For the discussion of current or near-future technologies related to the enhancement, armament, and protection of large vehicles.
Soil, Sea, Sky, or Space. Post your favourites.
Nae-sayers will be ridiculed in intense debate while the faithful enjoy fruitful philosophical debate on the nature of mechanized warfare.
This was originally supposed to be a supertanks general but I've expanded it because naval ships are too close of an analogy to landkreuzers.
Pic related is a submarine aircraft carrier. Utterly indestructible by conventional warfare when it's submerged below the range of a fusion blast's penetration into water.
All other ordinance in water is rendered ineffective from just a few meters. Shells, missiles, etc. With modern interception equipment torpedoes pose no threat. I foresee some attempt to drop nuclear depth-charges to get her to crack.
ya but its not gonna run off uranium alone right. it would need some kind of gas for the uranium to heat up like helium and the thrust to weight ratio would be shit. so in short i would say something like this isnt even theoretically possible. no propulsion/ power system exists to get something this size and weight off the ground.
one day maybe
James Watson
The concept of a submersible aircraft carrier will always have a fatal flaw: needing to surface in order for aircraft to take off and land. Other than that, in the real world the notion that missile defence technology can solve all your problems is wishful thinking. Missile defence is usually one or several steps behind missile offence technology.
Also, Schlock Mercenary is one of the few sci-fi universes to get the scale right. The grey triangle is a spaceship called a Battleplate. The blue circles are reactors, and it also has fleet support equipment like hangars and repair bays, massive stores of any kind of supply, and even with this, a population capacity of 50,000. Later in the comic, a character is famous for being nearby when one is destroyed twice, even though he had almost nothing to do with their destruction. Early on, they have a war against a 50 million year old race and it's collection of Dyson spheres.
It's pointless. Look at the battle group that surrounds every aircraft carrier that goes into combat. Where are the helidestroyers and helicruisers and helifrigates and heliSSNs? You're proposing an answer to a question nobody ever asked because it's never been a problem, and until the oceans dry up, never will be a problem.
Luis Evans
This is not a soviet tank. Russia had no huge super tank project.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket#Closed_cycle_designs for those rocket engines on the back, helium is a poor choice for this as it's expensive and higher molecular weight reducing exhaust velocity. Pure hydrogen gas should be used as the reactor coolant/propellant.
and the lift turbines are powered by electric motors
Christian Parker
Fucking anzac posters
Colton Cook
these support vessels are all obsolete with modern ordinance interception. Missiles cannot hit targets properly defended by counter-measures. This leaves ballistic shots such as shells or railguns. Shells at long ranges are also interceptable as they will take many seconds to reach their target.
technologies already exist for ordinance destruction on small vehicles. youtu.be/2VrAUTP6rTg
>helicarrier ascends to an altitude beyond firing range of conventional forces they're fighting. >the bottom side uses artillery to soften targets like AA sites for their airforce to engage.
James Edwards
the crawler has a whole resource refinery and equipment factory inside. The airstrips are just bonus
Gabriel Ortiz
>i have absolutely no idea how nuclear power works
Not without fusion power it isn't Regular fission reactors would probably not work because of the shielding requirements, and God help you if you use gas
Their high beta "truck reactor" as a confirmed scam
Bentley Cox
shielding in the modern era could even be irrelevant with a fully automated airforce which need to be hardened on their own anyway. However the vast amount of coolant/rocketfuel can be placed between the limited crew and the reactors
>and the lift turbines are powered by electric motors come to think of it this is a round-about way of generating thrust and steam could power these more efficiently
YES I fucking love these majestic floating whales, actually used to live near to the Friedrichshafen hangers where it all began, they still make little ones for short tourist views over the lake. I really with we could get back into making them with modern materials like lightweight carbon composite frames. Trans-atlantic airship hotel when? Imagine a few days comfy floating from Paris to New York
the concept is called a ground-effect-vehicle or GEV, where a fast-moving object will ride its own wake when close to another minimally or non-compressible material providing much greater lift
I think people would absolutely pay for a fastkreuz along their favourite waters, it would definitely needs a shielded aft-deck where they could get out and enjoy the sun/fresh air without the turbulence
I think we're at a point where weapon technology, especially small arms, is so ahead of anything that we're starting to focus more on developing active protection systems, like trophy countermeasures or large anti-missile laser weapons. There's only so much armour you can fit onto a tank or helicopter before it's too slow and heavy to be useful.
I agree, I'd still like to see a super tank vs a naval barrage
Wyatt Nelson
What about a 'space elevator' but instead of just being a giant line from earth to space; it's a space station floating in orbit, with an elevator going down into the atmosphere, holding up a landing pad.
with active support (think water going through a hose to resist gravity) megaengineering such as this is possible within the physical limits of steel and nothing new needs to be developed.
With just pumping water a few nuclear plants could keep your space elevator aloft with high-pressured steam.
Other possibilities are creating great lifting-gas floats which offset the force upon your structure allowing it to reach counter-balance in geo-stationary orbit.
Caleb Diaz
>I have literally no idea how orbits work, the post
Aaron Barnes
Is this proposed station in geostationary orbit or in a lower orbit?
If it's the former it might be possible, if it's the latter then it would be physically impossible to build.
Thomas Thompson
Low orbit like the ISS would still be impossible. Having a structure fly around in the atmosphere at Mach 22 is not going to last
Cameron Ross
Caspian sea monster
Angel Myers
Why not build it closer to the sun to get more power? And why not just encompass the entire sun?
Cooper Scott
This, but semi-auto.
David Anderson
not him but thanks to you I just read and learnt more more about satellite orbits, informative post user
this but fired from a scaled up 255mm GAU-8 Avenger
Caleb Bell
>shut it down for complexity sake aka Waves.
Alexander Kelly
it's just an artist's depiction but it should be just outside the range where it's able to keep the components functioning with the amount of incoming heat.
Joseph Ross
the following would be possible as a mega-engineering project, station not necessarily to scale and can be extremely small.
it rides on top of the surf and during storms the lift will be greater. The project leader was taken off of it and then shortly after they had an accident and shut the project down.
How much verticle lift would you need to generate from each of those turboshafts to even keep that ship aloft? Is it even possible to generate that much downward thrust with helicopter based spinning props? I'm a bit skeptical that it could be achieved without some sort of antigravity technology.
Lets be conservative and estimate 20,000 tons for that. I don't feel like doing the exact calculations, but you would need to generate an obscene amount of thrust/lift from each of those props, every second, to keep it from falling like a rock.
4 turboshafts makes it look nice for the movies, In reality it'd probably have more, and the combined lift from those and gimbaled main thrusters would just need to exceed 1.01
8,500 kW * 2 for the largest helicopter on earth lifting 56t
194mW of engine power on the nimitz class aircraft carrier could lift 672t (based on the direct power-weight of the MI-26) and weighs ~782t (reactor + turbines) but it's poorly optimized for pure lift-weight ratio.
With direct nuclear to steam turbofan propulsion vast amounts of inefficiencies can be discarded, meanwhile the super-cooled stratosphere will be used to radiate heat away from reactors
Connor Perry
change 194mW to 204
William Moore
the problem with the Zewalt DD-100 was that it was basically an attempt to make a modern battleship only 80 years after aircraft carriers made the idea obsolete and it was proven you could never use the fucking things.
