Flying aircraft carriers

[Patroklos]

Well, I'm not privy to what the military currently has or is using, but I'm assuming it's an order of magnitude (at least!) better than what the civilian world has, and probably several. Also, keep in mind that Google Earth is the free civilian tool, not the best tool in the civilian toolkit.

I am sure they do, but I think you are greatly overestimating their practical use as a tactical tool in a battle space of millions of square kilometers. I have been on three deployments serving as OOD and various CIC watch stations and I have never myself or heard of anyone at the tactical level getting any actionable time sensitive contact reports. The best I have seen is "as of our last pass these ships are in port, and these ones that were are no longer there." They could do that because they were monitoring a stationary target.

I am not secret squirrel important to be sure, but I would have been the one using that data to actually do something should it have been necessary so if it existed I don't see why it would not be shared.

True, satellites do not loiter... but put enough up you'll have excellent coverage. That is, after all, how GPS works so reliably these days. Between GPS coordinates and "smart" missiles I'm pretty sure it's getting harder and harder to hide your boat just by being in the middle of the ocean.

You MIGHT be able to make a hit with a smart missile based on a coordinate only. But in that case without a positive radar or visual seeker lock it would still be very dicey to hit a moving target from hundreds of miles away. You would need a non existent CEP. The idea could be to get the missile in the vicinity this way and let it acquire the target with its own sensors. This is in fact how Harpoons work. Nobody has this capability right now regarding real time satellite intel to the best of my knowledge. Third party fire control is a thing, just via recon planes and the like.

And as I said before and regarding your "flood the sky with satellites" as soon as lasers are capable satellites in general will be hugely vulnerable. I suspect this is already case. And yeah we are very worried about thinks like GPS being taken out as contemporary, not future, problem.

Well, yes, there are problems with evacuating a large ship, be it an airship or an ocean ship. There are plenty of other factors, too - there are many ocean areas in the world where jumping off a sinking ship still means you're dead - just of hypothermia instead of smacking into water at terminal velocity. Hell, the Great Lakes have that problem, for much of the year in most of those waters falling overboard without an arctic type survival suit means you're going to die within minutes.

In WWII a lot of guys successfully bailed out of wrecked bombers. And a lot of guys drowned at sea, or were eaten by sharks or whatever. People tend to overestimate survival post-shipwreck in the water and underestimate survival post-airwreck.

Any parachuting air carrier survivor would have the exact same problem if operating over those same waters. As for those guys who made it out of bombers, what percent didn't? Even if you get eaten by a shark five minutes after jumping of the deck of a ship your chances of getting to that water in the first place is orders of magnitude better than any aircraft borne personnel. Who would then face the same (probably worse, bailing out of an aircraft is rarely an injury free ordeal) survival problems of a shipwrecked guy in the same terrain.

[Elheru Aran]

As far as civilian satellite surveillance: Google Earth is *not* up to date, and censored. It runs a few months behind, typically. If I look up my house on GE, the picture I get is ~1yr old (judging from the foliage and some details of the landscape that have since changed). If you try searching for certain military installations by name, it won't show you anything, and if you try a lat-long search, more likely than not all you'll see is a blank stretch of digital landscape appropriate to the surroundings. Of course, some installations are less sensitive than others.

If you want something more up to date, I suspect you would have to pass a few bucks (probably more than a few) to people who run satellite imaging services for things like weather channels and what not.

[madd0ct0r]

If lasers do become a real threat in this 10-20 year timescale, all air traffic (and thus air cover) is under threat. Being fast is not a good defense. Being big enough to allow holes to be punched through without failing is a good defense. Heavy armour plates with heat redistribution blocks is. The ability to pump a stream of high mass, high reflectivity particles (like crushed sand) is. All of these defenses require weight.
I would also note that a flying cruiser would make an excellent Mount for a laser.

The battle barge's troops would require aerial support. Not sure if gunships or aircraft carrier fits role better.

Hard to reconcile patrokles statement of one missile kill vs sea skimmers eating half a dozen. Inclined to think on modern flying ship redundancy budgeted for.

[Sea Skimmer]

It depends on the nature of the tech. To return to history for a bit, the large airships were built with multiple gas cells, so even if one fully ruptured the remaining ones would be sufficient to allow continued operation. This was even more true of the helium ships (the US ones, largely) than the hydrogen-lifted ones (primarily German, since German access to helium was severely restricted due to political reasons) as helium will not support combustion.

Got to remember that vulnerability is a combination of the weapon effect and the target type at the same time though. The airship gas bags being very slow to leak due to low pressure meant something against .30cal machine gun fire. Against say modern aircraft cannon, let alone missiles the kill mechanism would become not fire or leakage, but massive structural breakup. All that ultra lightweight framing would be torn to pieces by fragmentation and blast and the thing snaps in half.

This was recognized in WW1, and people comically mounted manually guns as heavy as 47mm and 57mm (in the case of France on blimps!!!) in ordered to inflict such damage, but the guns were so heavy the resulting aircraft didn't have the performance to do the job. That in turn led to the invention of the first operational recoilless rifles but by the time those appeared airship raids had already ceased in the face of incendiary ammunition. The big guns and planes/blimps ended up being used as ASW weapons instead.

Satellite observation pretty much eliminates this difference. Yay, Google Earth. Actually, the military had that tech before Google, but the fact this tech is in civilian hands pretty much means you can't hide your ships in the ocean anymore.

This is not true. The swatch covered by optical and radar satellites is very small per pass,, and the wider the field of view employed the lower the resolution. Google makes massive use of aerial photos to get its high resolution images too. Its not all satellite data.

Since the world has ~50,000 merchant ships you need a decent resolution to tell them apart from warships. A low orbit satellite might circle the globe in 90 minutes, but it doesn't have the electrical power to operate at all times typically (gotta save battery power for the dark side, radar birds really suffer from this) and with such a narrow swatch that still means a least a day cover even one theater of combat, let alone the globe. And this assumes good weather too, cloud cover being a big deal. Radar can go through clouds, though not always rain, but the thermal cameras on some satellites are still degraded and may or may not work, and always have smaller swatches for a given resolution then similar sized visual wavelength cameras. That's just a basic weight issue.

This is why dedicated naval patrol aircraft like the P-8, Tu-142 and now the Triton drone are still being used and produced. They also have coverage limitations, but cost vastly less and can be concentrated in the area of interest in a manner not possible with reasonable numbers of satellites.

The only way to actually cover the broad ocean from above constantly is via ELINT, the US and China operate special formations of satellites for this purpose, but that in turn requires the warship to operate its radar or make radio transmissions identifiable as military. This in turn is why military ships usually mount commercial surface search radars and civilian satellite communications equipment besides military specific. That way they can avoid ramming random other ships in bad weather and keep in touch with home without identifying themselves as military to those satellites, as well as other ELINT.

And as mentioned already, satellites are very, very vulnerable to a peer competitor, and have been for a long time.

[Simon_Jester]

Anything that weighs tens of thousands of tons is going to be hard to truly destroy with a single explosion, unless that explosion is ideally placed (like when you wire a building for demolition). Good design can make it even harder to accomplish this.

Now, if you're prepared to go all-out and mount nuclear warheads on your surface to air missiles, the rules change- at that point a flying battleship or aircraft carrier becomes relatively easy to kill with a single shot.

Of course, then the odds are good that the flying battleships will start shooting back with nuclear-tipped missiles of their own...

Simon, putting an aircraft into a dive to re-start a turbine is actually an old and well-established procedure that has worked many a time. The key is to have enough altitude to pull it off successfully.

Acknowledging the earlier reply to me that there is a difference between diving to escape a stall and diving to restart an engine, AND replying to this...

It's not that you're mistaken, or that the other poster is mistaken. Trading altitude for urgently needed speed is of course one of the great classic maneuvers of all aviation.

The problem is... do you really want to build an aircraft carrier where that maneuver is the only way to get planes into the air under their own power? I can think of a number of reasons not to do that.

[Sky Captain]

Others have covered the practical details on carrier stuff better than I can, but I would say the biggest impact of this magi-tech would be in big airborne freighters. Something that can carry the same load as a bigass cargo ship but can move at aircraft speeds and isn't dependent on where the seaports are would be a big deal.

Exactly, I would expect such anti gravity tech to be used on freighters and only after it is proven to be reliable and highly failure resistant something as expensive as carrier could be built.

That said, between a dive to achieve airspeed (not a problem with an aerodynamic aircraft, gravity-powered acceleration without working turbine is sufficient, for example, for your average airliner to achieve Mach 1 in a dive, the worst issue being the controls aren't really designed for that speed so good luck getting out of that dive) and some mechanism on board to start/assist the turbine run-up a purpose-designed aircraft for this is well within reach of our current tech.

I'm not sure why that would be required. If launching from flying carrier without catapults you would start with engines on full afterburner reach whatever speed you can while on the runway, go over the edge trade some altitude for airspeed and you are good to go. Pretty much any modern military aircraft should be capable of that.

2.) Advanced interdependent technologies means that one hit is generally a mission kill for any modern warship. The difference here is that a mission kill, which probably includes at least temporary engineering losses in many cases, means you sit dead in the water for a bit while you restore propulsion if possible. At the very least you are still there with living crew and a surviving aircraft inventory even if vulnerable and useless. If you sink that's not generally a fast process and the sea, while not the most hospitable environment to evacuate too, is a viable escape route short term. A mission kill, from just one missile, on a flying carrier probably always means it crashes quickly for a total loss with all hands and aircraft.

If flying carrier is as fragile as normal aircraft then concept would not work. It would have to have survivability more like a ship than aircraft to be workable.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Its a great tool but it works more like the photographic spy planes of old which were not a 100% (or 10%) solution in this regard. The world is a big place and optics are only so good and can only be analyzed so fast.

IIRC during Cold War USSR launched several radar satellites specially to track US carrier battlegroups in near real time and that data were supposed to be used to guide a big spam of anti ship missiles launched at standoff distance from bombers towards a battlegroup. You don't need perfect coverage to have good idea where any particular ship may be. Update every few hours probably is sufficient.

If lasers do become a real threat in this 10-20 year timescale, all air traffic (and thus air cover) is under threat. Being fast is not a good defense. Being big enough to allow holes to be punched through without failing is a good defense. Heavy armour plates with heat redistribution blocks is. The ability to pump a stream of high mass, high reflectivity particles (like crushed sand) is. All of these defenses require weight.

High pressure water mist sprayed over the hull also may work well to defocus and degrade the attacking laser beam and cool parts of the ship exposed to attack.

[Sea Skimmer]

With the rapid pace at which the US is fielding insensitive munitions its questionable that in 10-20 years any single explosion could destroy a carrier, even with ideal placement, assuming were talking about something that actually has to fit on a missile and not in the tens of thousands of pounds aka MOAB or MOP which could sink the ship from structural breakup. The risk of a mass magazine explosion actually can be eliminated in principle with like sized weapon. We can and do now make 2000lb bombs now that be piled in a stack and survive one of them being detonated without sympathetic detonation. Its not perfect, but its amazingly better then anything that came before it.

This tech has not worked yet on larger munitions, but US CVNs are limited to 2,200lb weapons anyway (overall size) because of the size of the weapons elevator.

Thing is IM stuff does still burn like crazy, and the ship is going to need to land by a big water source real quickly to cope with that. This is one of the reason why I don't really like the idea of a flying carrier. It has too many fire hazards, and no source of water to fight them with. You might be able to carry even 10,000 tons on board, but that wouldn't be enough for a major weapons linked fire. The ship could easily consume 100 tons a minute fighting it one.

Though on the other hand at least the risk of capsizing from firefighting water trapped on board would be much easier to cope with, since you could now design the ship with drains leading out of the bottom.

[Sea Skimmer]

IIRC during Cold War USSR launched several radar satellites specially to track US carrier battlegroups in near real time and that data were supposed to be used to guide a big spam of anti ship missiles launched at standoff distance from bombers towards a battlegroup. You don't need perfect coverage to have good idea where any particular ship may be. Update every few hours probably is sufficient.

Every few hours would not be sufficient for a standoff attack with most weapons. The ship in combat is moving 20-30 knots. 40-60nm radius is too big to be workable given the limitations of missile seekers. Meanwhile the minimal revisit time for any one satellite is more likely to be ~1 day or even several days. Satellites are thus very good for cueing a search, but they cannot really replace other means of searching.

The RORSATs never really worked out for this and numerous other reasons, and they operated in very very low orbits to get good resolution coverage with a good swatch. This made them very vulnerable, and short lived. And they had to use nuclear power, because comically at such a low orbit DRAG from solar panels would have been too high. At this point nobody has any known capability on par with RORSAT, though something a lot better should be possible now.

High pressure water mist sprayed over the hull also may work well to defocus and degrade the attacking laser beam and cool parts of the ship exposed to attack.

It does work; actually been service fielded for that purpose by Sweden to protect coastal gun positions from laser guided bombs. However you need a lot of water (and the faster you go the more you'll need), and thus is not so useful to an aerial ship. Smoke might work out better, since while it would consume fuel the fuel could also be used for aircraft or the ships engines.

Water could also be firefighting water I suppose, but one would wish the minimize parasitic mass like that since the ship has to fly. Hell you could use the ships drinking water even, but the mere fact that the ship will need to handle lots of drinking and washing water is another problem with a flying ship with a very large crew.

Apparently about an inch of SAND is the best protection for the mass though against, and the US tested armor made of nothing more then randomized particle quartz sand and transparent glue as a means of protection of satellites from lasers and nuclear thermal pulse in the SDI program. For some completely insane reason it was also then tested for BODY ARMOR because the 1980s were that fucking awesome and is actually what I have data on.

The reason the sand works is it has a very high melting point, but also highly reflective. So the incoming thermal energy is bounced throughout a wide area of the sand matrix, spreading the energy away. A high enough power laser will still defeat this, but only if it can stay focused on the same spot (turning the ship constantly could prevent that). The random pattern and grain size is important because it gives the most possible reflections while still being realistic to actually mass produce. Its basically the same principle as using a mirror, but because its many surfaces, not one polished surface, it will work far better once it's been degraded by actual damage and realistic service conditions.

Anyway if the enemy has lasers the best countermeasure is to shoot your own laser back, to damage the enemy tracking optics and also his laser optics. This will work with much lower power requirements then the power the enemy needs to penetrate a steel hull. You might not destroy the enemy laser, in fact you likely wont, but you can blind it long enough to retreat or attack with another weapon. After all you will know the exactly location of the enemy laser. That really bright spot on the ground aimed directly at you!

This is a reason why I like the idea of an aerial destroyer more then a carrier. The destroyer can mount a bunch of high power lasers itself, and still have protection for them. A plane can also mount a laser, but with far more trouble, less power and probably only one or two of them (or more likely one laser with two beam directors, top and bottom) making it hard to defend against more then one enemy laser attacks at one time. The enemy after all can also blind your laser in turn.

Battles between lasers might well turn out to be comically short, and completely indecisive, with both sides blinding each other before either side can actually inflict major damage.

[Serafina]

Well the SHIELD Insight Helicarriers were pretty much aerial destroyers. Their main value was in their gun platforms, the planes were just there for support.

The first generation of Helicarriers wasn't made to fight in conventional wars either, they were a operation base for a secret organization. So there is less concern about survivability against a proper military attack, no need for mass sortie of planes and so on.

[Broomstick]

Simon, putting an aircraft into a dive to re-start a turbine is actually an old and well-established procedure that has worked many a time. The key is to have enough altitude to pull it off successfully.

Acknowledging the earlier reply to me that there is a difference between diving to escape a stall and diving to restart an engine, AND replying to this...

It's not that you're mistaken, or that the other poster is mistaken. Trading altitude for urgently needed speed is of course one of the great classic maneuvers of all aviation.

The problem is... do you really want to build an aircraft carrier where that maneuver is the only way to get planes into the air under their own power? I can think of a number of reasons not to do that.

It's also a technique used for non-urgently needed speed - heck, I used to do it to conserve fuel in Cessnas, if you're approaching an airport you can reduce engine power to something lower than cruise (even to idle given the right circumstances) but still maintain a cruising airspeed, why burn fuel when you can use gravity and covert all that potential energy you have to something useful?

Simon, you're a smart guy but you just don't seem to have an intuitive feel for the concept of relative speed.

Remember, though, that airspeed is relatively to the air you're moving through - between the carrier's speed and any headwind you'd already have some airspeed even at "rest". Water-based carriers utilize this as well, turning their runways into the wind to take advantage of the "free" airspeed when launching or landing aircraft.

The upshot is that you won't need that much of a speed boost because likely the carrier is already moving through the air.

[biostem]

If you have the ability to create power plants with the kind of output and endurance to keep an aircraft carrier aloft for extended period of time, then why not simply create a more modest vehicle with said capabilities, which can deliver whatever firepower and amenities you need, instead? Having a flying sensor tower, like an AWAC, is nothing new, and if you need the ability to deploy units forward of your actual location, then drones could fulfill that role rather easily, (and would be easier to retrieve).

[Simon_Jester]

It's also a technique used for non-urgently needed speed - heck, I used to do it to conserve fuel in Cessnas, if you're approaching an airport you can reduce engine power to something lower than cruise (even to idle given the right circumstances) but still maintain a cruising airspeed, why burn fuel when you can use gravity and covert all that potential energy you have to something useful?

Simon, you're a smart guy but you just don't seem to have an intuitive feel for the concept of relative speed.

I honestly do understand this; the problem is that if your carrier can't launch planes safely without said planes dropping X thousand feet to build up speed, that can cause a lot of trouble.

Maybe you're flying over mountains and the difference between the carrier's maximum altitude for flight operations and the surface of the ground isn't enough- by the time the plane's fallen far enough it's smacked into a mountain.

Maybe you're just plain trying to fly low, although in that case you can take advantage of low stall speeds at low altitude in dense air.

Maybe 'dropping' planes from the carrier risks them coming into range of light anti-air weapons like Stinger missiles at the bottom of their dive.

Or maybe something I haven't thought of yet; we can certainly tell there's a lot about aviation and air combat I don't know.

The upshot is that you won't need that much of a speed boost because likely the carrier is already moving through the air.

That depends heavily on how fast the carrier itself can fly; given its sheer size and blockiness it's liable to be pretty slow by the standards of fighter jets.

[Broomstick]

I honestly do understand this; the problem is that if your carrier can't launch planes safely without said planes dropping X thousand feet to build up speed, that can cause a lot of trouble.

But you won't need to drop thousands of feet. Honestly, we can launch from water-based carriers already, it's not like an aircraft carrier can churn through waves at a hundred kph. If you have a "runway" as long as a current carrier and use a catapult it should work just fine.

Maybe you're flying over mountains and the difference between the carrier's maximum altitude for flight operations and the surface of the ground isn't enough- by the time the plane's fallen far enough it's smacked into a mountain.

That's one of those things your navigator has to keep track of and the commander has to consider for operations.

[Darth Tanner]

I'm pretty ignorant on actual flight mechanics but if we are designing a new aircraft carrier for the flying future then we might as well go total drone and potentially do away with the runway... you could have drones launching by dropping down and be recovered by flying to match speeds with the carrier and then pulled in to a hanger via cable similar to mid air refuelling. Not sure how well that would work in practice but would perhaps be safer than operating runways at 5k up.

You could call them tie fighter racks.

[LaCroix]

You could call them tie fighter racks.

Because their operators would be sitting in offices instead of cockpits?

[Beowulf]

I'm pretty ignorant on actual flight mechanics but if we are designing a new aircraft carrier for the flying future then we might as well go total drone and potentially do away with the runway... you could have drones launching by dropping down and be recovered by flying to match speeds with the carrier and then pulled in to a hanger via cable similar to mid air refuelling. Not sure how well that would work in practice but would perhaps be safer than operating runways at 5k up.

You could call them tie fighter racks.

One of the big problems the Akron and Macon (and XF-85) had was that airflow can be turbulent near the carrier, and so had issues with the parasite fighter hitting the carrier when it got close. And both of those systems had much more positive control over the motion of the fighters than your proposed cable.

[Sky Captain]

Thing is IM stuff does still burn like crazy, and the ship is going to need to land by a big water source real quickly to cope with that. This is one of the reason why I don't really like the idea of a flying carrier. It has too many fire hazards, and no source of water to fight them with. You might be able to carry even 10,000 tons on board, but that wouldn't be enough for a major weapons linked fire. The ship could easily consume 100 tons a minute fighting it one.

How viable would be to fight major fire by going to higher altitude to starve fire from oxygen assuming propulsion still fully operational and you can keep crew into pressurized parts of the ship?

Anything that weighs tens of thousands of tons is going to be hard to truly destroy with a single explosion, unless that explosion is ideally placed (like when you wire a building for demolition). Good design can make it even harder to accomplish this.

Having as much as possible non essential stuff between outer hull and stuff that absolutely MUST work to keep the ship in the air also probably would help against penetrating hits.

[Broomstick]

How viable would be to fight major fire by going to higher altitude to starve fire from oxygen assuming propulsion still fully operational and you can keep crew into pressurized parts of the ship?

You'd be talking about something that can fly higher than modern commercial jets, basically, edge-of-space sort of altitude. If the propulsion system isn't dependent on atmospheric oxygen, maybe, but if it is getting oxygen from the air probably not doable.

[Patroklos]

Having as much as possible non essential stuff between outer hull and stuff that absolutely MUST work to keep the ship in the air also probably would help against penetrating hits.[/quote]

The problem is that "stuff that keeps the ship in the air" is probably stuff that is required to be on the outside of the ship just like props or jet engines. The same goes for ships regarding water jets and props, but another benefit of sea carriers and all ship actually is their engineering spaces enjoy a lot of free armor against everything but one weapon in particular.

that's also why modern warships are one hit mission kills. All those fragile radars, communications and fire controls not to mention the launchers themselves to some degree are on the outside of the ship and essentially unarmorable in most cases.

[Batman]

Depends on the workings of the antigravity magic really. It's possible you can bury the machinery deep inside the hull with no need for outside emitters or whatnot (though I personally agree that is unlikely).
As for the 'throw overboard' method of launching fighters, while as the 'only' or even 'preferred' method this is indeed stupid, as Broomstick pointed out, catapults work just dandy on real carriers, no reason they wouldn't on an aerocarrier. What the dropdown launch gives you is another option that seagoing carriers simply don't have. A modern carrier, the launch doesn't work, the bird is a fatality. Aerocarrier (depending on altitude) it can recover and not only be saved but actually proceed with its mission.
It also opens up more payload options. Off a conventional carrier, the bird cannot carry more armament than is compatible with its maximum takeoff weight including enough fuel to live until aerial refueling. Launching from the aerocarrier, it should be able to carry its maximum load and use the combined catapult/dropdown speed to acquire the needed lift.

[Elheru Aran]

Landing on an aerocarrier might actually be slightly easier than landing on a nautical carrier. I can see where it might require a change in plane designs, though...

[Purple]

Er... I just have one question. If this technology allows something the size of an aircraft carrier to fly, and does so at an energy efficiency that dwarfs anything we can put out today (given that it's superior to making the thing fly with conventional means this is a given) why not just use it on the fighter jets to begin with? Why do you even need an aircraft carrier when all your aircraft just became perfect, land anywhere, take off from anywhere, VTOL? You could literally restructure your entire air force to be composed out of nothing but supply trucks and VTOL jets. Why do you even need an aircraft carrier?

[Batman]

Because it doesn't work on anything massing less than 100,000 tons. Blam. No antigravity for fighters. Just because a technology is available doesn't mean it scales arbitrarily, leave alone cost-effectively.
Also, the magic antigravity device gives you lift, not propulsion so you'd still need a launch base inside the aircraft's powered range, which isn't going to change much because of antigravity (most military airplanes tend to move a lot faster than the minimum needed to maintain aerodynamic lift anyway because they usually need to get where they're sent ASAP).

[biostem]

Because it doesn't work on anything massing less than 100,000 tons. Blam. No antigravity for fighters. Just because a technology is available doesn't mean it scales arbitrarily, leave alone cost-effectively.
Also, the magic antigravity device gives you lift, not propulsion so you'd still need a launch base inside the aircraft's powered range, which isn't going to change much because of antigravity (most military airplanes tend to move a lot faster than the minimum needed to maintain aerodynamic lift anyway because they usually need to get where they're sent ASAP).

If we work from the premise that said antigrav tech *only* works on very large objects, then you'd still be better off making the vehicle to the minimum required size, and using unmanned drones, (could be launched form a catapult or via rocket assist), and carrying a nice sized payload of cannons/railguns/missiles to supplement the ranged punch. You'd just want to make sure to have enough of a ranged punch to be able to hit enemies from beyond their ability to simply lob dumb AA shells at you.

[Batman]

Oh I wasn't arguing the general viability of an aerocarrier. I was just commenting on Purple's assumption that since we can make it work for the carrier, why not use it on the fighters? While I think they're way cool I agree with the people saying they're essentially an unworkable (or at least extremely foolish) concept.