With the success of drones in Ukraine, I wonder if the future’s just going to be midget drone-mothership subs.
midget drone-mothership subs.
So is it a the mothership that’s a drone, or the midget subs? The latter would make more sense.
It would be a regular sized sub that’s a drone mothership, crewed entirely by midgets
I’m in for outrageous Ace Combat style drone carriers with their own point defense.
https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/Arsenal_Bird
And conventional warhead ballistic missile subs with drone launchers:
https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/Hrimfaxi
It’s “last second” MIRV too, so more politically correct.
The Japanese had things figured out in 2004, lol.
Military planning like that is exceedingly difficult and we’re almost always wrong. Like fixed fortifications, in history there’s at least 6 major moves away from fixed fortifications because they became “obsolete”. A few years later some new design or invention comes about and suddenly fixed fortifications are en vogue again.
In this case I think the definition of a battleship will just change like it did for dread/pre-dread ships. Eventually I think it will be twin high velocity low throw weight railguns in a all or nothing armored extremely low freeboard stealth hull.
Battleships being at the center of naval plans obviously changed. But, I think you’re right that something battleshippy will probably still exist.
I mean, look how long it took for the spear to go away. With bayonets you could argue that they’ve never gone away. But, they’re now a secondary thing, rather than the primary thing armies are designed around.
I could imagine a future where a sea-tank exists, something that can take a hit and attack with direct-fire weapons. Having said that, the war in Ukraine is showing that a multi-million dollar tank can be taken out with a few hundred dollars in drone gear. Battleships are/were closer to $1 billion, and they were already mostly obsolete when they were in danger from multi-million dollar planes, dropping thousand dollar bombs, piloted by pilots who had been trained at the cost of millions of dollars.
