New answers tagged ships
2
Consider something like a catamaran or outrigger, which will function more like a sled than a boat. The less of your craft that sits in the sand the better as it will have much higher drag than water.
Lets be clear your sea can't exist and even if it did no ship could sail it without being worn away in days so you need a fair amount of handwavium to work.
...
3
Sail powered airboat.
First principles: you do not want you boat to extend down into the quicksand, which would offer too much friction. The boat therefore will need to be completely above the quicksand.
I was thinking of something like a fanboat or airboat - flat bottomed boats powered across marsh and mud by a large fan or propellor. It would seem that ...
3
Quicksand is a non-newtonian fluid which means that it acts differently than a normal liquid when force is applied to it. Typically that means it is like a liquid when low forces are applied (e.g. standing) but like a solid when high forces are applied (e.g. hitting).
Your ship probably doesn't want to "float" in it, being under the surface of the ...
5
Seaborne commerce increased dramatically between the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Age of Machines...
From the History of the Port of London pre 1908 by the Port of London Authority:
"During the eighteenth century the rate of increase of the volume of the trade of the Port fluctuated with the alternating periods of peace and war. Marked ...
0
I would think that by the 1950's in your scenario, "crossing the T" would be considered archaic.
Firstly, even early in WWII, capital ships had radar, and by the end of the war radar had been well developed.
Secondly, scouting ahead is still possible, even without airplanes or zeppelins. Destroyers or Frigates with radar, powerful optical systems and ...
0
As others have mentioned by this time period crossing the T did not offer much of an advantage. Older ship designs had primarily fixed broadside armament that could on fire to the side of the ship. They few if any guns that could fire forward or rearward. Many battles were two lines of ships sailing side by side.
If you could arrange your line of ships to ...
1
God Rod Analysis
Facts:
Dropping anything from orbit produces 31mj/kg.
A telephone pole sized mass of tungsten weighs slightly less than 13 metric tons.
31mj * 13000kg ~= 400GJ. That's around 100 tons of TNT (1/10th of one kiloton).
It takes an object dropped from orbit around 15 minutes to reach the surface of Earth.
100 pounds of TNT has a kill radius of ...
1
Modern SSNs don't necessarily need to come to periscope depth to fire. It's possible to pop out encapsulated missiles that only launch AFTER the launching sub cleared datum. While currently they are only used for AGM's on SSKNs, there are no reasons why they couldn't also be applied to VLS tubes, or even apply them to ICBM tubes, albeit a new gen of missiles ...
5
Lets assume for this consideration that your spaceship can detect the exact location of the attacking submarine within a few seconds after the attack is launched.
Rod of the gods
The spaceship will be in an orbit of at least a few hundred kilometers, if not much higher. So even with an instant counterattack the submarine gets more than a minute to dive and ...
3
I think the key obstacles are submarine detection from space and spaceship detection from underwater.
Most submarine detection systems today are sound-based, and they rely on receivers in the water. Even aircraft (which are in the atmosphere) drop sonobuoys.
There are some non-sound systems, like MAD, but they are short-ranged.
Some things are possible ...
-1
No fossil fuels. A ship could run on wood (with reduced range /speed).
But without readily available fossil fuels, the development of internal combustion engines would be greatly hampered, and without those aviation wouldn't really exist.
7
Less dense air, for two reasons:
It would make flight harder, similar to Mars
It would make laser weapons more viable. They would probably be good at targeting fast-moving aircraft, but would need such power supplies that they can used on ships, but not on aircraft.
3
Other guys put decent answers, so I do some less decent:
Your people could have low G tolerance, making maneuvers in jet speeds above 1MACH very stressful for body, maybe only few people in your world can be trained to handle those Gs so jet pilots would be extremely rare and most of pilots would fly classics. This could be done perhaps by lowering gravity ...
7
I'd suggest a low-density but high-oxygen atmosphere would make it hard to develop safe flight, never mind weaponise it.
In order to attack a ship with an aircraft, you need to do two things: first you need to fly a plane to the target, then you need to drop (or propel) something explosive onto it. Explosives are heavy, and they're also dangerous to handle. ...
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