As people who know about battleships and naval design in general, I’m wondering your thoughts on the Kirov-class Battlecruiser, or a ship of similar design - a large cruiser fitted out primarily with anti-ship missiles.
I appreciate that the Kirov is basically a low-tech version of 3 Ticonderoga cruisers lashed together bow-to-stern. Is there any advantage to going for a larger ship type, or is it still better to go with smaller ships?
My take is that the main advantage was probably being able to carry their main missile. Shipwreck missiles are enormous, as in about twice the length and 4 times the weight of a Tomahawk.
If theres no major need for such a missile, theres no real need for such a huge platform. The USA is unlikely to need to develop systems able to potentially destroy multiple large surface warships without using carriers, only countries facing it do.
Otara
Yeah, it does. The faster the less time for outside factors to affect the accuracy of the shot, which includes the target taking evasive maneuvers.
Not to move the goalposts much, but they add maneuvering capability to dumb bombs now. They are even talking about rifle fired rounds now that will home in on people. Link.
And using an inexpensive ‘bullet’, your very expensive plane/missile has been shot out of the air.
You mean 1600 people to man the 16" guns on an old style battleship? I don’t remember saying we should bring back something like that?
But a ship that can withstand what it dishes out might make economic and military sense. You’d need a ship of a reasonable size that could generate the power to fire railguns, too. It could be fully automated with no people on it at all.
It isn’t? Then is it something like a propeller plane before the advent of the jet? Or are you suggesting that we know all the limitation, benefits and future possibilities right now even before the thing is in production and use? I’ve just mentioned a cheap capability upgrade up thread that effectively obsoleted aircraft. Just bolt the technology together.
What haven’t I thought of that could make it even more effective because really, you didn’t even think of that? My point is not to insult, but to mention that we have limited knowledge and predicting the future is difficult, if not impossible given that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what will be invented tomorrow that will be a game changer.
Heck, I could be wrong. I’m basing most of what I’m wanking on about from a series of sci-fi books by Keith Laumer: Bolo
Otara, 20km/s under the theory section (they are saying it has been done).
Apologies Otara if I have this wrong but do you mean the WW1 guns the Germans employed to bombard Paris. ( I know there are other rail mounted artillery weapons). The one I am thinking of had a numbered sequence of barrels and you changed them after so much firing as shell wear made the accuracy rather dubious. From what i recall the plans for this weapon was destroyed before the end of the Great War and it has never been replicated. (It has mistakenly been called Big Bertha).
Also, as has been pointed out, the fire of battleships against an entrenched enemy is not that great- trajectory is wrong. You need monitors.
I love battleships. Those who also have some affection may like to look at Big Bad Battleships.
Completely different than a projectile at hypersonic speeds.
You don’t need large ships for railguns. You need a lot of power, but that does not mean building a bigger ship.
Look, you’re off in science fiction fantasy land here. The first very modest railgun probably won’t be available for another decade, and we are talking about a system about 1/8th the capability that you’re fantasizing about. It isn’t going to look like a Gatling gun, it’s going to fire several shots a minute, and it isn’t clear for how long it can sustain that because the barrels still wear out quickly. A lab experiment is not a weapon, and it will take many decades to get anywhere near what you are fantasizing about. It just isn’t realistic in the slightest.
Plus, the idea that there will be unmanned surface combatants anytime in the near future is an idea, that, to be blunt about it, has about the same legitimacy as saying that we can use psychics to find Soviet missile silos. It simply isn’t credible on any level. The Littoral Combat Ship is a new design ship, somewhat similar to corvettes used by other navies. It has manning of several dozen and it is almost universally agreed that such a light manning level was a mistake (or to be charitable, “assumes too much risk.”) Link. Large warships going unmanned is a laughable concept, if for no other reason than that ships need maintenance while at sea, and larger ships need much more maintenance.
I appreciate that you’re trying to propose radical, out-of-the-box thinking here, but it doesn’t seem that you have a very good handle on why ships and other weapons are what they are today.
The whole reason battleships don’t exist anymore is because they don’t make economic and military sense. Back when armor and design improvements came about as quickly as weapon destructive ability, battleships made sense. Now, weapons are super-cheap and ultra-powerful when compared to the cost of making something strong enough to take a hit from them. Sinking a giant battleship takes about as many resources as sinking a modern cruiser. Even carriers are only viable due to the massive amount of resources spent to create entire fleets to surround them. Battleships aren’t versatile enough to justify building “battleship groups” to protect them.
As far as I know, the Navy doesn’t even have a theoretical plan for unmanned ships of any significant size. If it ever happens, it won’t be any time soon.
That’s not to say that railguns are useless. I’m just saying they’re probably useless for shooting down jets. And putting a railgun on a battleship will probably never happen, because battleships will probably never come back. This means that until railgun energy requirements are lowered quite a bit, making a smaller gun that can fit on a cruiser-sized ship viable, we probably won’t see railguns on navy ships.
Actually, we covered that in a previous thread.
Not to speak for Otara but I think he may have meant the 80cm super-heavy railway guns Dora and Gustav. They could fire a shell weighting more than 7 metric tons at the rate of one shell every 30 to 45 minutes, took 3 days to assemble for fire, required 2,500 men to lay track and dig embankments and two flak battalions attached to protect them from air attack. It all sounds great and impressive, but they were of little practical use. Only the Gustav was fired in anger lobbing a grand total of 48 shells during the siege of Sevastopol which wore out the original barrel, which had fired an addition ~250 rounds during development and testing.
Yes those ones were the ones I was thinking of but any large railway gun could qualify really.
Otara
So, somewhat less than the 1600 people someone said was a requirement of a battleship then? The actual point I was responding to, in fact.
I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of why ships are the way they are. Mostly because of cost. If you could put a carrier destroying weapon on a ship small enough to be run by a couple of people, it would make sense to do so. If you could divide the firepower of one large ship onto two smaller, less expensive to build and operate ships, then it makes sense to do so.
Yet, if each one of those ship can only take one hit before destruction vs. a larger ship able to potentially take multiple hits (assuming it can), then the economics becomes a bit more grey, doesn’t it? Leaving aside the capability of multiple ships completing separate tasks in parallel.
But then I’ve already agreed with this concept previously, so I’m not sure what you’re on about.
My main issue is that you are basing your arguments on exaggerating railgun technology into capabilities that may never exist (directed energy weapons may be more feasible than a Gatling railgun with a 20km/sec velocity) and then drawing all kinds of caveats and exceptions in arguing for larger ships. Sure, let’s set aside manpower. Sure, let’s set aside cost. Sure, let’s assume survivability. Sure, let’s ignore that more ships do more missions better than one. It is like saying that as along as we ignore issues of health and cost, there’s nothing wrong with cigarettes!
You don’t need manpower to load a railgun. It can be automated. A maintenance crew to keep the mechanisms running. Certainly not the 1600 people an old ship requires.
All things being equal, a larger ship costs more than a smaller one. Anyone denying that here?
Kind of the point of a battleship, otherwise you have a cruiser or destroyer. You have to assume survivability.
I factored that in, in case you didn’t notice. It helps to make a good decision if you look at all factors.
I believe that we eventually will see high rate of fire, high velocity rail guns that will fire round that are capable of at least marginal guidance. Maybe they will be some form or energy beam, like a laser. It doesn’t matter which as long as they are effective. When that happens, planes will become obsolete. Anything in the air that can be seen is obsolete because it can’t pack enough armor to protect itself from almost instant hit weapons.
At that point, the only thing to fight against the ship are indirect weapons (essentially missiles and can be hit and destroyed), mines, torpedoes, and other ships with direct firing weapons. So, essentially you’re back to slugging it out with the enemy toe to toe. And a heavily armored ship might possibly make sense in that scenario.
Under what circumstances wold there ever be a battleship-battleship encounter today? In the first place, superpowers have ships called “attack submarines”-these modern diesel electric subs are practically noiseless (the US Navy failed to detect the Swedish sub “Gotland”). These subs can launch antiship missiles-from ranges of 20-50 miles.
So your $5 billion, 18" gun battleship takes a hit and sinks-without ever encountering an enemy battleship.
Would the Chinese be so foolish as to build battleships?
I think not.
It would be like bringing back clipperships.
Loading a gun is not the driver of manpower. Big ships require more people because there’s more stuff to do. Even if the manpower of a battleship is cut to 700, that’s way more people than any modern navy would want to have on a ship (other than a carrier). People cost lots of money, ship maintenance costs lots of money, and big ships need lots of people and maintenance.
I’m not sure you understand how much a big ship costs. If we assume that the cost of a battleship is in the same league as a new carrier (an Iowa-class cost a more than an Essex-class, but who’s counting), then we’re talking about $13 billion cost for a new battlewagon. For the same price one can buy about four Flight IIA destroyers, two Virginia-class submarines, and a couple of Littoral Combat Ships. There ain’t no way any navy ever would choose a battleship over that flotilla.
There is no evidence that a new battleship will be any more survivable than any other kind of ship. Modern weapons aren’t even going to bother with its armor: torpedoes are going to attack the keel and missile threats are going to be steep divers. There’s no way a ship is going to armor the sides, top, and bottom.
And I say surface combatants may be obsolete before aircraft. But that isn’t going to be for a long, long time, and it isn’t because of railguns.
Hey, if you aren’t even going to read my posts, I won’t bother posting them.
I’m trying to respond systematically to your points, but when you make huge leaps of credibility like “one has to assume survivability for a battleship,” and I state that battleships are vulnerable to virtually every modern weapon, how is it that I’m supposed to respond to your comment of, “Why aren’t you reading what I’ve written?”
You seem to be saying that the same time that battleships are going to survive hits from torpedoes, missiles, and mines, and agreeing with my point that torpedoes, mines, and missiles will kill battleships because their armor is irrelevant. I read your posts, but again, you make spectacular leaps in judgment (railguns making planes obsolete?) and seem to get huffy when people point out why you’re wrong.
ETA: And by the way, there ain’t no goddamn chance that a railgun is going to be able to defeat a maneuvering reentry body like that on a DF-21. No. Way. Saying that missiles will be rendered obsolete is just… well, you get the point.
If you’re just going to post opinions as fact and ignore counter-arguments, you needn’t bother posting either.
If the big ship can’t survive one hit, then there is no point in building the damned thing. If the assumption is that it can survive more than one hit then the argument can be made to build it. Otherwise, build a bunch of smaller ships where it doesn’t hurt as much when they get destroyed.
You seem to think I’m disagreeing with your argument. I am not. That is what is bugging me.
Rail guns won’t stop torpedoes or mines. Enough armor could possibly do so. You understand ‘possibly’?
Could an energy weapon stop it? If I fired enough rounds into the air to essentially create a wall of ammunition? I’ve pointed out technology that is being used today that provide guidance capability regular infantry weapons. You don’t see the possibility of this on a high velocity weapon?
I’m sorry, you think I’m talking science fiction, yet all these weapons exist now and could see production shortly. Maybe 10 years, maybe longer. That isn’t a long time considering how long some of these weapons platform stay in service.
My opinion on how a weapons system currently under development (not some science fiction author’s wet dream) could eventually be used and what it can potentially do is an opinion. Did you think it was something else? If you did, then you didn’t read, or understand, what I wrote.
I haven’t ignored counter-arguments, I’ve agreed with most if not all of them. You think I’ve been arguing against them where what I’ve been trying to get across is that new weapons require new thinking.
Japanese: “Hah! Stupid Americans. We are invincible in our homeland!”
<Bright flash of light. Mushroom shaped cloud appears in the distance>
Japanese: “What was that?”
That was new technology. A game changer. The Japanese didn’t know what they didn’t know. I’m speculating about new technology and you’re waving it away as if it is unimportant, as if firing a round 10 times faster than a conventional round is essentially meaningless.
Wiki Link
“Railguns are being researched as weapons with projectiles that do not contain explosives, but are given extremely high velocities: 3,500 m/s (11,500 ft/s, approximately Mach 10 at sea level) or more (for comparison, the M16 rifle has a muzzle speed of 930 m/s, or 3,050 ft/s), which would make their kinetic energy equal or superior to the energy yield of an explosive-filled shell of greater mass. This would decrease ammunition size and weight, allowing more ammunition to be carried and eliminating the hazards of carrying explosives in a tank or naval weapons platform. Also, by firing at greater velocities, railguns have greater range, less bullet drop, faster time on target and less wind drift, bypassing the physical limitations of conventional firearms, “the limits of gas expansion prohibit launching an unassisted projectile to velocities greater than about 1.5 km/s and ranges of more than 50 miles [80 km] from a practical conventional gun system.”[14]
The increased launch velocities of railguns would also allow greater capability for both offensive and defensive applications as compared to traditional weapons. The greater kinetic energy and decreased time on target associated with increased launch velocities, when coupled with non-traditional rounds, allow a single railgun to effectively attack both airborne and land or sea based targets.
If it were possible to apply the technology as a rapid-fire automatic weapon, a railgun would have further advantages of increased rate of fire. The feed mechanisms of a conventional firearm must move to accommodate the propellant charge as well as the ammunition round, while a railgun would only need to accommodate the projectile. Furthermore, a railgun would not have to extract a spent cartridge case from the breech, meaning that a fresh round could be cycled almost immediately after the previous round has been shot.
Many critics of weaponized railgun systems claim running at a decent rate of speed would consume too much power, though this would likely not be a problem for nuclear-powered systems such as on large warships or submarines.”
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