It would be really funny if our counter-intel services purposefully played up the sail-less design and smooth hull as drag reducing steps, making it seem like this was our take an an Evolved Alfa type interceptor to get the Americans to build more Seawolfs, when in reality it's really focused on ultra quiet cruising.
The Ultra quiet cruising part would probably give the USA a heart attack since in the Cold War the US was like god tier in Subs to like a ludicrous extent.Like the UUSR Nuclear subs were actually louder than their old diesel fleet and the USA could actually differentiate each one based on noise alone(also because they created a giant ocean spanning system of listening devices because unlimited budget) and US subs are much safer than USSR counterparts.
Maybe we can "leak" some "top secret info" about how we're making carrier subs that can deploy mecha underwater and close to shore to land on American soil. Get the US to sink money into more boondoggles.
I mean modern Subs tend to have a section containing a minisub/diving chameber so they can discretely deploy special operations and act as a command HQ for a entire landbased campaign so if you add in a mecha or two it isn't that far off the mark.
I mean modern Subs tend to have a section containing a minisub/diving chameber so they can discretely deploy special operations and act as a command HQ for a entire landbased campaign so if you add in a mecha or two it isn't that far off the mark.
Makes it a more sellable ruse. Turn that 1 or 2 mecha into an entire dozen. Make em paranoid. Just believable enough to not ignore, just bullshit enough that it's not an outright threat of invasion.
Makes it a more sellable ruse. Turn that 1 or 2 mecha into an entire dozen. Make em paranoid. Just believable enough to not ignore, just bullshit enough that it's not an outright threat of invasion.
That idea does make sense because being able to deploy a squad of mechas anywhere there is a coastline to destroy, important targets seems very feasible and realistic as a concept, but I'm not sure how it would work in reality.
That idea does make sense because being able to deploy a squad of mechas anywhere there is a coastline to destroy, important targets seems very feasible and realistic as a concept, but I'm not sure how it would work in reality.
Maybe we can "leak" some "top secret info" about how we're making carrier subs that can deploy mecha underwater and close to shore to land on American soil. Get the US to sink money into more boondoggles.
Also they really love their subs.So much that since the 50's with SUBSAFE they haven't allowed the procurement system to majorly fuck up regarding it,which is pretty amazing that in the era of gunless jets,missiles that had a good chance of killing you rather than the enemy and Agent Orange the US Sub fleet was basically superior to it's soviet counterparts in almost any way.
IWas mainly referring to how in the early stages of the Vietnam war the F-4 main armament of Sidewinders were notoriously malfunctioning and prone to killing everything except the intended target which made a gun pretty useful.However once you have actual functioning misssiles you don't really need a gun since most modern Jets are designed to operate by killing each other beyond line of sight.
That idea does make sense because being able to deploy a squad of mechas anywhere there is a coastline to destroy, important targets seems very feasible and realistic as a concept, but I'm not sure how it would work in reality.
Yup, could be some real damage. Normal subs slipping in to drop off some frogmen is one thing.
Sub dropping off a mecha lance or two? Whole another threat. And for us it's minimal cost, because it's not gonna proceed past prototype stage.
Heck, they might not even need too much. Back in the RL Cold War, Russia pulled out Pyotr Kapitsa, who'd been in the GULGA for telling Stalin to get bent when he was "asked" to make a atom bomb. He was their top liquid hydrogen expert, and now was in Moscow on some top secret project.
Lockheed Skunk Works and the Chair Force thought it was a plane, so they tried to speed up development of a liquid hydrogen fueled plane, but wound up canceling the project, due to logistical issues (fuel was a nightmare, not much range, and they already had issues shipping special fuel for U-2s, let alone this stuff), but you wanna know the real kicker?
Pyotr was pulled out to work on Sputnik, which went up shortly after the plane contract got canceled.
So we could easily pull another fast one, see how much they waste on it.
IWas mainly referring to how in the early stages of the Vietnam war the F-4 main armament of Sidewinders were notoriously malfunctioning and prone to killing everything except the intended target which made a gun pretty useful.However once you have actual functioning misssiles you don't really need a gun since most modern Jets are designed to operate by killing each other beyond line of sight.
No, the issue was that the pilots didn't understand missile kinematics and kept making bad shots that had very low probability of kill. They fixed that with training.
Jokes aside, i do appreciate people tryna find ways to make stuff cheaper to build. It just means Cypac members are more likely to adopt and proliferate our own designs.
The Ultra quiet cruising part would probably give the USA a heart attack since in the Cold War the US was like god tier in Subs to like a ludicrous extent.Like the UUSR Nuclear subs were actually louder than their old diesel fleet and the USA could actually differentiate each one based on noise alone(also because they created a giant ocean spanning system of listening devices because unlimited budget) and US subs are much safer than USSR counterparts.
I mean modern Subs tend to have a section containing a minisub/diving chameber so they can discretely deploy special operations and act as a command HQ for a entire landbased campaign so if you add in a mecha or two it isn't that far off the mark.
Soviet subs during this era were actually starting to catch up to their US counterparts, acoustically. A lot of the soviets early disadvantage there lay in differing design priorities.
Once they wised up to the fact that low noise was more important than speed, they started catching up pretty quick. The process just never had a chance to complete because of the collapse.
That idea does make sense because being able to deploy a squad of mechas anywhere there is a coastline to destroy, important targets seems very feasible and realistic as a concept, but I'm not sure how it would work in reality.
Also they really love their subs.So much that since the 50's with SUBSAFE they haven't allowed the procurement system to majorly fuck up regarding it,which is pretty amazing that in the era of gunless jets,missiles that had a good chance of killing you rather than the enemy and Agent Orange the US Sub fleet was basically superior to it's soviet counterparts in almost any way.
I agree, yet I am compelled to remind you of the sheer psychological/morale damage and propaganda value such a force would be able to deal/provide you, should you ever decide to build that system (lol) or attack a country, like the US of middle north A. (LOL)
So, I've sort of been assuming our test reactor was going to be in the ballpark of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment that the US did back in the 60s, and I added an action to our reactor development for creating an enriched nitrogen brayton cycle to accompany it.
Now, in hindsight, this was dumb, because direct gas cooling for an MSR is not a great fit for a number of reasons, but it would have been configured to run with input temperatures around 750C, and it is nitrogen.
And it turns out that the output temperature of a marine gas turbine is around 800C.
That's means that action wasn't wasted, because we've not done the bulk of the work for an air bottoming cycle!
Now, my original pan called for a combined diesel and gas system for our frigate and a diesel system for our OPV, but marine diesels are sooooooo heavy. The 10 000 kW units I planned for the frigate each weight like 57 tons, while the 32 000 kW turbine on that same frigate weights like... 5.
The reason we use diesels is because they're more efficiency: 40-45% compared to the gas turbine's 30%, which works out to a huge savings in fuel for the diesel. (Takaishi, Tatsuo; Numata, Akira; Nakano, Ryouji; Sakaguchi, Katsuhiko (March 2008). "Approach to High-Efficiency Diesel and Gas Engines" (PDF). Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Technical Review.)
And let's be fair, Guangchou has more experience with designing turbines than diesels, so given that most of the design work is done, and our people are more comfortable with turbines, and given that their efficiency can be made similar to that of the diesel with the addition of this bottoming cycle... it makes sense to switch from CODAG to COGAG instead.
But wait! There's more!
You may be saying 'But Cyber, the foil track propeller (FTP) has really low RPM, and turbines have really high RPM! the gearboxes will be murder!'
My sweet summer child, if we were driving the FTP with shafts, like the drive bogies on tanks, you would be absolutely correct. But we can instead treat the track/belt that the propeller foils are attacked to as the rack of a rack-and pinion system, and hook the pinion to our prime movers directly.
I've done the math, and in a ship the width of our frigate, we can easily get a gear ration of 75 that way - enough to not need any further gearing whatsoever.
And because we've embraced the magnetic gear, we can deliver all that power vibration free to the FTP, which means we don't need the generator and electric motor for quiet running when dragging sonar during ASW work. (I'm still looking at it, but we might actually get away without a hull penetration for the FTP, similar to the submarine)
And because the FTP is this long ass track that stretches the width of the boat, we don't need any combining gears either, we can have each prime mover acting the the track directly! The electronics will still be a pretty penny, but all this other stuff will really help out in terms of reducing cost!
One of these days I'll write up a more detailed post about how all this stuff works and the synergies we've using, but now I have to get ready for bed.
PS. I've also added some SMES to the submarine so it can turn off the reactor compeltely and go into ultra quet mode - it's nice because even if we limit ourselves to marangin steel for our backing material we get energy densities higher than the commercial state of the art in 1983, and using something like Kevlar puts up well into lithium-ion territory.
So, I've sort of been assuming our test reactor was going to be in the ballpark of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment that the US did back in the 60s, and I added an action to our reactor development for creating an enriched nitrogen brayton cycle to accompany it.
Now, in hindsight, this was dumb, because direct gas cooling for an MSR is not a great fit for a number of reasons, but it would have been configured to run with input temperatures around 750C, and it is nitrogen.
And it turns out that the output temperature of a marine gas turbine is around 800C.
That's means that action wasn't wasted, because we've not done the bulk of the work for an air bottoming cycle!
Now, my original pan called for a combined diesel and gas system for our frigate and a diesel system for our OPV, but marine diesels are sooooooo heavy. The 10 000 kW units I planned for the frigate each weight like 57 tons, while the 32 000 kW turbine on that same frigate weights like... 5.
The reason we use diesels is because they're more efficiency: 40-45% compared to the gas turbine's 30%, which works out to a huge savings in fuel for the diesel. (Takaishi, Tatsuo; Numata, Akira; Nakano, Ryouji; Sakaguchi, Katsuhiko (March 2008). "Approach to High-Efficiency Diesel and Gas Engines" (PDF). Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Technical Review.)
And let's be fair, Guangchou has more experience with designing turbines than diesels, so given that most of the design work is done, and our people are more comfortable with turbines, and given that their efficiency can be made similar to that of the diesel with the addition of this bottoming cycle... it makes sense to switch from CODAG to COGAG instead.
But wait! There's more!
You may be saying 'But Cyber, the foil track propeller (FTP) has really low RPM, and turbines have really high RPM! the gearboxes will be murder!'
My sweet summer child, if we were driving the FTP with shafts, like the drive bogies on tanks, you would be absolutely correct. But we can instead treat the track/belt that the propeller foils are attacked to as the rack of a rack-and pinion system, and hook the pinion to our prime movers directly.
I've done the math, and in a ship the width of our frigate, we can easily get a gear ration of 75 that way - enough to not need any further gearing whatsoever.
And because we've embraced the magnetic gear, we can deliver all that power vibration free to the FTP, which means we don't need the generator and electric motor for quiet running when dragging sonar during ASW work. (I'm still looking at it, but we might actually get away without a hull penetration for the FTP, similar to the submarine)
And because the FTP is this long ass track that stretches the width of the boat, we don't need any combining gears either, we can have each prime mover acting the the track directly! The electronics will still be a pretty penny, but all this other stuff will really help out in terms of reducing cost!
One of these days I'll write up a more detailed post about how all this stuff works and the synergies we've using, but now I have to get ready for bed.
PS. I've also added some SMES to the submarine so it can turn off the reactor compeltely and go into ultra quet mode - it's nice because even if we limit ourselves to marangin steel for our backing material we get energy densities higher than the commercial state of the art in 1983, and using something like Kevlar puts up well into lithium-ion territory.
Pretty good! I'm basically making an aeroderivative Lotarev D-136 and sticking a cut down open cycle version of our test reactor Brayton turbine on the end of it. The compressor section is going to be oversized, and the extra air diverted to the heat exchanger stuck into the exhaust before it's expanded out through a radial turbine. Minimal added complexity.
Turbine engines tend to be pretty low maintenance, and our are noted to be especially rugged, plus we follow the Soviet practice of putting our turbines in power eggs so they just get removed and serviced offsite.
From GE's website, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's indicative:
Aeroderivatives require on average 10 times less operational and maintenance manpower and over 15 times fewer maintenance events than reciprocating engines in 3 years of operation. Aeroderivatives have no maintenance penalty for daily starts.
Mind you, I think the cost will be very front loaded into the development. As we build subsequent hulls and the bugs are worked out, were actually likely to come out ahead on price.
The combination of air lubrication, hull vanes, and FTP means we're looking at up to a 37% reduction is fuel costs over an equivalent diesel boat, then there's the lower maintenance that comes from a pure turbine system, the incredibly simple and non-wearing gearing, the possible lack of *hull penetrations* for the FTP (and the attendant lack of seals).
We're also not having to do CODLAG or other sorts of IEP which is a big cost savings.
It all adds up to a non trivial savings.
The electronics (in the ships and missiles) are really THE big ticket item. There's not much we can do about those, unfortunately.
Yeah, military procurement is a very expensive endeavor.
Naval procurement is even more so. Ships are designed with what is available and doable at the time of their design and have to be useful for up to 50 years. They also need a considerable amount of logistical support and high end capabilities which all cost even more money. And if you want to maximize the lifetime of one, you need to carry out refits which can be expensive. Oh, and you need to account for both keeping institutional knowledge alive(mandating a minimum amount of construction per year) and procure ships ahead of time(you are not going to build anything significant in naval fast).
Yeah. I tried to keep things reasonable without staggered sort of rollout:
So the IPVs are where we can prove out the fundamentals of the FTP and hull vane.
Then the OPVs are where we couple those to a new hull and expand on propulsion.
I expect the first OPV will have the new gas turbine and that's it, then the one after will add the dynamic hull vane adjustments, then the one after that will include the air lubrication system. That way you're not creating an exponential amount of new stuff you have to fix due to how everything interacts.
Likewise, this is the ship where we prove out the E-War system, the decoy launchers, and the new gun, and learn how to do helicopter ops.
Those are... less coupled than the propulsion systems. So you can probably add them all at once to see where they *do* interact.
By the time we start cutting steel on the Frigates, most of the hardware issues hopefully have been worked through on the OPVs, and it's "just" a matter of figuring out a shit tonne of electronics and missile bugs.
The submarine is in its own little bubble of weirdness because it's got less commonality, but we're definitely reusing the knowledge from that ill advised enriched nitrogen brayton turbine experiment, except with regular nitrogen and gas to liquid heat exchangers.
Meanwhile the LHA is this drawn out process of figuring out naval aviation, and the only really new tech is the nuclear reactors and turbines, which are adapted from the ones on the submarine so we're not starting from scratch.
All this doesn't account for the actual missiles and torpedoes we need to develop as well, I've just been making stuff assuming paper designs. We may need to throw an action that way - we're about due a round of munitions rationalization and refit anyway.
It's going to be a process tho, I don't expect to start cutting steel for the frigates until the Chinese Civil war is over.
Edit: Right now there's almost certainly something like the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory but for the frigate to help test and develop all the electronics.
[X] Cyber's Coke Fuelled Fever Dreams
-[X] [Boat 1] Red Sky At Night (Sailor's Delight)
-[X] [Boat 2] Red Sky In Morning (Sailors Take Warning)
-[X] [Boat 3] For the Tyrants (Fear Your Might)
-[X] [Boat 4] Mother Anarchy (Loves Her Sons)
-[X] [Submarine] (Now Is The) Time of Monsters
The bay of Wenzhou was lit with the flames of burning buildings, the screams of jets racing overhead nearly droned out the steady staccato of machineguns spewing forth their deadly munitions as anti-air systems lent their might to the city's defense, yet more explosions bloomed across the city and the sky with the callousness that only war could bring.
Tracers whipped into the harbor of Taizhou and the waters beyond, munitions illuminating the shapes of boats and vessels, thundering their replies back onto the mainland with the mastery and efficiency brought about by centuries of skill and tradition demanding the best from its crews and sailors. At the same time, its captains held steady in the face of mounting damage and losses to sell the illusion of this attack; the main attack force had landed unmolested to the sides of the city half an hour before and would begin its attack any minute now.
A jet raced over the skies, desperately trying to shake the missiles on its tail, only to fall afoul of another fired from its side, the plane barely escaping total destruction as its engines were ripped apart. Its pilot shot into the burning skies where Chinese and Guang aircraft fought to achieve dominance, the tracers chasing after ghosts and missiles biting deep into blooming fields of heat and screaming metal. The ejected pilot would not see their plane crash into a high-rise, murdering dozens in a second and killing nearly a hundred scared and sheltering civilians in total.
Elsewhere, the thundering steps of a Steel Leopard shook the earth and caused a small child to cry in fear, terror joining its shrill cries as the war machine's deadly machine gun roared its loathing against the warlord's soldiers that had occupied this village. Flimsy metal and weak flesh proved to be no match against munitions designed to punch through far stronger armor, limbs soon lying scattered around the hastily prepared position whenever they hadn't been pulverized outright. The pilot of the Steel Leopard was filled with a sense of superiority and high on the rush of invincibility granted by hearing munitions ricochet off their armor. Their burning corpse would only be identified by the markings of their Mecha, its burned-out corpse sporting the tell-tale signs of being penetrated by a tank round punching through its torso.
And yet, while thousands of Guang soldiers fortified beach-heads in eastern China, spreading out like cancer against forces barely prepared against their incursion, more and more troops fought in the north and west of the country, tens of thousands of soldiers marching to war, some loyal soldiers to the Communist cause squeezing the ill-thought out uprising in their midsts into nothingness. In contrast, others fought for the promise of a free nation, a free people, and a free future, as others battled against a regime that had only brought them hunger and devastation, with no mercy given to those that gave none. Meanwhile, others fought in the north for their own gain, knowing that it was not ideas or beliefs that ruled the country, but money and resources, seeing nothing wrong with throwing their lot in for personal gain...so long as others did the fighting, of course.
And yet, while a nation once united, now divided, ate itself in a cannibalistic feast aspiring to make this orgy of violence a massacre seeking its equal, other countries put their fingers on the scale. Some, like Guangchou and the USSR, sent troops to fight, kill, and die on foreign soil, one's contributions hampered by the need to not see as if they prepared an attack against Tibet. At the same time, the other had to fight against the effects of the purges that had gutted its industrial capabilities, each seeking to advance its interests on the backs of dead Chinese and a nation brought low by its sins. Some, like North Korea and Vietnam, sought to profit to the fullest from the conflict, selling munitions, equipment, food, and more at prices that seeded resentment in some, anger in others, and merely resigned desperation in the rest, as any apple bought was one more meal that could feed another person that wouldn't have to be taken by force from the land and larders of the people. A few stayed relatively neutral, as far as that word meant anything in this conflict. In contrast, others helped to ferry supplies and equipment given a nation patting itself on the back, safe in the assumption that, as bad as things were now, they weren't, and wouldn't be, descending into such a state as the degenerate communists murdering innocent civilians for tactical advantages.
Each side in the conflict had much to gain and much to lose, with mercy not an option to be given or accepted.
The civil war would last 541 days.
It would see over 200 million people dead once its final echos died down.
Choose the Point of View of the next update:
[] The Steel Leopard Sergeant
[] The Democratic Pilot
[] The Warlord General
[] The American Agent
