If you’re fighting against weaponry that can defeat any reasonable armor, and hit you from long range, it makes more sense to only lightly armor your ships and to not put all your eggs in one basket. Instead of buying 1 battleship, you buy 5 destroyers and divvy the crew and firepower between them. Given each destroyer or cruiser one main gun each, a lot of defensive weaponry, and lots of missiles.
The whole existence of a battleship is based on several fundamental assumptions :
Armor exists that can resist direct hits from modern weaponry. (semi-true in 1915, not true today - anti ship missiles can have several thousand pounds of shaped explosives or nukes)
The crew and mechanical computers needed to accurately aim a set of guns are bulky and heavy
Surface area to volume ratios follows from #1. That is, the bigger the ship is, the less the mass of the armor relative to internal volume. So it makes sense to make the battleship as large as possible. (bizmarck, iowa class, etc) #2 also means it makes sense to have several guns to a turret so they can share the same fire control system which is bulky and complicated.
Now that you can fit the same fire control system into circuit boards that fit into a few small boxes, you can stick just 1 gun a ship, and since armor is mostly pointless, you can split your forces into several ships. Also, this means a nuke won’t do as much damage since your ships are separated by distance.
Fair enough, there is no justification for the big guns, but a well armored rail gun or AGS platform with missiles and anti-air/anti-missile defense and reactive armor and the best anti-torp hull design should not be out of the question. I don’t see it as a high priority and small and fast rail-gun destroyers are probably more cost effective. I’ve seen no indication any armor we can provide would be enough to justify the extra cost and weight.
I guess, but if you just redefine what a “Battleship” is, I’m not sure I see the point of the conversation. We could just say a Battleship is a Capital ship with planes on it, and then the US Navy has a bunch of them already.
I assume the OP wants to discuss the pros and cons of heavily armored ships with large guns, rather then just "why don’t we rename some other class of ship “battleship”.
I don’t see it that way, obviously. I think that if you want to look at building a new class of ship you have to look at what role it could or would play. The Navy has a role for a ship larger than a modern cruiser. I suppose you could call the new class ‘really big cruisers’ if you were fundamentally opposed to calling them BBs or battleships. I’m not talking about taking an existing class and simply renaming it but building a new class of ship, so your example of calling a carrier a battleship by fiat doesn’t really work. I also don’t think that we should be limited to what a battleship USED to do 70 years ago, otherwise our current cruisers, destroyers and even subs don’t fit into those names either. We have redefined the roles of each of those types of ships, yet you balk at doing the same thing to the battleship.
While I do agree that reactive armor and hull design may be worthwhile, I am not understanding the rest of the paragraph. You say that a well armored rail gun or AGS platform should not be out of the question. Then you say that you’ve seen no indication any armor would justify the extra cost and weight.
I guess we’d need data on what kind of armor cost and weight would be required to defeat anti-ship missiles. To take the Harpoon as an example, it seems like a 221 kg warhead would require an awful lot of armor.
If you wanted the flag waver of a new capitol ship, some modern battle cruiser called a battleship might be OK. I just can’t really support it overall. But the big guns are a non-starter.
Actually considering how common Harpoons and Exocetsare around the world, maybe there isn’t even a weak excuse for armor any more. Soon enough more powerful missiles will be deployed and sold to potential combatants. The reality is armor cannot keep up which is why ships have largely done away with armor except torpedo protection. The LRASM will not be stopped by armor, only anti-missile weapons.
OK, so back to my original statement. **There is no justification for any ship that could carry the name Battle Ship. The big guns and heavy armor have no value any more. Guns have been superseded and heavy armor has no real value. **
In summary it describes the limitations of the BBs but how cheap they were to deploy are the time (as opposed to operate). It also mentions that the BBs would withstand the Exocet at least but not heavier missiles. It does a fair job of showing the reasoning of the reactivation.
So maybe a modern BB could be armored enough to withstand up to a Harpoon but the LRASM and Brahmos II Cruise missiles I doubt. These missiles will be supersonic and carry heavier loads then the Harpoon from what I’ve read.
Why in the world would a modern ship have mechanical computers? You’re just proving my point that virtually all anti-battleship people are stuck 70 years in the past.
I find it endlessly fascinating that so very many people who are against battleships cannot understand that most of their arguments against battleships apply equally well to aircraft carriers. I guess it’s due to the historical accident that no modern carrier has been sunk by one of those much-hyped “ship killer” missiles.
This.
A battleship HAS “an awful lot of armor.” Furthermore, a 16-inch shell weighs a great deal more than a Harpoon warhead.
Like I said in my OP, most modern anti-ship weapons are designed to be used against UN-armored targets. People keep ignoring that fact.
Finally–to people who insist that armor is useless–please explain why all major armies keep on using armor, and in fact, continue to improve it.
But remember–when the last battleships were designed, cruise missiles did not exist. A modern design would obviously include an anti-missile defense system.
Remember–a battleship is explicitly designed to EITHER out-fight or out-run everything else. It has the ability to take care of itself, without needing help from escorts. (Unlike carriers.)
The mechanical computers is an example of why battleships were ever a good idea. It is self evident they are a shit idea today, I’m explaining the background reasons why they were a good idea in the past.
Armor, in order to be useful, has to be able to block plausible incoming weapons. If any navy in the world started deploying battleships again, the other navies would spend a trivial amount of money developing modified missiles and bombs to defeat the armor of those battleships. Harpoons don’t have to get much bigger to go through any armor you could fit onto a ship without the ship sinking from the weight.
Navies do not have armor meant to take direct hits by incoming missiles. The “armor” you are referring to is a thin layer of lightweight materials, usually kevlar, meant to stop fragments from destroyed incoming missiles. It is a negligible fraction of the mass of the ship - which tells you how important the Navy considers this “armor” to be.
I define a battleship as a vehicle with very thick armor plates able to take direct hits from most available weaponry, and many cannon style guns mounted in large turrets.
If you want to call a missile cruiser with paper thin kevlar armor and a single railgun among other weapons a “battleship”, have at it. You “win”, the argument is over.
But if you believe that “battleships” that are just Iowa Class ships with upgraded main guns, automation, and more anti-missiles defenses are a feasible idea, you are wrong.
Carrier do have the disadvantages of being large, expensive targets and requiring lots of people. They may make up for it by carrying significant numbers of airplanes which BBs don’t.
Which in no way means that they would be ineffective against armored targets.
What Exit denied the utility of armor for warships, not armor for tanks or infantry.
If you were advising a BB captain about how to deal with guided-missile destroyers, fighter-launched anti-ship missiles or bomber-launched cruise missile, all of which have more mobility and range than BBs, how would you advise he do it?
That’s very true. And the vulnerability of aircraft carriers is a major concern.
The problem is that you can’t disperse naval aviation like you can other assets. You need a big ship to launch airplanes off of. So the navy has to just suck it up, deploy carriers, put a huge amount of effort into defending those carriers, and hope for the best.
There’s no comparable need for battleships. A battleship can’t perform any important mission that other smaller ships can’t perform as well. So battleships can’t justify the defensive resources that carriers can.
I was going to say, is it that time of the year again?
They are an inefficient use of manpower; the argument is neither disingenuous nor incredibly stupid. There isn’t a need for 16" naval rifles for shore bombardment anymore and they are never going to get within range of a ship to fire them on; a ship vs. ship engagement would be decided by either missiles and/or aircraft long before the opposing ships were within visual range of each other, much less the 25nm or so range of a battleship’s guns. Designing a very large, expensive and manpower intensive vessel around a system that will never be used is the very definition of inefficiency.
Horseshit. Submarines and torpedoes were a major threat to battleships from the day they were introduced. The Royal Navy and the German High Seas Fleet didn’t spend all that effort making torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers prior to WWI for the hell of it. 13 British pre-dreadnought battleships were lost in WWI; 5 were sunk by submarine torpedoes, 5 by mines, one by a torpedo boat and two from internal explosions. If any new design would obviously take the current situation into account and all that is needed to nullify the threat of torpedoes is a double-hulled ship with energy-absorbing material between the hulls, perhaps you could explain to us why it hasn’t occurred to anyone to apply this theory to the construction of all modern naval vessels to make them torpedo-proof? Here’s another tip: your double-hull with energy-absorbing material in-between isn’t going to be of much use when the torpedo explodes underneath the hull of your ship, as modern torpedoes are designed to do. WW2 torpedoes were supposed to, but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms.
Billy Mitchell got a lot more wrong than he did right, so much so that he’s almost a straw man. He argued that aircraft carriers would be useless and wanted the navy disbanded and America’s shores protected by long range bombers. The Ticonderoga class cruiser and Arleigh Burke class destroyers have had Aegis and CIWS without the huge added expense needed to include 9 16" naval rifles. You haven’t presented a meaningful case for why they should have.
I’m not sure you understand how reactive armor works, or that you are seriously suggesting coating the entire surface of a warship with blocks of explosives.
How does installing a nuclear reactor allow a battleship to outrun a plane flying 700mph, a missile going mach 3, or a torpedo doing 65kts?
ETA:
Again, utter tripe. Battleships were most certainly not designed explictly to take care of themselves, which is why they always had escorts. The only time I’ve heard this nonsense of being able to outfight anything they couldn’t outrun and outrun anything they couldn’t outfight was the German pocketbattleships. That theory didn’t pan out quite so well at the Battle of the River Plate when the Graf Spee was forced to flee to Montevideo by ships she was supposed to be able to outfight and ultimately scuttled when it could no longer stay.
I am thinking about modern technology. We have weapons now that destroy entire cities. How are you going to build a ship that can defend against that? Build the biggest most modern battleship in the world and add on every tech that’s even in the drawing board stage. And one tactical nuke will literally vaporize it.
The only defense against modern weapons is numbers. You have to have as many ships as you can so you still have a fleet even after hundreds of ships are destroyed.
I’d like to come back to this. Surely you didn’t think that argument would work. If anyone denied the utility of armor, it was within the context of warships, not the military as a whole. It makes quite a difference whether someone denies that armor is worthwhile for warships or for the military as a whole. You tried to make us look like we were denying the latter when it was the former.
You’ve been here 3 years now, you must have known that an argument that tried to pull that sort of conflation would get shredded until it looked like modern art.
I’m firmly arguing the side the a BB makes no sense. But there is also no sense in talking about tactical nuke. Think in terms of bombs, torps and cruise missiles. Use of a tactical nuke opens up a different level of war than any nation likely to be engaging a theoretical BB will want to start.
A BB as in a heavily armored, big naval gun ship cannot be justified. The few defenders of the concept have failed to lay out why it should be built and how it would have any advantage over cheaper solutions.
I think I did explain this. You are missing out on scale, we do not use cruise missiles or torps to take out tanks. Heavy supersonic missiles will destroy any tank made. But the missiles used against tanks are far smaller items and many of these small missiles will still blow up the best tanks today.
Can you explain the actual mission of the new state of the art BB? Do you insist on the big guns or will you at least concede more modern weapons? Can you find any information on how we can build armor to stop a state of the art cruise missiles?
List of naval battles. None since 1945 appear to meet that description, with the arguable exception of the Battle of Bubiyan in the Gulf War, which so one-sided that it was more of a demolitions operation than a battle.
Same issue with a carrier, really. The thing is, if you are going to say ‘one nuke will literally vaporize it’ and then use that as a justification not to do it we shouldn’t really have ANY weapons at all. I mean, we don’t have a weapons system immune to one tactical nuke. The reality, however, is that there have been exactly zero engagements between combatants using tactical nukes in the post WWII period, yet, conversely there have been a hell of a lot where we have used carriers and other surface ships, and will continue to have missions for them for decades to come. Yeah, they would all be vulnerable to ‘one tactical nuke’ but if we get hit with one we are probably so fucked, collectively, that losing a battleship will be the least of our worries. :eek:
Like I said, I think that there is a role for such a ship. It’s not obsolete or outdated, unless you think the entire concept of the US Navy is obsolete and outdated (and I know there are many posters on this board who do think that, since we’ve had similar discussions about carriers in the past, and mine seems to be a very minority view point). I think the main issue would be justifying the rather large funding needed to design, develop, produce, crew and deploy such a ship in a time of tightening budgets. The PTB in the Navy are all carrier admirals, so you aren’t going to get much traction there if it means cutting funding to carriers or other things they would much rather have (which it would). They would rather have new air superiority or attack fighters or support air craft/ships than produce a new non-carrier design that would cut into all of those things (and probably they would have a point). But none of that means that such a ship wouldn’t be useful.
This makes me wonder about the concept of arsenal ships; namely, ships with little purpose other than to carry hundreds of missiles to be used and guided by the U.S. warships around them. Seems like they would fill the firepower gap/niche.