Reply To: The North Atlantic Current

[Duke Leto]

Point taken, but you have to climb to the “high ground” for the little buggers to be at all useful. Which is no easy feat.

I still think my basic point stands, that FF renders just about all military hardware that has been stockpiled obsolete and changes all geopolitical miliatary assumptions. But you are right, which ever nation-state is the first one to get a “Space Fleet” operational is going to have a huge advantage.

In the meantime, if rapid fire ground/sea based rail guns are feasible and will work as I have outlined, then I think the following conclusions are valid.

Conclusion 1) Conventional Air Forces have now become flying turkeys. No unstealthy fighter, bomber or gunship will be able to dodge a shotgun barrage of these little things going at escape velocity, and the stealthy ones will be in deep trouble too since the enemy only needs to have a general idea where they are to kill them.

Concludion 2) Carrier Attack Groups are therefore every bit as worthless as Battleships were after the advent of Carrier Aviation.

Conclusion 3) In fact, the only Naval Ship that will remain useful is the Submarine, which will have to mix its present role with that of the old style Battleship to make up the backbone of the new navies. Surface vessels are in even worse shape than planes, but subs can use the oceans to avoid detection, and as about the only armor that can possibly protect anything.

Conclusion 4) The bigger the tank, the more danger it is in as a target. Armored columns have to be reduced in size and upped in speed a lot to remain effective. May have to scale down to “Motorcycle Cavalry”. Even that may not be fast enough.

Conclusion 5) In ground warfare, you’re basically looking at a return to WWI conditions, artillery slugging it out with high accuracy and the infantry hiding underground.

Conclusion 6) The artillery still has to be mobile to keep from getting slaughtered by counterbattery fire. It also has to be totally disposable. That means highly mechanized drones, ground or air based. But the air drones would have to stay way back, move really fast and be as small as possible, and stay below radar. For a self contained FF generating station with turret, this might mean a “Stealth Zeppelin”. Nuts as that sounds.

The practical upshot of all this is in fact that space is the only place to be. Especially if you could use teh FF to turn one of these jobbies “up to 11”. http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9567&feedId=online-news_rss20