Battleship gun range?

Great Debates
21

FWIW, the guns being fitted to the Burke class DDGs including and following the USS Winston Churchill have a range of 60 plus miles. I beleive it has to do with the improvements in artillery using Gerald Bull’s type of ideas.

DDGs and so on were not part of the OP, nor was the debate over whether or not BBs are of any use in the modern world. I understood the OP to concern the real range of BB guns.

But what may be of interest to the OP person (although they didn’t ask) is the rate of fire as well as the range. The BBs like the Missouri have big turrets with multiple guns because they had to have people in them to load their guns. DDGs like the Churchill have small single gun turrets, but they can fire pretty fast because they’re autoloaders. Leaving caliber and projectile weight out of the question, with modern range-finding equipment and fast loading, a ship that looks weak in terms of only having one visible gun can probably put as much metal on target in short order as an older style ship bristling with manual loaded guns.

22

SenorBeef…I love battleships - I have the honor of seeing the sun come up over the USS New Jersey every day - but they are outdated.

Big shells are nice, and cheap, but they aren’t very cost effective when many are lobbed with so-so accuracy.

You might be able to script hypothetical encounters where you could effectively use a battleship, but weapons are chosen for the type of warfare we are most likely to encounter, and the battleship isn’t as diverse as other modern ships.

Don’t let your love of the battleship and the nostalgia that is associated with them blurr your vision. Battleships can sit mothballed with respect. We need not try and prove their merit vs. modern ships. A modern ship can be better suited to today’s Naval role, and this does not say anything negative about battleships.

23

Cite for this?

As Little Nemo just pointed out BB’s are FAR from invincible. They weren’t even invincible in WWII. The Bismarck was hamstrung by bi-planes of all things. Why you think a modern BB is immune to modern missile weapons is beyond me. I forget which anti-ship missile I’m thinking of here that the US uses but in its final approach the missile ‘pops-up’ and comes down on top of the ship thus avoiding all that nice side armor. The Russians developed the Shipwreck anti-ship missile which carries a 1,600 pound warhead supposedly sufficient to take out an aircraft carrier in one or two shots (and at the very least severely disabling the ship in just one shot). I doubt a BB would fare much better against one of those.

I’ll grant there is a wonderful WOW factor associated with a BB blowing off all its guns and maybe even a useful pshychological effect to be had against an enemy. However, it is a lot easier to come up with ways to destroy something than it is to come up with ways to protect something and BB’s are just to freakin expensive.

The only use a BB can serve better today than anything else would be shore bombardment…especially in support of an amphibious assault. That assumes however that your enemy has little in the way of shooting back at a BB. Even third-rate countries can get their hands on all sorts of stuff these days making a BB standing off shore dicey.

99 times out of a 100 there are better ships for the job than a BB and it is hard to cost justify operating a BB for that odd 1 time in a 100.

[Off Topic]
IIRC a battleship was going to fire its guns in celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s birthday a few years back but they decided against it for fears of shattering much of the glass windows in Manhattan.
[/Off Topic]

24

Missiles? , its why capital ships are almost always escorted
and have anti missile systems such as the AEGIS radar , and the phanalax close range anti missile system.

25

Any defense can be overwhelmed. In addition, it is easier and cheaper to attack than it is to defend. For example, the Star Wars ballistic missile defense systems could be easily overwhelmed with dozens of dummy missiles. Star Wars defense system would cost tens of billions of dollars…a dummy missile might cost a few tens of millions (if that).

Also, the Phalanx system didn’t help the USS Stark when it was struck by accident by a missile from an Iraqi plane (when Iraq was still our ‘friend’ fighting Iran). In that case the radar of the Phalanx system had been turned off because it interferred too badly with the rest of the Stark’s systems. I would assume that this issue has been resolved by now but it goes to show that any defense has its limitations.

26

The reason subsequent carriers have only two reactors has nothing to do with speed. The Enterprise’s A1W reactors were dinky little things, by carrier standards, hence the quantity “eight”. The current generation of A4W reactors are powerful beasts, hence the quantity “two”. The A5W series looks to be even more impressive. You don’t need a reactor to go really d*mn fast, however. The USS Forrestal, coming out of Service-Life Extention (SLEP), could, in extreme need, reach low-end highway speeds. The Forrestal was oil-fired.

27

Thanks for all the great info guys. I’d guess though that the BB operating costs do not include crews, which are tremendous on BBs. N’cest pas?

28

Crew size isn’t really an issue with battleships. A carrier with Air Wing has crew of ~6000. A carrier without Air Wing has a crew of ~3000. A battleship had a crew of about ~1700.

29

Battleships were more vulnerable in WW2 than they are now. In WW2, most weapon systems were designed to be able to take out a battleship - and the effective air defense range of a battleship was only a few hundred yards. More on this later.

**

Modern missiles aren’t typically very big, and almost all of the space on the missile is used for fuel. The actual warheads involved are actually pretty tiny. This is fine for taking out unarmored cruisers and other modern naval ships, but they simply weren’t designed to be able to damage a battleship.

Modern naval doctrine has practically unarmored ships in favor of the idea of not being hit… they’re not designed to take a hit, and so the weapons designed to kill them aren’t very powerful.

**

Actually, battleships typically have stronger armor on their decks than their side - most naval gunfire comes in at a high arc, ‘plunging fire’, so in the design the deck was heavily armored.

**

It would fare better, but that’s a valid concern. Firstly, though, there are very few of the really large antiship missiles out there - predominantly there are small, cheap ones.
Secondly, the bigger, slower missiles are much easier for any given naval group to destroy at range so they don’t become a clsoe threat.

**

I’ve never seen it, unfortunately :confused:

**

Well, the first part is true. But I doubt a new country is going to spend money to design a new cruise missile for the specific purpose of taking out ships that we have only perhaps 2 of (if we recom some).

Secondly, they’re really not all that expensive. They’re already built and upgraded - there’s only the operations costs to worry about. Also, much of the upgrading computerized systems allowing for less crew, and so the battleship only requires about 1/4th of 1/3rd what a carrier would. Other costs are typically 1/3rd of a carrier, too. It’s really not that expensive.

**

As I said, weapons designed to hurt small, unarmored ships (the vast majority of modern day antiship missiles) aren’t going to do serious damage to a BB.

Also, anyway, the whole naval concept these days is not to let any missiles get within miles and miles of any naval task force - and the battleship would afford equal protection under that umbrella. It’s unlikely that a missile would penetrate that shield - but even if it did, like I said, the BBs can take a hit.
**

Tell that to the marines who have to fight without any real artillery support.

**

Ah, cool.

30

Actually, this happened because the ships self-defense systems were simply turned off on account of not having any fear of enemy threat.

31

Wow… Got a lot of good info on this OP… and a real good discussion, too (God, I love this place).

As to the BB vs. modern ‘shipkiller’ missiles…

I remember when the 4 Iowa’s were being recommissioned back in the days of Reagan, there was concern over this issue, especially since the Falkland crisis was a fresh memory, where the H.M.S. Sheffield (IIRC) was taken out with an Exocet missile. A reporter asked an admiral about the BB’s vulnerability to the Exocet (‘because it’s such a darn big ship!’). The admiral’s response - that the Exocet would just ‘bounce off’ the armor of an Iowa class ship. Don’t know if it’s true, but the imagery stuck in my head for years.

By the way, I live in Bremerton, WA, former home of the Misouri and New Jersey. 'Twas a sad day for us (actually, two days) when those beauties left for their new homes.

32

Yeah, that’s about accurate.

Everyone has exocet type missiles, but they’re sort of like .22 rifles. They’re good for killing rats, but shooting an iowa with an exocet is like shooting a bear with a .22.

33

wait a moment, Beef… You’re suggesting that they just re-activate one or two? That’s going to increase the costs tremendously. Suppose something breaks on one of those ships, and needs to be replaced. It happens, you know, with regular wear and tear. You need to have a replacement for that part available… as well as all the other 716,942 parts that could break. Basically, you need a third whole BB, disassembled, to make sure that you can fix anything. If, on the other hand, you have dozens or hundreds of a class of ship, you can still get away with only one or two each of most replacement parts, and more only for the things that break often.

Similarly, you’ve got to train the engineers who’ll be putting these spare parts in, and the gunners to fire the 16 inchers, and the guys to train the engineers and gunners, and re-activate the factory that makes those Volkswagen-sized shells, and meet all the other operating requirements for a full class of ships… All for those one or two hulls.

If, on the other hand, we start sailing significant numbers of them again, then everyone will be designing weapons to kill them. Sure, they’d be more expensive than anti-destroyer weapons, but they’d also be killing a more expensive target.

34

SenorBeef, the race between offense and defense has been going on for decades, but offense is far in the lead. Forget about WWII; capital ships were being sunk by torpedos in WWI (cruisers admittedly, but the only thing that saved battleships from the same fate was the subsequent refusal to sail them anywhere near a submarine).

So an Exocet bounces off a battleship’s armor? I’m not saying that’s true, but so what if it is? Just fire a bigger missile. If need be launch a tactical nuke and see how well the Iowa floats after it’s melted. This was standard Soviet doctrine for eliminating battleships and the USN admitted it didn’t have an effective defense against it. (The American “plan” was that if the Soviets used nukes against ships, the US would use nukes against Soviet cities in retaliation; a suicidal plan that was unlikely to be put into practice. Realistic war planners admitted that every major capital ship at sea was likely to be lost within the first week of a general war.)

And the whole argument about a battleship’s defensive capability is moot. How do you compare a battleship’s offensive capability to a carrier’s? Is an aircraft carrier with a squadron of aircraft each with a thousand mile range going to worry about a battleship’s twenty five mile gunfire? Hell, the Tomcat fighter has missiles with a two hundred mile range; the battleship might go down without even taking out a single plane.

As for naval support gunfire, it is admittedly impressive. But a load of bombs from a B-52 says “howdy” just as well and can be delivered anywhere on the 99% of the world’s land surface that a sixteen inch shell won’t reach. Plus a B-52 will travel from base to target to base in a matter of hours not weeks and do so with less than 1% of a battleship’s crew.

35

I am not yet persuaded by SenorBeef’s claims of economy, but this argument misses the point of shore bombardment. With a 20+ mile range (and the U.S. Marines continue to request 35+ mile coverage), a battleship can stand off a beachhead and control the movement of enemy reinforcements.

A B-52 or B-1 can, indeed, deliver a lot of explosive to a target (with a certain degree of accuracy) anywhere in the world. However, a flight of planes has a hard time “sitting” on a target for hours on end–and the big guys can only make one of those famous world-cruising attacks per day.

The battleship can loiter off the coast, picking new targets as they appear, and destroying them. If the first shots miss, the artillery director adjusts the aim and they try again. If a plane misses, you just have to wait until a second plane can make a new try–and if the planes were heavy bombers, you’re probably SOL. (This works out fine for limited advances, but simply does not work for massed formations.)

I think the A-10 is an amazing plane for combining loiter time, attack strength, and survivability. However, even a sqadron of A-10s would have a difficult time defending a beachhead.

It can be argued that we no longer do beachheads, but using the relative occurrence of events in recent history to identify future events is tricky, at best.

36

As for the arguements that a nuke or bigger missile will battleships in, well, big missiles and nukes made all ships obsolete, so why do we bother still building them? Because they’re still useful, that’s why. If you base your selection criteria on whether or not a vessels vulnerable to certain extreme criteria, you’ll never build anything, because everything is vulenerable to something. What we need to be looking at is: Is there a mission for the battleships? If “yes”, then bring them back. If “no”, then let them rust in peace.

Spare parts? We’ve got the mothball BBs to strip for them. Training Cadre? The Fleet Reserve has enough skilled GMGs that are young enough to be recalled long enough to rebuild the program.

So, when it’s all said and done, Is there a mission?
(BTW: In WWI and WWII, BBs went all kinds of places where submarines could get them. The subs just never got lucky)

37

I’m not saying that a battleship is useless. But I am saying that virtually any mission that can be performed by a battleship can be performed by some other piece of military hardware more efficiently. For example, I have a hard time believing that the amphibious assault support provided by a battleship cannot be equalled by an aircraft carrier’s strike wing (although I’ll admit Tom has a disconcerting habit of usually being right on a wide array of subjects).

As for the nuke argument, it’s true that a single nuke can blow up any ship. That’s why the best defense is to have a lot of ships. The cost of battleships force the navy to put too many eggs in a single basket. Which is admittedly also a major weakness of carriers. But unlike battleships, carriers perform a mission that smaller and less expensive ships can’t substitute for.

38

** Dozens or hundreds is pretty ridiculous. In any case, we only have 4 ships that could easily be pulled back for recommission. Also, there are large stockpiles of munitions and spare parts for iowas.

39

Firstly, a single battleship has the destructive power of several aircraft carriers over any given period of time within it’s reach. Close air support is a nice asset, but it will never replace artillery as the primary support weapon of war.

For any real marine amphibious operation, naval gunfire support is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. What we have today is laughable. If we ever used the marines how they’re supposed to be used, we’d be practically hanging them out to dry.

What new, small ships are going to address this problem?
In any case, you guys seem to think running a battleship costs as much as 10 carriers or something. It doesn’t. It costs a fraction of what one carrier costs to run.

40

Well, the Royal Navy lost at least two BBs to submarines in WW2.

HMS Barham: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-fornv/uk/uksh-b/barham.htm

And HMS Royal Oak: http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/jralston/rk/scapa/roak.html

(FWIW, my great-uncle was a marine serving on the Royal Oak, and was lucky enough to survive her torpedoing)

SenorBeef: surely the primary purpose of a carrier is to provide air superiority? Criticising them for providing poor close air support is a wee bit unfair. Anyway, they still provide better air support for targets > 25 miles inland. When was the last time a 16" shell hit Kabul? :slight_smile: