Carrier Free Seas (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario its 1910 and a group of aliens decide to do a little experiment with Humanity. They deploy three automated satellites platform in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. Each of these contains 1,728 162 kilogram tungsten rods and a gauss accelerator able to send them towards the planet's surface at about 10km/s as well as a number of telescopes and maneuvering thrusters. These Satellites are designed to do one thing, search for any ship with a runway on top of it and aircraft and then send it to the abyss. They will not attack ships that have landing pads for helicopters or carry pontoon planes. Each one also has two point defense laser turrets capable of firing five 250kj pulses per second for defense.

How does naval warfare unfold without aircraft carriers

Zor

[PeZook]

The space race becomes very very heated as people scramble to find ways to take control of these satellites before their rivals do?

I mean, the things are going to blow up the first carrier built, at which point everybody knows there's SOMETHING in orbit, and it's hostile. Either the world goes into hysteria and unites in preparation for an alien invasion, or people figure out they ONLY hunt carriers and thus rush into space so that they can turn the things against their enemies.

[tim31]

How the fuck do you come up with these things

Because seriously if flattops get speared by space rods every time they leave port the military thinking is going to be along the lines of 'how do we gear up to fight the martian menace'

Anyone want to have a crack at taking this seriously?

[PeZook]

It's actually an interesting question but has little to do with naval warfare. Just how fast can orbital spaceflight be achieved if nations of the world give it absolute priority and unlimited funding in 1918, after the HMS Argus gets sunk by Martians?

[tim31]

Does America throw money at Robert Goddard Y/N

Because he was an ideas man

[Darth Tanner]

Early aircraft carriers take the form of cargo ships that carry huge numbers of pontoon planes until helicopters take over. VTOL gets developed much earlier and becomes the norm, launching from pads rather than strips while the rest of the ship is covered so as to not be a runway.

Either that or we refloat the sunk ships 5184 times till the kill sats run out of ammo.

NASA, Nazi Space Agency Command and Her Royal Majesty’s Space Fleet get silly amounts of money to go take over the satellites before the other agencies do. Or conversely anti satellite weaponry gets developed quite a bit earlier.

[PeZook]

Hmm...yeah, how about constructing cheap-ass cardboard decoys to make the sats bomb them?

[madd0ct0r]

plane dropped cardboard decoys - how to remove your enemy's battleship

How big a cannon would you need to shoot down a satelite?

[MrDakka]

How big a cannon would you need to shoot down a satelite?

REALLY BIG.

Conventional cannons won't work because of the limitation of the speed of sound of the propellent gases. Projectiles from a light gas gun like one used in SHARP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_High ... ch_Project) or a ram accelerator could possibly reach LEO, but not geosynchronous orbit (slightly less than 36000 km above sea level). Your best bet using these guns would be firing a rocket assisted projectile.

However, if you want you projectile to achieve GSO/GEO purely by ballistic means alone, then you have to go nuclear.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/150-ki ... e-gun.html

Mind you, all of this hypothetical.

[KhorneFlakes]

I'm gonna say this devolves into "Humanity trolls aliens with cardboard aircraft carrier facades, and eventually cost the aliens billions of their equivalent money to dollars in hundred-kilo tungsten rods, fustrating the hell out of them. Becoming sick of this, the aliens promptly pack up and leave, and upon their return home, get bitchslapped by their goverment/government-stand-in's Minister of Finace/etc the grand poobah managing their economy for wasting billions of dollar-equivelants on tungsten rods to poke PRIMITIVES with."

Or something like that, anyway.

[Darth Tanner]

plane dropped cardboard decoys - how to remove your enemy's battleship

I now have the image of Al-Qaida painting an aircraft carrier on the roof of the world trade centre in this alternative worlds 9/11

[HMS Conqueror]

Sea power would be severely weakened against land-based air power. US would lose the Pacific War. The allies would do worse in the Mediterranean but probably still win; war in the West would otherwise go as normal.

The knock-on effects of this would be substantial, with Japan carving an enormous East Asian Empire. Probably it would benefit the US, though, because with naval power neutralised the USSR would become its primary rival.

Notes:

1. Guns would still die out, because I assume missiles aren't counted as aircraft. But note even in the missile era ships have a big disadvantage because they cannot easily detect or target enemy ships beyond the horizon (~10 miles).

2. I'm ignoring attempts to dodge the question by shooting down the satellites etc. etc.

3. Helicopters would become the primarily surface combat system from the 50s/60s onward, but that's too late to have much effect on any major naval conflict.

4. Worst consequence of all, Britain would lose the Falklands War

[Sea Skimmer]

The US wouldn't loose the Pacific War, not even remotely, while Japan's own ability to ever carve out such a large Empire would be considerably reduced. Forty plus US battleships can easily enough cover an advance by land based air power all the way to Tokyo, which you known, is what Macarthur was largely doing anyway.

[madd0ct0r]

how valuble is tungsten? i can kinda of see a profit to be made here...

[Admiral Drason]

Sea power would be severely weakened against land-based air power. US would lose the Pacific War. The allies would do worse in the Mediterranean but probably still win; war in the West would otherwise go as normal.

How do you quantify that at all? Didn't Japan knock out the US Battleship force with...AIR POWER FROM CARRIERS. Japan would never have been able to touch the US battleship force without their carriers, and with the added industrial power of the US building only battleships and cruisers we would have seen much larger surface actions. No way around the US having nearly 50% of the worlds industrial power Japan would be buried under the waves of US battleships.

[Darth Tanner]

how valuble is tungsten?

You would only get 3-7 thousand dollars per rod or 6 to 12 million dollars for the entire payload. Not really enough to pay for all the carriers you would have to sacrifice, also you would have to collect the rod after it has gone straight through your ship and lodged itself at the bottom of the sea.

Worst consequence of all, Britain would lose the Falklands War

We could run our harriers off of something sufficiently non aircraft carrierish to survive. Since Ark Royal wasn't built till 78 then I'd imagine we would have figured out how to build a VTOL launch craft that cannot get caught under the non airstrip rule.

[Mr Bean]

how valuble is tungsten? i can kinda of see a profit to be made here...

Not much considering at that Km/s in that size your not going to have a solid 162 kilogram shot but instead tiny tungsten particles spread around a half mile radius after the explosion of it impacting the water after hitting the ship in question. These rods are pretty small even if each one is worth about five thousand dollars before it hits the atmosphere, there's going to be nothing but trace particles left after it hits.

Also I'm not sure these rods can't be armored against because 162 kilograms of tungstun is pretty damn small after it's run through our atmosphere. A ten meter long dart on the other hand would turn out 80 kiloton explosions which are overkill.

[PeZook]

So...just build a massive concrete decoy and let it be pounded again and again and again and again until they exhaust their ammo?

This is assuming of course that you can figure out how much ammo they actually have.

[Eternal_Freedom]

So...just build a massive concrete decoy and let it be pounded again and again and again and again until they exhaust their ammo?

This is assuming of course that you can figure out how much ammo they actually have.

Well, you can find that out by pointing telescopes at the damn satellites and making some guestimates.

Or, well, keep planting decoys until they stop getting shot. Thenbyou know exactly how much ammo they had

[HMS Conqueror]

The US wouldn't loose the Pacific War, not even remotely, while Japan's own ability to ever carve out such a large Empire would be considerably reduced. Forty plus US battleships can easily enough cover an advance by land based air power all the way to Tokyo, which you known, is what Macarthur was largely doing anyway.

Sea power would be severely weakened against land-based air power. US would lose the Pacific War. The allies would do worse in the Mediterranean but probably still win; war in the West would otherwise go as normal.

How do you quantify that at all? Didn't Japan knock out the US Battleship force with...AIR POWER FROM CARRIERS. Japan would never have been able to touch the US battleship force without their carriers, and with the added industrial power of the US building only battleships and cruisers we would have seen much larger surface actions. No way around the US having nearly 50% of the worlds industrial power Japan would be buried under the waves of US battleships.

Knocking out [part of] the US battleship force also made pretty much no difference to the conflict.

It is true that Japan would not be able to, say, invade Hawaii, but nor would the US be able to attack Japan's conquests in the Pacific let alone the Home Islands. Land-based air power will destroy n+1 unescorted battleships where n is any integer.

We could run our harriers off of something sufficiently non aircraft carrierish to survive. Since Ark Royal wasn't built till 78 then I'd imagine we would have figured out how to build a VTOL launch craft that cannot get caught under the non airstrip rule.

I don't think you could get a sensible number of Harriers without gaming the ship construction rule past the point of reasonable doubt.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

It is true that Japan would not be able to, say, invade Hawaii, but nor would the US be able to attack Japan's conquests in the Pacific let alone the Home Islands. Land-based air power will destroy n+1 unescorted battleships where n is any integer.

So, what's stopping the U.S. from going to islands where the Japanese are NOT, setting up airstrips and using long range fighters like the P-38 and the P-51 as escorts? The Japanese can't be everywhere. Alternately, you might see purpose-built anti-air ships used in support of landings. The U.S. has so much more industrial capacity than Japan that there is only one way a war can go, once its started. The Japanese can slow the Americans down, but they can't stop them.


More realisticly though, the Second World War probably doesn't happen in this scenario, because, as has already been said, everybody is going to be more concerned with fighting off the Martian invasion.

[Lord Revan]

Correct me if I'm wrong weren't there airship based carriers like the USS Mackon (or how ever it was spelled) that never truly got off the ground (figurtively speaking) due to not being cost effective enough and too risky when compared to ship based carriers, now I'd suspect if you took out the sea based carriers research into these airships might increace as an alternative.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Guess what design gets a 10,000-aircraft contract in US factories after we defeat Hitler?

Seaplane carriers can recover aircraft astern with mats at speeds greater than 20kts and we'd develop steam catapults much faster. One the jet engine is invented, the need for floats separate from the aircraft body disappears, the Saunders-Roe a1 gets built in America in ludicrous numbers, and the Japanese Empire crumbles since the USN now has air cover. From jet floatplane fighters.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Correct me if I'm wrong weren't there airship based carriers like the USS Mackon (or how ever it was spelled) that never truly got off the ground (figurtively speaking) due to not being cost effective enough and too risky when compared to ship based carriers, now I'd suspect if you took out the sea based carriers research into these airships might increace as an alternative.

Yes, there would be attempts like that, but we're talking about airships at the very limit of human engineering capability even with massively more funding simply to carry like a dozen aircraft at most. I'd expect the US to nonetheless be able to field dozens of such airships for fleet reconaissance, and all of them by that point with high-end parasite fighters. There would also be long-range maritime patrol aircraft capable of launching a parasite fighter.

[HMS Conqueror]

It is true that Japan would not be able to, say, invade Hawaii, but nor would the US be able to attack Japan's conquests in the Pacific let alone the Home Islands. Land-based air power will destroy n+1 unescorted battleships where n is any integer.

So, what's stopping the U.S. from going to islands where the Japanese are NOT, setting up airstrips and using long range fighters like the P-38 and the P-51 as escorts?

The way the IRL island hopping worked is that the US attacked islands where Japan had airbases, and then the Japanese airforce had to attack them, and the US carrier airforce tended to win. The Japanese, when they lost their carrier fleet, did in fact switch to a land-based strategy like I'm suggesting here, but the US carrier forces simply outnumbered them.

They won't occupy every island maybe, but definitely the larger ones, and enough that to land on the others you need to spend time in range of their airbases with no cover.

There's really no way the US (or any other country) can project power across a sea more than about 100km wide, against another power.

Alternately, you might see purpose-built anti-air ships used in support of landings. The U.S. has so much more industrial capacity than Japan that there is only one way a war can go, once its started. The Japanese can slow the Americans down, but they can't stop them.

US industrial capacity was greater but only about 3x. If you're trying to exchange 10,000t escort cruisers for a couple of 5-10t planes, US loses.