroy the entire city WW2 style but cripple it enough that it cant add to the war effort.

[Simon_Jester]

So...is there a reason why I wasn't mercilessly ridiculed yet, despite making an obvious and incredibly embarassing mistake in the simplest physical calculation possible? On a forum which is supposed to be full of people keen on critical analysis, maths and logic?

Today, we decided not to suck?

The discussion topic is more interesting then yelling at people for not knowing the practical ceiling of aircraft operations.

Well if all else fails you could use a rapid up-down sensor buoy like thing. (That came out confusing) Basically you have a small craft that is all sensors and an anti gravity machine. You drop it down to take a snapshot and pull it back up. Or just use deployable antigrav jet pack guys to designate targets for you. Or fire cruise missiles. Or you know... a billion other things that don't rely on WW2 like air fleets flying over their target and dropping seas of bombs inaccurately.

The use of UAV surveillance, maybe equipped with laser designators would work well. you could do something like have a bomber at 22km and a uav at 2 km circling the target, say the supply depot for the advancing army, or mass transport hubs or any other important point in the transportation network, and a payload of really accurate ordinance comes and cuts off major supply lines.

Be advised, UAVs are very shoot-downable. The US makes huge use of them in its wars, but that's mostly because it's fighting people with no meaningful air defenses of their own.

An agrav drone that plummets down, comes to a screeching halt, takes a picture, then skyrockets back up might be relatively safe and difficult to counter, though.

one of the big advantages of antigrav is that they can put stationary defensive platforms some kilometers up that puts them out of range of most all retaliatory strikes, an advancing army would have to rely heavily on air support to take out weapons platforms, and air power would be in the hands of the antigrav forces.

Stationary targets are relatively easy, especially since the teleport-guys can build aircraft that have unlimited fuel and ammunition supplies, and missiles with arbitrarily large warheads that 'port as much liquid fuel as they need in.

It's moving targets that present serious difficulties.

[PeZook]

Today, we decided not to suck?

The discussion topic is more interesting then yelling at people for not knowing the practical ceiling of aircraft operations.

It's not the ceiling, dude.

I underestimated the thrust necessary to move the skylord about by THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE by making a grade school mistake (plugging tons into F=ma instead of kilograms)

That...changes the entire conclusion about a skylord's maneuverability, range and fuel consumption

So in short, no skylords and no bombers with 1000 ton payloads ; Fuel issues would rapidly destroy their utility and make their range pathetic.

[Terralthra]

Today, we decided not to suck?

The discussion topic is more interesting then yelling at people for not knowing the practical ceiling of aircraft operations.

It's not the ceiling, dude.

I underestimated the thrust necessary to move the skylord about by THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE by making a grade school mistake (plugging tons into F=ma instead of kilograms)

That...changes the entire conclusion about a skylord's maneuverability, range and fuel consumption

So in short, no skylords and no bombers with 1000 ton payloads ; Fuel issues would rapidly destroy their utility and make their range pathetic.

Yeah, I noticed your kN instead of mN. I decided since I'd laid out my own calcs on fuel issues, it wasn't worth it to dispute yours.

[Beowulf]

1500 ton bombers probably won't get you all that good of protection anyways. A good shaped charge warhead will penetrate at least 8 cone diameters of RHA armor. An AIM-54 Phoenix masses about 500kg, and has a diameter of 15in. The AGM-65 Maverick has a shaped charge warhead of similar weight, and could feasibly have the warhead swapped in. It's going to be relatively difficult to cover a bomber with 6 feet of armor over all the vulnerable locations, when RHA steel weighs about 40lbs/in/sq ft. Which is to say, about a ton and a half per square foot. Or in other words, if you bomber is about the length of a F-15, or 64 feet long, and other dimensions roughly 8ftx8ft, the armor to protect all of it would weigh about 6.1k tons, or about 4 times what your bomber's weight is. Yeah, fail. Bigger is a bit better, in that the armor weight will scale with surface area, which scales by the square of length, while the protected volume goes with cube of length. This doesn't help much though, as you get massively harder to get moving in the first place. I think trying to use anti-gravity to get you armored fighters/bombers is a losing proposition. The thrust simply doesn't scale well enough for you to not end up far too unmanueverable to avoid getting plinked from long ranges.

As for Air Defense: most of the problems of high speed bombers is because the interceptor missiles have limited range, especially at high altitudes. If your interceptor missile has infinite range, and a faster speed than the bomber, then many of the problems go away. Moving targets shouldn't pose much more difficulty than a stationary target. A moving armored target, poses a bit more difficulty, but with the infinite range, comes the ability to make a re-attack possible. Normal missiles can't do that because they don't have the fuel capacity to do so. Most of them are actually coasting when the intercept occurs. A teleporter missile has infinite fuel, so if it fails to impact, it can circle around and try again. Naturally, you'd want to have command guidance of some sort to avoid it coming back at the firer.

[madd0ct0r]

I underestimated the thrust necessary to move the skylord about by THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE by making a grade school mistake (plugging tons into F=ma instead of kilograms)

That...changes the entire conclusion about a skylord's maneuverability, range and fuel consumption

So in short, no skylords and no bombers with 1000 ton payloads ; Fuel issues would rapidly destroy their utility and make their range pathetic.

meh - you saw the mess i made trying to calc aircraft fuel. I'm hardly in a position to point and laugh.

[Sky Captain]

So in short, no skylords and no bombers with 1000 ton payloads ; Fuel issues would rapidly destroy their utility and make their range pathetic.

A problem would be acceleration because of large mass, but aerodynamic drag would be similar for armored and unarmored bomber assuming they have the same shape so fuel burn on a straight line cruise mode would be similar. Heavy armor would not work on a fighter because it needs rapid acceleration capability, but for a deep penetrator bomber that flies mostly straight like SR 71 it should work.

1500 ton bombers probably won't get you all that good of protection anyways. A good shaped charge warhead will penetrate at least 8 cone diameters of RHA armor. An AIM-54 Phoenix masses about 500kg, and has a diameter of 15in. The AGM-65 Maverick has a shaped charge warhead of similar weight, and could feasibly have the warhead swapped in.

The goal would be to provide enough protection to render conventional fragmentation warheads ineffective since it is much harder to score a direct hit than explode a missile somewhere nearby.

As for Air Defense: most of the problems of high speed bombers is because the interceptor missiles have limited range, especially at high altitudes. If your interceptor missile has infinite range, and a faster speed than the bomber, then many of the problems go away.

Teleporting fuel directly into missile - interesting, however it would require liquid fuel missiles (expensive) since teleporting loose chunks of solid fuel into solid fuel missile casing woudn't work. And the question is could a small teleporter that fits inside a missile sustain high acceleration fuel guzzling burn. A 50 kg teleporter could teleport 5 kg of fuel every five seconds. Have to work out how much fuel per second would fairly large AA missile need.

[madd0ct0r]

you could teleport 'magazines' of solid fuel. - it's be easier to handle then liquids anyway.