Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Kaelik]

Did Kaelik get his own custom title? I just noticed it.

[name_here]

So I have managed to find the specific weapon people are talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D

Important caveats:

1. Doesn't actually sink a carrier in a single shot, just means it can't launch or recover planes until repaired, so China would greatly desire two hits, which is rather significant for reasons below.
2. Not necessarily immune to interception; a destroyer fitted for intercepting ballistic missiles may be able to shoot one down. The US has a number of destroyers fitted for intercepting ballistic missiles, and while it's not sure how accurate they'll be against this particular set they can carry up to 96 counter-missiles apiece.
2a. The US has not tested intercepting them because a dummy target would cost $30 million apiece. While the US is known for overspending, I somehow doubt they're overestimating by four orders of magnitude. Also, the missile they would use to shoot it down costs $4.3 million apiece. Long-range missiles are pricey as all hell.
3. Requires knowing the location of the target with reasonable accuracy before launching. Satellites can do it, but I consider it fairly likely that if a war starts people will soon start shooting them down. Without satellites, it requires getting uncomfortably close to a carrier group.
4. No one has actually tested if their terminal guidance systems are reliably capable of overcoming electronic warfare and won't be decoyed into the ocean or into destroyers.
5. None of them actually have the range to strike US ships in the Atlantic or large chunks of the Pacific. Heck, they don't have the range to strike most of Australia
6. Importantly for Tussock's "every ship is sunk" scenario, there are only eighty of these missiles. The US could plausibly lose a ship to every single one and still win at sea.

There are plenty of other anti-ship missiles, but on the other hand we're much more confident that the literal thousands of missiles that the US fleet has can shoot them down, particularly with air cover to see them coming. So the most likely scenario is simply that fleets will clump up to combine their antimissile defenses and the side with the most missiles wins. Or everyone runs out of missiles and it's aircraft time.

As for land war, we have learned a number of things about it:
1. Air power does not win wars by itself.
2. Air power kicks ass at blowing up tank columns.
3. While there are a number of ground-based weapon systems that can kill tanks, the best one remains a better tank.
4. If you try to counter "better tanks" with "more tanks" the US blows the ever-living hell out of your tanks.

[Stahlseele]

With the US appearantly planning on using Lasers and RAILGUNS (both not exactly what you'd call ballistic [read: arcing instead of LOS straight line of fire shooting] weapons) it seems they are planning on going to the Battleship route again. For some reason. If i am not mistaken, 14km is the max distance you can draw a straight line from one ship to another. Everything after that needs to arc to follow the curvature of the earth over the horizon.
And to make a carrier useless, you only need to fuck up the lifts or the flight deck, not the entire ship. considering that the big carriers do not have just one but even two nuclear reactors, that might be the preferred thing to do anway.

[hyzmarca]

With the US appearantly planning on using Lasers and RAILGUNS (both not exactly what you'd call ballistic [read: arcing instead of LOS straight line of fire shooting] weapons) it seems they are planning on going to the Battleship route again. For some reason. If i am not mistaken, 14km is the max distance you can draw a straight line from one ship to another. Everything after that needs to arc to follow the curvature of the earth over the horizon.
And to make a carrier useless, you only need to fuck up the lifts or the flight deck, not the entire ship. considering that the big carriers do not have just one but even two nuclear reactors, that might be the preferred thing to do anway.

Railguns arc. They fire physical projectiles. Physical projectiles arc, unless you shoot them so hard that they escape Earth's gravity well.

The entire reason they want railguns is to shoot land-based targets that they'd otherwise use guided missiles against. Slugs are less expensive than missiles, by a wide margin.

Lasers are for anti-missile and anti-aircraft work, not anti-ship. Making a laser that would be powerful enough to harm a ship is an insurmountable task.

[name_here]

They're going with railguns because as mentioned cruise missiles are ungodly expensive and they want shore bombardment again; continuous bombardment is less attractive at $2million per shot. They're also interested in AA and antimissile defense.

While damage to the lifts and flight deck can take a carrier out of the fight, that's quite repairable unlike sending one to the bottom of the ocean. Admittedly the US has previously repaired sunken warships, but that was in shallow water and took a lot longer than when the US repaired a comprehensively fucked carrier.

[Chamomile]

Since this is a theoretical conflict, we don't know who is fighting who and what territorial gains matter, but we would expect the bulk of fighting in Eurasia.

Part of my question is what conflicts are reasonably likely to occur. I'd consider EU and/or USA vs. Russia to be the most plausible major powers showdown, just because USA and China seem pretty content to be economic rivals and are very dependent and very directly so upon one another for supply chains, which puts the two in a bit of economic MAD. In a USA vs. Russia scenario, I would expect China to remain neutral, and likewise if China decided to invade Japan or something.

I don't know exactly how plausible this is, but let's say that France continues going semi- or completely fascist due to the ISIS attacks, and Germany ends up going either fully fascist or at least ends up a democracy with lots of popular support for openly xenophobic and imperialist government as a result of the current refugee crisis. A war-weary America commits as little firepower to the war against ISIS as is possible without making it look like we're ignoring the problem altogether, which leaves Russia to take point in that offensive and they end up with Syria and Iraq both firmly in their sphere of influence. This becomes a talking point in France/Germany about the failures of the European alliance (a bullshit term I just now invented to refer to "people who are in the EU who France and Germany approve of), particularly as anti-Russian sentiment continues to grow.

Under this cloud of anti-Russian sentiment, the Ukrainian junta tries to blitz Crimea, which has declared itself an independent nation, is occupied and administered by Russia de facto, and which Ukraine still claims as part of their sovereign territory. The Ukraine has an agreement with France and is thus able to rely on French naval and air power to back the invasion. The Russians were unaware of the agreement and ended up overrun, with most of Crimea in Ukrainian hands.

The Ukraine and France issue an ultimatum to Russia not to send any troops to support Crimea or else it will be taken as an act of war against the entire EU, completely ignoring the facts that #1 Russian troops were and are already in Crimea, #2 France doesn't have the authority to declare that on behalf of the entire EU even if Germany supports the motion, and #3 the Ukraine isn't even a part of the EU in the first place. Russia laughs off this flimsy pretense and prepares a full invasion of the Ukraine in retaliation. French and German forces start a general mobilization to counter them. Poland, never a fan of the Russians, supports the invasion and provides a vital land corridor, and various minor sabre-rattlers like Latvia hop on board. America supports France and China supports Russia, but the two are economically intertwined and thus, after a few weeks of tense negotiations, they agree to mutual neutrality in the conflict.

Is this plausible? If so, what happens? What if the American public is extremely dissatisfied with the decision not to intervene against the Russians, and that dissatisfaction is enough to vote into power a president and congress who back out of the agreement with China and join the war a year or more after it's started? Is the war even going on at that point? What can China do to retaliate against America for this without completely destroying themselves, and if the answer is "nothing," will they demolish their own economy to bring America down with them?

[name_here]

Honestly, I think we're looking at US, NATO, and assorted non-NATO allies vs. Russia, China, and assorted or we're not looking at EU vs. Russia at all. If France and Germany start sabre-rattling either NATO in general backs them or NATO tells them that if they really want to fight Russia solo they can try any time they want and the German+French governments think better of this plan. And Russia and China aren't monolithic but do tend to work together, and Russia is unlikely to want to fight all of NATO solo. As for what happens to people's economies, well, they go to shit. That's what usually happens during wars. Team NATO dumps a ton of money into reopening/rebuilding all the mines and steel mills and such that closed because China undercut them and then proceeds to funnel everything into the war effort. China loses all their exports and puts a bunch of people to work making more weapons. Russia stops getting to export oil and funds a bunch of refineries because tanks need gas. Everyone finds out exactly how quickly you can get modern manufacturing plants built when you have a budget of "how much do you need?" and an approval process of "yes".

Oh, and India and Pakistan probably have it out. Whether as part of the overall war or a separate conflict is an open question.

[Stahlseele]

Still, blowing a Carrier out of the water is basically the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Even if it doesn't go BOOM GREEN EXPLOSION! . . you have now probably one or two nuclear reactors leaking into the waters around wherever you sunk it. Titanic moved, appearantly, quite a bit sinking/after sinking as well due to under water drafts and then pray it does not get into something like, say, the gulf stream for example. You'd irradiate huge parts of the oceans with that.

come to think of it . . who ever thought doing something stupid like that would be a good idea to begin with? Same problem with nuclear submarines, and those, while admittedly kinda harder to find are even more fragile so once found pretty much an easy kill i guess?

the russkies experimented with a nuclear powered plane once, if i remember correctly . . but they wisely decided to not keep doing that for fear of it blowing up in the sky or falling down and blowing up on the ground and making a nice glowy cloud all around it.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think any of Chamomile's suggestions are particularly likely, and I disagree with just about everything name_here said.

My major in college was International Relations but I'm certainly not an expert. That said, here is what I would consider somewhat plausible.

North Korea is a problem. They're still technically at war with South Korea and they make provocative gestures toward Japan (flying missiles over the country, for instance). The most likely scenario I see as escalating to a global conflict is a North Korean attack on a major Japanese population center. No country can ignore an attack on it's people. The Japanese SDF would be involved and the United States has a defense treaty with Japan. I wouldn't expect any Chinese attack on Japan unless North Korea started it. But if North Korea starts something (and they're crazy enough to do that), China wants to maintain a buffer from 'US influence' in the form of South Korea - that's why they support their crazy neighbor. China might enter the war in support of North Korea (like it did when the UN coalition was winning during the Korean war). China and Russia don't usually get along - they have been on the brink of war as recently as 1969, but Russia would likely want to get involved in the conflict - likely as an ally of the Chinese. From the Russian perspective, though, they have little interest in the outcome of the war - it's more a chance to realize other objectives somewhere else. This could be the form of economic pacts or agreements or possibly a chance to capture territory while everyone else is busy. It's also worth mentioning that while China and Japan have close economic ties, the Chinese are still upset about WWII and it wouldn't take a lot to get the people fully behind a war against Japan.

Ultimately, while this scenario is somewhat unlikely, I think it has a pretty huge escalation potential. The other major international threat would be an escalation of the conflict in the Ukraine. International norms call for the respect of national boundaries as they are today. This is why when Somalia had no functioning government at all, it wasn't divided up by it's neighbors - instead the territory was maintained as a country with the expectation that everyone would respect those borders. Russia has disregarded those international norms - a lot of people in Russia think that surrendering Crimea was a huge mistake and it's time to correct it. This conflict has some potential to become a major war, but I don't think Russia wants it to. Their actions in the Crimea are not too dissimilar from how Texas joined the United States of America. In that case, Texas seceded from Mexico and only the United States recognized its independence. Texas then voted to join the United States and was admitted in 1845. Following it becoming a state the United States fought a war with Mexico where Mexico ceded almost all of the Western United States. So there's certainly precedent for what's happening here, and if Russia can make a compelling case that the people are 'self determining' their destiny, it'd be hard for the conflict to escalate. The fact that there was a revolution PRIOR to the invasion makes it difficult to not treat this as a civil issue for Ukraine to sort out. However, Russia isn't usually the best at making a convincing case for the people truly choosing to join their Federation (and Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms posing as Ukranians undermines and self-determination case). Since Russia has some pretty limited territorial objectives, they'd have to do some really blatant things to escalate this to a shooting war. NATO isn't required to go to war if a single member declares a war - but NATO would have to act if Russia attacked a member nation. Russia objected to NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact nations so EVENTUALLY it's likely to get into a conflict, but it may be years after the Ukrainian situation has passed.

If Russia and NATO become involved in an armed conflict, I don't expect it would expand globally. I also don't expect either side to look for a total conquest of the other party. The war would be more limited - because if one side is on the brink of destruction nukes would come into play. So the former Warsaw countries would be a battleground until there wasn't enough of them to be worth fighting over anymore. We might see 40 million dead and Russia occupying much of the former Soviet Union territory that was lost, but it not being worth much.

[name_here]

We are discussing the hypothetical in which alien space bats forbid us from using nuclear weapons, which changes the calculus considerably.

[erik]

We are discussing the hypothetical in which alien space bats forbid us from using nuclear weapons, which changes the calculus considerably.

Does it? While they are a deterrent, I don't know if they are *the* deterrent. I like to think that the world has become smaller and more interconnected. Bombing population centers with the goal of wiping out civilians seems like the kind of thing that people would revolt over, be it with nuclear or conventional arms. I dunno. My mom's from Chile, my sister in law and nephew are Russian. I'm a citizen of the world before I'm an American.

Additionally, if there are aliens out there lording over us, even benignly, I think humanity would continue to bond further. Arrogant fucking aliens, thinking they're so high and mighty with their uber tech. It's our destiny to dominate this solar system, not some extraterrestrial chucklefucks. We'll learn to build our own warships.

On North Korea, I think if North Korea ever did a large scale attack, China wouldn't back them. They'd probably want to handle NK themselves to keep other people from stepping in. NK is a useful saber rattling tool, but once they wage war, they're fucked. Granted, that won't save Seoul and bits of Japan from being bloody rubble, but the shit storm will probably come from all directions on NK including its bigger neighbor.

[hyzmarca]

Yeah. The most likely scenario is that everyone gets together and secretly works on surface-to-space weapons.

[Josh_Kablack]

So apparently this question is mostly asked by/answered for cishet women... so I know exactly who to bring it to, the Den.

I've been seeing someone for about three months. We're both genderqueer, but they're dfab. What is an appropriate Valentines gift for a three-four month old relationship?

a spatula

[Grek]

Memorably pleasant experiences give more long term happiness than material possessions. Take your SO somewhere special for Valentines. Would they like the new Deadpool movie? How about dinner at their favorite restaurant? You know them better than we do, think of something they'd like.

[Hiram McDaniels]

My wife informed me that we have reservations for valentines at a local dinner house, and I will be wearing a tie.

[erik]

My fave thing to do on Valentine's is order Olive Garden to go, pick it up 15 minutes later and laugh at the crowd of people waiting an hour+ to be seated.

It's become a tradition almost.
[edit: well, didn't do it the last couple years since they ruined the menu option I used to order.]

[tussock]

Still, blowing a Carrier out of the water is basically the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Even if it doesn't go BOOM GREEN EXPLOSION! . . you have now probably one or two nuclear reactors leaking into the waters around wherever you sunk it. Titanic moved, appearantly, quite a bit sinking/after sinking as well due to under water drafts and then pray it does not get into something like, say, the gulf stream for example. You'd irradiate huge parts of the oceans with that.

Nah.

The pacific ocean has quite a lot of radioactive elements in it already, just because it's so big that a thing occurring one part per billion still has billions of tonnes of it in the pacific ocean. Because there is about 10^19 tonnes of pacific ocean.

So if you release a few more pounds of uranium, that's going to nothing. I made that mistake myself a while back. Dumping radioactive waste in the oceans is bad if barrels of it wash up in a populated area and the local government won't clean it up (because people will touch it), or if you have a chain of life accumulating it from the immediate site that you happen to eat for a lot of years afterward (in that it will raise the rates of various medical problems in your population, until it too dilutes to nothing).

Like, nuclear reactors on land (where the dilution processes are extremely slow) are annoying when their cooling systems boil, but the pacific ocean also has quite a large capacity to absorb heat.


@Missile tech.
Guys, seriously, Supercarriers cost 10 billion dollars (and much more for the support fleet) and there is near zero capacity to build replacements. The missiles to sink them cost nothing by comparison, and can be produced in large numbers if a use is found for them (like, say, a war). Missiles have limited range, but guess what, so do carrier warplanes.

@Anti-missile missiles, LOL. That often works for ballistic termination rounds, not for the things that are MaRV (and possibly MiRV).

United States Naval Institute in 2009 stated that such a warhead would be large enough to destroy an aircraft carrier in one hit and that there was "currently ... no defense against it" if it worked as theorized.

To which they responded by no longer ever keeping ships in range of China, and not being a dick about where they sailed carrier groups, because holy shit. But seriously, they're on a big truck, they can be fired from anywhere there are roads.

[tussock]

Still, blowing a Carrier out of the water is basically the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Even if it doesn't go BOOM GREEN EXPLOSION! . . you have now probably one or two nuclear reactors leaking into the waters around wherever you sunk it. Titanic moved, appearantly, quite a bit sinking/after sinking as well due to under water drafts and then pray it does not get into something like, say, the gulf stream for example. You'd irradiate huge parts of the oceans with that.

Nah.

The pacific ocean has quite a lot of radioactive elements in it already, just because it's so big that a thing occurring one part per billion still has billions of tonnes of it in the pacific ocean. Because there is about 10^19 tonnes of pacific ocean.

So if you release a few more pounds of uranium, that's going to nothing. I made that mistake myself a while back. Dumping radioactive waste in the oceans is bad if barrels of it wash up in a populated area and the local government won't clean it up (because people will touch it), or if you have a chain of life accumulating it from the immediate site that you happen to eat for a lot of years afterward (in that it will raise the rates of various medical problems in your population, until it too dilutes to nothing).

Like, nuclear reactors on land (where the dilution processes are extremely slow) are annoying when their cooling systems boil, but the pacific ocean also has quite a large capacity to absorb heat.


@Missile tech.
Guys, seriously, Supercarriers cost 10 billion dollars (and much more for the support fleet) and there is near zero capacity to build replacements. The missiles to sink them cost nothing by comparison, and can be produced in large numbers if a use is found for them (like, say, a war). Missiles have limited range, but guess what, so do carrier warplanes.

@Anti-missile missiles, LOL. That sometimes works for ballistic termination rounds, not for the things that have active re-entry.

United States Naval Institute in 2009 stated that such a warhead would be large enough to destroy an aircraft carrier in one hit and that there was "currently ... no defense against it" if it worked as theorized.

To which they responded by no longer ever keeping ships in range of China, and not being a dick about where they sailed carrier groups in the area, because holy shit. But seriously, they're on a big truck, they can be fired from anywhere there are roads (or, I don't know, maybe an innocent-looking fishing boat).

$10000000 <- missile.
$10000000000 <- ship destroyed in one hit.

10 <- missile crew.
10000 <- fleet crew.

[name_here]

No one actually knows whether or not the anti-missiles work against those specific missiles. Or whether those specific missiles actually can hit a carrier group in practical terms where the ships are moving and launching chaff and messing with radar signatures to confuse the missiles into targeting the wrong ship. Neither has ever been tested. They are, however, reasonably confident that they need the approximate location of the target carrier, and without a satellite or aircraft that requires being way inside the carrier's operating range. So if a war starts unexpectedly it does not result in every ship getting sunk in the first day because the vast majority of the US fleet is more than a day's travel away from the maximum range, and later on they won't go within range unless they either have the capacity to shoot them down or have crippled enemy satellite overwatch and have aircraft up to destroy spotters well short of the fleet.

People are going to counter those missiles. Maybe they'll be able to use the existing missiles, maybe they'll make new missiles, maybe they'll get the anti-ballistic laser to work, maybe they'll just avoid letting people get targeting data. The aircraft carrier will not be irrelevant until either an airbase a few miles off the coast is not meaningfully better than one on the far side of the Pacific, or aircraft are rendered irrelevant. As noted, China and Russia apparently agree because they haven't scrapped their own carriers and in fact want more.

Also, counter-missiles have successfully engaged standard cruise missiles as far back as the first gulf war. So the concept is sound.

[Username17]

Argentina had 28 Exocet Missiles at the start of the Falklands war. They successfully sank 2 ships and damaged a third with them. If you think you're going to sink one ship per missile, you're living in a fantasy world.

-Username17

[erik]

Fantasy world or no, needing 10:1 is a small price to pay since Tussock says I can build them in my garage out of parts from the Apple store.

[Eikre]

I don't think it's unreasonable to surmise that the economy of scale on some of these systems might move if their relevance was bumped from "proxy wars; hegemonic conquest" to "primary deterrence to other superpowers."

EDIT: And, hey, that's a pretty shitty way to characterize Tussock's position. He admitted to a ten million dollar missile, and indicated correctly that even at that level of expense it's still a thousand times less expensive than the flagship he's interested in deterring. Admitting a 10:1 ratio of missiles fired to ships sank still gives him two magnitudes of efficiency.

[name_here]

No, erik was accurately characterizing Tussock's original position.

China is of the official position that carrier fleets are rather like throwing spearmen at machine-guns. Literally a multi-billion dollar joke that anyone can sink in under ten minutes with a few tens of thousands of dollars in missile tech that you could probably build in your garage in a couple weeks with parts found in typical apple stores. The Russians prefer supersonic torpedos, but the end result is the same, all the ships at the bottom of whichever sea they were in when the war started, quite possibly before they got their orders.

Anyways, I would find it entirely unsurprising to learn that it's possible to destroy something with explosives much cheaper than the thing you're destroying. Even the toughest WWII carriers would take fewer than twenty hits from the weapons of the time. Tanks are more expensive than anti-tank rockets. But I find it highly dubious that it will be impossible to counter the missiles (the US report predates the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense deployment), and if they can be countered they don't make super-carriers irrelevant. Aircraft, in addition to carrying weapons, provide spotting, intercept ship-launched missiles, and can link with ship-based defense systems to lengthen the engagement window for counter-missiles or give warning to deploy chaff and other decoys. And larger aircraft are better and must be launched from larger ships. So if you can protect your ships, you are going to want to protect super-carriers.

[Kaelik]

Yeah I'm not buying "There a missiles that can unfailingly sink any ship!"

If that's the case than it becomes literally impossible to conquer enemy territory if you are not trudging there on land.

Japan is the new world power apparently because no one can ever land more troops there than they can parachute down in planes!

Or you know, there are probably ways to sail big boats around without letting them get sunk.

[Eikre]

No, erik was accurately characterizing Tussock's original position.

oh wow lol yeah Tuss you gotta cop to that one