Antigravity nation vs teleportation nation (RAR)

[Simon_Jester]

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.

I think the armor scheme would have to revolve around spacing, honeycombing, and composites- sheer size can make it big enough to have a pretty good chance of surviving a weapon that penetrates six feet into the structure. You don't have to use big slabs of rolled homogeneous armor, even if you could actually roll the stuff in six foor slabs anyway.

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.

Hm. Yeah, if you can scale the teleporters down that small you're right.

I had sort of pictured teleporters being small enough to fit in planes and maybe trucks, but not into something as small as a missile chassis. Then again, you could just build a bigger missile- a teleporter would surely fit in a heavy enough SAM.

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.

That's an interesting question...

[PeZook]

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.

You need to fly straight AND FAST. You also need the ability to turn, because the only thing that made the SR-71 survivable were limitations of Soviet missiles and radar, which you can't always count on. And when fighting a conventional bombing campaign, you CANNOT lose a high percentage of aircraft on every raid ; Losing 20% of the attacking Valkylie Minogues when they have bellies full of nuclear death is no big deal, the enemy will be reduced to a glowing crater anyways ; Losing the same amount of Valkylies when they have conventional bombs is a freakin' disaster.

A 1000 ton bomber would need 1 MN of thrust to accelerate at just 1 m/s^2. Getting up to Mach 3 (a good speed to have if you want a chance to actually penetrate air defences while flying straight) would take over an hour at that acceleration.

Let's assume you use jets to do that so you don't have to carry oxidizer - a 1 MN engine will consume about 150 kilograms of fuel per second, so that's 555 tones of fuel just to get up to speed, leaving very little space for the plane itself, the armor and the bombs. You can save by being subsonic, but then you need to terrain-skim, maneuver etc or you'll just get shot down like a clay pidgeon, armor or no armor.

The higher you go with mass, the more exponentially troublesome fuel becomes, even with NO drag at all. And you need a reserve for maneuvering and repeated strikes (again, employing smart weapons en masse runs into huge problems with the maximum number of targets you can mark in close proximity to each other without compromising accuracy).

It might actually be better to use dumb bombs and radar bombsights, to increase survivability of the bombers.

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.

So, build your own bombers, except use them as huge-ass interceptors loaded with AA missiles. Fuel and engine oil teleporters, plus a teleporter for the crew, and the bomberceptor can stay up until its engines need servicing or replacement, just rotating the crews mid-air. Same goes for airborne early warning: even antigravburgians will have to land their floating radar stations to resupply and rotate out the crews.

Which reminds me: the teleporter nation will suffer a fraction of the casualties of the antigrav nation, because they could A) Evacuate crews back to base even from an airplane disabled over enemy territorry (at least in some cases, obviously the crew-porters won't always remain intact, but it will reduce losses of trained pilots) and B) Evacuate battlefield casualties directly to hospitals, thus vastly reducing fatalities. An "ambulance" would simply be a porter truck linked to a field hospital. Even chemical weapons lose a lot of their potency if casualties can be removed to a specialist hospital shortly after exposure - not to mention the "rotate tired troops back" factor, which will be especially important with NBC warfare. Teleportstanis would have to fight in their protective suits a lot shorter on average than Antigraviburgians.

On the other hand...antigrav supersonic trains?

[PeZook]

I wonder just how efficient wings actually are. I might've overestimated fuel consumption for jet engines ; The XB-70 could get away with a maximum thrust of 768 kN which got it Mach 3 speeds and a range of 6900 kilometres, although at a mass of 246 tonnes (half of which was fuel). Total bomb payload? 22 tonnes.

Applying my calculations to it: that's 3.12 m/s^2 top acceleration, 1025 seconds to get up to speed ; So it should consume 115 tons of fuel to do so? It obviously didn't...

It's within an order of magnitude, but I obviously overestimated a jet's fuel consumption ; Still, for napkinwaffe calcs, the performance of RL winged Mach 3 bomber and a hypothetical antigrav mach 3 bomber seems pretty similar. I can't do anything more because it requires specialist knowledge.

But order of magnitude fuel/mass savings by using thermodynamics-breaking antigrav seems unlikely. You could perhaps expect an increase of 2-3 times? A tripled bombload isn't bad, for sure, but without nukes it's not something that allows you to break an enemy's spine in one fell swoop, the way 20 tonnes of nuclear weapons do.

[Simon_Jester]

You need to fly straight AND FAST. You also need the ability to turn, because the only thing that made the SR-71 survivable were limitations of Soviet missiles and radar, which you can't always count on. And when fighting a conventional bombing campaign, you CANNOT lose a high percentage of aircraft on every raid ; Losing 20% of the attacking Valkylie Minogues when they have bellies full of nuclear death is no big deal, the enemy will be reduced to a glowing crater anyways ; Losing the same amount of Valkylies when they have conventional bombs is a freakin' disaster.

A 1000 ton bomber would need 1 MN of thrust to accelerate at just 1 m/s^2. Getting up to Mach 3 (a good speed to have if you want a chance to actually penetrate air defences while flying straight) would take over an hour at that acceleration.

...The engine thrust problem is a legitimate one- a dozen jet engines would come close to providing that kind of straight-line acceleration, but that's about it. Although... heh. You did it again. Mach 3 is ~1000 m/s, and there are a lot more than one thousand seconds in an hour.

[PeZook]

Hmmpf. Yeah, apparently I'm a unit dyslexic

Or just sloppy because I post it at work and in a hurry.

So...this means, a thousand ton bomber is actually feasible and economical. As an aside, it also means the Valkyrie calcs mesh somewhat with its real capabilities!

EDIT: Actually, the 747 has about 1 MN of thrust, although for a bomber you'd want more than 1 ms^2 of acceleration, so yeah, a dozen engines sounds about right.

EDIT2: I think the biggest gain from antigravity wouldn't be payload per se, but the gross simplification of the entire construction of the aircraft.

[Beowulf]

You can't really use thrust figures in the way you're hoping. Jet engine thrust is dependent on both air density and speed. Listed figures are for sea level at 0 mph. http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/ngnsim.html has a neat little program that can help you estimate engine performance at different altitudes and speed. Still grossly complicated, especially since they don't get up to the altitude regimes we're talking about for turbine engines. Still, a turbojet with an estimated 45k lbs of thrust on the test stand would have about 12K lbs of thrust at max altitude and speed.

Lesson: jet aircraft engineering is hard.

I think the biggest advantage of antigravity as applied to a high speed bomber is that you can get a huge bomber into the air without needing a runway the length of France.

[Terralthra]

I made this point earlier, regarding the propulsive efficiency of a jet engine as a factor of the ratio between airframe speed and exhaust speed, but it was largely glossed over by SKY BATTLESHIP wanking.

[Sky Captain]

I think the biggest advantage of antigravity as applied to a high speed bomber is that you can get a huge bomber into the air without needing a runway the length of France.

Anti grav bomber also could climb vertically on grav drive presumambly turning fuel into altitude much more efficiently than conventional aircraft.
Less drag because wings can be small only required to assist with maneuvering. When flying straight and level wings could be kept at zero angle of attack to further reduce drag.
Ability to cruise very fuel eficiently at low speed because grav drive provide lift, jet thrust required only to compensate drag.

Teleporter nation would have advantage it could easily refuel planes in flight so a more brute force solutions could be used to counter some of anti grav advantages. Like flying on afterburner for extended periods. Maybe ultra high performance fighters with rocket engines could be possible if teleporters could manage to supply engine fast enough. It would give ability to intercept attacking bomber formations from above.

[Beowulf]

Hydrogen powered scramjets. They're enough of a pain in real life to use that we don't try. Cyrogenic fuel tanks are hard to put on an aircraft, especially since hydrogen isn't dense, and you'd need a giant tank. More usable when you don't have to care about that. We'd prefer to use hydrocarbon powered scramjets because the fuel is easier to deal with. It's harder though, because it takes longer for hydrocarbons to burn.

At high speeds, the form drag is going to so massively outweigh the induced drag from lift that it won't matter much whether you get lift from wings or from anti-gravity.

[Purple]

Here is a thought. Have the bomber have big wings. Next, have it fly real high and start gliding down. As it glides down, the aerodynamic shape and stuff make it fall at an angle thus moving forward (with no power). Now, what would happen if you used the grav drive all the time to pop back up. Basically creating a patten of movement that looks like this. |/|/|/| Obviously your speed would suck horribly. But it is infinite fuel free (well compared to normal flight) flight.

[Simon_Jester]

I made this point earlier, regarding the propulsive efficiency of a jet engine as a factor of the ratio between airframe speed and exhaust speed, but it was largely glossed over by SKY BATTLESHIP wanking.

Blame Skimmer, he's been spreading the concept around lately.

[Lancer]

Here is a thought. Have the bomber have big wings. Next, have it fly real high and start gliding down. As it glides down, the aerodynamic shape and stuff make it fall at an angle thus moving forward (with no power). Now, what would happen if you used the grav drive all the time to pop back up. Basically creating a patten of movement that looks like this. |/|/|/| Obviously your speed would suck horribly. But it is infinite fuel free (well compared to normal flight) flight.

So basically you're doing the antigrav equivalent of tacking and beating? If you're using large sweeping arcs, then you have a predictable flight path and you end up exposing much more of the bomber's profile as a possible target, both for detection and for hostile fire. If you're using short tight arcs, you're either disorienting your crew or adding an additional level of complexity into your design to make sure they stay relatively level.

Either way, you get eaten alive by a network of hovering teleporter-fortresses with an advance-warning drone radar network and the ability to spam defensive and offensive missiles.

[khursed]

Here is a thought. Have the bomber have big wings. Next, have it fly real high and start gliding down. As it glides down, the aerodynamic shape and stuff make it fall at an angle thus moving forward (with no power). Now, what would happen if you used the grav drive all the time to pop back up. Basically creating a patten of movement that looks like this. |/|/|/| Obviously your speed would suck horribly. But it is infinite fuel free (well compared to normal flight) flight.

So basically you're doing the antigrav equivalent of tacking and beating? If you're using large sweeping arcs, then you have a predictable flight path and you end up exposing much more of the bomber's profile as a possible target, both for detection and for hostile fire. If you're using short tight arcs, you're either disorienting your crew or adding an additional level of complexity into your design to make sure they stay relatively level.

Either way, you get eaten alive by a network of hovering teleporter-fortresses with an advance-warning drone radar network and the ability to spam defensive and offensive missiles.

You know, what you save in having multiple missile launchers with teleporter, and make up with multiple teleporter all over the place, might actually cost more then you're saving.

Think about it, if a teleporter station+launcher, cost more then say a launcher and 24 missiles, then why the heck would you even put a teleporter there?

Cuz basically, the infinite missile theory doesn't fly, since you have finite ressources. Think about it for a minute, the paranoid USSR had how many mobile platform with missile scatered all over their territory? Did they stockpile hundreds, thousands of missile per launch site? No, cuz they still cost a lot of money. If a teleporter cost the same as a couple dozens of those missiles, and they are stationary, or even on an expensive launch system, you don't save much when you think about it. But then again, who knows how much a teleporter cost? And how much they cost to operate? Without those info, no real idea how feasible much of those ideas are.

[PeZook]

You'd put a teleporter there to make the missile station cheaper to OPERATE, because you won't have the headache of trucking missiles around to the sites.

You'd have a central logistical warehouse (or a network of warehouses for redundancy), teleporters at each missile site, and missiles could be shifted around. Even if you can't port missiles directly into their launchers (by, say, using a teleporter/launch container), it still simplifies logistics to an absurd degree.

You only have to run security at the warehouse and missile site ; You don't have to have drivers, trucks, all the assorted personnel, fuel and maintenance headaches related to those, no need for gates (the missile site can literally be a bunker with no entrance!). Maintenance cycles are shortened - the site operators can send a broken missile back and get a new one basically instantly. Storage is simplified...

Over a missile site's operating life, this will easily add up to enormous savings.

And by the way, the Soviets DID stockpile missiles for their reloadable missile silos

[vengence]

So all the munitions for all the anti air are located at a few locations. with this in mind the use of stealth aircraft to destroy these warehouses would severely cripple the nations ability to respond to threats, or supply forward troops.

Another idea is the use of ICBMs, and airborne stealth platforms, one could put a stealth shell/wire frame housing, equipped with an agrav generator and have it float at altitudes near the borders of the enemy nation.

Some malware in the systems of the power plants and you can track where sums of power are being sent and can time it to tele activations(it is likely a lot more complicated than that) and find out where hidden supply bunkers are located.

on an industrial point the use of wind power generators at high altitudes could be vary effective. A city has a wind farm floating above the city anchored to the tops of the buildings that could power the entire city( you would just have to make that area a no fly zone or take other saft precautions) for example.

also this

no need for gates (the missile site can literally be a bunker with no entrance!).

works really well until the other teleporter's partner pad gets destroyed.
____________________________________________________________________________
A question I have been trying to figure out: how would the infinite fuel work?

[PeZook]

So all the munitions for all the anti air are located at a few locations. with this in mind the use of stealth aircraft to destroy these warehouses would severely cripple the nations ability to respond to threats, or supply forward troops.

Who said anything about storing ALL missiles in central warehouses? Store enough at missile sites to make them capable of responding to attacks ; More at central warehouses to quickly resupply those which run low and service any problems (upping total readiness of the system).

In other words, exactly like it's done today, except a zillion times quicker (today resupplying a SAM site is basically impossible while an attack is in progress...not so for teleportguys)

And of course the central warehouses will be hardened and located in the best defended spots precisely to make sure stealth aircraft can't penetrate defences and easily take them out. You'd have to grind up the air defence network first.

no need for gates (the missile site can literally be a bunker with no entrance!).

works really well until the other teleporter's partner pad gets destroyed.

You could have traditional access, just keep it locked 99% of the time. The security problem from gates comes from the fact that stuff has to go through them on a regular basis so that the base can perform its function ; When you can just keep them locked and open only in case of teleporter failure, you save operating costs because you don't have to maintain constant yet permissible security around them - just guys who shoot anything that comes through until they're told to stop.

[Beowulf]

As a note: anything that goes boom tends to get stored in multiple small bunkers, simply to keep the chance of one thing going boom (from being dropped, say) causing everything in the compound going boom. Oh, and power analysis of the power grid is both insanely too complicated, and won't work. The teleport nation could literally run everything off small generators. Admittedly, there's advantages to running big power plants. But when you effectively have a pipeline to everything that needs to run on hydrocarbons, it's pretty easy to just stuff it where ever it needs to be.

And teleporting ammo has more applications than just anti-aircraft artillery. Tanks for example. Don't need to store ammo on the tank. Just request what ammo you need next, and it shows up in your autoloader. Ammo dumps are at home, so battlefield air interdiction has significantly less to hit (stuff too big to teleport, like additional tanks, bridging equipment, etc).

[Simon_Jester]

Granted, the warehouses will be targeted in an attack- but... I wonder how much it'll matter.

It's very hard for me to wrap my brain around this whole war being non-nuclear. Nukes are such a big part of the fundamental assumptions of modern warfare that removing them from the picture changes everything.

Weapons like ICBMs really become kind of pointless without nuclear warheads.

One thing that's on my mind is the power demand of the teleporters. Cost of electricity is something like 3 to 5 cents per megajoule (converted from costs per kilowatt-hour); it's an open question how much energy teleportation uses.

[Beowulf]

Actually, Zor did specify that a 1kg teleport could be powered from a wall socket. Given the cycle rate of 5 seconds, 120VAC power, and a fuse on the circuit of 15A, you can determine the power required. About 9MJ. This is roughly an at most figure. It might not take the full current on the circuit (better not, actually, or you'd be tripping the breaker all the time).

[Purple]

Here is a thought. If you already have teleport everywhere. Would it not be easier to have concealed ground stations with them along the front lines. And than teleport in whole launchers when needed? It lets you concentrate your fire nicely and it makes them almost impossible to track down and kill by other enemy craft and ground forces.

[Beowulf]

Well, your idea put even smaller limits on the size of a missile. A fixed launcher with a teleporter can handle missiles up to 5000 kg. A teleport mobile launcher must be smaller than 5000kg, and so it can teleport missiles of a max size of 500 kg. The bigger a missile you have, the bigger warhead you can throw at the anti-gravity flying tanks. Also, a fixed teleport launcher can be hardened against attack fairly well. It's a small point target, which can have armoring, etc. The radars are definitely the more vulnerable bit in the whole arrangement.

[vengence]

the best alternative to nukes would likely be fuel air bombs, while not as powerful as nukes they are more or less the most powerful non nuclear weapons in modern times. In the weapons are even more deadly in enclosed environments like bunkers and caves, so used in cunjunction with bunker buster missiles they could make short work hardened bunkers, and are small enough to be equipped to most all aircraft. Also the use of such weapons on advancing forces and naval ships would likely be effective as well.

also who would have the advantage in the ensuing space race?

[Sky Captain]

Fuel air bombs should work althought IIRC they had problems if there are high winds scattering the explosive mixture before it can ignite properly. Wikipedia says blast radius (I suppose it is meant to be area where overpressure exceeds 5 PSI) of largest Russian fuel air bomb is ~300 m and it weighs 7.1 ton so a bomber with 1000 ton payload could carry a bit over 100 of them and under ideal conditions devastate ~3 - 4 km2 area so one such payload would be roughly equivalent to first generation nuclear weapon.

also who would have the advantage in the ensuing space race?

Teleporter nation would have advantage if they could establish a foothold in orbit. However anti grav nation could deny use of orbits by polluting them with shrapnel. They would also suffer less from lack of sattellites because communications otherwise going through sattelites could be done by floating relay stations and espionage by swarms of cheap drone aircraft.

Outcome of war also depends on at what state those two nations were before they went to war. If they had prolonged state of cold war before and were actively prepearing for eventual conflict by hardening and dispersing critical infrastructure, and bulding up large military forces, stockpiling weapons and supplies then it is hard to tell who would have upper hand.
If they both were at peace with little active military and little air defense and are forced to go to war with whatever they have because of sudden political change or whatever then anti gravs would have advantage because they already would have large fleet of civilian air cargo ships that could be quickly repurposed into crude bombers to cripple teleport nations infractructure before they manage to build up serious air defense network. Main weakness of teleport nation is if their teleporter grid aren't hardened it could easily be destryed by first strike targeting power plants and teleporter farms crippling the economy that is used to on time deliveries and lack large quantities of other modes of transport.

[vengence]

for space could the anti grav nation use the grav generators to catapult payloads into space, basically rapidly accelerate to the 22 km and let its momentum to catapult the payload higher? maybe augment the momentum with boosters.

also a good anti missile defence for the anti grav would be to when the missile is on the plains tail to increase its altitude rapidly(through the use of anti grav). effectively moving out of the missiles path.

[PeZook]

If they both were at peace with little active military and little air defense and are forced to go to war with whatever they have because of sudden political change or whatever then anti gravs would have advantage because they already would have large fleet of civilian air cargo ships that could be quickly repurposed into crude bombers to cripple teleport nations infractructure before they manage to build up serious air defense network.

Didn't we just go through a round of crude calculations that showed no "air cargo ships" would exist?

Even if they did, repurposing them into "crude bombers", yet with the capability to cripple infrastructure is way more difficult than you're suggesting. For one, you'd need to produce all the weapons to arm them, install bombsights and train the crews in doing bomb runs - and run into the fact that "peacetime readiness" does not mean "complete lack of any defences whatsoever". The fact the US has a rather lousy air defence network right now doesn't mean Russia could cripple them with a sneak attack using converted passenger liners.

for space could the anti grav nation use the grav generators to catapult payloads into space, basically rapidly accelerate to the 22 km and let its momentum to catapult the payload higher? maybe augment the momentum with boosters.

That's not how orbits work. Even if antigrav units could proper you all the way to an orbital ALTITUDE, you'd still need to give the payload all the necessary orbital VELOCITY, which would require traditional boosters of only slightly less size than what you'd normally need. You save quite a bit of launch mass on two things: one, aerodynamic drag in the lower atmosphere and two, the fact you can use one type of engine optimized for low-pressure operation (normally rockets use at least two types of engines, because different fuels and configurations work with varying efficiency in and out of atmosphere)

But it's not something that can make a crushing difference, especially if teleporterstanis can use them to replace a space elevator. Then the antigravburgians are down to trying to deny space to the enemy Which might work for LEO (thus, no spy satellites), not so much for GEO. Especially if the teleportstanis get a chance to set up killsats to kill the delivery mechanisms before they can insert the debris into dangerous trajectories.