Logistics is quite a complex beast and you mention "the military". Out of POL (Petrol, Oil, Lubricants) you now have one item nearly sorted - "petrol" ie power source. Your machines also need a few other things to work. Then there is food and water - your army's people need a power source too. Oh and they need a few things to throw at the opposition - munitions.
There's a major war being fought in Ukraine right now. Ukraine is bloody huge and it's all about logistics. Russia cannot possibly "win", where win is take and hold all of Ukraine. There was a huge armoured convoy headed for Kyiv and it stalled because it could not possibly have had enough of anything to run for more than a few days.
As my dad always used to say (Col. (Retd) RAOC): "An army marches on its stomach". That means that Russia may continue to commit acts of barbarism but it cannot possibly achieve its original aims. They have not got the legs.
That's not much comfort for the peoples of Ukraine suffering massive indignity and savage brutality, day after day.
As it turns out, there were also a group of Ukrainian Special forces that pestered and attacked that column relentlessly. Kudos to them and their efforts.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/28/the-drone-oper...
I mean yeah? That is the nature of millitary offensives. The opposition tends to make your life harder every way they can.
When someone says that the attack stalled because the attacking force botched the logistics, that doesn’t mean that they forgot that tanks run on fuel. It means that they couldn’t deliver the supplies needed because their logistics were not resilient to enemy action.
In the very micro level this might mean that a particular Ukranian soldier shot dead a particular Russian fuel truck driver. (Or they blown up the truck, or trapped it, or misrouted it, or caused them enough fear the truck driver decided to run away instead of getting the supplies to the troops.) On the macro level the details don’t matter, there you can say that the logistic failed.
Similarly if during an excercise in your own country the fuel trucks show up a day late that’s not a problem. You spend the day camping next to your tank and the fuel arrives when it arrives. But if the same happens during a real invasion you are a sitting duck the enemy is trying to kill.
Logistics failing and the Ukrainan forces pestering and attacking the column are not two different things. They are one and the same, but on two different levels of abstraction.
That saying is a little older than your dad. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/15/army/
People need fuel within 24 hours at a minimum. LI need more than most because they need to move fast. I was a once a Devon and Dorset Light Infantryman (cadet). The DnDs used to have a mad pace - 180 per minute. We could get there as required and then get cut down by a single machine gun. That's old school stuff and the world has moved on.
You need safe food and safe water for yourself and a chance to consume it. You'll also need water for bathing etc if you can to maintain comfort. To be combat effective you need a lot of energy. You'll also want to be comfortable so let's say 2l water for drinking and 50l for washing if possible. Food - at least 4000 calories per day.
Now you need to do something and that will require munitions and weapons. A tankie will require a lot of fuel, bits of track, lubricants for all the funky stuff. They'll need shells of various types - AP (anti personnel - basically ball bearings to kill people) and APDS types (armour piercing discarding sabot) and the other more modern fancy types with nastier purposes. Anyway - quite complicated and expensive too.
A tank out of fuel and shells is just a quick kill for the enemy.
Logistics is not that simple and we see this in Ukraine.
I guess maybe the difference is there is redundancy in the GPS network – taking out one satellite wouldn’t do much damage, but with power supplying satellites I presume it would.
There are a few counterexamples, but they wouldn't be, for instance, Russia or China or the US. They'd be mad to do that over a power delivery system that they can utilize or hack.
Much harder to generate power from nothing in the middle of nowhere.
And if you are fighting guerilla fighters it does not matter that you saved 5% of your logistics
> Imagine being able to deploy energy anywhere on Earth and not have to setup a logistics chain to facilitate it.
theoretical setups for receiver arrays for space based solar power beamed over microwave are very large, if you're going to go to the trouble to erect a big receiving array somewhere in an empty piece of land, you might as well just build a large ground mount photovoltaic system based on commodity 72-cell monocrystalline Si 400W rated panels.
I think anyone that's done terrestrial point to point microwave telecom professionally will take a very skeptical view of things like 10 GHz band, 1 km power "beams".
the reality is that the atmosphere absolutely eats microwave, and when it's not eating it, you have temperature inversions, ducting and diffraction effects to take into account at long distances as well. this is why their demo only works at 1.0 km.
The paper is published in the Journal of Microwave Power, proposes using a wavelength around 10 cm, and with a vertical beam calculates a loss of 1% in clear skies and up to 10% loss with rain.
... there are newer sources, but I'd have to dig through notes, nothing very concrete.
How so? Wouldn't a space-based-solar facility need to transmit through the full height of the atmosphere which is much more than 1km?
- Gather a whole shitload of power on-orbit
- Build a massive fleet of power-shunting satellites
- Deliver all of that down to the ground
I think you may have watched too many James Bond movies.
What seems to be missing is consideration of what happens to all that 'lost' power.
In their test, they sent 91kW, and received 1.6kW, over a distance of 1km. That missing power doesn't just up and disappear, it's heating the air and water between it. You'd have to scale this up, massively -- I'm not good enough at the math or physics, but I can't imagine it gets any easier at longer distances.
So what you're really describing is a death-beam that even if you don't cook the people on the ground, is going to be dumping huge amounts of heat into the atmosphere.
Only if the government has alien power generating tech, would they care so little about power loss.
I might be wrong and someone can do the calculation to prove me wrong, but I don't think there is any way you're going to power an army or even a single regiment with that (or even more than a couple of toasters).
First, Low Earth Orbit is at least 160km above the Earth. You could do it at 100km but now you have to fight atmospheric drag on top of everything else and constantly need to readjust your orbit to avoid burning up.
Forming a beam tight enough that it stays focussed on your small target is the first challenge. Talk about fraction of a degree. You'll get much worse energy loss just there, because your target will always be smaller than the energy spot. If you have to build large targets, then there is a point where it would be more advantageous to just use solar panels on the ground.
Second, since you'd be using a low orbit, you'd still be in the dark at night, so no power for you.
Third, the lower the orbit, the faster the satellite is going to zoom past in the sky. You'd need a constellation of these to constantly reshape their beam to all their targets. As their distance from the target increases, the power received will also vary a lot. It also means the satellite will have to know the precise location of the target at all times. Might be workable for a static unit, but if you're talking drone/autonomous system, then they will need a way to transmit this information somewhere, very, very accurately too so the beam can find it.
It's not something you could deploy anywhere in an instant unless you have thousands of satellites covering all areas of interest.
The solar panel size you would need to ensure some decent minimum power received on Earth would be pretty big. Say you have a super efficient solar panel that can get you 30% efficiency, you'd get max of 300W/m2. So you would need very large arrays of panels just to get a few kW on the ground.
Now if instead of solar panels you want to beam up energy to bounce from the satellite back to the target, you'd double your problem space: need lots of large emitters that would need to target a constellation of fast moving satellites. Not great unless you know you can deploy them exactly where they are needed, which probably limits the use cases in foreign territories.
So, I'd say this will remain a niche application on Earth, where the size of the transmitting arrays depends on the distance to the target, and will probably never go beyond a trial in space if they manage to convince someone to get funding for it.
I am just thinking out loud but what if we went out further and added an array of satellites in the geostationary orbits, not to power anything on earth but rather to power each other. I was thinking if we had enough of these satellites and they were in line of sight between each other, could they kind of send power to each other in case one of them was in the dark? Just thinking out loud.
And these geostationary satellites would still be in the earth's shadow. Even the moon gets in the earth's shadow, and it's more than 10x the distance. You would need to have a bunch of satellites that can bounce energy to the target at low angles (so longer distances) which makes losses a lot worse and the problem even more complex.
Others have also mentioned that the claim of achieving 60% efficiency at 1km looks dubious. Look at the pictures of the size of the antennae needed to basically run a couple of toasters... extrapolate even just a bit to compensate for the orders of magnitudes in range.
https://www.viasat.com/about/newsroom/blog/how-satellites-ar...
1.6kW deployed to any area in the world. I’m not sure how to visualize that, or what the implications are.
Could this power a drone indefinitely with no need to land?
Here’s an out there scenario - a few power generating aircraft or satellites in high orbit sending power down to drones at lower altitudes, and vehicles on the ground that just have inverters and motors. No costly batteries, let alone the logistical supplies required for fuel and maintenance for combustion. You are no longer limited by the slow moving fuel vehicles; a blitz is a whole other thing now.
Generators and solar arrays are the backbone of most forward operating bases - no longer. You have so much more freedom and space as you are no longer restricted by your power / fuel requirements.
It will shift the balance of war, vehicles, infrastructure, logistics.
For less military uses - imagine doing away with power cables entirely. No more costly infrastructure built above or below the ground. Just a few towers (much like mobile phone towers) transmitting to households. Depending on where the technology goes, imagine not needing batteries in anything anymore. You’re just hooked up to the wireless grid for power too.
It’s still in its infancy, but this is pretty significant.
Which seems extremely unlikely.
And if the enemy captures your vehicles, you can simply deauthorize them and they won't work anymore.
I’m fairly certain that even if this works you need battery or fuel based backup power.
The key is to win, not to hide.
I suppose. But on the other hand, let's say "anywhere on Earth" is a PCB inside an attacking enemy jet fighter. I haven't designed any PCBs for the military, so I don't know what their standards are, but I can say every low voltage circuit I've designed would not appreciate even 10W being dumped into any arbitrary net...