Scaling anthropomorphized 'ship girls'

Question

Currently i'm building a world where conventional warship is largely replaced by Kantai, anthropomorphized human female posessing power of modern warship. They are basicly a human sized girl that is so overpowered because they posess full power of a warship, in human sized package. (think of Kantai Collection, but set within present times, and more serious). The problem that currently makes me stuck is their firing range, since it will affect the tactics used in battle, so... to the questions.

From here, i will use data from Wikipedia for example. The Arleigh Burke Destroyer has an array weponary, including the Mark 45 5-inch deck cannon with effective firing range of 37 km, and Harpoon Anti-Ship missile with firing range of 130 km (correct me if im wrong). The Arleigh Burke also has speed in excess of 56 km/h, (lets assume it over 60 km/h).

Also, F/A-18 Super Hornet has combat range of 722 km with speed up to 1912 km/h and service ceiling is 15 km, while MiG-29K has combat range up to 850 km with low-alt speed up to 1400 km/h and service ceiling about 17,5 km(both are carrier-based multirole fighter). (again, correct me if im wrong)

So, the question is how i can scale those number to human size? By scaling, i mean the firing range of those weapons, combat range, speed, and service ceiling of those fighters will decrease 'accordingly' and the speed of the ship itself will increase.

The questions is mainly about the math that needed to calculate this, but feel free to add anything that maybe i missed.

Anyway, sorry for my english. It's not my first nor second language.

Image credits: me

Answer 1

Not really an issue.

For conventional warships to be replaced by Kantai, the Kantai need to advantageously replace said warships. They must be better overall, and there must be very few scenarios where a warship couldn't be replaced by a reasonable number of Kantai (the less the Kantai cost, the higher that number).

This is a complicated calculation involving range, power flow rate, stealth, speed, manoeuverability, endurance, advertence, expendability and supply (ignoring moral issues, expendability becomes a function of supply).

An extreme example: a Kantai range is puny (say 100 meters), its hitting power very low.

But they have ESP, so infinite advertence; acceleration in the order of the tens of G's, and top speed just shy of Mach 1, say 300 m/s. This means that a conventional warship cannot target and hit them. They are invulnerable. You can achieve the same with infinite stealth, provided that just shooting at random or replying blindly at incoming fire isn't likely to bring down too many Kantai.

Suppose also that Kantai can be mass produced at low cost, and they can keep hitting for any length of time (yes, this means they require a very high power density, way up in the nuclear range; or they can zip away to refuel after a few minutes, while being replaced by fresh Kantai. If the supply is high enough, this is the same thing as an infinite power Kantai group).

This means that a lumbering warship can be attacked by a Kantai swarm, blinded under a sheet of fire within seconds, then utterly destroyed at leisure - it will take time, granted, but the warship is effectively defenseless.

And just like that, warships are obsolete. This example is akin to a r-strategy. But you can as easily imagine a K-strategy, where a single (or a few's) Kantai hitting power is enough to sink a warship.

Your design question becomes then, "How much power, speed etc. can I pack in a Kantai?". You can play at leisure with the "how easy and cheap it is to produce a Kantai", and that should go a long way into offsetting anything else.

Operational range is still an issue.

The enemy warship is 1,000 miles at sea. Your Kantai need to reach it, so either they have the range, or they need... a carrier. Which would be a target, so we did not really replace warships.

Any reduction in Kantai advertence or endurance, and it remains advisable to have smaller warships acting as a screen - using maybe unconventional weapons, lasers, or some creative means of interdiction: balloons trailing razor wire, toxic fumes, who knows.

Kantai vs Kantai

This would necessarily be a very intense short range dogfight, and the simpler tactic would be to reduce the opposition's manoeuverability somehow (encirclement?). Seen from a distance it might resemble a bird flock, peppered by explosions.

In the K-strategy example, you'd have instead a sort of manoeuvering war of the sort fought by submersibles: the first to get the drop on the enemy is likely to win.