Wasn’t one of Clive Cussler’s first books “Raise The Titanic”?
Interesting question.
A quick look shows that after the war when the German fleet was divided by the three powers, that the British pushed for, and got special treatment for the U-boats.
I’ve found some referencesto the salvage rights being awarded back in 1997, but nothing seems to have come from it.
Maybe the initial objection was because of the specific agreement that they were to be sunk and not salvaged, but then it was resolved? Donno.
It was. Of the movie version, the producer Lew Grade commented, “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”.
Yeah, I remember reading it way back when. IIRC, the book had them patching the holes in the ship while it was still on the bottom then raising the ship with inflatable air bags. I remember thinking that it was all a bit unrealistic when I read it, and that was long before they had found the Titanic and proved that it had split apart during its sinking. Back then a lot of folks believed that the ship was probably sitting on the sea floor basically intact.
How about one that got frozen into an iceberg, ala Avatar: The Last Airbender? A ship getting trapped in ice is quite plausible. (happened to MV Paul R Tregurtha in the documentary series ‘Mighty Ships’ ).
Other ideas:
scuttled after it got trapped in a harbor by a mudslide sealing off the harbor’s mouth.
Also the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop was a converted fishing trawler, although it probably never sunk before the conversion. EDIT: Oops, looked it up, it was actually original a *space *fishing trawler, so not relevant to the discussion, sorry.
I remember getting up at 6:00 am to watch that in the 80’s.
Good times 
My mistake. All I meant was, along with the colder temp which keeps calcite from precipitating, there is also more dissolved CO2, which means there is more carbonic acid to also keep calcite from being deposited.
I"m not so sure about that. I’m not sure if this link will work but it’s to a powerpoint concerning damage to steel at depths due to electrolysis and the work of anaerobic bacteria.
Well, in a fictional setting, I’d say Clive Cussler™ has pretty much exhausted the bizarre ways a ship can be lost, sunk or vanish and be “salvaged.” Raise the Titanic is actually one of his better Dirk Pitt® books, but it’s now a silly historical oddity. (A monument to the wing of Titanists who chose all the wrong options from the panoply of eyewitness accounts - mostly that the ship went down in one piece, despite a plenitude of witnesses who saw and heard it break up.)
It’s a very minor example, but one of the Travis McGee novels begins with a detailed side-story about raising wrecks with flotation foam. Turquoise Lament, I think. Might want to read the first chapter or two for notions.
Balloons, lots and lots of balloons.
Highly unlikely. It is estimated that Titanic hit the ocean floor between 25 and 40 miles an hour, buckling the entire structure. No way a battleship could survive such an impact without major structural damage. It would never float again.
If the hull could survive, which I doubt. The equipment would be useless. The boilers would have to be replaced, the turbines would too much corrosion so they would have to be replaced. The complete electrical system would need replacing. Because of the amount of dissimilar metal used in a ship cells would be set up through out the machinery spaces.
I got the powerpoint to download, but it seems to be just discussing mechanisms of corrosion in the deep sea. I can’t find anything in it about comparing rates of corrosion in anoxic zones vs. oxygenated zones. Slide 12 seems to hint that increasing oxygen concentrations from wood decomposition increased the rate of corrosion, which would support the idea that anoxic zones would have lower rates of corrosion, but it doesn’t seem to examine that question directly.
I did find a paper which describes experimental placement of metal and wood arrays near shipwrecks in the Black Sea, which has some of the largest deep-water anoxic zones in the world. (Archaeological oceanography and environmental characterization of
shipwrecks in the Black Sea from 2011) but it doesn’t contain the results of that experiment. (frustratingly!)
As someone stated earlier there were only 4 Iowa class battleships ever constructed and all are intact and are being used as floating museums. There 6 commissioned , but plans for two were scrapped as WWII had ended and the need for the Kentucky and the Illinois was rendered irrelevant.
Even if we proposed that a South Dakota class or a North Carolina class battlewagon ( the next steps down) could have been have been salvaged had they been lost ( they weren’t) the technology didn’t exist 30 years after they would have been lost (circa 1971-1975) to do so. The technology now, 4+ years later doesn’t even exist to raise more than a tiny fraction of the hull.
Frankly, other than salvaging nuclear weapons, some type of lost treasure or medical supplies (a la the morphine which is the plot of the 1970s novel and eponymous film The Deep) trying to salvage a ship after more than a few years under saltwater would be a costly and fruitless exercise.
Er…for the record, yes, I’m aware that no Iowa class was ever lost at sea. If the OP was a bit muddled on that point, the event—both the sinking, and the year of sinking—is purely hypothetical. As a matter of fact, the scenario I’d envisioned around 1985.
Though a sudden thought occurs to me: is there anything you could do to the wreck, shortly after it sank, to help preserve it? Aside from (or in addition to) it sinking in an anoxic basin—and possibly miraculously landing on a colossal sea-marshmallow colony to break it’s fall. (Okay, maybe forget that last bit. 
)
Probably not as the vessel would have sunk for a reason for a reason.
Most of the naval vessels which have been lost in the 20th century were lost to:
[ol]
[li]Torpedoes[/li][li]Aerial bombardment/Kamikaze attack[/li][li]Naval mines[/li][li]Naval gunfire[/li][li]Accidental collisions[/li][li]Secondary explosions caused by one of the above.[/li][li]Intentional scuttling/Used for target practice[/li][/ol]
A rare exception were the three destroyers lost during Typhoon Cobra ( they capsized and sank). The Japanese had a similar incident in 1935; but we are only talking about US naval vessels.
My point is this: All of the ships which sank did so because they experience severe damage to their hulls, in some cases complete destruction when their weapons magazines exploded. While it’s possible that they could be salvaged, almost none would intact enough to be rebuilt or reused again.
Ah, thank you for your attentiveness…though I actually am aware of the various ways in which a ship might sink, though that wasn’t actually my question—nor was it why someone might hypothetically want to artificially protect a wreck from seawater corrosion after the fact; how the wreck might later be raised; whether it would remotely make any technical, economic, or military sense to raise it; or how the hypothetical ship would avoid the (likely inevitable) structural damage from an attack that sank it, or the collision with the seafloor.
In fact, I did say I was leaving aside that last (admittedly important!) part of the problem for the moment, if a bit facetiously. My apologies. 
And, as always, thank you, everyone, for the input! An informative pleasure, as always.
As long as we’re drifting (sinking?) into hypothetical territory - how about electricity? Since an electric current can prevent rust - what about a scenario where the ship comes to rest in such a way that an electric current is passing through it? Perhaps it comes to rest on an undersea power cable - severing the line but maintaining current flow through the ship itself? Far fetched? Sure. But at least there might be a hint of plausibility?
Hello!
Not a battleship but
German submarine Wilhelm Bauer (former U-2540) was sunk in 1945, raised in 1957 and put back into service in 1960.