Re: GZG FH: Blue water navy.

john wrote
<<
You wrote: 

>Do any of the NAC/NSL/FSE etc. have blue water navies?
>Is there a place for them with grav vehicles and starships?

IMHO, a lot of the roles of these clowns can be taken up by Grav MBTs.	
A MDC/5 or DFFG/5 on a small, fast, well armored hull can sink any 
freighter out there, and scrap most any warship small enough to avoid 
being 'plinked' from orbit.  Brown water craft will likely abound, but 
the blue water stuff is primarily there for maintaining or cutting 
SLOCs (Sea Lines Of Communication) which won't be likely to have the 
exaggerated prominence that they do, for instance, in the case of the 
United Kingdom or the United States (one being an island and hence 
forced to have a navy or be restricted to invading Scotland yet again 
and the other having oceans between itself and any enemies, unless of 
course Canada is taken over by Nazis)

John M. Atkinson
>>

but for some reason sent it as an attatchment.

anyway; i'm not sure that ocean-going ships will wane in
 importance - global trade depends utterly on ships to
 move billions of tonnes of freight each year. i don't
 see many technologies on the horizon which seriously
 threaten this. thus, ocean communications are still
 vital. however, i do not think that wet navies will
 have much use; by then, shore-based aircraft and recon
 satellites will control the seas.

possible alternatives to ships:

- a huuuge rail network, massive-gauge and
 computer-controlled, shipping cargo at great speed.
 possibly subterranean, as in those dodgy 80s gene
 roddenbery post-apocalypse movies with 'subshuttles'.

- airships. studies have been done of a cargo airship a
 mile long with 35 000 tonnes cargo capacity, comparable
 to modern freighters. some way to go before they can
 rival the 564 763 deadweight tonne jahre viking
 supertanker which plies our oceans.

- non-synchronous skyhooks. the less said about these the better, so
i`ll stop there.

and remember, the UN is there to stop all conflict in in core systems,
which includes earth.

Tom

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