Sure, if you can put a carrier and battleship into an unarmed ramming contest, you can rig a “blow up reactor now” button.
I hate discussing Samar Strait because it blows away what used to be my favorite theory: “a carrier needs to plan and coordinate like God himself while a battleship needs to get lucky only once.” Kurita was not on a suicide mission. The plan was for a near-surgical attack on carriers and transports and then bug-out. Straight out of Mahan.
You guys might as well play simulation instead of dwelling on Taffy 3, or even HMS Glorious. 10 battleships vs. 10 carriers. No escorts. Open-upward stats (make your carriers as big and fast as possible, make your battleships as big and armored as possible.)
FTR, that’s a different thread.
First of all Aircraft have usually 1-2 destroyers to defend it and two missile cruisers and they have a better radar the battleship have no chance.
Read the OP, FTLOP, neither vessel gets its battle group for backup.
As a former atom jockey have to point out that if the reactor was not critical, the carrier wouldn’t move at all, and in fact acceleration will cause the reactors to go supercritical.*
*Critical just means it is producing enough neutrons to sustain fission at the current level (stable power production) and supercritical means the neutron level is high enough to increase the fissions, subcritical means fission levels are decreasing.
If the carrier started off at full steam and started a ramming run, it would only be about 16 or 17 minutes until contact. If it started at rest, it would take longer, obviously.
Would the big guns themselves be enough to sink it in the time period?
You’d get something like the Halifax explosion.
Band name! (Or sports-team name.)
Going by the set-up in the OP, a Nimitz with no aircraft vs. an Iowa as they existed when retired, almost certainly. The 32 Tomahawks and 16 Harpoons the Iowa’s had when they retired are going to cover the distance in little over a minute if that and will easily saturate the Nimitz’s own point defenses and make a lot of hits. 20,000 yards is well, well within effective range of the Iowa’s main battery and with radar directed gunfire they are certain to start getting hits by the second or third salvo. The rate of fire of the 16in/50s on the Iowa was 2 rounds a minute. In an undamaged state the Nimitz would have at best a 2 or 3 knot speed advantage over the Iowa; if the commander of the Iowa felt he was in any danger of the Nimitz closing to ram he would either move obliquely away from the Nimitz while still keeping the full battery of 9 16-inch rifles able to fire; or if really worried put the Nimitz directly behind him which would still allow turret C of 3 16-inch rifles to fire with the Nimitz barely able to gain ground. The combination of fires and flooding would soon cut into the speed the Nimitz could make even without damage to the engine rooms.
So IMO, there is no way the Nimitz could close on the Iowa to ram before the accumulation of damage cut into her ability to maintain any speed advantage and would quickly be unable to close the distance at all unless the Iowa chose to allow it in order to more efficiently sink the Nimitz by unmasking the full main battery and the secondary battery of 12 5in/38 DP guns.
So… this is GD. What’s the conclusion from this thread - that the U.S. navy needs more battleships and fewer aircraft carriers?
That the US navy should avoid having its carriers located within 10 mi of rouge US battleships, if any are taken out of museum duty and recommissioned.
Rouge?! What happened to battleship gray?
Anyway, if anyone wants to see the Iowa kicking ass, I recommend American Warships, a cheesy but well-conceived Asylum movie, meant to lamprey onto the success of Battleship. The acting and effects are awful, but the premise is actually far better.
But what if they can deploy ex-SEALs to work as chefs on all the battleships? Would this provide an adequate level of security to protect against the danger of recommissioning an enroguification?
I assume you meant rogue rather than rouge - even in these more enlightened times I don’t think rouge has any place in naval affairs (other than actual affairs, natch).
While tempted to reply ‘This is GD, we don’t need no stinking conclusions,’ I’ve given it some thought (no snide remarks on how much, thank you) and have come to the conclusion that the navy needs a way to get carriers close to battleships without being detected. With all of the savings from no longer carrying planes, a good starting point would be kidnapping Michael Paré to find out how to make ships invisible and/or time warp them, as he must know something from his starring role in The Philadelphia Experiment. I’m also told that he is ‘yummy’ by those into that sort of thing. To keep things fair, I also recommend kidnapping and interrogating Jessica Paré as she is considered ‘yummy’ to those not into that sort of thing, or into both of those sorts of things, or the sorts of things not requiring any male parts at all; and there is every reason to believe she must have the knowledge we seek since she has the same last name and thus must be related to Michael Paré.
I would like to point out that the shells from the Iowa were designed to punch through armor that is as thick as the armor on the Iowa. By comparison the skin of an aircraft carrier is made of tissue paper.
Those shells are going to go DEEP inside before they go boom!
Bismarck and Hood were fifteen miles apart when the shooting started, though they’d closed to about nine miles by the time Hood was sunk…
As I wrote before, 10 miles is not only well within the range of the 16" guns, it is within the range (barely) of the 5" secondary batteries of the battleship.
ETA: as far as ramming goes, as the carrier gets closer, have the secondary batteries (5" turrets) concentrate on the carrier’s island. A few hits there and there will be nobody alive driving that sucker.
I remember this thread!
Now… answer THIS…
What if the battleship were filled with lions, and the aircraft carrier were filled with tigers?
Who wins now?
Better yet, the battleship is crewed by pirates, and the carrier by ninjas. 