Anticanonical Rational Surfaces

A determination of the fixed components, base points and irregularity is made for arbitrary numerically effective divisors on any smooth projective rational surface having an effective anticanonical divisor. All of the results are proven over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. Applications, treated in separate papers, include questions involving: points in good position, birational models of rational surfaces in projective space, and resolutions for ideals of fat point subschemes of $P^2$.