Know what would give me a freedom boner? Nuclear powered battleships w/ railguns instead of conventional guns ❤ Sadly there's no justifications for it lmao

yeah by the time railguns are tenable they will be able to just fit them on destroyers.

which i still am not sure why the navy is pursuing railguns, earth's curvature puts a hard limit on the range of something with a shallow firing arc like that

aircraft mounted railguns, though...

or, you know, orbital ones

that might actually be a really efficient weapons system, just collect solar energy to power it and fire low-mass inert projectiles through it... easy to get into orbit and rearm, compared to missiles or something

With our focus on anti-missile tech, I can't say it's too crazy that we'd also be researching tech for (relatively) close combat that wouldn't be able to be stopped by the same tech.

that's fair. still, being limited to within 20-30 miles of the coast kinda sucks

That's international waters baby, totally legal to patrol ❤ Then when ya need to, BOOM.

Don't get me wrong, being able to strike from the other side of the world is pretty hot too, but it's nice seeing sci-fi tech come to fruitation. Gives you hope for the future, yanno?

yeah it's cool

i'd be concerned about weaponizing space though tbh

going back to orbital railguns or something, that just gives the controller of that system the ability to obliterate anything you want, anywhere at any time without any of the consequences of deploying nukes

that's a lot of power to put in the hands of one government with no balancing

i think we signed a treaty or something not to weaponize space, but with the whole space force thing not sure if that's out the window or not

From my understand we've signed a treaty that doesn't allow for WMDs in space

But ship to ship or ship to satellite "combat" should be fair game

And let's be honest, if you took out a country's satellites and disallowed use of your own to them they'd be struggling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

"It exclusively limits the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes and expressly prohibits their use for testing weapons of any kind, conducting military maneuvers, or establishing military bases, installations, and fortifications (Article IV)"

"However, the Treaty does not prohibit the placement of conventional weapons in orbit and thus some highly destructive attack strategies such as kinetic bombardment are still potentially allowable."

i guess that answers my question

Honestly from what I'd heard about kinetic bombardment I figured they'd be classified under WMDs, but ey I'm not complaining lol

there's probably a line somewhere where it becomes a WMD if it destroys a large enough area or something

ie the size and speed of projectiles you're sending down

although the definition of WMDs is pretty contentious as far as i know

Yeah probably, I just don't know those numbers lol. I just figured with the way the US works we'd go big or go home

yeah

imagine the butthurt though if we put kinetic bombardment weapons into space

"AMERICA HOLDS WORLD AT GUNPOINT"

Haters gonna hate hate hate~

Unless we go full on socialism the world's gonna hate, so fuck em

problem is eventually another evil globalist type is going to become president and have access to these weapons

You're right, one day we won't have our shitposter in chief 😢 I try not to think about that yet

I'm praying that my boat will get a presidential unit citation from him though. Would be one of my prized possessions.

which boat?

SSN-23 USS Jimmy Carter

oh nice

Historically we've gotten similar awards and our predecessors have gotten them as well. It'd just be nice knowing I was wearing it from the god emperor himself 😛

no fucking way i'd want to be in a submarine though lol

Honestly it's not as bad as it seems