Democracy and Tyranny use the same tools, I guess.
What mission do you want battleships to do, that isn’t currently done better by modern ships?
The better question is what kind of supernatural powers would zombie battleships brought out of mothballs after three years have?
You forgot russty. Zombie russty battleships.
A quick note on the Iowa class ships ammunition. The Navy has bitten the bullet, ho ho, and authorized the destruction of the remaining 16"/50 and 5"/38 shells; all types except the inert items standing around as decoration. Nothing to shoot anymore.
Ah, a zombie thread on battleships? Excellent. 
[QUOTE=smithsb]
A quick note on the Iowa class ships ammunition. The Navy has bitten the bullet, ho ho, and authorized the destruction of the remaining 16"/50 and 5"/38 shells; all types except the inert items standing around as decoration. Nothing to shoot anymore.
[/QUOTE]
Don’t use the 16" guns anymore. Put in MLRS or railguns, plus lots and lots of tomahawk batteries. It’s a huge platform. Whatever you put in, make sure it’s highly automated…that will cut down on the crew numbers, something that’s been brought up in this thread several times (only skimmed it but it seems a recurring theme).
As they are, nothing. Others have noted earlier in the thread that big guns aren’t really needed anymore. So, don’t emphasize them. Instead, make the BB’s big missile boats with lots of anti-aircraft defense and maybe some automated main guns using MLRS and railgun mounts. This would be part of a carrier task force, so a lot of the vulnerabilities mentioned in this thread don’t really make sense…we have support ships and the carrier itself to offset many of them. I could see such a ship adding a lot of additional firepower to the battle group. Or, make it a huge recon platform stuffed full of UAVs an other electronics…possibly a combination ASW and air coverage platform missile boat. The things are freaking huge and if you take off the 16" guns and a lot of the older, labor intensive stuff you’d have a lot of space for whatever automated systems you’d want to craft to enhance your battle group.
Of course, this would cost the world to do, so I’m unsure of how it would be feasible…but if money wasn’t an issue I could see it being useful, something dismissed a lot in this thread.
More firepower to a battle group. A battle ship is a huge weapons platform with a lot of capacity, if it was used correctly. Put modern weapons and systems on it and it could give a large boost to any carrier task force or battle group out there.
Plus, it would be freaking cool to be part of the crew. I wish I could have served on one of the old BBs in my time…and a new, modern version would just be wonderful to serve on. More prestigious than even carrier duty.
-XT
Maybe those old battlewagons are a bit expensive, but they sure were impressive. Here is the New Jersey being really pissed off at something.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/usnavybattleship2.jpg/
The keel of the Iowa was laid 72 years ago. There’s a limit to the amount of automation that could be put in place and the cost of automating being more expensive than the savings of crew would be worth; both things that came up when they were reactivated in the '80s.
Hmmm… but zombie battleships would work, they’d be manned the cursed undead!
If money wasn’t an issue, I’d live in a huge mansion with solid gold toilets and use toilet paper made from $100 bills, but alas money is always an issue.
This is always at the core of bring back the BBs discussions: romantic nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, I feel a romantic nostalgia for them myself and they were wonderful in their day, but the time of the battleship has come and gone; much like the day of horse cavalry which also had a great deal of romantic nostalgia about it. I most likely said something to that effect back when this thread had a heartbeat.
Carrier duty is prestigious? I was on a carrier and we never thought so. This was the 80s and the BBs and subs were the prestigious ships. Carriers were about the same as any other major ship. Some dislike the huge crew but many liked it but there was nothing special. Not even the Big ‘E’ herself seemed elite.
And what inherent defense does an aircraft carrier have against said torpedo?
[QUOTE=Dissonance]
If money wasn’t an issue, I’d live in a huge mansion with solid gold toilets and use toilet paper made from $100 bills, but alas money is always an issue.
[/QUOTE]
Although in that case money would be a tissue.
[QUOTE=Extank]
And what inherent defense does an aircraft carrier have against said torpedo?
[/QUOTE]
Lots of helicopters with ASW capabilities?
And a BB, if brought back/reactivated, wouldn’t have such capable protection? Wouldn’t have escort frigates or subs?
[QUOTE=Dissonance]
The keel of the Iowa was laid 72 years ago. There’s a limit to the amount of automation that could be put in place and the cost of automating being more expensive than the savings of crew would be worth; both things that came up when they were reactivated in the '80s.
[/QUOTE]
Certainly, though again if money isn’t an issue then new power plants and automated controls would cut down on required crew by a lot…same with automated fire control and modern weapons that don’t require loaders to move big ass shells and powder chargers into the breeches of those big ass guns. Would it be worth it? Probably not…which is undoubtedly why we haven’t done it. But it seemed to me that the theme earlier in this 3 year old thread was that they wouldn’t be useful, which is what I was addressing. They could be VERY useful if fully modernized.
Certainly it is, which is why we haven’t done it. What I’m envisioning would be billions of dollars to put it together.
BTW, solid gold toilets would really be cold on the ass, AND depending on your level of, er, stoutness, might tend to bend or break at an awkward moment, so even if you had that kind of money it wouldn’t make any sense. Same with using $100 bills to wipe your bum, since they really aren’t all that good at absorption and might be a bit rough on your fundament. I’ve always found a peasant to be far superior, if you have the means.
So, they were bad examples, since a battleship WOULD be quite useful, even if in a cost to benefit ratio it doesn’t make good fiscal sense…unlike either solid gold toilet seats OR using $100 bills to wipe with.
Well, I don’t know about cavalry, but sure…part of it is the nostalgia aspect. However, I think a battleship could make very good military sense and could do things that, while they can be done by other ships in a battle group would add something beneficial to the mix. If you put those MLRS batteries on it, for instance, it would certainly be a bit punch if you wanted a shore bombardment system. If you put tomahawk batteries on instead then you get long range cruise missile capability. If you had lots of anti-air batteries then it could augment the battle groups air defenses…say with if you put close in support weapons all over the thing. And if you were smart, you’d make these systems interchangable and relatively easy to reconfigure on the fly, so you could change role as needed in a few hours or a few days…swap in MLRS batteries instead of tomahawk batteries, or put on additional air defense or ASW features. Plus, maybe have a few automated 5" batteries and some of those big ass rail guns the Navy has been working on (with several Navy nuclear power plants inside for juice) and you’d have a pretty kick ass war machine.
Granted, with a seriously kick ass price tag.
[QUOTE=ExTank]
And a BB, if brought back/reactivated, wouldn’t have such capable protection? Wouldn’t have escort frigates or subs?
[/QUOTE]
Yes…exactly. It would be part of a carrier battle group or task force, not an independent unit operating along.
-XT
Technically, that’s not integral to the ship, nor a defense against the torpedo, but rather against the launch platform.
Both the Nimitz-class CVNs and refitted Iowa-class BBs share the AN/SLQ-25 torpedo countermesures system for an integral torpedo defense system.
Can we bring back the airships too?
I have it on good authority that it doesn’t get any better than the neck of a live goose.
First, why would we want a shore bombardment system? Shore bombardment is a seventy year old anachronism.
Second, why would we spend a trillion dollars to launch tomahawks, when we can spend a few hundred million instead?
The problem is once you’ve done all that, you’ve just recreated an Arleigh Burke or a VLS Ticonderoga. Take a look at the armament of a VLS Tico:
2 × 61 cell Mk 41 vertical launch systems
122 × Mix of RIM-66M-5 Standard SM-2MR Block IIIB, RIM-156A SM-2ER Block IV, RIM-161 SM-3, RIM-162A ESSM, RIM-174A Standard ERAM, BGM-109 Tomahawk, or RUM-139A VL-ASROC
8 × RGM-84 Harpoon missiles
2 × Mk 45 Mod 2 5 in / 54 cal lightweight gun
2 × 25 mm Mk 38 gun
2–4 × .50 cal (12.7 mm) gun
2 × Phalanx CIWS Block 1B
2 × Mk 32 12.75 in (324 mm) triple torpedo tubes for lightweight torpedoes
2 × Sikorsky SH-60B or MH-60R Seahawk LAMPS III helicopters.
It’s got everything you wanted, a couple of automatic 5" guns, ASW capability, and 122 missile cells that can be filled up with any combination of surface to air, ASW, or Tomahawk missiles you want. There’s no reason you couldn’t just modify a Tico rather than an Iowa with MLRS batteries or rail guns, and everything else is already there.
[QUOTE=Mosier]
First, why would we want a shore bombardment system? Shore bombardment is a seventy year old anachronism.
[/QUOTE]
Sez who? Even a cursory glance at a globe of the planet will show a large number of potential military targets in some future conflict that would be accessible to a naval force using bombardment. Just because YOU think that shore bombardment is an ‘anachronism’ doesn’t make it fact…unless you want to make similar assertions that the entire concept of a navy is an ‘anachronism’. I mean, you could simply fly planes in from CONUS, right? That was the argument put forth by the Air Force in why we should stop funding the Navy…just before the Korean War broke out of course.
Currently the Army’s MLRS seems to be approximately 60 miles (90km), but I see no engineering reason why that range couldn’t be extended by larger rockets…larger rockets that could be put on, say, a big ass battleship. Anything further than that could be hit by tomahawks…again, something we already know could be put on a battleship in fairly large numbers. For things outside of that range, well, that’s what the carriers are for, no?
Well, I’m not saying we need a thousand of the things, so a trillion dollars is a bit much for a launch platform, no doubt. At most I could see us needing one per carrier battle group, so about the same number as we have super carriers…though if we are merely talking about retrofitting all this stuff into existing hulls then it would be a lot fewer as I believe there are only a few Iowa hulls available.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Can we bring back the airships too?
[/QUOTE]
Why would we want too? Again, the assumption and theme in all of this is that somehow a battleship is completely obsolete and would have zero military role or value beside nostalgia. That’s simply incorrect. The reason we don’t have any atm is purely cost…the things require a huge crew and are resource intensive. But that’s because the only battleships still in existence were built over 70 years ago and even the retrofittings that were done were 30-40 years in the past. In fact, the Navy has looked into larger, more modern gun platform type ships, and it’s possible they will build some in the future. But with ever tightening budgets they only have so much to spend on big ticket items like large capital ships.
-XT
[QUOTE=Dissonance]
It’s got everything you wanted, a couple of automatic 5" guns, ASW capability, and 122 missile cells that can be filled up with any combination of surface to air, ASW, or Tomahawk missiles you want. There’s no reason you couldn’t just modify a Tico rather than an Iowa with MLRS batteries or rail guns, and everything else is already there.
[/QUOTE]
Yep…I’ve actually been on board one, though I never served on one. One of the reasons they brought back the BBs was that there was never a follow on to this ship and they were being run to death. They are dead useful as missile platforms and also in other fleet support roles. Exactly what I’m talking about for a new, modern BB, except the new ship would be bigger than the Ticonderoga class cruisers.
Do we NEED them? Well, probably…or at least we will need something to replace the Ticonderoga class at some point. A large BB along the same designs but larger with more capacity would be useful though…which was my point. It might not be cost effective, but it would not be either obsolete OR an anachronism. There is still a role for such a ship in a modern navy such as ours.
-XT
Why do you need one huge ship to do all that when you could have a couple of smaller ships that do the same thing?
Battleships before the missile age had to be big because they had huge guns. Nowadays you don’t need huge guns, a missile doesn’t care how big the launch ship is, 2 smaller cruisers/destroyers can have the same firepower as your hypothetical rail gun battleship and then you’d have 2 ships instead of one.
Hopefully the Chinese will built a new battleship, though, because they sure look neat.