Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea • Hacker News Board

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#71

Post by gaius » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 6:29 PM UTC

jrdrake wrote: post #69

lionhearted wrote: post #28

Actually a pretty good article, despite the inaccuracies noted here in other comments. The author uses some hyperbole and makes some errors, but still an interesting discussion regarding phalanx vs. maneuver warfare. While we're picking on individual parts, though - > For missile silos, just target the enemy’s silos with lots of missiles and you can duke it out and win (just like the phalanx). If he puts his missiles…

I think missile silos are stationary is pretty easy to understand. They're easier to guard and if you look at when they were built rather than their current functional use (its debatable if there is one when looking at SLBM and B-52/B-2 dropped nuclear weapons). In the 1950s, when ICBM projects began, the threat was not thermonuclear weapons, but fission weapons. It was thought that the silos might survive a direct/i…

And accuracies measured in hundreds of metres.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#72

Post by gaius » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 6:32 PM UTC

akdubya wrote: post #65

Any battle tech that's an order-of-magnitude cheaper to kill than to produce is destined for obsolescence. You can see this happening now with main battle tanks, which are easily knocked out by IEDs and increasingly sophisticated man-portable missiles. It will be interesting to see what happens to the manned air superiority fighter over the next couple of decades now that unmanned drones are being deployed on a wide…

Probably nothing. Remember that unmanned drones were used in combat in Vietnam. They were quite short ranged of course, and could only be used for one mission: Sidewinders.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#73

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 6:47 PM UTC

lupatus wrote: post #58

icarus_drowning wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how much I agree with the statement "even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash". Not that it matters for this discussion, because I think its clear that the U.S. military is still trying to design itself for a Cold War scenario, and encountering huge problems when faced with asymmetrical opponents.

I think the USA are doing smashingly well against their current crop asymmetrical opponents. Wikipedia has the GWOT American casualties count (military and civilian) at 8800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Casualties ). Far more American citizens than that died the last time we faced a serious asymmetrical opponent ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars ).

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Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#74

Post by marcinw » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

latch wrote: post #23

fraserharris wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aircraft carriers are somewhere in between. The aircraft they carry are part of maneuver warfare.

except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority. Ever see Independence Day or, more recently, Battle LA? Didn't you find it stupid that once the command ship are destroyed, the enemy essentially dies? This is what aircraft carrie…

Carriers of today hold 90 aircraft, 2 RAMs, 3 Phalanxs and 2 Sea Sparrow launchers (specs from Wikipedia page on George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier). I'm pretty sure with all this they can defend themselves pretty well.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#75

Post by burke » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

dolvlo wrote: post #31

I don't find this article applicable to hacking at all. Maybe running a business, but I don't follow the necessary relationship between hacking and business.

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#76

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:26 PM UTC

Unseelie wrote: post #68

stcredzero wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship. Or, playing the "wolf card" amidst the fog of war and a resourcefully laid smokescreen with a bunch of smaller…

Not just drones, but -swarms- of drones. I make that point because its important to differentiate between what could be massive, battleship (or, likely, crusier) sized drones, and collections of very small drones. There's reasons this makes sense, even in the context of a fight against battleships (please assume similar technical capability, since a WWII Battleship would likely not fair well against a 2020 drone swar…

A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship

The smoke and the rain squalls at the Battle of Samar were sufficient to make the larger guns available to the Japanese fleet irrelevant.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#77

Post by pizza_ » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:28 PM UTC

Hindsight is 20/20. Current missile and nuclear weapons technology obsolete monolithic armored weapons, just like gunpowder and cannons obsoleted medieval castles. No doubt the same argument will be trumpeted across the interplanetary neural net in a few generations against nuclear submarines, ICBMs and capitalistic culture. The answer is: they aren't perfect, but they get the job done.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#78

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:28 PM UTC

Unseelie wrote: post #67

ramchip wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autonomous Air Independent Propulsion submersible drones Isn't this basically an electric torpedo?

only if it runs into things and explodes...if it launches its own torpedoes, its not a torpedo. Mother-torpedo..

I'd equip those drones to launch anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles as well as aerial drones.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#79

Post by smallblacksun » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #32

werpon wrote: post #8

Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range. These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with. IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thou…

Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range. In hindsight, if the ability to deliver more ordinance a longer distance was the thing, the aircraft carrier should have been a shoo-in.

The problem was that until WWII-era bombers, airplanes couldn't deliver ordnance with enough accuracy to actually hit enemy ships reliably.

Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

#80

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 7:34 PM UTC

bluekeybox wrote: post #49

arethuza wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When Nazis attacked the USSR, was there an advance warning?" Stalin had plenty of advance warning - there were even people defecting from the German ranks and telling them that the Germans were coming (they were probably shot for their troubles). Even after the invasion started Stalin refused to believe the reports coming from frontline units for a long time after the invasion started. See: http://www.simonsebagmont…

Intelligence information is speculative and absolutely cannot be compared to an official warning.

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