Not so. The Monitor was ordered to use only half-charges of gunpowder in its March 1862 battle with the ironclad CSS Virginia, as the Navy Department was concerned that its two new cannon might burst. But when the USS Weehawken went up against the CSS Atlanta in June 1863, in a matchup very similar to the Monitor v. *Virginia *battle, it used full charges of gunpowder and defeated the Confederate ironclad with just five shots: USS Weehawken (1862) - Wikipedia
I can think of one solid reason to bring back battleships.
As a subsidy to oil companies! As a Congressman from Texas, I say the Navy should coat all of it’s new warships with at least 1000 tons of additional armor. Don’t forget to upscale the engines proportionally - I don’t want that extra armor to slow them down. Then we make sure to have enough fuel to actually move that baby with all that extra weight from the heavier engines and the armor! So we gotta make the ship bigger! That means more armor! And bigger engines and more fuel!
A few more cycles of this, and the ship is twice the volume for the same missile payload!
You know, they have these Dr. Evil Air Quote nuclear end air quote engines in the Navy these days, yes? They are pretty new technology (it’s only been around for 50 odd years now) so perhaps you haven’t heard, but I’d go with that instead of oil, personally. Though you might want to try using coal fired boilers or even sails if you REALLY want to make it old school.
Bah. Nuclear turns things into Chernobyl! Burning oil is perfectly safe. Global warming is a liberal lie from a conspiracy of more than 99% of all credentialled climate scientists! Also, God gave us oil and he gave us the right to burn all of it we can. CO2 in the air just makes plants grow faster!
Now, that same god also gave us uranium, and apparently it’s a bad idea to let it loose into the red forest, but I digress…
Except if you want 6 inch or 8 inch rifles, then stick them on a modern destroyer. You only need a ship the size of a BB if you need to haul around a bunch of giant guns. If you have smaller guns you only need a smaller ship. Except we don’t stick cannons on our current destroyers, because they’d be a waste of space that could better be used for more missiles, more AA, more torpedoes, more sensors, and so on. The idea that since modern ships are all smaller unarmored frigates you just need a small gun to blast them out of the water forgets the problem that you have to get within cannon range to blast them out of the water with your cannon. And a small unarmored frigate isn’t going to let you get within cannon range, it’s going to blast you out of the water with missiles or torpedoes while you’re still over the horizon.
Bingo! Add to that the fact that almost every anti-ship missile outranges the 16" guns, and are drastically more likely to hit than guns would be at combat ranges.
The only thing battleships might have going for them would be armor, but in classic battleships, this is concentrated in 3 main areas: the “belt”, meaning the strip of armor that goes down the hull along the waterline, and protects the machinery spaces, the turrets and barbettes, which protects the guns, magazines and ammo hoists, and the conning tower- basically where the ship’s steered from and commanded from in combat.
Everything else is effectively unarmored. And with modern pop-up anti-ship missiles and attacks by airplanes, battleships would be fairly vulnerable. What’s an *Iowa *-class ship going to do if a JSOW with a BROACH warhead comes calling? The Phalanx system might take out a couple, but if the attack involves a dozen, several are going to hit, start fires, and possibly cause the ship to start taking on water. They might even go through the belt armor, depending on the angle.
The only real use for battleships in the modern day would be for shore bombardment, which is what they were ultimately relegated to by 1944- Battle of Leyte Gulf/Surigao Strait notwithstanding. The only reason they were brought back in the 1980s was as much for the bad-ass factor, and because they were 4 capital ships that could be brought back into service relatively easily.
Actually, drones are cheaper…in human cost. They don’t require training or shore leave or VA benefits. And a dead drone doesn’t make for visits from the base chaplain, blue star flags, or pictures of flag-draped coffins being carried off Air Force transports by men in dress uniforms. The U.S. military has, at least since WWII, preferred when it can to put machines in harm’s way instead of servicemen and -women.
Still… what makes anyone think that the advent of drones = end of aircraft carriers? Drones aren’t disposable, and the combat ones aren’t even small.
Drones still require the vast majority of the maintenance that conventional aircraft require, they still require people to fuel and arm them, and they still require a catapult and flight deck. And, I suspect as drones get bigger and more capable, they’ll become even more similar to piloted aircraft and require even more similar support.
The only major difference will be that there won’t be a person in the cockpit- he’ll probably be squirreled away below decks somewhere, or even on a different continent.
Yes, but a drone carrier can be a radically different sort of ship than our current supercarriers. The reason we have supercarriers is to launch and recover full fledged fighters and bombers. Most other countries make do with smaller carriers that launch less capable VTOL craft, or helicopters.
Drone carriers will be the equivalent of WWII escort carriers, and won’t be capital ships. If you don’t need a 12 inch cannon, you don’t need a capital ship to carry that cannon. If you don’t need a vast launch and recovery system for F-18s, then you don’t need a capital ship to carry that airport. That leaves boomers as the only capital ships left in the fleet.
This thread seems to come down to semantics. Flyer titles it “Bring back the battleships”, a word that to me at least, and clearly to some of the other posters, means “honking big ships with honking big guns”, a la the Iowa. Flyer says no, no, I mean a modern battleship, with railguns and missiles and helicopters and stuff. Like modern warships, but bigger!* To which everyone else says, like the Zumwalt*?*
To me, it sounds like what Flyer and XT mean is “Bring back the name ‘battleship’ and apply it to a big modern, non-carrier warship.” Is that what you guys mean? Are the Zumwalt-class destroyers what you had in mind? Or are you arguing for something else?
*Not trying to put words in your mouth, and I really am far to ignant of such matters to have an opinion, but that’s what your posts sound like to me.
We are talking about building a BB for the modern age. That means that the rifles are going to be an intergrated weapons system, thats for the most part, impervious to directed energy weapons. IF those don’t come to pass, then no one is going to build anything beyond what a Burke can do right now.
Next, I dont see the rifles being anything but a secondary or tertiary weapons system, If your thinking that I am advocating a 3x9 Turret to gun, or old school, then no. Its just an exercise in which the BB becomes a player again, and for that to happen in the wet navy, then aircraft and missiles have to become obsolete.
Your last point is interesting. Frigates are like cars in some respects, its all about the options when you buy them. Those torpedoes, are anti sub. The warheads are too small to do much damage against a surface ship. Missiles, depends on how many were bought , when the frigates came new and you would need four harpoon class for a ww2 heavy cruiser.
An American response to an armored threat would be different from a Peruvian or Swedish naval unit, not every navy is going to have enough of everything, and a carrier or bomber squadron just a phone call away.
So between directed energy weapons to neutralize missiles and aircraft, and the rail gun to engage enemy surface combatants, then every surface navy is going to have an epiphany. Until their own domestic light and nail guns are sourced, they are going back to some heavy calibers.
Yeah, but what makes you think that a combat drone taking the place of an F-18 will be significantly smaller or easier to recover than a F-18?
Today’s drones aren’t really taking the place of the manned aircraft; they’re supplementing them because they’re able to stay on station far longer than most manned aircraft, and because they’re smaller and able to go places that manned aircraft would cause trouble going into. But get rid of aircrews, and you’ll have to have larger, more capable drones to replace the manned aircraft.
That said, I don’t know that a drone carrier would be 95,000 tons, but I don’t think they’d be rinky-dink things like the Spanish and Italian carriers either. They’d probably end up more like the Wasp and America class amphibious assault ships- 45-50k tons.
Where are these heavy calibers going to come from until domestic light and rail guns are sourced (or much more realistically, outsourced)? Few countries manufacture artillery, fewer still naval artillery. The largest caliber naval guns that have been manufactured in a long time are 5", and I can count on one hand the number of countries that manufacture naval guns in that range: the US (5"/54), Italy (Otobreda 127/54), the UK (4.5" Mark 8), Russia (AK-130 130mm/70), and China (H/PJ38 130 mm).
One author pointed out that the major role battleships played in WWII was as oil carriers. They have huge fuel tanks. So the navy would fill them up with oil and assign them to a fleet and they could refuel other ships as needed.
You wanna know what is arguably the most expensive, most important plane in any fleet?
The basic design was introduced half a century ago.
It’s a turboprop whose maximum speed is about 650km/h, around Mach 0.5.
It costs more than 170 million dollars a piece, more than an F-22.
That kind of plane is a big part of why carriers are useful and why the US prefers big carriers. There doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to make those unmanned.
It’s not sexy or macho, it’s just sophisticated and useful in modern war. So the opposite of a battleship.
Sure, but a anti-ship missile going at mach 2 with a 2000 lb non armor-piercing warhead isn’t going to necessarily do much to actual battleship armor, considering it’s meant to be protective against 1500-2500 lb hardened steel armor-piercing shells going at similar speeds.
Likely all that would happen if a missile hit an armored part of a battleship would be a big bang, some scorched paint, and maybe a dent.
First, battleships are not only armored where you say they are. In fact, their decks are highly armored to protect against plunging shots. Witness what happened to the HMS Hood with its thin deck armor. The ship detonated from a plunging shot from the Bismarck and a big reason for that was thin deck armor on the Hood.
During the Battle of Jutland, after two of his ships had exploded, Admiral Beatty opined, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” The problem with these ships is they were the new concept of a Battlecruiser. Supposedly the guns of a battleship but little armor. The thinking was anything they could not kill they could outrun.
Well, they exploded. Same as the Hood.
As for things outranging their main guns so what? LOTS of things have various ranges. That is neither here nor there. The main guns on a BB are best used as seaborn artillery in support of Marines landing on beaches and invading somewhere. There is nothing else we have that does this. Additionally, it would make a great platform for the new railguns coming online with abundant power generation from a nuclear powerplant plus room for tons of capacitors. Add in missiles and copious AAA and point defense.
And for the JSOW that is meant to target stationary targets. It goes to a GPS coordinate. I do not think it has any terminal guidance to let it hit a moving target.
I am curious here what people here arguing against heavily armored ships think of tanks?
They are expensive, heavily armored and require a lot of support. Yet they can be killed (or rendered combat ineffective) by man-portable missiles (as minor as an RPG), planes, helicopters, drones, other tanks, Jeeps with a TOW missile or maybe RPG, mines and a well dug ditch just to name a few.
Why bother? Clearly the military should all be Humvees and Bradley’s right?