by Brent Reilly
Enormous power requirements had long delayed the installation of electromagnetic railguns on US ships. The engines didn’t generate enough power and their batteries could not store enough electricity or release it fast enough. Even the railguns on the latest DD(X) destroyers could only shoot 60 miles, compared to railguns in the lab that could shoot nearly 1000 kilometers.
A low-draft ship with a 1000-km railgun was a strategic weapon since virtually everything on Earth is within its range. A fleet of railgun ships that can ride rivers hundreds of miles inland could project its power over virtually the entire planet.
And now they had enough juice to operate it.
They designed the entire ship around the railgun. They incorporated a network of Jackson’s best ultracapacitors because they could store far more electricity than industrial batteries and, more importantly, they could release that energy far faster.
Which helps fire a railgun more than once.
Now, unlike “strategic” nukes, this was a strategic weapon: a small, fast ship that could approach any coast in bad nighttime weather without detection, quickly fire GPS-guided shells, then disappear. The mere existence of such a ghost ship virtually negated conventional nation-against-nation warfare. One ship could decimate Iran with impunity or could have wiped out Saddam Hussein’s invading force into Kuwait in 1990.
A strategic weapon does not just win battles. It wins wars.
And, hopefully, prevents them.
This new railgun ship could strike dozens of long-distance targets an hour – more than an entire aircraft carrier battle group. Even more impressive, those shells could be target-optimized – meaning anti-personnel shells hit troops, penetrators hit bunkers, buildings and armored vehicles, while others shed thousands of tiny munitions over convoys, military bases, and runways. Matching the munition to the target meant destroying it on the first try. Target-optimized warheads were a force multiplier.
But if the new ships can hit something one thousand kilometers away, then what use are aircraft carriers? $30 billion aircraft carrier battle groups exist to deliver several tons of explosives several hundred miles away. Something that a $1 billion railgun ship can do far better, cheaper, easier, faster, and safer, while putting 6000 fewer troops in harm’s way.
Carriers are so vulnerable that they need two dozen vessels and fifty aircraft just for protection. As Warren Buffet put it, price is what you pay, while value is what you get. A carrier’s value can be measured by the damage it can inflict, which hasn’t improved in decades, while its vulnerability increases every time another two-bit country deploys anti-ship missiles, supercavitating torpedoes, and their own satellites. 99% of a carrier group’s cost is defense-related, including over half of its aircraft. While the Chinese may be tempted to deploy a micro-nuke on a $30 billion battle group, it becomes harder to justify releasing a nuke on one of many railgun ships. The Navy only deploys 3-4 carrier groups at a time, so destroying one makes a huge difference. Destroying one railgun ship makes little sense when there are a hundred others to take its place.
Whereas a stealthy railgun ship can approach an enemy coast in bad nighttime weather, an aircraft carrier must stay far away to avoid detection and destruction, rendering it relatively useless. Carriers are simply too vulnerable and not very capable.
Railgun ships made aircraft carriers obsolete.
But that’s not all they did. Defense industry experts designed it not just around the railgun, but also around a speed-of-light free-electron laser weapon. The Army and Air Force had been improving them for years, but lasers, like railguns, require huge amounts of juice. Batteries can neither store that much electricity, nor release it quickly enough.
But Jackson’s latest ultracapacitors could.
The defense industry knew that they would not get any new orders until they made a compelling case. A super-fast railgun ship was compelling, but a super-fast ship with both a railgun and a speed-of-light laser really captured the imagination. And made for great animated battle scenes to wow the public. They had to generate and store huge amounts of electricity anyways. Adding a laser weapon in the design phase added little to the ship’s cost.
A laser can fry anything within its line of sight. Not just aircraft, torpedoes, and fast-attack boats, but anti-ship missiles or uranium rods dropped from orbit. Speed-of-light means not just a faster defense, but a more accurate one. Lasers make a missile attack so unlikely to succeed that no enemy would probably try, unless at very close range like in a foreign port.
Traveling at the speed of light means there is no need to lead the target because time-to-target is virtually instantaneous. That also makes it impossible to evade. It eliminates the influence of gravity and wind which can throw solid projectiles off target, which makes lasers ideal for killing over long distances, especially since laser beams don’t generate light or sound to betray their position. A stealth ship during a rainy night could laser-fry an enemy coast with virtual impunity.
The downside is it requires line-of-sight, which limits its usefulness on a ship, although they installed it on the highest possible point. An enemy bomber flying near the surface water must “pop up” briefly to get a radar lock on the American ship. If the Americans know where he is coming from, the laser could melt him during that brief pop up. Another interesting application was using the laser to boil the water around a mine or in front of an incoming torpedo.
The problem with lasers is that they waste a lot of energy as heat, which requires power-intensive cooling equipment since simple air cooling would leave too much time between shot cycles. Jackson, however, solved this problem with second-generation superconductors that don’t require super cooling.
To maximize profit while minimizing taxpayer costs, the defense industry wanted to standardize the entire Navy on as few hulls as possible, like automakers producing several cars from the same chassis. Defense lobbyists were trying to sell Congress on using just four hulls to serve almost all of the Navy’s needs.
For example, Jackson had just started producing a 200 meter long Roll On, Roll Off cargo ship that could double as an amphibious assault vessel. At 60 knots, twice the speed meant half the time to close with an enemy coast. Its cargo bay opened a ramp out of which hundreds of small, fast, amorphous metal hovercraft could assault an enemy coastline. Just one cargo ship would be more effective than an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Hovercraft are peculiar beasts that resemble a truck driving on water, a ship sailing on land, and a plane flying on the surface. Armed hovercraft are much more useful than wheeled or tracked vehicles because they can travel over any surface (sand, snow, slush, mud, water, grass, ice, rocks, waves, coral reefs, fast-flowing rivers, and minefields) and do not need a port to be off-loaded. The Navy has used them since the 1980’s.
In addition to assault and transport hovercraft was a version specifically designed to carry a standardized 40 foot container. Planes, trains, or trucks could deliver the containers to the safest, closest location, then armored hovercraft could relay them over sand, rivers, mud, swamps, snow, or ice to the front lines. Loading and unloading a ship using hovercraft to move standardized containers meant the Marines did not need to invade, capture, and then operate an enemy port under fire. Ports will always be the most heavily protected areas of an enemy’s coastline -- which Marines could now simply bypass.
And the 99.9% of the time the ship was not attacking an enemy’s coast, it served as a general-purpose cargo or transport ship. The Navy needed a hundred cargo ships anyways, but having a hundred fast, stealthy, railgun-laser cargo ships that could be reconfigured to serve as amphibious assault ships that unleashed several thousand heavily armed hovercraft meant the entire Marine Corp could D-Day a coastline at the same time. As Napoleon proved, concentration of firepower wins battles.
In essence, this was exactly what the Communist Chinese needed to invade Taiwan, since hovercraft could travel hundreds of miles up rivers, across reefs, or down highways at high speed.
The Marines could park a stealthy cargo ship pre-loaded with armed hovercraft in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and throughout Asia, to back up the regular railgun-laser ships carrying F-35s and heloplanes. Just one cargo ship with one hundred hovercraft, drones and/or spy blimps could reduce the pirate threat off Somalia better than an entire aircraft battle group.
The enemy never knowing when a stealth railgun ship was around alone multiplied the Navy’s ability to project force. Saddam never would have invaded Kuwait if he assumed a railgun ship was within a thousand kilometers.
But it got better.
Amorphous metal submarines, injection molded at the same time for maximum structural integrity, had several times the 600 meter depth and blast-resistance of current American subs. Because torpedoes and depth charges cannot handle greater pressure, any sub that can submerge deep enough can also operate with impunity. An American sub could thus sink an entire enemy fleet without endangering itself if it had enough depth to protect it.
Since they were designing new submarines from scratch, and since they needed to capture the public’s imagination, the defense industry maximized the new subs’ ability to descend. Instead of rising or falling slowly like a blimp, they duplicated research subs by using water running past two stubby “wings” to create reverse lift to descend at 400 feet per minute, or four times faster. The depths would be the sub equivalent of the high ground. Smaller, faster, quieter subs that escape danger by descending quicker made enemy subs virtually obsolete against the U.S. Navy.
Then they put a fucking pop-up railgun in the sub to nail the value proposition. It only shot 50 kilometers, but that was enough for one sub to stop an entire Chinese invasion fleet from overwhelming Taiwan. And since they would run on compressed hydrogen gas, they could be refueled and re-supplied at sea, multiplying their time on station, rather than waste weeks going back home.
And the Institute just loved Bell’s new heloplane.
Bell Helicopters, owned by defense giant Textron, shocked the crap out of the aircraft industry in 2009 when they first showed off the prototype of their evolutionary helicopter-plane hybrid. As the owner of fifteen deep sea farms, space a thousand or more kilometers apart, Jackson couldn’t imagine having too many aircraft that could takeoff and land vertically like a helicopter, but had the range, altitude, and carrying capacity of a cargo plane. Bell, however, needed a large order to justify building a mass-production plant. Jackson, therefore, became their first customer in order to replace his entire fleet of seaplanes with heloplanes that landed right where he needed to unload his supplies.
Called the 2X, which some confused with a new duel rotor technology by Sikorsky Aircraft also called 2X, the amorphous metal airframe was both stronger and lighter than conventional bolt-and-weld airframes. The canard amorphous metal rotor wing spun a central wing to take off vertically like a helicopter, then after accelerating to at least 120 kn, would deploy flaps from the front and rear wings. This allowed the central wing to cease rotation and lock into place across from the fuselage and act like a third wing. The flaps on the other two wings would retract so that all three provided lift loads for fixed-wing flight. Shifting in mid-flight from rotor to wing while using a canard rotor to maintain lift during the transition was revolutionary. Switching to amorphous metal rotors and airframe was critical in literally getting it off the ground, while also increasing its speed, altitude, and range.
The Army was so excited about the heloplane that many in the Pentagon’s E-ring openly talked about replacing every single helicopter in the service because it rendered helicopters obsolete.
But the jumbo version inspired the greatest excitement. Jackson needed vertical takeoff and landing craft with the longest possible range and the heaviest possible load capacity for his sea farms, so he challenged Bell’s engineers to design the largest heloplane possible by promising to buy a thousand of them. Large helicopters like the Blackhawk, Sikorsky’s Skycrane, or the Russian Hinds max out at roughly 70 feet, yet Bell came up with a jumbo nearly twice as large. While the reigning world champion, the Hind Mi-24, could lift 12 tons, the jumbo heloplane could lift over twice as much and fly several times as far.
Small heloplanes would make great scouts and tank-killers; medium-size ones could insert special forces behind enemy lines, but these jumbo versions could transport an entire light infantry platoon or 25 tons of supplies a thousand miles. Their range meant they could stay over a battlefield or escort ground troops several times longer than helicopter gunships, while their amorphous metal frame automatically made them virtually immune to small-caliber fire without having to weigh them down with heavy armor. They were not as fast or have the range of other planes, but they could land virtually anywhere, which multiplied the Army’s reach and lethality. This meant that one hundred stealthy jumbo heloplanes, each carrying a light armored vehicle, could move 4000 light troops a thousand miles at night in bad weather to avoid detection.
Like, say, to Tehran.
But building every new vehicle, ship, and aircraft out of amorphous glass was not the Institute’s most controversial proposal. That award fell to their proposal to replace almost every warhead with gamma-rays, which have thousands of times the explosive power of conventional explosives. When exploded correctly, gamma-rays left virtually no radiation. They scaled up, so they could destroy anything from an underground bunker to a small town – all without radiation.
Their main problem, aside from high cost, was exploding the gamma-ray completely, because anything that did not explode left radiation. 98% didn’t cut it. Any undetonated isomer disperses as slightly radioactive particles, similar in effect to the uranium tank shells that reportedly caused so many birth defects after the Gulf War. And, perhaps, caused the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome that screwed up so many returning veterans.
A stealth bomber could use a small railgun to fire thousands of tiny GPS-guided, gamma-ray munitions from hundreds of miles away, instead of flying right over the target. A speed-of-light laser plane using Boeing’s new fuel-sipping Dreamliner 787-9 was possible as well. Just coat the upper frame with high efficiency nano-solar to supplement onboard electronics, pack it with the best ultracapacitors for power, and switch to hydrogen fuel to improve the weight-thrust ratio.
That much juice could also fire a 10 nano-second-long, gigawatt bursts of power to induce a surge in unshielded electronics to fry enemy weapons, radars, and communications. Unlike an electromagnetic pulse, this microwave pulse could be targeted to travel up pipes or down ventilation ducts into underground bunkers.
And the Holy Grail was a maglev-launched, hypersonic scramjet that could fire gamma-rays, laser beams, and microwave pulses, and hit any target on Earth within an hour.
The Institute was also selling a “railgun tank”, which more accurately resembled a railgun truck.
The Institute flatly declared the tank obsolete. The U.S. Army lost hundreds of tanks in Iraq after Bush claimed “major combat operations” over. One division alone, the 1st Cavalry, lost 70 tanks during just one tour in Baghdad.
What’s the purpose of a tank that’s so easily destroyed?
The Institute wanted to replace it with a quiet 90mm railgun with no muzzle flash, can strike several times farther, and whose projectiles travel four times faster. Its target would have four times less time to evade, which means higher kill rates and greater safety since fewer of the enemy can fire back. With quiet shots, no muzzle flashes, and firing from farther away, the enemy needs more time under fire to determine where they are being attacked from. The railgun tank made the Abrams obsolete.
But the heavier the vehicle, the less juice there is to power the railgun. A railgun converts 30% of its electrical energy into kinetic energy, so the more electricity, the more powerful the railgun. The solution is to use the lightest possible truck that carries the most ultracapacitors. So they designed a plug-in fuel cell truck around the railgun.
The purpose of a tank is to send a few pound
s several thousand feet. A railgun tank could fire several times farther, while traveling faster and farther than an Abrams could dream of. Just multiplying its range on a tank of fuel dramatically increases capability while reducing vulnerability when long range artillery or local insurgents can strike at any time.
But the real value was that the “tank” doubled as mobile artillery, which made howitzers obsolete. Yet it was so light that even a jumbo heloplane could transport two of them a thousand miles. A fleet of heloplanes could therefore airlift an entire armored battalion wherever they were most needed.
Like, say, from a ship at night to Beijing or Tehran.
Veterans loved Jackson’s double decker bus that accommodated a platoon of forty along with their gear. Instead of a utility truck where troops sit with their backs to the enemy, these seats faced small bulletproof windows so soldiers could insert their M-4 into a slit and fire while comfortably seated. Each seat even had a cup holder because, as any gamer knows, shooting shit up is thirsty work. On the second floor in the front and back there were special openings for two heavy machine guns each to give the bus 360 degree coverage. Its amorphous metal frame, with an extra diamond hard coating, and an apron to shield the tires, was all the armor it needed to repel rifle-caliber bullets and RPG’s. They even reinforced the floor in a “V” shape to dispel bomb blasts from IEDs. With forty weapons shooting with relative impunity, it was the perfect transport vehicle for inner city hot spots like Iraq or Compton.
A smaller version the size of a van accommodated a squad: a driver and five shooters on the first level, each facing out, and on the upper level four heavy machine gunners laying flat, to reduce its height, facing all four directions. Its boxy design made it look like a tall Volvo.
The shorter, faster “economy” version just had a driver and one shooter with a .50 cal, Hellfire rockets, and a wide angle lens camera on a platform that turned 360 degrees while the gunner stayed safely inside. In case of trouble, their immediate superior could monitor their progress in real time by tapping into their video feed. They were still tinkering with the design so that the weapons could be remote-operated in order to park them at hot intersections, which would draw out any enemies in the area. Even more exciting was Jackson’s plan to make a hovercraft version -- not only to help Marines storm beaches, but for soldiers to fly over sand, snow, mud, rivers, lakes, swamps, and rocky terrain.