The whole torpedo issue with regards to battleships seems overblown to me. If you are going to use invulnerability to modern torpedoes as the criteria, is there any surface ship that can meet that standard? No matter the ship, a battlewagon or a carrier, if a submarine gets inside the screen you are going to have a very bad day. Both classes have more survivability built into them then any of the ships in the screening force, but both are likely due a long stint in a drydock if a solid under-keel hit is scored.
There’s a similar issue when arguing that the battleship can’t protect itself from missiles. Is a carrier really any better equipped to defend against a swarm of 100 surface-to surface missile drones closing at high Mach?
As for upgrading or building a follow-on to the Iowa class, it will depend on how well rail guns and lasers pan out. If those weapons systems mature, the battleship may once again find a place in the battle line.
The Wiki page for Gunfire Support Debate has a claim that at one point Pratt and Whitney had studies that indicated a 16" scramjet round would have a range of some 400nm and would cover that distance in 9 minutes. That’s similar to the combat radius of an F-18, but a much more rapid reaction time. No warhead is needed when the round is impacting at speeds in excess of Mach 5, the kinetic energy alone will result in the kill.
The Iowa was designed to carry 16" guns and cruise at 33 knots while being armored against its own guns. The armor part was already impossible in 1940s (at least without excessive increase in tonnage). Modern 16" gun could fire 6-foot tungsten rod at 5,000 fps, and there is no armor in the world that can stop that.
Guns: Thin-walled HE shells have a lot more explosive fill that their WW2 predecessors. Modern 12" HE shell could deliver the same amount of explosive as Iowa’s 16" shell. It would have the same or better range and better rate of fire. Twin-gun turrets are easier for an auto-loader and also lighter. Three turrets are a good compromise.
Armor: 2 tonne supersonic cruise missile is the standard you are protecting against. You would have a rather thick steel hull, a thick layers of composite armor and a very hard outer layer (probably special steel).
Engines: 30-33 knots, diesel engines for cruising at 20 knots, gas turbines for top speed. Nuclear reactor is a very bad idea. You would never put a nuclear reactor into direct danger. One small shrapnel cuts through the primary coolant loop, and you may as well sink the ship, because you will never remove all of the radiation from the engine spaces.
In the end, you would end up with a much smaller ship, perhaps around 25,000 tonnes.
The vulnerability of pretty much anything to torpedoes and anti-ship missiles means there’s precious little reason to build a giant heavily armed ship. You can’t add enough armor to defend against modern weapons, so the giant battle wagon doesn’t make as much sense. If we want to have ships carrying some kind of hypothetical 8-12" advanced gun system or 16" scramjet launcher, why not make them the modern equivalent of battlecruisers with a couple such giant guns on a relatively cheap and speedy platform?
On the scramjet-gun digression, what benefit is there from launching a scramjet by shooting it from a giant gun instead of simply using a rocket booster to get it up to speed? As I understand it you need to get a scramjet above Mach 4 or so before it can do its magic. In all the scramjet tests so far, it’s been done with a rocket booster. I can see how a gun would probably need less propellant to accelerate the scramjet, compared to a solid rocket. But then you’d need complicated, heavy, and expensive gun mounted on a large stable ship, instead of just a box full of rocket-boosted scramjets that could conceivably fit on any contemporary missile cruiser.
Exactly. The Navy has kicked around the idea of a robotic barge loaded with missiles as an offensive warship. Now we’re talking. Zero armor, all offense, just a big disposable container to hold your missiles. Obviously the missile launch system would be designed to empty it’s magazine in a few minutes, before the enemy can target the barge.
Great questions and I wish I had more than just WAGs. My guesses would be that:
[ol]
[li]Railgun rounds are shorter in length, you can carry more in the same magazine space since it doesn’t need the extra space of a booster.[/li][li]No need for highly combustible propellants and fuels in the magazine.[/li][li]Rockets are expensive as you need motor and the warhead. With a rail gun, the main expense is sunk in the launcher. Each shot is pennies by comparison.[/li][li]Launch speed from a rail gun is expected to be in the Mach5+ range, not sure a similarly sized rocket can achieve the same.[/li][li]Quicker reload time. Open the breech, slide the round in, close breech, shoot. [/li][/ol]
On the other hand, rocket-boosted ship-launched missiles are a very mature technology. To take one example, the SM-3 anti ballistic missile uses three solid rocket booster stages to get to Mach 10-15, and fits in standard vertical launch system cells. Sure it costs $5 M a pop, but I’m guessing any early generation scramjet is going to cost megabucks with or without a booster.
The X-51a scramjet has been launched from the B-52 using a not-too-huge rocket booster, so I imagine it would be feasible to engineer a version that can be packed into a vertical launch system.
Meanwhile, that first railgun system is probably going to have an obscenely expensive $10B+ development program* and cost $100M+ for each installed gun.
But now I’m fighting the hypothetical. Sorry. Umm, in 50 years when railguns are [del]THE FUTURE[/del] reasonably mature technology, I can imagine a class of big nuclear powered ships with big railguns meant for launching very long range guided missiles.
*in which we learn that salt and seawater is Very Bad for high current electromagnetic systems, and the rails on the gun last 100 shots instead of the intended 10,000…
I have always wondered, if there were a full-on shooting naval war, whether the only vessels still viable a month or two after hostilities commenced would be submarines.
IMO the big benefit of nuclear power on aircraft carriers is converting all the space that’s no longer needed for fuel tanks for the ship’s engines into fuel tankage for the aircraft.
And for submarines the advantage is obviously the ability to operate submerged almost indefinitely.
For (almost) all other ship types the benefits just aren’t there. Pretty much nobody is building nuclear naval vessels of other types now.
So when talking about the OPs (silly) idea of an updated BB nuclear power is IMO, simply a red herring. We could build one that way, but why?
The Navy studied this question in relation to two shipbulding programs – the next generation cruiser (CG(X)) which was later cancelled, and for larger amphibious ships.
The advantages were potential fuel cost savings if oil were to cost something greater than $75 a barrel over the three-four decades of the ship’s life. Also, the reduction in need for fleet oilers was a pretty substantial benefit – it meant the investment would pay itself back faster the higher optempo the ship has.
The principal downside was cost. In 2006 dollars, about $600 million for a medium-sized surface combatant (like a cruiser), maybe $800 million for an amphib. The Navy analysis concluded that the sweet spot for for medium surface combatants – they’d have a larger hull the fit the damn thing in, and get a lot of use.
There were other factors examined, but the Navy certainly did not dismiss the idea as “silly.” Had CG(X) gone forward, I’m guessing there would have been about a somewhat-less than coin-flip chance that it could have been nuclear powered.
In my mind this kind of makes the whole exercise moot – that’s simply saying you can’t upgrade the primary weapons system. Someone’s suggested rail guns, and banks of missiles. Another thought would be tossing the front turrets and replacing it with a flight deck for VTOL aircraft.
But apparently all these and more are off the table.
Oh, you meant semi-submersible as a way to expose less of the ship to sensors and above-water missiles.
Are there any anti-ship weapons that deploy as missiles for 100-2000km then, when they’re close to their target but still below their horizon, go into the water and act as a torpedo? Seems like it would be the best of both worlds.
I suppose one could use UAVs to air-launch torpedoes instead.
The point of slat armor is to have the warhead detonate away from the vehicle so that the explosion has less effect.
The reasonable consensus seems to be that, just as Ravenman said, below a certain tonnage, the math doesn’t work out in favor of nuclear propulsion. Above it, it becomes worthwhile. Thinking about it, it isn’t surprising that scale would matter a lot when it comes to using a nuclear reactor.
I do wonder how it would progress if the US and China got into an actual war over Taiwan or islands in the South China sea.
Right on the semi-submersible, and I only know of ASW missiles that have ranges in dozens of miles.
And then the ship is pushing a huge amount of steel through the water, and I still doubt it would have any utility, but I don’t know that for a fact. It’s just that 600 pounds of HE makes a lot of water move very fast, and I just can’t imagine that the torpedo being ten feet further away from the bottom of the hull would increase protection substantially.
I’d like to see the OP come back and tell us more of what he’s thinking about. Other than just salivating over military violence pron.
Overall in military design, it’s more productive to think in terms of missions than platforms. A platform is simply a means to an end. A means chosen based on the tech and budget available at the time. And for an end relevant to the adversaries and tech of the time.
So today we’d start with “What are our foreseeable missions?” And then for each mission ask “What are achievable and affordable ways to accomplish this mission, given that there will always be more total missions than total money?”
The nuclear vs. conventional ship’s power debate comes to the same thing: If nuclear plants were real cheap, they’d be in everything including Toyotas. But they’re not cheap, so they’re not in Toyotas or DDGs.
That is a big boom indeed.
I did say “Something like spaced armor on either side, not as part of the hull but held a few meters away, going down to the water line.” Perhaps “going down to the water line” was badly phrased. I meant that it should stay above water, so no pushing lots of steel through the water and no expectancy that it would do anything against torpedoes, just anti-ship missiles. I agree that armor against torpedoes like the Mk48 is pretty much useless.
Since ships are so vulnerable, what defenses exist against torpedoes aside from decoys and anti-torpedo torpedoes?
I don’t know that rail guns are that pie-in-the-sky. There are engineering hurdles to overcome, the one mentioned in every article is how to dissipate the heat generated by a chunk of lead moving at Mach5+ through the barrel, but the concept of an electromagnetic rail gun seems to be sound and likely to be fielded in the next decade.
Longer range is not of great use because you have to locate the target before you shoot. Most naval engagements are a variant of what air forces call “armed recce”; the target finder is armed and can usually shoot what it finds. So your weapons don’t need more ranger than your sensors.
As we get farther into networked warfare where everything from satellites to subs can be used to spot targets for other shooters we’ll see a large increase in the desired range of weapons. Whether we can affordably build and deploy those longer ranged weapons in large numbers is another matter.
Fair enough, I pretty much pulled those numbers out of nowhere. But I do expect that costs will balloon when the rail gun transitions from a technology demonstrator to a full-blown weapons system. As one point of comparison, the Advanced Gun System, which is “merely” an autoloading 155 mm gun with nifty guided rounds for the Zumwalt class destroyer,reportedly cost $1.4 B to develop. I expect that any railgun system development costs will be at least that much.
Building an Improved Iowa other than for purely Nostalgia reasons would be foolish as its a design 70 years removed from the threats of today. Building a Battleship of today would require Nuclear Power to run. SPY radar and SPQ-20 Sonar systems and the most modern towed array system. Fire Control and communication systems comparable to the CVX-78 class carriers. Armor would be much reduced although it should retain the armored citadel protection of the Montana Class. Fire Suppression systems would also need to be in that same category as Missles do more damage with fire than they do with straight penetration like the AP rounds of the 40’s. Her fire power in terms guns should be no higher than 8 to 12 inch in no more than 3 dual or 2 triple turrets She should also be armed with SAM-3 ERs, ASROC’s, Harpoon and Cruise Missles, CWIS as well. She should also have a complement of 3 F-35’s and 3 Sea Kings for additional protection from air and sea threats. The Guns would be auto-loaders and feature the latest tech in gun manufacture. A Prarie Masker system would also be installed which would giver her greater protection from incoming torps.
All this could be done on a hull smaller than the original Iowa and would probably more resemble an Alaska Class Super Heavy Cruiser (Battlecruiser)
There are no battleships in the mothball fleet, Iowa class or otherwise. Those that remain were all stricken from the navy register and are museum ships now.