TheDS
Regular Riot
NOT! You haven't got any idea what a nuclear war would be like. Imagine a single megaton blast hitting Detroit. The number of wounded would swamp the hospitals of THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. You can't win a nuclear war if you get hit, and it's too hard to hit an ICBM. The Patriot missile system did not stop all the SCUDs. Studies by people a lot smarter than you and me put together have concluded that ABM is a myth, and that winning a nuclear war is a myth. Read the studies. Here's a recommendation: "Nuclear Illusion and Reality" by Solly Zuckerman. It's a small book, will take a few hours to read, and you'll thank God we never had a nuclear war.
Nothing that can't be duplicated by anyone else in the next few years. In fact, the plasma thing made the news not too long ago; this year I think. Useful for all kinds of things, not just stealth.
And a TANK? How long is that gonna be king of the hill? I daresay it's as good as an M1A1, maybe better, but I'm calling it "Modern Armor".
Heard about that. It's pretty cool; fires a rocket underwater and you can't dodge it; you hope it misses. And what makes it so impossible or undesireable for some one else to build? Won't be long before our helos can drop the things.
And what modern army doesn't have this capability? Ever see an M1A1 get parachuted? Or see one fly along the water on a hovercraft at over 100 mph? And it's not even unique.
Actually, they have at least two, the Kirov (which the whole class is named after) and the Frunze. Two more were supposed to have been built, but I think they were scrapped when the Commies gave up. They also have the Slava class, which is an even better air-defense vessel, but I don't know how many units they have. It was comparable to an AEGIS ship.
Again, nothing that anyone else can't duplicate in a few years (I think we deploy such mobile nuke units in Europe). It's called SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. Anyone can do it if they have the right tools. Anyone can do it if there is a need for it. That's why everyone developed gunpowder instead of just one or two people.
Would a 1946 version of Civilization give the Americans a nuclear bomb as a UU? Or would an 1862 version of Civ give America the Ironclad? No one else had one, so that's pretty unique, right? But we can agree that that would be ludicrous, because eventually everyone got to make them. There's no stopping them.
However, no one else had made anything even close to a supercarrier. It's not that they couldn't, but why would they want to? It's a huge drain on resources, it costs more than even an oil-sheik can afford, and what's it going to give you? Who are you going to use it against? Why should Austria build a supercarrer when their good buddies the USA already have enough to cover the whole globe, and are cranking out more every few years? Mightn't it constitute some kind of threat to build one?
So that's why I suggest the supercarrier. No one else has built one, no one else will ever build one, no one will ever want to build one. Just us crazy cowboy Americans and our laughable attempts at keeping the peace now and then.
On the subject of lasers:
There's this irritating thing called the atmosphere (irritating to the laser, anyway) that really hoses up your focus, and focus is everything to a laser. If you can't focus all your power onto a spot about the size of a quarter, you can forget about it being useful. You also need a ton of power to generate your laser, and that means you can't fire it like a beam you see on Babylon 5. You get a really quick pulse of energy. In order to get any range out of it, you have to make the focal diameter pretty darn huge. Darn physics won't let you build something like Star Wars.
All this adds up to a small weapon that can only be used against targets that are close to it in outer space. The mirror thing is a bad joke from Spies Like Us, and active mirrors almost make it sound feasible. (Active mirrors are what allow ground based telescopes to outperform the Hubble, which has a really small focal diameter anyway.)
The laser will attempt to intercept the target at the worst possible time; it's going incredibly fast, it's split up into its multiple warheads, it's deploying its decoys, it's got spent rocket parts all in the way... It is damn near impossible to achieve a hit, never mind a 90% hit rate. The laser can't reach ground and do any appreciable damage because it's not designed to.
A lot of "sci-fi" tv shows and movies are not even close to real-world physics. This is because they have to pander to their audiences. How exiting is it to watch a space battle where the target is so far away you can't see it (or is just a dot), your command center is buried in the center of the ship where it's well protected, your ship is changing course constantly and under heavy acceleration to randomize your position as much as possible, your lasers fire a millisecond pulse every 2 minutes, and you can't even see the laser because it's ultraviolet? Not terribly movie-worthy. You might not even get worked up if you were actually doing it, until you got hit. And once you got hit, it wouldn't be just some little control panel exploding into sparks and then you get a break. That one hit knocks out your engines and next thing you know, you're blown apart because your fuel tank got hit, and lemme tell you, hydrogen fuel doesn't like to be superheated by a laser, no sir.
