@addressforbots In the 70s the expected thing was particle accelerators. Math got done about how you hit a high altitude target with a gigajoule worth of protons.

One answer is that you build your particle accelerator emitter so it's coaxial with a laser and precede the protons with enough laser energy to create a vacuum tunnel to the target. (The laser won't work on its own because the target is shiny.)

The tunnel doesn't need to last or be very wide; it's energetically doable.

@addressforbots This does assume the energy budget of a major ground installation or a CVN, and it did NOT assume today's solid state lasers, but in terms of plausible energetics, it's an implementation problem. (Magnets and the ability to control everything have massively improved, too.)

"Volume contests you" is going to be low altitude, low energy (except when it isn't), cryptic, and frequently immobile.

Attacking is going to look like faunal succession in a soil biome.

@rabidchaos @addressforbots That's more or less what the Zumwalts were meant to be without the nuclear powered part. It's apparently consensus that the highly experimental design mostly works EXCEPT for the guns intended as primary armament, and the plan now is to replace the guns with hypersonic missile silos.

SSGNs are a better way to evade the drone swarm for coastal bombardment than a large cruiser. On the other hand, for everything short of sink-them-all, the cruiser is better.

@rabidchaos SSGNs are more expensive[1], but this gets into expected effectiveness. No amount of money spent on useless is worthwhile; the least much you can spend for useful is exactly that.

It mostly comes down to the rumoured mass interferometer applications for submarine detection being effective or not.

[1] The USN stopped building SSNs some time ago; they're ALL SSGNs. The degree and flexibility to which they're SSGNs has tended to increase with time.