With the success of drones in Ukraine, I wonder if the future’s just going to be midget drone-mothership subs.
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.
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
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.
