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[nefastor]

As a spin-off to this thread about the LHC, I'm starting this thread so we can throw around ideas as to how controlling gravity might affect warfare, and if that would actually be desireable from a strategic and/or tactical standpoint.

If any truly revolutionary engineering results emerge from the LHC, like control over gravity and inertia, you can pretty much bet they would be applied to warfare before anything else.

That's a good cliché, and it seems like a real no-brainer, but I don't think it would go down that way.

Artificial-gravity weaponry is one of those ideas that sounds really cool on paper but when you try to make it real, you realize it's not gonna be practical or even useful.

Remember what happened with the jetpacks : at first, every general loved the idea of soldiers who could fly around the battlefield. Then when the prototypes took off, the generals noticed a flying trooper makes one hell of a good target for everyone else.

I've worked in the military industry. Plus, every man in my family as far as anyone can remember has served in the army, myself included. And I'm a weapons freak. I can't think of a single weapon we have today that could be vastly improved by controlling gravity, and I don't think you realize how great our weapons are.

The only valuable military application might be in deflecting incoming ordnance away. So it would actually make it harder for people to kill each other. Unless the attacker decides to use a nuke or good-old small pox. Or fuel-air bombs. Or air-bursting gunshells, missiles and rifle-grenade. Or just plain old flame throwers. Or lasers. Or landmines... should I stop there ?

At any rate, any weapons designer will tell you : "better" tends to be the enemy of "good". Kinda like each new version of Windows.

It's a bit off topic but if anyone's interested we could start a thread about gravity-based warfare. Sounds important enough, or it could be if the LHC yields the results I'm hoping for.

Nefastor

Fire away !

Nefastor

[niner]

Nefastor, if we could control gravity and inertia, we could have aircraft that required very little energy to put into the air, or spacecraft that could be launched very cheaply. The military implications of this alone would be huge. If inertia could be turned off, any vehicle could accelerate or change directions very rapidly, kind of like all those UFOs everyone keeps seeing. Of course, I don't expect any of this to happen.

[nefastor]

Nefastor, if we could control gravity and inertia, we could have aircraft that required very little energy to put into the air, or spacecraft that could be launched very cheaply. The military implications of this alone would be huge. If inertia could be turned off, any vehicle could accelerate or change directions very rapidly, kind of like all those UFOs everyone keeps seeing. Of course, I don't expect any of this to happen.

I remember there's a conspiracy theory out there about the B2 Spirit which basically says it features a device which makes it 10% lighter than it should be, giving it increased range. I don't remember where I read that, though, it was a long time ago.

Good point about space : if you can cheaply access Earth's low orbits, you can put some interesting weapons up there. For instance a conventional laser-guided bomb dropped from orbit might have enough kinetic energy you wouldn't even need to fill it with explosive. It could just be a big lump of steel. Saddam Hussein wanted to achieve a similar effect by using a cannon so powerful it would shoot its projectiles in orbit, from where they could hit anywhere in the world (look up Gerald Bull if you don't remember)

Of course using space for military purposes implies making a few amendments to the Outer Space Treaty.

As for UFO-like maneuverability, it's probably in the jet-pack category of ideas. In a simulation I've seen, even with an F-35 (which is very maneuverable) a human pilot couldn't manage to follow a cruise missile. The plane is fully capable of following the missile, but the human's reaction time and the delay induced by manual control makes it impossible. In other words, high accelerations aren't the limiting factor in plane maneuverability.

Nefastor