Whale Wars, Do the dinners become the diners? Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Switch to: Outline Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Daddy's Litt...]

Is there whaling in the 2070's?

I do not know about Iceland or Norway but modern whaling in Japan is just because of influencial power blocks. There is no market for the meat they take. Despite claims it is a part of Japanese culture, the bulk of the meat rots in warehouses. The only scentific research seems to be does mink whale go best with red wine or white?

The only time it was a big part of the diet for a large part of Japanese culture was in the 1940's when the war meant any protein was hard to come by. The fact it is not truly a part of the culture is shown in that it is an economic failure today and eaten as an exotic oddity than a staple.

BUT in 2070 would this still be the same? Japan in the 6th World is a super power but would the high cost of 'real' food mean that whaling is active again? And would that be the 'deadliest catch' considering what might happen with a meta-whale. Have any of you read Moby Dick?

What about the indians in SS? Isn't one of those tribes claiming whaling as a right?

[Ancient History]

In the 2070s there is a bit of whale-farming, but I can't remember if there is much actual whaling after meistersingers, torpedo sharks, and leviathans came into play.

[Daddy's Litt...]

Well yeah, that was kind of what I meant. It is meat. Real meat. But very dangerous. Can anyone offer insight to the culture in the European nations' whaling cultures?

[Kerenshara]

Real life, or 6^th World

I'm told (1^st hand) that whale meat is absolutely delectible. I was told to think of the finest well aged steak I ever had, make it twice as tender and three times as flavorful. Now tripple that.

[Ravor]

Damn, now you've got my mouth watering... Damn import laws...

[Link]

Considering the polluted 6th world and awakened predators such as megalodon, torpedo sharks, sea drakes and kraken, unless the Japanese hegemony have renounced their cetacean culinary cravings I'd think there'd be few mundane whales remaining.

I found this in PCoE, it seemed apt.

The full ramifications of this politically contentious subject receives a fair, learned discussion in Professor Landauer's volume, Homocidal Cetaceans.

[Earlydawn]

You know, a really cool theme campaign could revolve around a Deadliest Catch-styled fishing operation, that fishes awakened creatures like kraken and leviathan instead of crab or whales. There's plenty of room for every archetype, too..

Riggers manage their vessels like taskmasters, diverting their consciousness into the machine, carefully supervising every hatch, rudder, and valve. Meanwhile, the crew's hacker lays inert in his VR cocoon, rocking his SeaNet satellite account. BootyBB may not have any updates on their fishing board worth checking out, but there's more then one way to gut a devilfish. It'll probably take a few days to inject a spoofed account into Ares' krill observatory in LEO, but when you're out at sea, time is abundant.

Time is abundant at sea, but life is cheap. On the rain soaked deck, chaos prevails. Gone are the days of nets and crab pots; the contemporary fisherman's tool comes in a calibre. The kraken trying to pull the ship to the bottom started getting serious after the Dolphin Shaman hit it with lightning. She's still trying to get herself to her feet. The chromed troll you hired at the port dive bar is trying to get his assault cannon braced, but it doesn't seem like sea legs come in 'ware grades. In fact, he's far more likely to hit the rotodrone hovering over the deck, searchlights blazing in the typhoon. The done's electromagnetically-propelled harpoon could certainly pierce the kraken's rough hide - better hope it doesn't miss.

[Tachi]

"Call me Ishmael."
Yeah, I read it about 20 years ago. Don't ask about it, I don't remember anything but the opening line.
Given the somewhat "extra-sporty" nature of deep-sea fishing in the sixth world, I'd figure whale meat is available but prohibitively expensive. So, yeah, pretty much like now only with a higher body count among the fishermen, and the Green Peace whackos probably have shaman among their harassment crews, and the "Whale Wars" have probably gotten a lot rougher (i.e. mounted crew served weapons at the very least, probably using anti-ship missiles and torpedos by that point since the Japanese are using water cannons and microwave crowd-control weapons even now to force the GPers to stand off).

I keep watching that show hoping to see some treehuggers die, no joy yet, unfortunately.

[toturi]

You know, I keep thinking: If only we could get the whales to breed off the coast of Somalia and the whalers go there to hunt them. Whalers vs pirates. Problems solved.

[Grinder]

"Call me Ishmael."
Yeah, I read it about 20 years ago. Don't ask about it, I don't remember anything but the opening line.
Given the somewhat "extra-sporty" nature of deep-sea fishing in the sixth world, I'd figure whale meat is available but prohibitively expensive. So, yeah, pretty much like now only with a higher body count among the fishermen, and the Green Peace whackos probably have shaman among their harassment crews, and the "Whale Wars" have probably gotten a lot rougher (i.e. mounted crew served weapons at the very least, probably using anti-ship missiles and torpedos by that point since the Japanese are using water cannons and microwave crowd-control weapons even now to force the GPers to stand off).

I keep watching that show hoping to see some treehuggers die, no joy yet, unfortunately.

Don't forget that there are the more radical eco-groups like Green War and Terra First, who'll prbably take more direct action than Greenpeace does today.

[Tachi]

Ah, yes, good point there Grinder.
Hmm... Terra First attack subs... Green War fast attack boats...
At which point the whalers will really get nasty... hehe... hope it's televised.


You know Earlydawn, after rereading your post up above I got a really strange mental picture of Sig and Edgar Hansen, Sig as a fishing-rigger and Edgar on the deck as a cyber-fisherman.

Sig strapped into his rigger cocoon, with a nicotine and caffeine I.V. drip. Cyber Edgar magnetically attached to the deck by his cyberlegs' magnetic systems, shooting a hook out of his cyberarm and biting the heads off of various "goodluck" sacrifices with his cyberfangs. Hehe, the funny part though, is that the mental picture has them still fishing off of the same old rust encrusted Northwestern, albeit with a few upgrades.

[Mortified Pengui...]

Warform Biodrone competitive whaling. That is all. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Earlydawn]

You know Earlydawn, after rereading your post up above I got a really strange mental picture of Sig and Edgar Hansen, Sig as a fishing-rigger and Edgar on the deck as a cyber-fisherman.

Sig strapped into his rigger cocoon, with a nicotine and caffeine I.V. drip. Cyber Edgar magnetically attached to the deck by his cyberlegs' magnetic systems, shooting a hook out of his cyberarm and biting the heads off of various "goodluck" sacrifices with his cyberfangs. Hehe, the funny part though, is that the mental picture has them still fishing off of the same old rust encrusted Northwestern, albeit with a few upgrades.

Exactly. But who will keep the peace when Jonathan launches an anti-shipping missile off of the deck of the Time Bandit and sinks the Wizard? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[hobgoblin]

Ah, yes, good point there Grinder.
Hmm... Terra First attack subs... Green War fast attack boats...
At which point the whalers will really get nasty... hehe... hope it's televised.

probably right next to the latest desert wars episodes, alongside urban brawl and similar.

at times, it seems that SR entertainment borders on the colosseum of rome...

or maybe its a scale up of the current fighting stuff on pay-pr-view?

ok, now i am starting to digress on what the rise of violent entertainment indicates about the society that finds it entertaining, given the historical context...

[Kerenshara]

The thing I think might have been missed to this point is that if the anti-whaling forces are willing to abandon non-lethal methods, shoals of small, fast vessels could swarm whalers easily and anti-ship missiles - even the heavier models - are surprisingly compact and light-weight.

[Ravor]

Sure, but I imagine that the whalers would have access to bigger guns if push ever came to shove. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

[Tachi]

The thing I think might have been missed to this point is that if the anti-whaling forces are willing to abandon non-lethal methods, shoals of small, fast vessels could swarm whalers easily and anti-ship missiles - even the heavier models - are surprisingly compact and light-weight.

Personally, if I was a whaler and I saw (on radar) an unidentified ship (or identified hostile ship) off-load a bunch of small boats that headed for me, I'd automatically launch anti-ships of my own towards the tender-ship. Small boats don't usually don't have the range or supplies to survive on their own without support, especially that close to the antarctic circle. But hey, that's just me and I'm an asshole. That is why I would figure them to usually use subs when they go out hunting whalers in deep water, they'd probably only use small boats when near land by the time things have escalated that far. But yeah, subs make good anti-ship platforms also.

[Daddy's Litt...]

Personally I wonder what would happen if some RL protestors did flip their wheels and got their hands on an old Long Lance torpedo.

The problem is that if the whalers load more combat ships, it makes them more expensive. And it takes up room that could be used for cargo-ie the corpses of dead whales. More likely you might get escourt ships around the whaling ship.Sink the main whling ship and you end the hunt. Repalcing them gets expensive.

Though some corp might want to make a few donations to the anti-whalers- to test out EW masking and anti-ship weapons while the Japan-o-corps loan out similarly to the whaler escourts. Would it still be too controversial for a Renraku frigate to openly support the whalers? Mabe SK also if the Scandanavians still whale.

[Kerenshara]

The Long Lance torpedo was a nifty device in it's day, but it's not a guaranteed kill against a 6^th World whaling vessel, which is probably dual-hulled, heavily compartmentalized (at least in the outer spaces) and armored over the vital spaces at least lightly to deal with seriously horked off Awakened and possibly intelligent cetations deciding to take up the issue with your ships personally. The point about armament taking up space is partly useful, but truthfully, most modern anti-ship weapons are mounted on the deck in light-weight launchers. The old PHM-1 Pegasus class hydrofoils of the US Navy actually packed in a rapid-fire 76mm deck gun and up to eight Harpoon anti-ship missiles. They were less than 150 ft / 42 meters long and had a crew of barely 20.

Something to bear in mind when conducting warfare at sea: the radar horizon is only 7-12 miles / 11-19 km away, even from the top of a very tall radar mast. Modern anti-ship weapons in the first decade of the 2000's are well over 60 miles / 96 km. That means if the anti-whalers find you, they can launch a off-axis attack with missiles from beyond your own radar horizon and you'll never be able to localize them for return fire. In other words, they fire missiles in a direction well away from you initially and then at a designated point, the missiles turn and come back at you, so if you were to fire a seeking missile back down the arrival vector of the incoming vampire (A BOL or Bearing Only Launch) your missiles will never find their tartets. In fact, with enough launch platforms and missiles, it is entirely possible to set up a multi-axis time-on-target missile salvo certain to confuse even the best anti-missile defenses. Or you could go for a good old roll-back-attack where you salvo enough weapons to "roll-back" the defenses of the ship along any one axis.

The big issue is going to be finding your opponent in all that open ocean. Drones, an ideal sollution to the problem, are going to be a real problem because of the arctic conditions; Most aircraft don't like that much cold and wet (read: freezing) and a drone is going to be even more succeptible because a quarter inch of ice is going to be proportionally much more devastating than the same amount of ice on a conventional wing, for example. Once you get to the radar horizon, it's the equivalent of knife fighting distance.

On mature consideration, one sollution would be an LTA (Lighter Than Air) drone at high enough altitude to be above the weather able to utilize look-down mapping radar, but with all the ice, it would still be a tough search. It just becomes one huge battle of measure and counter-measure.

Submarines would have a distinct edge in finding their prey (from the anti-whaler's perspective), and the best weapon to kill subs is other subs. But operating a submarine in close to where you're actively hunting whales is kind of counter-indicated, so that would go slightly to the anti-whalers. They could also listen with sonar for the discress calls of whales under attack. Finally they have the option to use either torpedos or anti-ship missiles. The expense necessary to successfully defend a big, slow target like a whaling mother-ship from a modern submarine would be prohibitive, especially if you had to include point-defense costs on the mother-ship herself. And those kinds of things are going to eat into space as well. The second best means to hunt subs is a dipping sonar helo', but we're right back to that whole "icing" issue; Choppers are a nightmare in those conditions, and the minimum size of vessel needed to maintain, launch and recover a VTOL large enough to carry effective anti-submarine torpedos and a dipping sonar plus a brace of sonar bouys and probably a MAD system is going to be pretty substantial, certainly double or more the size of the escorting vessels I have seen on the show. Then there's the specially trained personnel needed to prosecute an ASW attack, especially if you're trying to find and kill the sub before she's launched her weapons at your vulnerable mother-ship.

OK, since I'm thinking submarines, your main concerns are cost, size, submerged endurance, range and payload. Most GreenPeacers don't like nukes, so I wonder how small you can engineer a fusion plant? What are the detectable emissions of same? Or with the Super-Conducting Super-Capacitors in the 2070s, DE (Diesel Electric) subs become very very viable. Or advanced fuel cells. OK, so power and propulsion are set, and you've got enough speed and range to work. How many crew would you need? Well, is your weapons are in single-launch tubes outside the pressure-hull (vertical tubes for missiles and horizontal ones for torpedos), you don't need the crews for them. Computers can handle a lot of the basic monitoring functions. If the power plant is reliable enough, you can dispense with most of the engine watch. Drek, you can replace the whole bridge watch with a spider Rigger. OK, so that's going to be a small crew. That also simplifies logistics (read: food). You could use nearly any kind of mid-sized cargo vessel as a tender to make things even more effective. The tender could also be a base for LTA search-drones. So call it a pair of subs working in concert. As long as the mother-ship hung back enough, she'd be essentially proof to reprisal.

And with two subs, you can have one execute a surface attack with missiles from one vector once the other sub has stealthed into position where they can launch sub-surface attacks with torpedos against the whaling mother-ship. You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the whalers would be screwed unless they were willing to take extrordinary pains (read: money) to protect themselves, especially compared to the outlay costs of a single pair of subs, half a dozen LTA drones and the mother-ship to tend them. It would probably put the price of the whales at market beyond the point of marketablity.

[Tachi]

I see your point. However, radar horizon for a tall mast is slightly further than that. A 20meter mast can see a 10meter target at 19.5miles.


Radar Horizon Calculator

[CanRay]

An NPC of mine went fishing once...

The group decided not to ask when they saw Depth Charges being loaded onto the boat.

[Tachi]

An NPC of mine went fishing once...

The group decided not to ask when they saw Depth Charges being loaded onto the boat.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. (says the guy who has fished with dynamite in a 50 ft diameter pond, ahh, childhood memories)

[Kerenshara]

I see your point. However, radar horizon for a tall mast is slightly further than that. A 20meter mast can see a 10meter target at 19.5miles.


Radar Horizon Calculator

Interesting find. I always had a lower number for a rule of thumb, and I wonder why that might be, if the calculator is correct. It's still the same problem though, even if the thing is completely acurate, considering an incoming missile is going to skim under 3 meters until the final pop-up maneuver. That means that you'd only have about an 80 second warning when it popped over the theoretical radar horizon. If it was one of the newer Russian Moskit's (SS-N-22 Sunburn family) you'd have under 27 seconds. While that's plenty of time for computerized defenses to respond, it's a VERY short engagement window, considering you need to stop it far enough out that the airframe and warhead don't go ballistic and hit your ship anyhow. There's a reason newer capital vessels in the USN are switching to the RIM-116 Roling Airframe Missile, because it's far more able to down one of these heavy monsters than a 20mm cannon shell. The RIM-116 is a lightweight installation, but it's still not without penalties, and it will have arc-of-fire constrictions on something shaped like a whaling mother-ship, so you're going to need probably at least three to guarantee full protection, if not four based on the whalers I have seen. The escorts can probably get away with two, but it's extrordinarily difficult to hit a skimming-to-pop-up target moving at 2.2 Mach. Short of deploying some kind of dedicated air-defense vessel for the flotilla, that's going to be rough.

And that 27-80 second warning window assumes you pick it up immediately as it crosses the horizon, and these things are pretty small radar targets, and they will get even smaller. Add to that the problem of scatter from floating ice, and it's nightmarish (even doppler isn't going be perfect at discriminating out all the ice). The other problem is that you have <80 seconds to set Condition 1 throughout your ship (damage control crews to ready, weapons to active and - most important - all watertight compartmentalization doors sealed). I guess you could put a lot of that under computer central control, but I don't see mariners handing that over to a computer, for a lot of reasons.

Either way, thanks for the link.

[Tachi]

Either way, thanks for the link.

No problem, I ran a nautical arc awhile back and found it useful. Keep in mind that you could always put up a tethered blimp with radar capability to extend the horizon, or use a weatherized small plane/helicopter, of course the small plane/helicopter would increase costs quite a bit. Putting one up at 1000ft will give you 40-45miles depending on waves. If you go to 5000ft you get 100miles.

BTW, The page with the actual equation to find the horizon is on the previous page from that calculator, strangely, you can get there from there (lol), so, just in case anyone is curious...

The page where the equation is located, it also has the equation for finding the visual horizon.

[Kerenshara]

No problem, I ran a nautical arc awhile back and found it useful. Keep in mind that you could always put up a tethered blimp with radar capability to extend the horizon, or use a weatherized small plane/helicopter, of course the small plane/helicopter would increase costs quite a bit.

Teathered blimp = LTA Drone, but the LTA Drone version is actually superior to tethering because the cable itself can become a liability in arctic conditions. With solar panels on the top, that blimp could probably out-last the stores on the mother-ship for the crew. But the problem there is going to be target discrimination amongst the ice floes. Some of them can move with relative motion that's going to slip past the gates on a doppler, and if you dial the gates up high enough, another vessel can just move ahead dead slow and you'd never see them. Mind you, that LTA is going to be useless for finding a pair of long-duration submersibles. Heck, even snorking they would just have to maintain steerage and they'd be below the gate of the doppler. Worse, the mast head would have a lower RCS than the ice around it. About the only place I can think of worse to try to look for a determined (and advanced) DE boat on electric would be the Persian Gulf, because it's shallow enough and has enough subsea geography to make DICAS bouys and actvie dipped/towed sonar nearly useless. Murder on a homing weapon's sonar too, if it just goes all stop and sits just off the bottom. Hull sonar won't work in the arctic, unless you mind losing the installation to a good-sized chunk of ice you didn't see to steer around. Now that I think about it, a towed installation from a surface ship's goint to be a problem too if it's maneuvering in tight ice. *shudders*

Like I was saying, if the anti-whalers can get even a bearing on the whalers, the whalers are in a world of hurt. The one thing that's going to kill them, fundamentally, is that the ability to defend against a sea-skimming missile is having to emit constantly. I suppose you could try to rely on some kind of IRST (InfaRed Search & Track) but that's too affected by precipitation and fog. No, radar is just your best bet in those conditions, and if you're using an advanced phased aray (or better, something with ISAR capability) you can localize and hand directly off to guidance on contact. Now that I think about it, the RAM is a miserable choice for those conditions, given the guidance method. Better something like the British VL SeaWolf... except that's got a minimum engagement range over a mile from the ship, which is going to narrow your engagement envelope from the INSIDE. The light-weight SeaWolf could be a winner, except for the limited number of rounds on-hand and increased vulnerability to icing (it's easier to blow a simple roof door than to pop open those clamshells on both ends and traverse the mount. Dear heavens, I am SO glad I'm not actually responsible for designing a defense in depth for the whaling fleet, because it's going to be a nightmare from the word go. IF the anti-whalers are willing to go with full lethality utilizing submersible platforms, the whalers are going to have to commit a frightening amount of resources and ship tonnage to (point) defense and detection systems... and the crews to run them properly. Computerization is only so good, and if things go multi-axis, you want extra eyes on the screens. More to the point, that requirement is going to be duplicated across every ship in the fleet (unless you tell their crews they're expendable) and since they're useless in their bunks when you only have 27-80 seconds to engage and STOP the incoming vampires, you're going to need rotating watches, all trained. It's not going to be a LOT of people, but these ships don't tend to operate with gargantuan crews to begin with, and adding a 2-person sensor-watch in addition to the spider and a group TACO spider, that's a lot of extra bodies... or another dedicated (and very expensive) ship. Like I said: Ick.