Antigravity nation vs teleportation nation (RAR)

[madd0ct0r]

How, exactly, are they going to get a huge ass piece of metal up there without it getting shot down? Moving something with anti-gravity is slower than moving something with teleportation.

"Sir, the station's radar is picking up a large metal object at ten thousand feet and climbing. It looks like some sort of impactor."

"Teleport a missile up there and frag the damn thing."

"There are already twenty of them on an intercept course, sir."

"Of course there is. Have a laser broom up there within the hour to sweep away the debris and shoot down any future attacks. Make sure those idiots don't try that again."

tch, try and think this through. The (reasonably expensive) teleport bay has been sent into space by rockets (extremely expensive) and presumably assembled there (unless you have a lollipop shaped rocket). A small bay might be sent up working and the parts for a large bay then ported up, but you still need to assemble it.
Assuming the anti-grav nation don't interfere with this process, they let you actually get up into orbit and get set up.
Then all they have to do is throw something massive up into the orbital path and wait. Shoot it down? Why would it go down? Grin. (for grim humor, a limpet grav-mine could even throw one of your own warships up into the orbital path. Oh drat, but we can always bring it down again over your real estate. Returning lost property and all that)
Laser broom? you have those? since when? are they really going to be effective enough to clear the incoming debris field? nah. They're not. You just lost space and orbit parking rights, and wasted a huge amount of resources to do so. So, since your commanders and advisors aren't idiots, the whole space gamble will probably never happen.
The teleporters will have amazing logistics and industrial output*, but will be outmatched on the battlefield everytime.

*although since heavy loads can be floated, trucking costs just got reduced to air resistance and time. And since you can go up, above buildings and the like, those costs just got reduced to going in a straight line as fast as possible for priority loads. Construction is revolutionised, as cranes are only needed to tug pallets into position, not actually lift. You could float sheets of steel or clouds of rocks over the cities/critical locations at night to make area bombing a waste of resources, Airbattleships might be surrounded by loose sheets of cheap ablative Armour floating several meters away from the hull as well as their own heavy plating.

[Sky Captain]

OP stated that largest teleporter stations can transport 5 tons at once. If it is a physical limitation of technology and stations to teleport heavier objects are impossible then it is a severe limitation since no tanks, APCs, artillery pieces, jet fighters and large missiles could be teleported without disassembly. Making a main battle tank that can be easily taken apart and put back together in 5 ton pieces would be severe engineering challenge and such tank would be much more expensive and less durable than normal tank.
Teleporting something in space may be tricky, because of relative velocity between teleporter on ground and teleporter in orbit although that may be solved by putting teleporter in geosync orbit so it stays at rest relative to ground. If it is possible then teleporter nation could make cheap rods from gods type system and establish industrial foothold in space although anti grav nation could counter this advantage by using conventional boosters to pollute orbits with shrapnel to deny space access.

Anti grav nation has the advantage it can move around nearly anything in one piece. Depending of the details of anti grav tech (size, power consumption) air force of anti grav nation would be much more capable and they could make stuff like flying tanks, flying artillery platforms, huge armored bombers that are impossible otherwise.
While teleporters greatly improve logistics so do anti gav since any supplies can be shipped by air quickly and landed anywhere. Imagine how easy a logistics in Afganistan would become if stuff could be shipped by 10 000 ton flying freighters.

[Formless]

Even still, five ton flying freighters make awesome and impressively expensive targets, thanks.

[madd0ct0r]

presumably attacked by conventional forces?

[Sky Captain]

Transports obviously would not go into hostile airspace without fighter support kinda like the US did not send C17s into Iraq before air defense systems were taken out and air superioty achieved. And we have to keep in mind that those transports would not be as fragile as modern cargo aircraft snce they would have little concern about additional weight they could easily carry some armour and anti missile defences making conventional AA missiles inefective. Effective missile would need to be armour piercing and have some monster warhead like in modern anti ship missiles and achieve direct impact to penetrate and explode inside the ship.

[Beowulf]

Getting up to orbital altitude is easy. The problem is getting the velocity. Getting out of the first 22km is ok, but doesn't gain you nearly as much as being able to laugh as Tsiolkovsky. You don't need to have a giant rocket. You need an engine with enough of a fuel tank to sustain it until the next load of fuel gets teleported to you. I hate to break it to some people, but jets can make it to 72k feet. Sure, you need to wear a space suit, but you can lob missiles at the flying battleship all-day. Eventually the flying battleship runs out. The attacking fighters never will. At which point the flying battleship goes down. And yeah, modern AAMs don't have the ability to penetrate much armor(they still have some, simply because a lot of the critical parts of fighters are lightly armored).

For those postulating limpet grav mines: it's unlikely that the structure of a warship will be strong enough to be lifted such as you postulate. More likely is the grav mine just ripping it's way through the ship until it hits 22km. You're better off with a standard mine, which aren't very effective in the open ocean anyway.

Also, sure, antigravity can get you into thin air, but it doesn't help you at all with propulsion. You'd need to have fleets of tankers to supply your airships with fuel.

Really, the space based aspects of this win it for the Teleport guys. Rods from god are exceedingly cheap ways of taking down your airbattleships, that you can't effectively counter, because you're fuel limited in your ability to get to orbit, and the teleport guys aren't. They have infinite dV to spend to avoid your ASAT missiles. And can boost enough armor up (even if they are small slabs to begin with) you can't match them.

For those who like the idea of teleporting fighters, only to be discouraged by the 5 mT limit on teleportation: I introduce to you, the Boeing 747 AAC. Google it. Carried microfighters of 4760kg loaded weight. Sure, the armament kinda sucked (2 20mm cannons + 1/2 missiles). For those with slightly larger ideas of a fighter, the F-5 had a <5000kg empty weight, while it's slight modification, the F-20 only barely exceeded that (5090kg). Sure, you might not be able to teleport a full up tank, but you can teleport some decently nifty stuff, especially if you don't have to care about fuel or ammo weight, but can afford to add those reasonably quickly after teleportation. Also note, alot of the weight shouldn't actually be an issue, since the aircraft doesn't need to carry much fuel, and so you can shrink the fuel tanks (and therefore fuel tank weight) down to nearly nothing. You might even be able to manage something with performance similar to a JAS-39. As a fun aside, an AMRAAM weights 152 kg. Thus, a teleporter for it weights 1520kg. Which is small enough to be passed through a larger teleporter still. You could stick an AMRAAM teleporter/launcher onto a fighter small enough to be passed through a large teleporter. Commence Macross Missile Massacre.

Anti-grav bunker busters probably won't work. It's implied that 400m long vessels are the biggest possible, and those will likely require fairly impressive installations. This implies at 100k tons or so is the largest you can make it and that's with a giant devices. More critical is that any significant depth of penetration would require such exceedingly strong casing that you can't make it. There's no indication that anti-grav devices actually make stuff weigh less, instead of providing a energetically cheap way to provide vertical thrust. If they do make stuff weigh less, your airbattleships are going to be zero-g internally during the entire time they're airborne, with all the inefficiencies that implies. Also, it makes less sense than the anti-gravity pod being something you bolt the rest of your ship to.

[Rossum]

Also, both nations are going to need ground-based installations to support their economy and infrastructure. Even if Anti-Grav nation feels like putting all their military buildings and stuff into floating castles, they will still need power plants and oil fields to get the fuel to power them (unless they can use anti-grav to levitate windmills up to an optimal altitude for getting wind energy... which could be interesting. If thermodynamics allow it, it could open the possibility of whole near self-sustaining floating towns or buildings powered by wind. Said places would probably be drifting around unless anchored to the ground, but it would be interseting).

Regardless, unless they can build airborn structures that can generate all the power needed to keep themselves aloft then they will need fuel depot to keep them powered. If Teleport nation would have an advantage in breaking apart their enemies supply lines. If they can get one of their Doom Satalites into orbit and keep teleporting metal slugs or missiles to drop onto the planet then it becomes a matter of them bombing their enemys cities and supply lines from orbit. Can't very well fuel a giant airship is all the fuel depots are constanly getting hit by meteors.


On the other hand: I can see the Anti-Grav Nation have a very good defensive advantage against traditional invasions. Even if their airborn aircraft carriers can't reliably invade their enemy (due to anti-air defences shooting them down), they could just patrol their own nations boarders and fire missiles or cannons at any sort of traditional invasion force the Teleporter Nation could throw at them. Setting up airporn patrols and floating platforms with radar should let them spot any incoming aircraft and use their own anti-air to take them out. Trucks carrying teleporters capable of sending in troops could get spotted and captured and any teleporters that get behind enemy lines could get hunted down and destroyed.

Depending on how the Teleporter Nation has their cities set up, they may be more vulnerable to invasion than the Anti-Gravs. Anti-Grav Nation could conceivably build a lot of stealth fighters or stealth transport planes that could sneak past radar and defenses. I'm guessing designing a stealth plane that is invisible to radar is hard greatly due to the need for them to be areodynamic in addition to stealthy, if the Anti-Grav field can't be easily detected itself then they could have alot more leeway in shaping the plane to make it invisible and carry people.

So, Anti-Grav nation could build alot of stealth transports and try sneaking people behind enemy lines to do stuff. If Teleport Nation relies too much on their teleport network then they won't have as many people watching the roads and such. This results in Anti-Grav Nation being able to set up camps all over the places that Teleport Nation doesn't normally look at and could start sabotaging things.

[Hawkwings]

I still don't see how teleporter nation is going to counter a 22km high floating brick dropping bombs. OK, so maybe you can send a fighter up there and fire infinite missiles. Just intercept with ablative flying armor. Or heck, shoot the plane down. If it's got a teleporter capable of receiving a Harpoon missile (as a low-end example of something that might be able to actually harm a flying brick) which weighs 691 kg, you need a plane that can carry a 7000kg payload. OK, possible. But it's gotta fly at 77,000 feet. And it can only fire a missile every minute or two. And it has to deal with antigrav defense fighters.

As stated before, I believe that nobody will have orbital superiority. In fact, it is in antigrav nation's interests to toss as much trash in orbit as possible as make it impossible for teleporter nation to have any satellites up there. Sure, teleporter nation's satellites can have infinite delta-v, but without the ability to actually go to useful locations because of the amount of trash up there, satellites are effectively neutralized. Plus magical mass changes are going to fuck up orbital paths something fierce, necessitating large d-v expenditures every time you beam something up. That's more downtime for your satellites.

Rods from god are great for hitting fixed installations, but utterly fail at hitting flying battleships. So all they can do it destroy small fixed installations of great value. Meanwhile, sky-battleships are fire and chemical bombing your cities and farms, doing similar damage but over a much larger area. Yes, ground installations are important, and destroying them will likely be the key to victory for either side. It's just that antigrav nation can do it faster, to more targets, and better. You can't deploy chemical weapons out of a tungsten rod, after all.

Or, instead of flying battleships, how about antigrav artillery? Float an artillery platform up to 22km, then float antigrav rocket-propelled bombs onto cities from 100+ km away. Flicker the antigrav on and off to make it difficult to track and intercept. Or heck, just fire normal ballistic artillery. Your range is gonna be insane from that altitude. And there's the opposite too: ground skimming cruise bombs. Float your bombs in at mach 2 500 feet off the ground. Sure it's not stealthy, but who gives a shit? Air defense systems fail when your enemy is not flying and not subject to the rules of aircraft/missile design.

This war is effectively over after the first winter, when teleporter nation starves out. Both sides will massively decentralize their power generation and supply chains, which seems to favor the teleporters. However, teleporter nation has a massive glaring weakness and that is the great banks of paired teleporter farms that are required to move everything around. A good analogy is the internet: sure it can be decentralized, but you still have a 'backbone" in which most of your data moves, and if enough of those go down then the rest of your network becomes incredibly slow. In addition, even assuming rods from god are up and work, it's not as good as flying battleships or artillery because they cannot effectively attack large areas, such as cities and farms.

Plus, knocking out power plants is easy with flying battleships, high-altitude artillery, and ground-skimming bombs. While antigrav nation also has vulnerable powerplants, they also have floating ones that are awesome for generating both wind and solar. Tether a platform and park it in the jetstream: regular constant high winds. 22km up also means constant strong sunlight. While it's no nuclear power, it is better than what teleporter nation has.

[ryacko]

Very simple.

Teleporter nation will dig 100m under ground and build giant underground complexes. You drop bombs and make holes. They dig deeper.

Each complex will be connected via teleporter. Infact, teleportation could be used to accelerate the digging process. If this civil defence program began with foresight before the war, then there will be stalemate.

Holes created by bombing could be filled by teleportation as well, so effectively you can't bomb the teleporter naiton to smithereens. Power plant exhaust can be teleported out as well...

[madd0ct0r]

Really, the space based aspects of this win it for the Teleport guys. Rods from god are exceedingly cheap ways of taking down your airbattleships, that you can't effectively counter, because you're fuel limited in your ability to get to orbit, and the teleport guys aren't. They have infinite dV to spend to avoid your ASAT missiles. And can boost enough armor up (even if they are small slabs to begin with) you can't match them.

Anti-grav bunker busters probably won't work. It's implied that 400m long vessels are the biggest possible, and those will likely require fairly impressive installations. This implies at 100k tons or so is the largest you can make it and that's with a giant devices. More critical is that any significant depth of penetration would require such exceedingly strong casing that you can't make it. There's no indication that anti-grav devices actually make stuff weigh less, instead of providing a energetically cheap way to provide vertical thrust. If they do make stuff weigh less, your airbattleships are going to be zero-g internally during the entire time they're airborne, with all the inefficiencies that implies. Also, it makes less sense than the anti-gravity pod being something you bolt the rest of your ship to.

limit grav mines - yeah. funny but impractical idea.

orbital - denied.

teleport farms - ypu hardened under ground strucuters (expensive but necessary)

Also @ Hawkwings - well I think the Skylord warship thingy will probably get attacked by by more then one fighter at a time. It comes down to spreadsheeting - will it cost the teleporters more resources to take one down then it cost to build? The teleport nation would need to build a fleet of decent size jets with multiple gates built in (expensive) that are too big to redepoly themselves via gate (although being honking great jets thats not such a big drawback - they're pretty easy to redeploy already.) I know you were talking about smaller fighters, but the battleship plating I'm thnking of will require a BIG missile and thus bigger transporter and a big plane to carry it. To be able to intercept a Skylord quickly enough, they'll need to build a lot of these and spread them around the country. It's a big commitment in resources that Teleport Nation will HAVE to make for defense.
(alternitvely, they could just fire cruse missiles at the thing)

Skylords are also huge amounts of material, upper edge of grav tech (expensve) and will need a lot of fuel for moving sideways and maneuvering. I think we won't be seeing many of them, unless the Anti-gravvers give up on a a wet navy (in all fairness, they could do this).
Extrapolating I suppose we'll see artillery skylords, bommas and carriers, possibly operating in battle groups of one big with a few smaller. AEGIS or similar will be a must.

As for the land churners - http://www.zetica.com/productsandservices/uxbdepth.htm - suggest a 1000kg 'bomb' will penetrate between 10 and 14 m in farmland. That's not going to render useless a greater area then a conventional bomb making a crater so yeah - idea abandoned.

I think we're going to see a WWI situation where defense tech/investment might out weigh offensive, meaning any attack will be really expensive, bloody and unlikely. Is a stalemate an acceptable outcome to the scenario?

[ryacko]

Is a stalemate an acceptable outcome to the scenario?

Assuming similar politics and culture, then yes.

I haven't voted since there is no none of the above option.

[Sky Captain]

The southern has another system that has revolutionized transportation, Quantum Displacement based teleportation. This system requires two terminals and swaps what is on one for what is on the other, so long as they are within 50,000 km from each other.
Zor

So no resupply of air and space forces since they have no spare mass to give back. Only land and naval force could be easily supplied by teleporters because they always have some dirt or water to swap with the required supply load.

[madd0ct0r]

ummm, he dosen't say the terminals have to swap equal mass, simply that a 2 way transition happens at the same time.

[Zor]

ummm, he dosen't say the terminals have to swap equal mass, simply that a 2 way transition happens at the same time.

Correct.

Zor

[Purple]

Why do people here keep talking about metal rods fired from space as something that would actually be of any use? Seriously, even if you could fly them up there by teleportation the things would just burn up on reentry. And what ever is left won't carry nearly as much energy as the concept implies.

[Terralthra]

Why do people here keep talking about metal rods fired from space as something that would actually be of any use? Seriously, even if you could fly them up there by teleportation the things would just burn up on reentry. And what ever is left won't carry nearly as much energy as the concept implies.

Because some of us have done the calculations involved (or read calcs done) and no, they won't burn up on reentry. This is a real concept, hampered only by the difficulty of getting appropriately-sized cylinders of tungsten into orbit in the first place. Here's a link, here's another.

[Simon_Jester]

Why is there an altitude limit on anti-gravity here? Why can't you just go all the way up to orbit using it? In that case you'd recover a lot of the space advantage over teleportation- not all of it, but being able to send up arbitrarily large massive objects means you don't have to obsessively pinch pennies with the weight the way real life would, which is something.

Also, what kind of interesting uses can people see for this in peacetime? How would, say, a teleport network be set up? Would you have roughly one-ton teleport booths scattered around the country for people to flick from one place to another? Or would energy costs be prohibitive? Would teleporters replace long distance aviation? Long distance buses? Cars? Metropolitan subway/bus transit?

[Purple]

Why do people here keep talking about metal rods fired from space as something that would actually be of any use? Seriously, even if you could fly them up there by teleportation the things would just burn up on reentry. And what ever is left won't carry nearly as much energy as the concept implies.

Because some of us have done the calculations involved (or read calcs done) and no, they won't burn up on reentry. This is a real concept, hampered only by the difficulty of getting appropriately-sized cylinders of tungsten into orbit in the first place. Here's a link, here's another.

And I have read calculations that show they will. And your links lead me to web pages that take 50 years to load to one half and than crash.

[Terralthra]

Why do people here keep talking about metal rods fired from space as something that would actually be of any use? Seriously, even if you could fly them up there by teleportation the things would just burn up on reentry. And what ever is left won't carry nearly as much energy as the concept implies.

Because some of us have done the calculations involved (or read calcs done) and no, they won't burn up on reentry. This is a real concept, hampered only by the difficulty of getting appropriately-sized cylinders of tungsten into orbit in the first place. Here's a link, here's another.

And I have read calculations that show they will. And your links lead me to web pages that take 50 years to load to one half and than crash.

If you can't access the New York Times or SFGate, then I really don't know what to tell you. Move to a country with an actual internet infrastructure? Stop trying to surf the web on your TI-85?

At any rate, tungsten rods of the appropriate length and diameter, with a ceramic ablative tip, will not burn up on reentry, and will have sufficient mass remaining to do a fair amount of damage, striking at ~4 km/sec. Maybe this site will work for you? It's notes from Jerry Pournelle's presentation to Congress on space warfare, including kinetic orbital strikes ("rods from god").

[Sky Captain]

IIRC ballistic missile reentry vehicles also blast through the lower atmosphere at several km/s and they don't burn up. I remember somwhere on the internet I have seen a very cool picture from ICBM test showing white hot MIRVs streaking through the atmoshere till impacting ground so there is no reason why tngsten rods should burn up.

[madd0ct0r]

are we allowing teleport nation rods from god then? I still think trashing the orbit path is too easy for the anti-gravvers not to do, especially since they can have their own sattleites floating happily at lower levels.

[Terralthra]

IIRC ballistic missile reentry vehicles also blast through the lower atmosphere at several km/s and they don't burn up. I remember somwhere on the internet I have seen a very cool picture from ICBM test showing white hot MIRVs streaking through the atmoshere till impacting ground so there is no reason why tngsten rods should burn up.

This one?

[khursed]

Quick question, does your teleport nation use teleporter that negate the law of thermodynamic? Because if your teleportation machine can refill gas tank, and ammo bays for cheaper then the equivalent alternative, this sounds relatively broken.

I mean, the main problem of getting stuff in orbit, is that it cost a huge amount of energy to send ridiculously small amount of material. So even if you could send a teleporting booth up there, and you started sending material, it would probably be cost prohibitive to build rod from gods station if you spend so much energy that you cripple your economy to do so.

Atm we're talking about the best possible launcher, the russian proton rockets, they cost roughly 4300$/kg, the fuel to cargo ratio is roughly 26 to 1, so 26kg of fuel for 1 kg of load to low earth orbit, it gets ridiculously worse for Geostationary which comes at roughly 100 to 1, so 100kg of fuel for 1 kg of load.

I imagine if you want very penetrative rods of gods with an awesome impact speed that you'll want to launch them pretty high, so there comes the issue of how much does it cost to teleport stuff? Because like some said, if the energy used at the end of the signal is lower then what is received, then you've got the basis for some pretty broken shit.

But that doesn't mean the ratio is still favorable for a jet, lets figure you have a 95% efficiency, and you then get a 5% "extra" meaning you need say 950kw of energy to teleport in 1000kw of energy in your plane. Considering you can only teleport every 5 second as per the original post, then does this overhead cover the planes need? Or will the plane simply be incapable of teleporting fuel fast enough and with enough extra to actually fly indefinitely?

Also, something not taken into consideration, is that it's one thing to have endless fuel, and maybe endless ammo, however, as far as I know, high tech fighters are some of the most demanding machines when it comes time for maintenance, I know a F-15 takes roughly 30 hrs of maintenance for every hr of flight. F-117 demanded as much as 100+hrs of maintenance per hour flown.

Doesn't even begin to cover how big and how heavy a teleporting machine is for its capacity. If the 5kg teleporting machine weighs in at half a ton, and you can only teleport 5 kg at a time, you'd need multiple of them to make sure you had enough fuel, and ammunition to do your mission. You might save in one place, then lose it in another, thats not even taking into consideration how big and awkward those teleporting machine will be.

I haven't even touched the anti-grav side.

I do imagine however that it would be mainly useless to fly up to 22km those big ships, simply build 400m wide round tanks, fly them at 3 meters from the ground, and simply use them as super tanks. The number one problem for tanks these days is their weight, because you kill the motor trying to move them, and you can't move across most bridges, both are negated by the anti-grav device.

If you can make it possible to build gigantic armored flying tanks, you still need to figure out how much energy you need to move them around. Since we have neither the figure for the energy requirement of those devices, and we don't know exactly their weight and other critical data, I think it's too soon to declare victory on one side or the other.

We also don't know how they both work, so some of our ideas might just not be feasible, such as those re-fueling teleporting jets, maybe the teleporting machine can not send matter to a moving platform... As for those flying battleship, maybe the math will make them impossible to move once afloat...

For the anti-grav battleship, a very simply way of moving them, would be to make them aerodynamic, and simply shut the anti-grav off, and let them glide, then turn it back on, repeat as needed. But i don't know again too many info to make it work.

[madd0ct0r]

rereading the OP

anti-grav devices: These allow them to elevate payloads safely and reliably to a maximum altitude of about 22 kilometers from sea level with marginal enegry cost

teleporters: These terminals range in scale from units about 10 kilograms which can teleport single kilogram payloads every five seconds (if both terminals have power, to which a wall socket can provide enough juice

yup - both break the laws of thermodyamics.

[Simon_Jester]

Quick question, does your teleport nation use teleporter that negate the law of thermodynamic? Because if your teleportation machine can refill gas tank, and ammo bays for cheaper then the equivalent alternative, this sounds relatively broken.

I mean, the main problem of getting stuff in orbit, is that it cost a huge amount of energy to send ridiculously small amount of material. So even if you could send a teleporting booth up there, and you started sending material, it would probably be cost prohibitive to build rod from gods station if you spend so much energy that you cripple your economy to do so.

The transporter may be able to turn electrical input directly into gravitational potential energy- the real cost of putting things at orbit altitude is about forty-five megajoules per kilogram... and that's only about twelve kilowatt-hours. There's an added problem if you're worried about conservation of momentum, but that's a separate issue.

What's so expensive about rockets is that they have to release this energy in a controlled fashion, and you can't use electricity to do it, you have to use burning chemicals. Dollar cost per kilogram is not the same thing as energy cost per kilogram.

Also, something not taken into consideration, is that it's one thing to have endless fuel, and maybe endless ammo, however, as far as I know, high tech fighters are some of the most demanding machines when it comes time for maintenance, I know a F-15 takes roughly 30 hrs of maintenance for every hr of flight. F-117 demanded as much as 100+hrs of maintenance per hour flown.

This is gonna be an issue.

I do imagine however that it would be mainly useless to fly up to 22km those big ships, simply build 400m wide round tanks, fly them at 3 meters from the ground, and simply use them as super tanks. The number one problem for tanks these days is their weight, because you kill the motor trying to move them, and you can't move across most bridges, both are negated by the anti-grav device.

It's more complicated than that. Hovertanks that fly at low altitude (ground level, basically) are still vulnerable to things like minefields, cannot see over terrain features, aren't free to dodge at high speed in just any direction because they'll smack into a mountain, and so on.

Skimmer's the guy to talk to about this, but if you really could construct flying battleships that had anything like the level of protection enjoyed by real battleships... I'm assured by people I trust that they'd make a significant difference.