Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Light carriers (CVLs) have had a very troubled history. They were the very first aircraft carriers, from USS Langley & HMS Argus, and were frequently built to use up extra treaty tonnage (USS Ranger, IJN Ryujo) or when fleet carriers weren't ready yet (USS Independence class). But they almost always exhibited poor seakeeping characteristics and could carry only small air wings, which prevented them from being very useful in combat. Light carriers haven't proven the decisive element in any major sea battles, and major naval powers usually relegated them to playing support roles for fleet carriers or doing aircraft-ferrying or escort jobs.

I would bet against them being all that useful now, too.

Escort carriers (CVEs), however, don't get nearly enough praise. Aside from one decisive strategic victory (the Battle of Samar) where U.S. escort carriers beat back the main body of the Japanese navy under overwhelming odds, they also were a major factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoy losses plummeted once escort carriers started being attached to convoys.

I'd bet that the future of carrier warfare lies in a "drone swarm in a box". Outfit ordinary shipping containers to launch & retrieve a swarm of drones with a combat radius of a few hundred miles, and then you could load these onto ordinary freighters. They'd create an effective deterrent for any surface or submarine warfare, and could be added to existing vessels without modification.

Wait a minute, how in the world do you outfit ordinary shipping containers to "launch and retrieve a swarm of drones with a combat radius of a few hundred miles"?

I mean, yeah, that sounds like it would be pretty effective. Assuming that you could actually do it. But I'm not aware of any drone that might conceivably have an operational radius of a few hundred miles that could launch, land, and be serviced in an area of 8ft x 20ft or 8ft x 40ft. Much less a "swarm" of them in the same area.

A Cessna Skyhawk has range of 640nm, height of 8ft, length of 27ft, wingspan of 36ft, and payload of about 900lbs. Take the pilot out, streamline & shorten the fuselage, and give it folding wings, and you're basically there for size, range, and payload.

For landing: well, SpaceX can land a rocket vertically on a drone ship after taking it to orbital velocity. You could do similar maneuvers with a drone. Flip the plane so that its wings act like a parachute to slow its descent, and then turn it around all the way to use the propeller to lower it onto the deck, then fold the wings. Without a pilot, the only limits on G-forces is the structural integrity of the airframe, and such planes are likely to land very lightly after completing their mission. Computer control lets you do things that would be totally impractical with a pilot, like maintain stability in a stall.

Takeoff seems the biggest challenge. Ground roll on the Cessna is 960 ft, and the drone will be at its heaviest on take-off. Maybe do an assisted take-off, launching from a gun barrel or compressed air cylinder? Again, without a pilot, you can be much more liberal with G-forces, and with computer control you can do things like unfold the wings in the air. It wouldn't fit in a single container then, but you could have a system of containerized components all working together.

Also, the Russians reportedly have containerized cruise missiles, which meet the requirements for range, payload, and take-off. They don't really have multi-mission capability, but it may not be all that far from there to drones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch2Rqte6XOs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7632...

I think you meant "km," not "nm."

Cessna Skyhawks also do not, you know, carry munitions, and have a top speed of about 180mph. I'm by no means an aerospace engineer, but I think a blithe assumption that you can take a slow, light, un-durable civilian aircraft, turn it VTOL, arm it, and launch it from a box essentially no larger than it is, and have an even remotely effective combat aircraft, is unfounded.

And in any case, that's still not a "swarm."

It's 640 nautical miles according to Cessna's website.

And a lot of the assumptions about what makes an effective combat aircraft go out the window when you take humans out of the loop. The #1 cost in a manned airplane is the pilot - we do everything we can to bring them home, first of all because human life is sacred and second of all because there's a massive investment in training them which can't be replaced. Why do you need durability when the drone is expendable? Why do you need performance? All you need is to deliver a critical mass of ordinance accurately onto a target. If your drones cost less than the missiles used to shoot them down, just have more drones than missiles and you win.

A typical container ship has between 10,000-20,000 TEUs. Many of those are stacked below decks and wouldn't be available for flight operations, but even if you assume 500 containers on the top deck and pack 2 drones/container, you could have an air wing of 1000 drones. Or put 50 containers each on 10 ships in a convoy. I'd consider that a swarm.

Oh, sorry, "nm" means "nanometer" to me, but of course nautical miles.

The drone swarm folks are persistent and resist the facts that as drone lethality approaches fighter jet, so does the size, complexity, cost and operational requirement of the drone.

It's one thing for a drone to carry a few hellfires and be remotely controlled over air space where completely supremacy as been achieved or access granted versus actually having autonomous drones do strikes in hostile air space.

I mean, the later kind of drone exists of course, they're called cruise missiles and they cost 1.6m$ each (Tomahawk Block IV, 2014 price).

The traditional approach has been to put missiles on a destroyer.

The US Arleigh Burke-class can carry missiles to shoot at land, sea and air targets.

I'm a little lost, what is your differentiation between CVL and CVE?

To add to your praise of CVEs, one example of the victories of the CVE (particularly the Casablanca-class escort carrier[1][2][3]) is kept in Chicago to this day[4].

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca-class_escort_carrie...

2) one of the more interesting men of WWII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Kaiser

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Shipyards

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-505

CV = fleet carrier. These are purpose-built as aircraft carriers, designed for sustained flight operations, had speeds of 30 knots or better, and support an air wing of roughly 80-100 aircraft (this has remained constant from WW2 to now, but the aircraft today are bigger).

CVL = light carrier. These were usually built on cruiser or ocean-liner hulls, with a (WW2) displacement of ~10-14k tons. Some were also purpose-built as small aircraft carriers. I would also include the Cold-War era VSTOL carriers of the British Invincible & Soviet Kiev classes in this category, as well as the jet-conversions of 1950s-era carriers that ended up in many third-world countries. They were built with fleet-carrier speeds of 30+ knots, so they could accompany the fleet on operations, but had air wings of only 20-30 aircraft and often lacked armor protection.

CVE = escort carriers. These were often converted merchant hulls, or purpose-built with a hull similar to merchant ships. They were the same tonnage or slightly smaller than light carriers and were similarly unarmored, but sacrificed speed for simplicity & seakeeping - they were designed to escort merchant convoys or amphibious assaults, which required only about 10kts.

Basically, it's a speed vs. simplicity tradeoff. CVLs were intended to accompany the fleet and participate in offensive operations, while CVEs were intended to accompany merchant or landing ships and operate only defensively. But the tradeoffs involved in making CVLs hit their design goals of speed and aircraft capacity tended to give them poor seakeeping characteristics and made them ineffective in their primary mission, while relaxing those constraints and focusing only on defense led to a platform that was very effective at its more constrained mission, and could also be produced in large-enough numbers that it was surprisingly effective against even superior surface forces.

(This trade-off should be familiar to anyone following the F-35 project.)

CVEs also spent a lot of time shuttling aircraft out to the CVs. Being able to quickly replenish lost aircraft was no small advantage.

>Outfit ordinary shipping containers

You could also drop one of these into any cargo ship, and have clandestine weapons systems at any major port in the world. I'm guessing this violates volumes worth of international maritime law/treaty... but I can think of at least one organization that'd be comfortable doing exactly that.

https://warisboring.com/missiles-in-a-box-and-more-at-russia...

If you don't care about retrieving them afterwards, we already can do that - they're called missiles ;-)

Such drone swarms already exists in particular scenarios against mobile AA units to overwhelm and make them use up all of the AA missiles. I can't remember what it's called but the #1 weakness is reloading times and limited quantity of defensive projectiles against a potentially numerically overwhelming independent flight vehicles tricking the radar into thinking they were legitimate jets or ATG payloads.

CIWS seems like an answer until you realize you can't shoot all of them down. Just a few that will bypass is enough to take out the C&C for AA mobile units.

Extrapolating that further, I shudder at the thought of a black cloud emerging over the horizon only to discover they were military drones powered by AI, all independently communicating and strategizing against human operators.

The problem with drones is that they don't really work against a country with air defense.

We essentially do this already with destroyers and cruise missiles. No real need for a drone middle man.

If you want a plane, it has to be big and fast enough to gain air superiority. Drones don't do that.

There hasn't been a major sea battle between powers with advanced missile and guidance capabilities.

It's hard to not see large carriers as floating coffins in a war between closely matched powers, unless anti-missile capabilities went through a huge leap. But then you would just throw more missiles at the target until one got through.

The idea of "swarm drone in a box" also ignores that ordinary freighters are easy targets against missiles or other swarm drones. That doesn't rule out other implementations of drones which would likely play a role.

A war between powers with such advanced tech are also sophisticated enough to be nuclear powers, and that's just another scary path to wander down.

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