Re: GZG FH: Blue water navy.

tom.anderson@altavista.net spake thusly upon matters weighty: 

> > Therefore policing 
> > them effectively (and they'll be harder to police than land) will 
> > require effective military force
> 
> eh? in the same way that policing the land takes effective military
force? i don't think so. policing the oceans will take ocean police, not
a navy.

I'm not sure police in the world of the future might not (in some 
ways) resemble second line military (in the ESU, they might BE second 
line military). But point taken.
 
> > - now, we aren't talking USS 
> > Enterprise and New Jersey, but we are talking frigates and such
armed 
> > and armoured to withstand stand up fights with airborne, sea or land

> > threats
> 
> only for SWAT units.

Not necessarily so - yeah, there would be a lot of small craft, but 
the coast gaurd (U.S. especially) is quite formidable in small ocean 
going vessels. I can easily see them capable of handling a pirate 
hydrofoil, a smuggler military vtol, or an escaping smuggling ship, 
and of supporting boarding operations and sometimes landings on 
island strongholds of suspected drug or terror lords. Especially if 
the actual navy is gone. 

> > Do you plan on taking your shore based aircraft out in 10m waves to 
> > try to land your inspection teams on a suspect ship? No. You still 
> > need to have your frigate pull alongside and board. 
> 
> maybe. or maybe i'll use vtols. i was really talking about military
operations.

My point was that these things would exist for peace time reasons, 
and hence would probably be at least useful in certain on-planet (in 
a balkanized planet or a place with lots of smuggling/insurrection) 
military ops. 
 
> i suppose so. i would also add a mention of the Ekranoplan. 
<lecture>this, also known as the wing-in-ground effect (WIG) 
aircraft, is a type of aircraft which flies at a few metres altitude, 
exploiti> 

Interesting story. A friend's father just retired from Canadian Coast 
Gaurd as their only hovercraft inspector. Because of this, he was 
involved with the WIG problem - do you regulate it as a ship, or a 
plane? Apparently, neither the airspace guys nor the naval guys 
wanted it, and of course the regulations of the naval side and the 
air side are not the same. Ended up I think the aerospace guys got 
it. You know these things can carry obscene amounts of cargo 
(exceeding that of a C5 Galaxy I think) and they can move at quite a 
clip at heights up to 500m off the water surface (or at least they 
can bounce that high to hop stuff). Neat stuff, hard to regulate, 
very efficient. 

> > YMMV. 
> 
> nautical mileage, of course :-)

Let's not get into that... then we open the door on chains, cables, 
fathoms and other relatively bizarre measurements..... god save 
us.... 
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Thomas Barclay		     
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