How might you build an "updated" Iowa class battleship, today?

Factual Questions
61

It’s certainly not going to materially damage an incoming 2700 lb 16" APC shell, as most of that mass is hardened steel at the front of the projectile intended to pierce battleship armor. 30mm DU rounds aren’t going to do much of anything to it.

I’m still not sure what the point of this thread is; battleships have been obsolete for 75+ years, with the exception of shore bombardment in support of amphibious landings. What would the mission of this latter-day battleship be anyway? Seems to me that’s the most important piece of information for determining how you’d redesign a battleship for the 21st century.

62

The reason for nuclear is that maybe you could at least cover the whole ship with antifragment armor. More weight, less room for fuel tanks. All your weapons use electricty, which substantially increases the fuel consumption and decreases the time on station of a conventional ship. You also need something like 50% more power than the same warship as a conventional ship if you want to be rapid firing your railgun and running your anti-missile lasers and running away at flank speed. Each railgun, if the shots are 64 megajoules each, and you’re firing once a second (autoloaders ftw!), and the weapon is only 10% efficient (I think real prototypes are less), that’s 640 megawatts! 1.2 gigawatts if you fire twice a second.

A “battleship” needs like 4 of those, at least. And some really powerful lasers so you can kill incoming missiles with only a brief period of beam exposure. Probably 1-10 megawatts of power draw per turret. (the military thinks 100 kilowatts of lasing energy is about the minimum, and they really want megawatts, 10% efficiency assumption)

Really, the problem is that the Navy safety regs won’t let them put in the kind of reactor that could meet these specs. And they’d probably need superconducting gensets and power cables.

63

It really is just based on a combination of nostalgia and ‘big ships are cool’ - I’ve never seen anyone explain what the ‘modern battleship’ is going to do that cruisers don’t already do on a less ‘all eggs in one basket’ platform.

64

It’s a capital warship that is pointless because of atomic warheads. That’s what I think of my interpretation of the OP’s prompt. As I mentioned, it would be a ship shaped object that would have :

  1. An extremely high power density nuclear reactor pair producing on the order of 5 gigawatt electric
  2. Rapid fire railguns on turrets
  3. Armor that can absorb fragment hits
  4. Spotting drone and over the horizon SAM launchers.
  5. Anti-torpedo torpedoes
  6. High power lasers on turrets, maybe with a massive free electron beam driver located down in the bowels of the ship

So it’s basically meant to sail around firing it’s railguns and protecting itself from most known threats. Except, you know, things like those nuclear tipped rocket propelled torpedoes the Russians have. Which are specifically intended to be “capital ship busters” for 1 shotting a vehicle just like this.

And that’s the problem. Any peer enemy you need a warship this powerful to defeat has nukes, and that’s a much bigger threat that I guess the dozens of cruisers something like this might be able to take on in a battle and defeat.

65

Yes, battleships are pointless against a “peer enemy”. But we don’t really have many of those, and thanks to MAD we are unlikely to wind up in a shooting war with one of them.

Just because you don’t need something like a battleship to take on a lesser foe doesn’t mean a battleship would be useless.

But I agree that what’s under discussion here is just a “wouldn’t it be cool if we built a battleship” scenario.
Nothing wrong with letting your inner 12-year old come out and play. :wink:

66

You could make a battleship which could be automated, to the point that you would need a very small crew (unlike the hundreds of men on a WWII battleship). But, as has been pointed out, such a ship would be almost useless, in a modern navy. It would be vulnerable, and spending $2 billion on a battleship (that could be sunk by a $10,000 smart mine) would be foolish. The era of the battleship ending in 1927.

67

A battleship would not cost $2 billion today. The cost would probably be more like $8 billion or more.

68

No, the US would be happy to use it on puissant countries like Grenada. They wouldn’t risk it against any country which would actually have the means to sink it.

69

Puissant? :dubious:

70

The whole point of traditional battleships was being able to engage a 'peer enemy’s battleships, and to be essentially invulnerable to attack by cruisers and other less armed ships. We’ve established that you can’t armor against modern cruiser weapons, and if you take away operating against a peer enemy what’s left?

If the battleship can’t do anything against a lesser foe that a much cheaper cruiser does, then I would call the battleship project useless, even though the resulting ships could be functional. You can gold-plate your garden tools, and they can still dig up dirt, but the project of gold-plating them was a useless endeavor.

71

And just to add to the chorus, you don’t need battleships to have railguns. At some point, Arleigh Burke-type destroyers (either like a DDG-51 Flight IV or a successor to that line of ships) will have at least one railgun that is in the 50+ megajoule class. The idea that you need 12 or more railguns on one ship is highly suspect – why would one need to have them all on one boat?

72

You could; most antiship missiles aren’t really armor piercing, just really big and strapped to what amounts to a really fast moving small aircraft. Kind of like a kamikaze on steroids, in a certain sense. I suspect that no antiship missile would make it through the barbettes on an *Iowa (or anything after the North Carolina *class really)

But the armor’s not the point. The point of battleships like you and others have said, was to be the ultimate evolution in the line of battle style of naval warfare that started centuries ago with the development of the cannon. You know, the way that Nelson, Cochrane, Hull, Broke, Lawrence, Tromp, De Ruyter, Bart, Jellicoe, Scheer, Hipper, Beatty, et al fought.

Problem was, in WWII, the aircraft carrier had rendered that style of fighting hopelessly obsolete. What good were 16" or 18" guns with an effective range of 16 miles, if one of your enemy’s aircraft carriers can launch 43 dive bombers, each with a bombload of up to 2000 lbs, and 11 torpedo bombers, each carrying a torpedo? This was proven time and time again with the Japanese in World War II.

So what’s a battleship good for? In WWII, with the capital ship role rendered obsolete, they were used as extremely powerful naval artillery to shell enemy positions prior to, and during amphibious landings, such as D-Day, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, etc… In this role, they excelled, since the 14" and larger guns pack a lot more punch than a destroyer’s 5" guns, or a heavy cruiser’s 8" guns. But they were only effective to a range of 20-25 miles inland at best, and probably not with much accuracy at that distance.

That’s also why they were scrapped or mothballed at the end of the war, and a couple were brought back to service during Korea and Vietnam. The only reason they were brought back into service in the 1980s was essentially because during the Cold War, we were willing to use just about any hull that would float, not because there was a legitimate surface warfare role for the battleship again.

In today’s navy, most of the surface warfare ships (i.e. destroyers, cruisers and the few frigates that are left) are predominantly armed as either anti-aircraft platforms or as anti-submarine platforms. In a sense, it’s the 1945 Okinawa strategy writ large, with 70 years of technological advancement. The cruisers and destroyers protect the carriers from enemy missiles and aircraft, and the carriers’ much longer ranged air wings go after the enemy ships, while the submarines do their own thing under the waves. Now whether or not this doctrine is still valid… who knows? But it’s likely that a battleship wouldn’t have a role in it or any follow-on doctrine.

So what role would a latter-day battleship fulfill? Shore bombardment? I don’t know that you really need a 16" gun for that- wouldn’t a terminally guided 8" gun do just as well> You wouldn’t need armor, as it would almost certainly operate within the aegis (heh) of some kind of battlegroup.

If the point was to close with the enemy and destroy their surface ships, you’d probably be better off with some kind of stealth ship that could get in close and fire, and then get away without being detected. Even there, I’m not sure what a surface ship in that role would offer that a submarine doesn’t already offer in the same situation.

There’s a good reason that nobody operates battleships anymore; they’re big, expensive and there’s no place for them in a modern navy.

73

How well will the battleship fight if the armor prevents missiles from penetrating the hull but the battleship loses all radar dishes and radio antennas? A ship with it’s sensors and communications crippled is not an effective combatant, and you can’t put those under armor. Also, a lot of missiles will hit on top armor instead of neatly on the armor belt or specificly armored parts like the barbettes; IIRC it’s quite possible to gut the ship by coming in from above without really hurting heavy armor.

Finally, most antiship missiles aren’t armor piercing because people no one sails heavily armored ships, not because of some fundamental limitation. No one has any reason to field missiles designed to quickly take down a battleship when there are no battleships around, but if you start a big, expensive program to make battleships then someone will start a small, inexpensive program to update anti-ship missiles against them. By ‘armor against modern cruiser weapons’, I don’t mean just the current inventory, but the stuff you could easily develop and deploy on a cruiser with current technology in less time than it would take to design and build the battleships.

74

An SS-N-27A Sizzler ASuW missile has about 1,000 pounds of high explosive. An SS-N-22 Sunburn missile has about 750 pounds of HE.

Does 12 inches of armor stand a chance against that much HE?

75

I was never a great fan of the Space Shuttle. What was it? A Corvette? An F-150 with or without a camper? A Freightliner with a sleeper pulling a trailer? A Grand Caravan? Sure, it did them all, but it didn’t do them well. Like a Swiss Army Knife, it was mostly convenient.

So, before we rebuild a BB class, let’s define a mission for it. Maybe two. Maybe come up with a dozen missions and then whittle away what’s unnecessary, unneeded, and/or what’s redundant. I suppose regardless of it’s mission, you’d want to do away with as much tube electronics and copper wire (yeah, you need copper to distribute power, but you can use fiber-optic for data) as possible and EMP harden all the electronics. Has there been much technological advancement in turning oil into steam into propulsion and electric since the 1940s when the Iowa class was designed? That’s all infrastructure that can be looked into regardless of the mission, but still, until you can decide on a mission or two or three, why invest any more than a couple of brainstorming sessions on it?

76

I don’t see how, that’s thinner than the armor on a tank, and you can punch through that armor trivially with a 20 lb warhead. Hellfire is said to defeat all current and anticipated tank armors.

77

Depends on the warhead. You could put 20 lbs of C4 on the glacis of a tank and not destroy it, but a 7" diameter 20 lb tandem shaped charge (what the Hellfire has) will do so.

After all, battleship HE shells weighed a LOT more than 750 lbs and were going at least as fast as a Sunburn anti-ship missile, but weren’t lethal to battleships. They might wreck the superstructure and effectively render the battleship useless for combat, but they weren’t going to sink the ship.

Also… ships are a LOT bigger than tanks; a shaped charge is going to poke a little bitty hole through the armor, but not necessarily wreck everything behind it, unless you hit a shell or powder bag or something else that’s explosive. And that’s not too likely if you’re merely hitting the side of the ship- even if it penetrates the belt, what is it going to damage on the other side? The barbettes are well within the ship itself- any anti-ship missile is going to detonate before it even reaches the barbettes, and most of the really important stuff behind the belt is below the waterline, as well as under the armor, like turbines and boilers.

The whole point of the “all or nothing” armoring scheme is that the engines and everything related to the guns (turrets, ammo hoists, magazines, fire control) is all armored entirely, and everything else isn’t armored at all. So antiship missiles would make a colossal mess of the superstructure and hull, but likely wouldn’t actually sink the battleship or make it unable to use its guns in anger… at a range of about 16 miles, well shorter than the missiles hitting it.

78

Railguns have some advantages, huh. If the battleship’s range is 200 miles+, it would be able to shoot back, and it eliminates the powder magazines from the ship. I’m not sure what would be safer to carry for actually powering the railguns, bunker oil or nuclear reactors. Nuclear has the advantage that the core itself is a very small target, located at the bottom of the ship, but it’s a lot harder to fight the fire if it takes a direct hit…

79

I think something must have autocorrected. I meant to use the word “pissant.”

80

Well, I’ve read that a specific reason was the (then-Soviet) launching of the Kirov class of “battlecruiser” surface combatants. The US perceived it had no immediate answer* except to reactivate the battleships.

Wikipedia seems to agree: Kirov-class

[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The appearance of the Kirov class played a key role in the recommissioning of the Iowa-class battleships by the United States Navy in the 1980s.[8][9][10]
[/QUOTE]

*whether the question being answered was “an equivalent surface combatant” or just prestige/bragging rights is an exercise for the reader.