600 Flying Tanks or 10 Flying Battleships (RAR!)

[Simon_Jester]

You sounded pretty sure when you flat out told people it was impossible based on trials involving different vehicles and probably different speeds fifty fucking years ago when my shoe had more processing power than the entire world. Are you aware machines can be landed automatically in the non-flying battleship world?

Regardless, just trade a few battleships for 60 tanks apiece, air wing established, milnerd repetition of irrelevance rendered more irrelevant.

So why don't they land drones on runways automatically, which is easier?

They do, and the auto landing ones generally crash less often then manually landed ones too to the point the US congress ordered that all future Reaper drones have this feature even though the USAF didn't want it. F/A-18 can land on a carrier automatically as well, though I'm sure no pilot worth his ego has ever used that feature in service.

I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I was attempting to pass something on. Either I garbled it because of my own lack of knowledge, or I didn't make a good enough case of laying out the groundwork.

Skimmer, you were the one who had negative remarks about flying aircraft carriers in the first place; what do you have to say?

[Zwinmar]

I would take the flying battleships, put a flat top on them and boom, flying aircraft carriers. Or put another way, carriers that do not need water. Talk about being able to project force any where at any time.

[Simon_Jester]

That's the theory. The main question is how practical it is to land planes on a flying airstrip.

[Sea Skimmer]

The speed involved here is the same as landing on a 30 knot carrier steaming into a 35 knot wind, which isn't typical but certainly has happened. Helicopters have landed on Sea Fighter while it was doing 55 knots outright. This is much different then making the attempt at hundreds of knots as is more typical for proposals of representations of flying carriers, and for example still allows for men to be on deck if need be at least on an emergency basis.

In any event, I would still call it a waste of capability to do more then operate some spotter, which could easily be helicopters and need a pad and not a deck. A flying carrier isn't nearly as much advantage as a flying missile battleship compared to a normal carrier and missile battleship. I'd convert it to embark a lot more missiles and fill the hanger, if it has one, with reloads. Though if we allow modifications, I'd also look into a way to get more speed. Acceleration might be slow as shit, but if the thing generates lift by magic as it must, you aren't going to need that much extra thrust to really get moving.

Also don't underrate the need for armoring. A heavy SAM striking at mach 6 is kind of a serious impact, and people can and will replace blast fragmentation with AP ones. Warhead on an S-300 is 330lb, so more or less an 8in shell that can strike you at the velocity of a 120mm sabot round from a tank and then some. The warhead on SA-2 is even bigger and its still a 1,200m/s class missile. You might remove some armor, but only to fit reactive armor on top, since little hope exists of stopping an AP SAM without it really. That's also why I like the battleship more, it'd have a fair chance of shooting down the SAMs, and its guns and missiles can wipe out the SAM sites rapidly while a 120mm armed flying tank really can't do that at long ranges. Armor will hopefully prevent it from exploding from a few leakers.

[Venator]

The appeal of the flying battleship is that if you repurpose and redesign it to use its tonnage efficiently, there are a huge number of things you can do with a flying platform of that 50000-ton size. By comparison, a Boeing 747 has a take-off weight of less than 500 tons.

That's my line of thinking, too. Flying battleships, flying carriers, flying command centres... but that's just strictly military. Just imagine the impacts for foreign aid and disaster relief if you can airlift thousands of tonnes of freight, whole prefabbed shelters, and emergency vehicles, regardless of access to ports or road infrastructure.

Or - what about using it as a launch platform for space payloads - I'm not up to scratch on my launch energies, but I imagine ferrying your material 10km up and launching from there would reduce fuel requirements to some degree?

[Simon_Jester]

The main advantage you'd get is being above a large fraction of the atmosphere: less drag. You haven't really gotten that much advantage in terms of climbing out of the Earth's potential well.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Agreed, about 80% of the atmosphere's mass is in the first 10km, though the total height of the atmosphere itself extends up to around 600km.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I would probably do what Skimmer mentions too. Get rid of some of the armour and make it have a decent composite armour plate system with ERA and spacing, but focus mainly on having ECM/ECCM and CIWS. If you have the power to make this thing fly, then you likely also have the power for some amazing phased array radar and powering solid-state or FE lasers or railguns, if you get the option at some point. In any case, turning it into a flying missile battery is going to make it better than the tanks on a number of levels and it only gets better if you can upgrade to point defences that work at lightspeed.

[MrDakka]

Note that a Boeing concept also exists for a 2 million pound aircraft to transport crude oil in Alaska instead of building the Alaska pipeline, so connections to reality of aircraft concepts may vary.

Talk about huge. http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=19571 How would this have compared to the Hughes H-4 Hercules (spruce goose)?

[Simon_Jester]

Step one: Google "spruce goose."
Step two: Look up "loaded weight."
Step three: Find "400,000 pounds."

So, that's the answer.

Note that the Spruce Goose has a fully loaded weight comparable to a 747's empty weight, or the payload (not weight, payload) of the An-225. The state of the art has advanced from 1947, impressive as the H-4 was at that time.

[MrDakka]

Note that the Spruce Goose has a fully loaded weight comparable to a 747's empty weight, or the payload (not weight, payload) of the An-225. The state of the art has advanced from 1947, impressive as the H-4 was at that time.

Sorry I forgot to specify.

I wanted to know how does the Boeing concept compare with the H-4 in wing dimensions? IIRC the Herc still has the largest wingspan of any plane.

I'm not finding too much hard info about that Boeing concept

[Sky Captain]

I'd go for 10 flying missile battleships. The flying tanks are too slow to effectively fill the role of attack helicopters or ground attack aircraft. A flying battleship is completely different beast, something that have no analogue in current military forces. Maybe closest thing would be Boeing missile carrier concept or some Arsenal ship concepts.
I would remove one 400 mm gun turret to make more space for missiles and bomb bay. a 400 mm gun would have some serious range when fired from 10 km altitude so I'd like to keep some guns. With GPS guided shells guns would have same accuracy as missiles and shells are cheaper than missiles so it makes sense to use long range missiles to destroy AA defenses and then move in closer to destroy targets that can't shoot back with gunfire or bombs. I'd also fit Aegis radar system and long range AA missiles to give it capability to engage enemy aircraft from long distance.