Puppygod, once again, the railgun version have 290 mile range. Mach 7 speed.
Read what the Zumwalts can do. 80 VLMS cells for Tomohawks.
For a main gun?
This is not your grandfather’s battleship. There will be only three, but they will be Queen of the Seas.
Edit: Msmith, check out the armor ratings and the missile launch capability.
Granted. With today’s technology it isn’t possible. But if it is developed then there will be a case made to mount them on ships big enough to defend themselves and power the weapon, plus carry the electronics and sensors to make them useful.
I was refering to 16 inch artillery, not future railgun or improved 155 mm systems. Actually my point was that there is not enough benefits for 16 inch to be developed when compared to, say, improved 155 mm artillery systems.
And Zumwalt is not battleship. It weights three times less than Iowa and don’t have any armor worth mentioning.
It’s not like anybody is arguing that surface ships and barrel artillery is obsolete. It’s just huge, heavy, armored floating colossi with huge, heavy artillery guns are done for and not going back.
“Beserkers” are unmanned, autonmous, heavily armed fighting ships with multiple weapons capabilities. You send them out, and they engage the enemy. Nolives lost, and they are expendible. Sort of like RPAs-we could knock them out quickly, and use them against any Chinese fleet.
Closer than one might think It’s not small enough for a tank, but it is small enough for a battleship.
The Zumwalt is classified as a “destroyer”, not a battleship.
I hate to do this, but really: read up on that, and I mean all of this. Check, for example, the various articles written by Trent Hone (I can give you cites if you so desire) on the role of the battle line in U.S. Navy thought.
Billy Mitchell’s attacks on Ostfriesland were a joke. What he proved as that given what time they needed, attacking an anchored, undefended and unmanned ship, planes were capable of inflicting enough damage to sink a battleship. Give me a blow torch and the same conditions, and I’ll sink you a battleship myself. That, however, does not render the battleship obsolete.
The same goes for the other examples. Pearl Harbor proved nothing (if it had been the Pacific Fleet submarines that the Japanese had concentrated on, would that have proven they were obsolete?).
The case of Midway is interesting. Midway demonstrated that carriers operating wihtout battleship support would not be able to control the sea, although they could deny it to the enemy. Spruance declined to pursue the Japanese fleet because of his fear of a night engagement with enemy battleships, against which he could not have stood. Carriers in 1942, even up to 1944, could not expect to unilaterally control naval operations as long as the enemy posssessed sufficient strategic opportunity to force a fight, as, for example, the Japanese had at Leyte. As for the others, Bismarck was rather unlucky, but she was sunk by battleships, not by carrier planes; and all Yamato proves is that a single battleship without air cover escorted by one cruiser and eight destroyers cannot stand up to the air power of sixteen carriers over a prolonged period of time. That’s the lesson of Prince of Wales and Repulse, too. None of it has any bearing on the utility and or obsolescence of the battleship.
I’m not so sure. The new 155mm for the Zumwalt is apparently planned for a range of 100km or so, and I imagine a well-designed 16" gun would be capable of quite a bit more. I agree about the point about the price tag, though not about the applicable targets (again, think submunitions, or something of the sort; but even with a regular WWII type 16" shell, you’d have only about 2000lbs total weight and significantly less explosive filler; certainly, what an F-16 may bomb with a Mk84, a battleship could legally shoot at).
I suppose you’d end up with something akin to a short-range (shall we say, just for the heck of it, about 250kms?) carrier-based fighter-bomber in performance, without needing to endanger a pilot or plane. Probably, as I said, not worth it.
And which do you think is more vulnerable, a battleship or an SSGN? Those fuckers are stealthy, carry 154 TLAMs, need only 150± crew, are nuclear powered, and we got FOUR of 'em. Not to mention B-2s armed with small diameter bombs – not quite as stealthy, but we’re talking about many, many dozens of precision guided weapons falling from the sky.
I’m at a loss to think of a good reason why a battleship would do better than SSGNs and stealth aircraft in softening up a beach for an assault, should that ever be needed.
This is true, DD, not BB. But it does seem to be darn impressive for a DD. Will a BB result from this? I don’t know, but I can tell you that this is a new kind of warship. I honestly can’t guess how it’ll change warfare, but if it performs, I don’t see any reason why a BB successor might not happen circa 2050.
Isnt the biggest barrier to the battleship turning up again political?
Ie there has to be an opponent building a significant enough navy that it would come up as a theoretical concept. Currently the US’s lead over other navies is so huge its unlikely to be a viable concept, and any opposing navy is likely to concentrate on submarines for a good while before considering major capital ships, making a new capital ship for the US an unlikely prospect as a counter.
Otara
On the contrary, I’d say it is technology. Precision guided weapons can be carried on nearly any platform, so what’s the point of 16 inch guns? Especially considering that a battleship costs a lot more to build and operate, and there’s a lot to be said for having a slightly larger number of slightly less capable platforms, rather than one-of-a-kind ones (e.g., we could probably build 2 DDG-1000s and perhaps even the first of the next generation cruiser for what it would cost to build one battleship).
Meh. We’ve already got SLBMs. Much handier.
Not likely. A modern destroyer is roughly equivalent in tonnage to a WWII cruiser but with a lot more firepower. The class designation is more a product of a ships role, not it’s size.
Right. FWIW, the ships the USN still classifies as cruisers have themselves been built on what are essentially stretched destroyer designs for decades now.
I’m not an expert on the history of the battleship, but it’s my understanding their purpose is to dominate the sea with their firepower. The problem is that they don’t and never did. Battleship duels like the Hood vs the Bismark or the Battle of Jutland were the exception, not the rule. And when you can launch dozens of relatively cheap aircraft with bombs and torpedos that can cripple them relatively easily, their huge cost becomes prohibative.
I’m having a hard time imagining something dominating the sea more than that Tomohawk carrier/rail gun design I’m seeing. Add in some drone scouts…
Maybe thats now, but in twenty years the tomohawk and B2 may not be in service for any number of reasons. The kind of war that would require a kick down the door ,beach operation, would mean that those systems would be dedicated to non nuclear strategic targets like airfields and the like, so you would be limited to the harrier and F18 hornet for servicing targets with the old fashioned iron bombs, pgm’s and cluster bombs.
Declan
Billy Mitchell had the correct idea that battleships would be obsolete in the face of naval air power. Taranto Battle of Taranto - Wikipedia proved it, and so did Pearl Harbor. So did the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway. Carriers render battleships utterly obsolete. Had the Japanese continued to attack Midway with only their battleships and escorts after their four carriers were sunk, they would have lost every ship that remained. Every damn one. With few to zero American losses to anything except submarines.
Why have a battleship with a 30 mile weapons range, or even a 100 miles weapons range when a cruise missile from a cruiser can hit a portable shit house at will? When a Predator can do it and report back that it was unoccupied at the time of the hit? The only other advantage that a battleship had (other than big guns) was lots of armor. An Iowa was 800 feet plus and weighed 40,000 tons. Well, a Nimitz is 1000 feet long and weighs 100,000 tons. They are substantially more heavily armored than battleships were. They are faster, can protect the missile cruisers and destroyers from anything in the open ocean short of a nuke and launch attacks 500 miles away and refuel bombers flying from the other side of the globe. You could put up a fleet of Iowas and Yamatos against one carrier battle group and lose the all the battleships with no casualties to the carrier battle group.
Short of nukes, a carrier battle group constitutes naval and air supremacy in any military situation for the next 10 years.
Nukes make that a whole lot more problematical.
Hell, the HMS Victory is cool, but like the USS Missouri, it is properly a museum.
Beach operations are are done over the horizon and the “shelling” can be done with destroyers and cruisers and support aircraft to the extent it is necessary. Or even B-52s. Yeah, we don’t know if in 20 years cruise missiles and bombers will work, but they do now, and battleships are bizarrely more expensive and less effective at accomplishing the same thing.
