• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

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

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 days ago

      midget drone-mothership subs.

      So is it a the mothership that’s a drone, or the midget subs? The latter would make more sense.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        The subs contain lots of drones, but the subs are unmanned, making them drones, and they’re launched by a bigger mothership sub that’s also a drone. All manned by midgets pretending to be AI, of course.

    • Madison420@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        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.