NS Military Realism Consultancy Thread Mk X Purps Safe Space

[Laritaia]

any value said idea had was completely invalidated by this


3D printing is not a replicator from Star Trek, it takes a long time to produce even the smallest and simplest of parts and is massively expensive.

people who waffle on about how its going to revolutionize X sector of Y industry/technology by allowing on demand production have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.


3d printing is an incredibly useful tool that truly can speed up the design and development process but this belief that it has some sort of magical power to reduce the time and cost of actual manufacturing is only serving to make people heavily disappointed when they find out what it's actually like.

I totally disagree. People in countries littered with mines (and amputees) are being given [url]printed prosthetics[/url]. A Russian-American company (probably owned by Trump) is experimenting with printed houses. The technology may not be cost-effective in an MT setting, but it would in a PMT or FT setting. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it could be a useful tool in the militaries of a lot of countries, real and imaginary.

prosthetics are expensive custom made items so the cost and time associated with using 3d printing technologies is not really a change from how it was done previously.

the technology is not going to get faster, it may get moderately cheaper, but it's never going to even approach the cost effectiveness of proper existing production methods

3d printing has already proved useful to irl militaries for sourcing components that are no longer manufactured, it is however not a replacement for traditional manufacturing

And realistically it's never going to be


to put it another way

there is never going to be a box you can install on a carrier which the maintenance crew can go up to, press a button and say "one drone, extra hellfires"
and it then spits out said drone in a period of time that makes such a request viable rather then simply shipping a drone from a supply depot to the ship.

the same is true for practically every sub-component of the drone

[-Celibrae-]

The Wikipedia article for light fighters was literally written by Pierre Sprey.

Which prompts me to ask, to what degree are light fighters useful? Despite all the advantages baked up by Sprey, does hi-lo genuinely improve the effectiveness of an Air Force, or could one go all-hi, or God forbid, all-lo?

By light fighter, I would include the F-16 and MiG-29. I know some prefer to limit the definition to planes like the F-5.

[Laritaia]

hi-lo is a way for compensating for the fact that you can't afford to go all hi

[-Celibrae-]

Has anyone ever gone all-hi?

[Laritaia]

Has anyone ever gone all-hi?

technically speaking the RAF

but it's very questionable whether or not that counts

[The Soodean Imperium]

any value said idea had was completely invalidated by this


3D printing is not a replicator from Star Trek, it takes a long time to produce even the smallest and simplest of parts and is massively expensive.

people who waffle on about how its going to revolutionize X sector of Y industry/technology by allowing on demand production have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.


3d printing is an incredibly useful tool that truly can speed up the design and development process but this belief that it has some sort of magical power to reduce the time and cost of actual manufacturing is only serving to make people heavily disappointed when they find out what it's actually like.

I totally disagree. People in countries littered with mines (and amputees) are being given [url]printed prosthetics[/url]. A Russian-American company (probably owned by Trump) is experimenting with printed houses. The technology may not be cost-effective in an MT setting, but it would in a PMT or FT setting. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it could be a useful tool in the militaries of a lot of countries, real and imaginary.

In addition to what Lariatia said, it's also worth adding that there's a very big gap between prosthetics and houses, on the one hand, and military-grade electronics and turbine components, on the other.

Your "3D printed house" is certainly interesting for its intended purpose, but at the end of the day it's a rotating arm that pours concrete at the right time. In no way does it relate to your claim that a 3D printer can crank out fully functioning military drones at a rate which will revolutionize naval warfare.

[Halfblakistan]

prosthetics are expensive custom made items so the cost and time associated with using 3d printing technologies is not really a change from how it was done previously.

This article (which I meant to link to) says that the price difference between a standard prosthetic arm and a printed one is several thousands of sterling. So that's not true.

the technology is not going to get faster, it may get moderately cheaper, but it's never going to even approach the cost effectiveness of proper existing production methods

I'd like to see some sources for this. Maybe you're right, but I don't trust some random person on the internet to make that kind of judgement. Sorry.

3d printing has already proved useful to irl militaries for sourcing components that are no longer manufactured, it is however not a replacement for traditional manufacturing

And realistically it's never going to be

Electronics are always getting smaller and faster... even when Moore's Law hits its limit, we'll have quantum computing to explore. Within a few decades, you could be able to fit the computer and comms systems of a Predator Drone in a compartment the size of a smart phone. The only limitations will be the airframe's capacity to carry weapons. Saying "never" is usually a bad practice if you're trying to prepare for the future.


to put it another way

there is never going to be a box you can install on a carrier which the maintenance crew can go up to, press a button and say "one drone, extra hellfires"
and it then spits out said drone in a period of time that makes such a request viable rather then simply shipping a drone from a supply depot to the ship.

the same is true for practically every sub-component of the drone[/quote]

[Laritaia]

This article (which I meant to link to) says that the price difference between a standard prosthetic arm and a printed one is several thousands of sterling. So that's not true.

yes 3d printing makes the process of manufacturing custom one off items moderately cheaper, said items are still custom made and expensive

this has nothing to do with the idea of using it to replace regular manufacturing processes

Electronics are always getting smaller and faster... even when Moore's Law hits its limit, we'll have quantum computing to explore. Within a few decades, you could be able to fit the computer and comms systems of a Predator Drone in a compartment the size of a smart phone. The only limitations will be the airframe's capacity to carry weapons. Saying "never" is usually a bad practice if you're trying to prepare for the future.]

what the fuck does this have to do with the speed of 3d printing?

making electronics smaller doesn't make the process of laser sintering any faster


you're trying to back up your argument with things that have little to do with the subject at hand

[The Soodean Imperium]

prosthetics are expensive custom made items so the cost and time associated with using 3d printing technologies is not really a change from how it was done previously.

This article (which I meant to link to) says that the price difference between a standard prosthetic arm and a printed one is several thousands of sterling. So that's not true.

And again, the prosthetics in question are a rudimentary metal frame with a rudimentary plastic cover and will not be exposed to any greater stress forces than what a child can produce.

This is on an entirely different level from producing turbine blades, silicon chips, lenses for electro-optical sensors, and so forth, and then assembling all those pieces together into a multi-million-dollar piece of military equipment, and then expecting this device to function under considerable strain with an acceptably high degree of reliability.

As far as I'm aware, the only serious proposals for shipboard 3-D printing are for making small solid objects with no moving parts, like shear pins and screws, and even then there's debate over whether they're better than relying on dedicated supply lines. And over whether the parts they make are any good. The word "porous" seems to pop up a lot whenever 3D-printed metal components are discussed.

Electronics are always getting smaller and faster... even when Moore's Law hits its limit, we'll have quantum computing to explore. Within a few decades, you could be able to fit the computer and comms systems of a Predator Drone in a compartment the size of a smart phone. The only limitations will be the airframe's capacity to carry weapons. Saying "never" is usually a bad practice if you're trying to prepare for the future.

No, the limitations will be the actual production facilities needed to turn raw stores of metal into untold thousands of individual parts and then assemble these parts into a functioning whole.

Moore's law is for electronics, and silicon chips more precisely, and it does not generalize to everything else. Robotic arms can save enormously on labor costs in an automobile factory, but they don't make the assembly line orders of magnitude smaller. If anything, the last few generations of consumer electronics have been getting bigger, because they have to interface with a physical object (i.e. a human hand).

[The Akasha Colony]

I totally disagree. People in countries littered with mines (and amputees) are being given [url]printed prosthetics[/url]. A Russian-American company (probably owned by Trump) is experimenting with printed houses. The technology may not be cost-effective in an MT setting, but it would in a PMT or FT setting. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but it could be a useful tool in the militaries of a lot of countries, real and imaginary.

Simple prosthetics are literally one of the poster children for 3D printing technology because they require some custom sizing that makes mass production impossible and yet are still made out of fairly simple materials like plastic. But the problem is that this doesn't generalize to every other type of manufactured object. Not even by a long shot.

And that "3D house printer" is literally just a concrete-pouring robot arm. There's nothing new about it; it's just a concrete-pouring hose connected to a conventional industrial robotic arm with some new programming. It's not even that fast; it's already possible to assemble pre-fabricated houses in three hours. And the dome house is cheaper and easier to transport than a massive reservoir of concrete and an expensive robotic arm.

The Wikipedia article for light fighters was literally written by Pierre Sprey.

Which prompts me to ask, to what degree are light fighters useful? Despite all the advantages baked up by Sprey, does hi-lo genuinely improve the effectiveness of an Air Force, or could one go all-hi, or God forbid, all-lo?

By light fighter, I would include the F-16 and MiG-29. I know some prefer to limit the definition to planes like the F-5.

I've always preferred classifying F-16 and MiG-29 as "medium fighters" if only to distinguish them from light or ultra-light fighters like F-5 and JAS-39.

As always, the degree to which they are useful depends on what is expected of them. Assuming equal levels of technological sophistication they obviously come up short against twin-engine heavy fighters with large radar suites, beefy engines, heavy war loads, and longer range. But most of the time there are either heavy fighters supplementing them or there is simply no budgetary choice in the matter, which is the real reason they've hung around.

Hi-lo allows an air force to field more airframes for a given budget which can be useful in meeting targets for number of aircraft available for missions or to survive expected attrition rates in combat. But the lighter fighter will require more airframes in the first place for the same missions because it will almost certainly have shorter range, meaning more of them will be needed to cover the same area. And it will require more pilots and maintenance personnel.

It's a bit of a sliding scale, anyway. A heavier light fighter like F-16 or MiG-29 is obviously closer in performance to a heavy fighter like F-15 or Su-27 and thus entails fewer compromises without that much of an increase in cost over ultra-lights like JAS-39. F-35 only takes this trend further by being even heavier.

Electronics are always getting smaller and faster... even when Moore's Law hits its limit, we'll have quantum computing to explore. Within a few decades, you could be able to fit the computer and comms systems of a Predator Drone in a compartment the size of a smart phone. The only limitations will be the airframe's capacity to carry weapons. Saying "never" is usually a bad practice if you're trying to prepare for the future.

Jumping at every single technology that promises to be "revolutionary" or "disruptive" without an appropriate understanding of the technology involved and its comparison to existing methods is no better. People jumped at the rigid airship as the future of air travel in the early 20th century and look how that panned out?

It's probably important to look at your first article and note that it does not make any comparisons to existing manufacturing or operating methods when it pushes 3D printing as "the future." It doesn't have any comparisons about why 3D printing is superior to the current system of manufacturing aircraft in factories in the US and flying them out to their air stations and carriers.

In fact, it has some rather interesting logical leaps: anti-ship ballistic missiles have made aircraft carriers obsolete (questionable), so the response is... 3D printed drones? What? How does that answer the fundamental problem of China's ballistic missile threat? You've replaced the big, expensive aircraft carrier full of expensive manned aircraft with... a big expensive aircraft carrier full of expensive 3D printers? The USN's problem with China's AShBM threat isn't whether it can 3D print drones, it's that it doesn't have the range to strike those launchers hiding deep inland. And 3D printed drones don't solve that issue.

Moore's Law isn't and wasn't meant to be some kind of prediction about how technology always wins or whatever. It was simply that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years. And it's increasingly looking like it cannot hold in the realm of silicon chip development. Speed and efficiency increases were powered by the relatively easy availability and quick development of smaller production processes, but as we've reached the edge of single-digit nanometer territory, development has slowed and costs have increased because working at such small sizes demands extreme precision and there have been problems with quality control. Intel, the company Gordon Moore himself helped found, has already codified this slower pace by adjusting from a two-year cycle to a three-year cycle between fabrication changes. Moore's two-year cycle itself was a climbdown from his original idea that it would double every year, which was the pace when he wrote his hypothesis but which he knew was not sustainable.

[-Celibrae-]

Has anyone ever gone all-hi?

technically speaking the RAF

but it's very questionable whether or not that counts

I would have thought that the main distinction between hi and lo is cost, and the Eurofighter and F-35 seem quite equally priced in the long run.

I've always preferred classifying F-16 and MiG-29 as "medium fighters" if only to distinguish them from light or ultra-light fighters like F-5 and JAS-39.

As always, the degree to which they are useful depends on what is expected of them. Assuming equal levels of technological sophistication they obviously come up short against twin-engine heavy fighters with large radar suites, beefy engines, heavy war loads, and longer range. But most of the time there are either heavy fighters supplementing them or there is simply no budgetary choice in the matter, which is the real reason they've hung around.

Hi-lo allows an air force to field more airframes for a given budget which can be useful in meeting targets for number of aircraft available for missions or to survive expected attrition rates in combat. But the lighter fighter will require more airframes in the first place for the same missions because it will almost certainly have shorter range, meaning more of them will be needed to cover the same area. And it will require more pilots and maintenance personnel.

It's a bit of a sliding scale, anyway. A heavier light fighter like F-16 or MiG-29 is obviously closer in performance to a heavy fighter like F-15 or Su-27 and thus entails fewer compromises without that much of an increase in cost over ultra-lights like JAS-39. F-35 only takes this trend further by being even heavier.

One of Sprey's arguments is that smaller aircraft have a lower RCS, and this outweighs the beefier radars available to heavy fighters. Does this argument have any stock?

[North Arkana]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

[Rhodesialund]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

It's like the concept of force projection doesn't exist to them...

[North Arkana]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

It's like the concept of force projection doesn't exist to them...

Or the concept of interdicting the kill chain. Or general countermeasures. Or that shooting ballistic missiles in a major war is asking for massive trouble when there's people who have to wary of potential nuclear weapon use.

[The Akasha Colony]

One of Sprey's arguments is that smaller aircraft have a lower RCS, and this outweighs the beefier radars available to heavy fighters. Does this argument have any stock?

Not enough to matter. RCS is only loosely correlated with size. It's usually more a factor of whether any real attention was paid to RCS and how much effort was put into reducing it. F-22 is much bigger than F-35 but has an RCS that's estimated to be ~10 times smaller. Super Hornet has a smaller RCS than Hornet despite being larger.

There was a case to be made of light fighters when Pierre Sprey was pushing them hard in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, rules of engagement required positive visual identification of targets before engagement and thus severely hampered the effectiveness of any BVR missiles available at the time, which also tended to have a relatively high failure rate. Thus, you had scenarios like the ACEVAL/AIMVAL trials in the 1970s where light F-5s were able to regularly close in to IR SRAAM range with heavy F-14s and F-15s, who were not able to get reliable positive VID at ranges beyond 8 miles or so. Thus, a light fighter like F-5 had a decent chance of getting into close range, firing off their AIM-9s at the heavy fighters, and then retreating. Or getting shot down but taking several very expensive heavy fighters with it. It still didn't solve the range issues, but it made the F-5 a surprisingly deadly adversary (oddly enough, the F-14 and F-15 supposedly had better performance in gunfights than the F-5, but this only mattered if they could get through the wave of Sidewinders fired by the F-5s).

But with the development of more advanced and more reliable NCTR techniques, the need for VID was eventually phased out. In Desert Storm, coalition aircraft did not require VIDs despite operating in perhaps the most complicated environment (most of the aircraft in the area were friendly coalition aircraft so the risk of friendly fire was high and the Iraqis were flying some of the same aircraft as the French). New BVR weapons like AIM-120 replaced the less capable AIM-7 and BVR went from being something of an infrequent occurrence to being fairly common. In this method of combat, radar range, flight range, payload capacity, stealth, and speed are king. Coincidentally, this is what all fifth generation fighters (the first generation designed with these advances) have been focused on: extremely powerful engines, long-range sensors (radar, IRST, passive detection), aerodynamically efficient airframes, and stealth. Weapons capacity sort of got the shaft in favor of the stealth and aerodynamic benefits of internal carriage, but that was unavoidable.

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

It's not just blogs and publications that are talking about it. There's real concern on the part of the US Navy about long-range anti-ship weaponry, especially ballistic missiles. While to some extent I think the "A2/AD" meme has been overplayed (most of the elements of the "A2/AD threat" are not new), it cannot be simply brushed aside and ignored. It's a challenge the USN hasn't had to seriously face in nearly 30 years: the prospect of a near-peer opponent employing technologically sophisticated weapons in large numbers.

AShBMs might not be the magical wonder-weapon that some claim them to be, but even if not, they're a weapon the US Navy currently doesn't have a good answer to. And that's a concern.

Or the concept of interdicting the kill chain. Or general countermeasures. Or that shooting ballistic missiles in a major war is asking for massive trouble when there's people who have to wary of potential nuclear weapon use.

They're not totally wrong though. Carriers aren't necessarily obsolete but anti-ship ballistic missiles and by extension the general category of long-range (1,000+ km) stand-off anti-ship weapons is a cause for concern. Mostly because while interdicting the kill chain is cool and all, you are at best just buying time and hoping the enemy doesn't manage to sneak a ship or drone or MPA close enough to guide a strike in. All the enemy needs is a single successful strike to put that carrier out of action. And it means the carrier will have to devote so much of its air wing and escort group to protecting itself that it may not have enough resources left over to launch offensive strikes, meaning that it's essentially neutralized anyway.

The preferred option of course is to outright destroy the launchers, but the problem with long-range anti-ship weapons is that they can be based well inland, protected by air bases stocked with fighters and a robust air defense network. The range alone poses a formidable challenge.

[-Celibrae-]

Thanks for the response Akasha. As always, it was very enlightening.

If one would want to destroy the launchers, why not put TBMs on warships? Fight fire with fire?

[NeuPolska]

This is new to me. So if I invest in a proper coastal defense system, I could keep hostile warships away from my beaches and force all fighting to be conducted on land?

[Ormata]

This is new to me. So if I invest in a proper coastal defense system, I could keep hostile warships away from my beaches and force all fighting to be conducted on land?

What tech level are you fighting at? If it's modern then I would say "Hell no".

[The Akasha Colony]

Thanks for the response Akasha. As always, it was very enlightening.

If one would want to destroy the launchers, why not put TBMs on warships? Fight fire with fire?

The kill chain problem remains, but in reverse: how do you manage to spot targets for those missiles? You'd need aircraft capable of penetrating deep into enemy territory to hunt for their mobile TELs, a capability the US Navy doesn't have (although the USAF does; this is what B-2 was designed for).

And there's a significant cost issue. The USN would need to develop a new family of ballistic missiles and redesign their ships to carry them, assuming this didn't break any treaties or cause any other political concerns. This would all be very expensive and take a very long time. In comparison, land-based truck-mobile ballistic missiles simply require new trucks to be made to carry them, they don't have to worry about redesigning their warships to carry them or anything. And the Chinese already had ballistic missiles in this size category that they could modify for the role; the US hasn't had any missiles like that since the retirement of the Pershing II force.

The USN's response has been to try to develop longer-ranged cruise missiles for various purposes in order to extend the engagement range of their existing platforms. Deep strike is a difficult prospect for a carrier-based air wing because the aircraft are obviously size-limited so compromises have to be made to maximize range, which will still probably fall short of a huge land-based bomber like B-2. Perhaps the best the USN can hope for in this case is that B-21 is procured in reasonable enough numbers and the USAF is willing to accept some mission requests.

EDIT: That aside, from a purely *NS* perspective, it is an idea that had crossed my mind and that I had originally expected to include in my guided missile cruisers. A battery of Pershing II-sized missiles for use as anti-ship ballistic missiles (and possibly land attack missiles) and more powerful, more capable anti-ballistic missiles for things beyond the capabilities of SM-3. But the upper-level BMD capability got moved to the orbital Brilliant Pebbles constellation and the AShBM capability was sort of sidelined. Might make a comeback later.

This is new to me. So if I invest in a proper coastal defense system, I could keep hostile warships away from my beaches and force all fighting to be conducted on land?

No. "This is a concern for the navy" does not mean "all ships are now totally obsolete and all fighting will happen on land."

[Austrasien]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

China has mastered the indirect approach.

China identified three major weaknesses in the USNs defenses: The current AEGIS/SPY-1/VLS triplet is not well suited for BMD, it has become extraordinarily difficult for the US military to replace major weapon systems outright, and the US is constrained by treaty and cold war neuroticism in the development of its own ballistic missile technology for conventional use. They have gone on to exploit it ruthlessly. A DF-21 is not a silver bullet, but its chance of success is many time higher than a cruise missile. But because of the grindingly slow process of procurement in the US, a genuine new BMD ship will probably not appear for another twenty odd years, which will make the AShBM-BMD gap the longest gap in USN capabilities since ever really.

And what more can you ask of a weapons system?

The US has a definite edge in China in terms of human skills. Their experience is infinitely greater, their professionalism is higher. But the Chinese have acquired a significant edge in their ability to rapidly acquire foreign weapons technology and bring weapons based onto it into production and service. So the technical approach to undermining US seapower is at present much more problematic for the USN than a tactical/operational approach; American sailors will adapt long before the DoD can shepherd a new warship through the procurement swamp. Which is probably related to why the USN hasn't shown much concern over Chinese carrier developments, they are quite capable of countering that with the weapons they already have.

[Gallia-]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

China has mastered the indirect approach.

China identified three major weaknesses in the USNs defenses:

1) Energetic materials suppliers.
2) Rare earths.
3) Foreign direct investment.

So the three major weaknesses of USN defenses are just capitalism?

"An open market is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded." - Money Manager 2008

Has anyone ever gone all-hi?

Britain
Post-Soviet Russia
Germany
Aeronavale
Italy before F-35

[Laywenrania]

What's with the boners for "carriers are obsolete because of crappy ballistic missiles" thing these days... *sigh*

China has mastered the indirect approach.

China identified three major weaknesses in the USNs defenses: The current AEGIS/SPY-1/VLS triplet is not well suited for BMD,

what's the reason for this?

[Austrasien]

It is all too small.

IRBM RVs travel about 10x faster than aircraft but have head-on RCS which approach stealth aircraft. To have the same opportunity to engage RVs as cruise missiles they must detected, tracked and engaged at a correspondingly longer range. This is very demanding, both for the radar and interceptor missile. And neither the AN/SPY-1 or size constraints of the standard VLS cell are suitable. With current systems, the fleet really only has one opportunity to make a close range kill of the incoming missile. It is not unlike the situation if cruise missiles could only be engaged with CIWS.

[Gallia-]

NS irl

e: Would SABMIS be adequate for defeating the ~BMD threat~?

[Austrasien]

SABMIS was kind of wrong because it was meant to shoot down ICBMs going towards America, not missiles attacking a fleet. Though it might have potential to evolve into a self-defense platform.