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 pounds 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.
An armored car, van, and bus sure beat the hell out of Marines invading in unarmored Humvees like in Iraq.
Jackson would have made billions if McCain didn’t croak. Instead, Palin and Senate Republicans blacklisted Jackson as a supplier and subcontractor, but at a cost since the millions in defense contributions that used to go to Republicans now went to Democrats. And the Democrats who received the most from the defense industry were those running for president.
So, yeah, Jackson felt under-appreciated.
He knew, of course, why Cooper was pissed. Jackson and the mega-donors in his Millionaire’s Club bought futures just as shares of defense contractors soared a year ago. Critics claimed they pocketed billions.
And no one profited more than Henry Fucking Jackson.
18
Cooper finally chilled out enough to sit down.
“Henry, don’t try to change the subject. What the hell do you need one hundred nuclear spaceships for?”
Jackson hesitated to tell him the truth, which would take way too long, so he told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. He sat down in one of the cheap chairs in front of his desk.
“Ah, hell, Dan. You got me. But it’s not a billion dollar opportunity we’re looking at. It’s $1 quadrillion.”
Cooper did not look impressed.
“Remember this joke? Bush was told that two Brazilian soldiers died, so he asked, ‘how many soldiers are in a Brazilian?’”
“You don’t believe me!” Jackson played offended.
“Stop fucking with me, Henry. You say you want me to back you, but you won’t even level with me.”
Which was funny since Jackson thought exactly the same about him.
“Aren’t you in a hurry, Dan?”
“Oh, I got time for this.”
“You think I’m playing? If you must know, we want to mine space rocks. Of the Near-Earth Objects at least one kilometer big, at least 50 are metallic or Type M, which are up to 99% metal. One of these, Amun, is a two-kilometer wide rock that, according to John Lewis, a planetary sciences professor at the University of Arizona, has $8 trillion in nickel and iron, $6 trillion in cobalt, and another $6 trillion in precious platinum-group metals, for a grand total of $20 trillion. These large metallic NEOs are collectively worth $1 quadrillion, those 100-1000 meters a $1 quadrillion, those 10-100 meters a $1 quadrillion, and those less than 10 meters another $1 quadrillion. And those are just the M-class and stony-iron NEOs, which make up only 4% of the NEO population. The other 96% are worth several quadrillion dollars more. The average non-M NEO has a higher concentration of precious metals than the richest ore mines here on Earth. To put it another way, several quadrillions dollars worth of metals float near Earth.
“And past Mars lie millions of rocks in the Main Asteroid Belt. Three times that many float 60 degrees in front and behind Jupiter. Then there are billions of asteroids and comets past Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, and trillions more past Pluto in the Oort Cloud.”
“Yeah, but how do you get them?”
Cooper was interested in anything that made money.
“We capture a big one when its closest, then re-orbit it into a gravitationally stable orbit called a Lagrange point. There are five of them: L1 and L2 are on either side of Earth relative to the Sun; L3 is on the other side of the Sun directly opposite Earth; and L4 and L5 are 60 degrees before and after Earth in its orbit. More specifically, like we have with many satellites, we give it a Lissajous orbit around L2 from where we return precious ore and send people, materials, and supplies.”
What Jackson didn’t mention is that his father had already located a $20 trillion asteroid in a Lagrange point sixty degrees behind the Earth, that they named The Jackpot. They didn’t even have to move it. No one else knew of it because its location made it visible only momentarily at the horizon at sunset.
Jupiter has many asteroids that orbit sixty degrees before and behind it, but what got the Professor started
was the discovery of the asteroid 1990 MB in a Lagrange point near Mars. If any rocky planet should have Lagrange asteroids, it should be Earth, which has the greatest gravity well of the four rocky planets. Because he headed the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch program for so long, the professor had more equipment than virtually anyone else on Earth. And he looked specifically for it.
He not only knew where to look for, but what to look for. Detecting NEOs requires different telescopes than those that measure their spectra. Most astronomers rely on colleagues from other universities or in other countries, but Spacewatch had access to the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, which has the largest collection of scopes in the world. So the Jacksons became virtually the only people on the planet to know that a $20 trillion asteroid floated exactly behind Earth. And if he told Cooper, then as president he would take it away. Sure as hell.
“It sounds like you just need one. Why do you want one hundred?” Cooper, sensing weakness, dug further.
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