by Dean Ing
Among the most fascinating military craft are those designed for scouting forays: surveillance, pinpoint bombing sorties, troop support, and courier duty being only a few of their duties. The Germans briefly rescued Mussolini with a slow but superb scout craft, the Fieseler Storch. Our SR-71 does its scouting at Mach 3, while the close-support A-10 can loiter at a tiny fraction of that speed. Now in development in the U.S., Britain, and Germany is a family of remotely piloted scout craft that may be the next generation of scout ships, combining the best features of the Storch and the SR-71.
The general shape of the scout ship is that of a football flattened on the bottom, permitting high-speed atmospheric travel and crabwise evasive action while providing a broad base for the exhaust gases of its internal ACV fans. The ship is MHD powered, drawing inlet air from around the underlip of the shell just outboard of the ACV skirt. The skirt petals determine the direction of deflected exhaust for omnidirectional maneuvers, though auxiliary jets may do the job better than skirt petals.
The scout uses thick graphite composite skin and sports small optical viewing ports for complete peripheral video rather than having a single viewing bubble up front. The multiple videos offer redundancy in ease of damage; they permit a stiffer structure; and they allow the occupant, if any, maximum protection by remoting him from the ports.
The question of piloting is moot at the moment. Grumman, Shorts, and Dornier are all developing pilotless observation craft for long-range operations, but a scout craft of the future would probably have a life-support option for at least one occupant. The design has an ovoid hatch near its trailing edge. For manned missions, an occupant pod slides into the well-protected middle of the ship, and could pop out again for emergency ejection. For unmanned missions the occupant pod might be replaced by extra fuel, supplies, or weapons. Some version of this design might inherit the missions of the battle tank, but with much-improved speed and maneuverability.
Well, we’ve specified high maneuverability and a graphite composite skin. Given supersonic speed and automatic evasion programs, it might be the one hope of outrunning an orbital laser weapon!
Of course the scout doesn’t exceed the speed of light. What it might do, though, is survive a brief zap long enough to begin a set of evasive actions. Let’s say the enemy has an orbital laser platform (OLP) fairly near in space, not directly overhead but in line-of-sight, four hundred miles from the scout which is cruising innocently along at low altitude at a speed of Mach 1. The laser is adjusted perfectly and fires.
What does it hit? A thick polished carapace of graphite composite, its skin filaments aligned to conduct the laser’s heat away from the pencil-wide target point. Sensors in the scout’s skin instantly set the craft to dodging in a complex pattern, at lateral accelerations of about 10 g’s. At this point the occupant is going to wish he had stayed home, but he should be able to survive these maneuvers.
Meanwhile the OLP optics or radar sense the change of the scout’s course-but this takes a little time, roughly two millisec, because the OLP is four hundred miles away. Reaiming the laser might take only ten millisec, though it might take considerably longer. Then the OLP fires again, the new laser burst taking another two millisec to reach the target.
But that’s fourteen thousandths of a second! And the scout is moving roughly one foot per millisec, and is now angling to one side. Its change of direction is made at well over three hundred feet per sec, over four feet of angular shift before the second (“corrected”) laser shot arrives. The scout’s generally elliptical shell is about twenty feet in length by about ten in width. Chances are good that the next laser shot would miss entirely, and in any case it would probably not hit the same spot, by now a glowing scar an inch or so deep on the scout’s shell.
Discounting luck on either side, the survival of the jittering scout ship might depend on whether it could dodge under a cloud or into a steep valley. It might, however, foil the laser even in open country by redirecting a portion of its exhaust in a column directly toward the enemy OLP. The destructive effect of a laser beam depends on high concentration of energy against a small area. If the laser beam spreads, that concentration is lost; and beam spread is just what you must expect if the laser beam must travel very far through fog, cloud, or plasma. If the scout ship could hide under a tall, chemically seeded column of its own exhaust for a few moments, it would have a second line of defense. And we must not forget that the laser’s own heat energy, impinging on the target, creates more local plasma which helps to further spread and attenuate the laser beam.
One method of assuring the OLP more hits on a scout ship would be to gang several lasers, covering all the possible moves that the scout might make. The next question would be whether all that fire-power was worth the trouble. The combination of high-temperature composites, MHD power, small size, and maneuverability might make a scout ship the same problem to an OLP that a rabbit is to a hawk. All the same, the hawk has the initial advantage. The rabbit is right to tremble.
An unmanned scout ship, capable of much higher rates of angular acceleration, would be still more vexing to an OLP. If the OLP were known to have a limited supply of stored energy, a squadron of unmanned scouts could turn a tide of battle by exhausting the OLP in futile potshots. It remains to be seen whether the jittering scout craft will be able to dodge, intercept, or just plain outrun a locally-fired weapon held by some hidden infantryman. But given a compact reactor or an antimatter drive, the scout ship could become a submersible. In that event the scout craft could escape enemy fire by plunging into any ocean, lake, or river that’s handy. The broad utility of such a craft might make obsolete most other designs.
But what of vehicles intended to fight in space? As colonies and mining outposts spread throughout our solar system, there may be military value in capturing or destroying far-flung settlements-which means there’ll be military value in intercepting such missions. The popular notion of space war today seems to follow the Dykstra images of movies and TV, where great whopping trillion-ton battleships direct fleets of parasite fighters. The mother ship with its own little fleet makes a lot of sense, but in sheer mass the parasites may account for much of the system, and battle craft in space may have meter-thick carapaces to withstand laser fire and nuke near-misses.
Let’s consider a battle craft of reasonable size and a human crew, intended to absorb laser and projectile weapons as well as some hard radiation. We’ll give it reactor-powered rockets, fed with pellets of some solid fuel which is exhausted as vapor.
To begin with, the best shape for the battle craft might be an elongated torus; a tall, stretched-out doughnut. In the long hole down the middle we install the crew of two-if that many-weapons, communication gear, life support equipment, and all the other stuff that’s most vulnerable to enemy weapons. This central cavity is then domed over at both ends, with airlocks at one end and weapon pods at the other. The crew stays in the very center where protection is maximized. The fuel pellets, composing most of the craft’s mass, occupy the main cavity of the torus, surrounding the vulnerable crew like so many tons of gravel. Why solid pellets? Because they’d be easier than fluids to recover in space after battle damage to the fuel tanks. The rocket engines are gimbaled on short arms around the waist of the torus, where they can impart spin, forward or angular momentum, or thrust reversal. The whole craft would look like a squat cylinder twenty meters long by fifteen wide, with circular indentations at each end where the inner cavity closures meet the torus curvatures.
The battle craft doesn’t seem very large but it could easily gross over 5,000 tons, fully fueled. If combat accelerations are to reach 5 g’s with full tanks, the engines must produce far more thrust than anything available today. Do we go ahead and design engines producing 25,000 tons of thrust, or do we accept far less acceleration in hopes the enemy can’t do any better? Or do we redesign the cylindrical crew section so that it can eject itself from the fuel torus for combat maneuvers? This trick-separating the crew an
d weapons pod as a fighting unit while the fuel supply loiters off at a distance-greatly improves the battle craft’s performance. But it also means the crew pod must link up again very soon with the torus to replenish its on-board fuel supply. And if the enemy zaps the fuel torus hard enough while the crew is absent, it may mean a long trajectory home in cryogenic sleep.
Presuming that a fleet of the toroidal battle craft sets out on an interplanetary mission, the fleet might start out as a group of parasite ships attached to a mother ship. It’s anybody’s guess how the mother ship will be laid out, so let’s make a guess for critics to lambaste.
Our mother ship would be a pair of fat discs, each duplicating the other’s repair functions in case one is damaged. The discs would be separated by three compression girders and kept in tension by a long central cable. To get a mental picture of the layout, take two biscuits and run a yard-long thread through the center of each. Then make three columns from soda straws, each a yard long, and poke the straw ends into the biscuits near their edges. Now the biscuits are facing each other, a yard apart, pulled toward each other by the central thread and held apart by the straw columns. If you think of the biscuits as being a hundred meters in diameter with rocket engines poking away from the ends, you have a rough idea of the mother ship.
Clearly, the mother ship is two modules, upwards of a mile apart but linked by structural tension and compression members. The small battle craft might be attached to the compression girders for their long ride to battle, but if the mother ship must maneuver, their masses might pose unacceptable loads on the girders. Better by far if the parasites nestle in between the girders to grapple onto the tension cable. In this way, a fleet could embark from planetary orbit as a single system, separating into sortie elements near the end of the trip.
Since the total mass of all the battle craft is about equal to that of the unencumbered mother ship, the big ship can maneuver itself much more easily when the kids get off mama’s back. The tactical advantages are that the system is redundant with fuel and repair elements; a nuke strike in space might destroy one end of the system without affecting the rest; and all elements become more flexible in their operational modes just when they need to be. Even if mother ships someday become as massive as moons, my guess is that they’ll be made up of redundant elements and separated by lots of open space. Any hopelessly damaged elements can be discarded, or maybe kept and munched up for fuel mass.
Having discussed vehicles that operate on land, sea, air, and in space, we find one avenue left: within the earth. Certainly a burrowing vehicle lacks the maneuverability and speed of some others-until the burrow is complete. But under all that dirt, one is relatively safe from damn-all. Mining vehicles already exist that cut and convey ten tons of coal a minute, using extended-life storage batteries for power. One such machine, only 23 inches high, features a supine driver and low-profile, high traction tires. Perhaps a future military “mole” will use seismic sensors to find the easiest path through rocky depths, chewing a long burrow to be traversed later at high speed by offensive or defensive vehicles, troop transports, and supply conduits. Disposal of the displaced dirt could be managed by detonating a nuke to create a cavern big enough to accept the tailings of the mole. The present plans to route ICBMs by rail so that enemies won’t know where to aim their first strike, may shift to underground routing as the subterranean conduit network expands.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO VEHICLES?
A vehicle of any kind is, as we’ve asserted, essentially a means to carry something somewhere. So it’s possible that the vehicle, as a category, might be obsolete one day. The matter transmitter is a concept that, translated into hardware, could obsolete almost any vehicle. True, most conceptual schemes for matter transmitters posit a receiving station-which implies that some vehicle must first haul the receiving station from Point A to Point B. But what if the transmitter needed no receiving station? A device that could transmit people and supplies at light speed to a predetermined point without reception hardware would instantly replace vehicles for anything but pleasure jaunts. The system would also raise mirthful hell with secrecy, and with any armor that could be penetrated by the transmitter beam. If the beam operated in the electromagnetic spectrum, vehicles might still be useful deep down under water, beneath the earth’s surface, or inside some vast Faraday cage.
But until the omnipotent matter transmitter comes along, vehicle design will be one of the most pervasive factors in military strategy and tactics.
REFERENCES
Air Force Times, 12 June 1978
Aviation Week & Space Technology, January 1976, p.111
Biss, Visvaldis, “Phase Analysis of Standard and Molybdenum-Modified Mar-M509 Superalloys,” J. Testing & Evaluation, May 1977
Bova, Ben, “Magnetohydrodynamics,” Analog, May 1965
Clarke, Arthur, Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (N.Y.: Signet Books, 1973)
Committee on Advanced Energy Storage Systems, Criteria for Energy Storage Research & Development (Washington, D.C., N.A.S., 1976)
Compressed Air, April 1978
Fairchild Republic Co., Data release on A-10, 1978
Ing, Dean, “Mayan Magnum,” Road & Track, May 1968
Marion, R.H., “A Short-Time, High Temperature Mechanical Testing Facility,” J. Testing & Evaluation, January 1978
McPhee, John, The Curve of Binding Energy (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974)
O’Neill, Gerard, The High Frontier (N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1978)
Owen, J. I. H. (ed.), Brassey’s Infantry Weapons of the World (N.Y.: Bonanza Books, 1975)
Pretty, R. T. & D. H. R. Archer (eds.), Jane’s Weapon Systems (London: Jane’s Yearbooks, 1974)
Raloff, Janet, “U.S.-Soviet Energy Pact,” Science Digest, February 1976
Rosa, Richard, “How to Design a Flying Saucer,” Analog, May 1965.
Saunders, Russell, “Clipper Ships of Space,” Astounding, May 1951
Singer, Charles et al, A History of Technology, Vol. I (N.Y.: Oxford University Press; 1954)
MILLENNIAL
POSTSCRIPT
Because every general wants better whiz-bangs, I would never have guessed what the Air Force would predict, in 1999, about our bomber force of the year 2040. They said that the venerable BUFF, or Boeing B-52, would still be in service! It first flew in 1952 and soon got a pet name from its looks: big, ugly, and fat. They claim BUFF means Big, Ugly, Fat Fellow, but that’s window-dressing. You can guess what the final “F” really stands for.
I got high-speed watercraft right. For some years now, according to Jane’s High-Speed Marine Craft, water-skimmers capable of 100 mph have been darting about in Russia and Germany, and others are catching up. Check on the German “Jorg” series for an eye-opener.
As for tiny vehicles, they now have a generic name: Micro-UAV (for Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle). Some fly, but some walk, and a few fit in a shirt pocket. Soon, radio-controlled mites may be pocket-sized, and yes, some may be self-controlled with surveillance capability. Takeover by the bugs is an old SF theme, but these bugs are being built with microchips. Microfluidic chips are inevitable.
Even though I got no mail about this from alert techies, let me disavow what I said about using fluorine as fuel with hydrogen. The exhaust would be hydrogen fluoride, horrendously corrosive stuff which will eat almost anything, including glass. Bad idea; what was I thinking? Let me put it a better way. What? Was I thinking?
VITAL SIGNS
Before July, it promised to be an off-year. Not an election year, nor especially a war year-either of which seems to enrich bail-bondsmen. Early in the summer I was ready to remember it as the year I bought the off-road Porsche and they started serving couscous Maroc at Original Joe’s. But it was in mid-July when I learned that the Hunter had been misnamed, and that made it everybody’s bad year.
It had been one of those muggy days in Oakland with no breeze off the bay to cool a sweaty brow. And I sweat easily since, as a doctor friend keep
s telling me, I carry maybe fifty pounds too many. I’m six-two, one-eighty-eight centimeters if you insist, and I tell him I need the extra weight as well as height in my business, but that’s bullshit and we both know it. It’s my hobbies, not my business, that make me seem a not-so-jolly fat man. My principal pastimes are good food and black-smithy, both just about extinct. My business is becoming extinct, too. My name’s Harve Rackham, and I’m a bounty hunter.
I had rousted a check-kiting, bail-jumping, small-time scuffler from an Alameda poolroom and delivered him, meek as mice, to the authorities after only a day’s legwork. I suppose it was too hot for him to bother running for it. Wouldn’t’ve done him much good anyhow; for a hundred yards, until my breath gives out, I can sprint with the best of ’em.
I took my cut from the bail-bondsman and squeezed into my Porsche. Through the Berkeley tunnel and out into Contra Costa County it was cooler, without the Bay Area haze. Before taking the cutoff toward home I stopped in Antioch. Actually I stopped twice, first to pick up a four-quart butter churn the antique shop had been promising me for weeks and then for ground horsemeat. Spot keeps fit enough on the cheap farina mix, but he loves his horsemeat. It was the least I could do for the best damn’ watchcat in California.